The Horus Heresy®

It is a time of legend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The age of knowledge and enlightenment has ended.

The Age of Darkness has begun.

~ DRAMATIS PERSONAE ~

The XVIII Legion ‘Salamanders’

Vulkan, Primarch, the Lord of Drakes

Artellus Numeon, Pyre Captain, and Vulkan’s equerry

Leodrakk, Pyre Guard

Skatar’var, Pyre Guard

Varrun, Pyre Guard

Ganne, Pyre Guard

Igataron, Pyre Guard

Atanarius, Pyre Guard

Nemetor, Captain, 15th Company Reconnaissance

K’gosi, Captain, Pyroclast of the 21st Company

Shen’ra, Techmarine

The VIII Legion ‘Night Lords’

Konrad Curze, Primarch, the ‘Night Haunter’

The X Legion ‘Iron Hands’

Ferrus Manus, Primarch, the Gorgon

Domadus, Battle-brother and unofficial quartermaster

Verud Pergellen, Legionary sniper

The XIX Legion ‘Raven Guard’

Corvus Corax, Primarch, the Ravenlord

Hriak, Librarian, Codicier

Avus, Battle-brother

The XVII Legion ‘Word Bearers’

Erebus, Dark Apostle, disgraced First Chaplain

Valdrekk Elias, Dark Apostle, sworn to the service of Erebus

Barthusa Narek, Huntsman, former legionary Vigilator

Non-Legion personnel

Seriph, Remembrancer

Verace, Remembrancer

Caeren Sebaton, Frontier archaeologist

From scorched earth…

‘Vulkan lives.’

Two words. Two grating words. They closed around me like a rusty trap, snaring me with their savage teeth. So many dead… No, slain. And yet…

Vulkan.

Lives.

I felt each one reverberate inside my skull like a triphammer striking a tuning fork, pressing at my temples, every syllable pulsing headache-red. They were little more than a mocking whisper, these two simple words, mocking me because I survived when I should have died. Because I lived, they did not.

Surprise, awe, or perhaps it was the simple desire not to be heard that made the speaker craft his words so quietly. In any case, the voice that gave utterance to them was confident and full of undeniable charisma.

I knew its cadence, its timbre, as familiarly as I knew my own. I recognised the voice of my gaoler. And I, too, rasped as I declared it to him.

‘Horus…’

For all my brother’s obvious and demonstrative puissance, even in his voice, I could barely speak. It was as if I’d been buried for a long time and my throat was hoarse from swallowing too much dirt. I had yet to open my eyes, for the lids were leaden and stung as if they’d been washed out with neat promethium.

Promethium.

The word brought back a sense memory, the image of a battlefield swathed in smog and redolent of death. Blood saturated the air. It soaked the black sand underfoot. Smoke clung to banners edged in fire. In fragments, I recalled a battle unlike any other that I or my Legion had ever fought. Such vast forces, such strength of arms, almost elemental in their fury. Brothers killed brothers, a death toll in the tens of thousands. Maybe more.

I saw Ferrus die, even though I wasn’t present at his murder, but in my mind I saw it. We had a bond, he and I, forged in more than fraternal blood. We were too alike not to.

This was Isstvan V that I saw. A black, benighted world swarmed by a sea of legionaries bent on mutual destruction. Battle tanks by the hundreds, Titans roaming the horizon in murderous packs, drop-ships flooding the sky and choking it with their death-smoke and their engine fumes.

Chaos. Utter, unimaginable chaos.

That word had a different meaning now.

Further snatches of the massacre returned to me. I saw a hillside, a company of battle tanks at the summit. Their cannons were aimed low, firing off ordnance into our ranks and punishing us against the anvil.

Armour cracked. Fire rained. Bodies broke.

I charged with the Pyre Guard, but they soon lost pace with me as my anger overtook my capacity for reason. I hit the tanks on my own at first, like a hammer. With my hands I tore into the line of armour, battered it, roaring my defiance at a sky drenched crimson.

As my sons caught up to my wrath, light and fire arrived in the wake of my assault. It tore open the sky in a great strip of blinding magnesium white. Those nearby shut their eyes to it, but I saw the missiles hit. I watched the detonation and beheld the fire as it spread across the world like a boiling ocean.

Then there was darkness… for a time, until I remembered waking, but dazed. My war-plate was burned. I had been thrown from the battle. Alone, I staggered to my feet and saw a fallen son.

It was Nemetor.

Like an infant I cradled him, raising Dawnbringer aloft and crying out my anguish for all the good it would do. Because no matter how much you wish for it, the dead do not come back. Not really. And if they do, if by some fell craft you can restore them, they are forever changed. Revenants. Only a god can bring back the dead and return them to the living, and we had all been told that gods did not exist. I would come to understand the great folly and undeniable truth of that in the time that followed.

My enemies reached me in a flood, stabbing with knives and bludgeoning with clubs. Some were midnight-clad, others wrapped in iron. I killed almost three score before they took Nemetor from my arms. And as I knelt there, bruised and bleeding, a shadow fell across me.

I asked, ‘Why, brother?’

And these next words were freshest in my memory, because of what Curze said as he loomed over me.

‘Because you’re the one who’s here.’

It wasn’t the answer I was expecting. My question had a much wider meaning than what Curze took it to be. Perhaps there was no answer, for isn’t it inevitable that one day a son will rebel against his father and desire to succeed him, even if that succession meant committing patricide?

Though my eyes were gummed with blood, my helmet gone, I swore I saw Curze smiling as he looked down on me as at one of his slaves. The bastard. Even now, I believe he found it amusing. All the horror, the dirty shame of treachery and how it stuck to all of our skins. We primarchs, we who were supposed to be the best of all men, turned out to be the very worst.

Konrad had always enjoyed irony like that. It brought us all down to his level.

‘You are full of surprises.’

At first I thought it was Curze again – my sense of time and space was colliding but not connecting, making it hard to focus properly – but he never said that to me at Isstvan; he never said anything else after that moment.

No, it was Horus speaking. That cultured tonality, that deep basso which had made this treachery possible. Only he could have done it. I just didn’t know why. Not yet.

I opened my eyes at last and saw before me the patrician countenance of a once noble man. Some would call him a demigod, I suppose. Perhaps we all were in our different ways, but then gods were supposed to be superstition honoured by lesser, credulous men.

And yet here we all were. Giants, warrior-kings, superhuman in every aspect. One of us even had wings; beautiful, white, angelic wings. Looking back now, I cannot fathom why no one looked at Sanguinius and wondered if he were really a god.

‘Lupercal,’ I began, but Horus cut me off with a mirthless laugh.

‘Oh, Vulkan, you really were badly beaten.’

He was armoured in black, a suit I had only seen him wearing once before and which bore no resemblance to either the Luna Wolves of his origin, or the Sons of Horus that he led afterwards. As much as he wore it, the black also bled off him in waves like it wasn’t armour at all but some dark anima enclosing him. I had felt it before, caught some inkling of the man he was becoming, but to my shame did nothing to prevent it. An eye glowered in the midriff, blazing and orange like Nocturne’s sun but without the honest heat of natural fire.

He gripped my chin with a taloned power fist, and I felt the claws pinch.

‘What do you want with me? To kill me, like you killed my sons? Where is this place you have me imprisoned?’

As my eyes adjusted, healing through the gifts my exceptional father gave me, I saw only darkness. It reminded me of the shadow Curze cast over me when I was at his mercy on the plains of Isstvan.

‘You are right about one thing,’ Horus said, his voice changing as I grew more lucid, becoming gradually sharper and more rigid, ‘you are a prisoner. A very dangerous one, I think. As to my purpose,’ he laughed again, ‘I honestly don’t know yet.’

I blinked, once, twice, and the face before me transformed into another, one I could scarcely believe.

‘Roboute?’

My brother, the primarch of the XIII Legion Ultramarines, had drawn a gladius. It looked ceremonial, never blooded.

‘Is that who you see?’ Guilliman asked, eyes narrowing before he slid the blade into my bare flesh.

Only then did I realise that I was unarmoured, and sense the fetters around my wrists, ankles and neck. The gladius bit deep, burning at first but then growing colder around the wound. It was sunk into my chest, all the way to the hilt.

My eyes widened. ‘What… what… is this?’

Breath knifed through my lungs, bubbling up through the blood rising in my throat, making me gurgle.

He laughed. ‘It’s a sword, Vulkan.’

I gritted my teeth, anger clamping my mouth shut.

His voice changed again as Guilliman leaned in close and I could no longer see his face, but felt his charnel breath upon my cheek.

‘Oh, I think I am going to like this, brother. You definitely won’t, but I will.’

He hissed as if savouring the thought of whatever tortures he was already concocting, and it put me in mind of soft, chiropteran wings. My jaw hardened as I discovered the true identity of my tormentor, his name escaping through my clenched teeth like a curse.

‘Curze.’

Persona non grata…

A figure armoured in crimson stumbled into the chamber as if through a cut in a veil, a literal knife-thrust that parted realities and allowed him to escape into blessed darkness.

Valdrekk Elias had been waiting in the sanctum, waiting for days for his master’s return. It was foreseen, his humbling at the Warmaster’s hands. It was known that Horus would challenge the Pantheon and it was known that his own father would forsake him. A martyr’s cause was not for him, however. He was destined for greater and everlasting glory.

So it had been told to Elias, and so he had waited.

Now he cradled a wretched figure in his arms, torn and broken, savaged by the very warriors who were meant to be his allies.

‘Blessed master, you are injured…’ Elias’s voice trembled, in fear, in shame, in anger. There was blood all over the floor. Rivulets of dark red ran into sigils marked upon the iron tiles, casting off an eldritch glow as each engraving was filled with blood.

Elias muttered to keep the lambent glow from growing into something he could not control. He doubted his master would be of any use at that moment. The chamber was a holy sanctum; blood should not be spilled there idly.

Head bowed, facing the floor, his master was shaking and mewling in pain. No… it wasn’t pain.

It was laughter.

Elias turned him over and saw the ruin of Erebus’s face, white eyes staring from a skull wrapped in blood-soaked meat. His red-rimed teeth chattered in a lipless mouth, clacking together in a rictus grin before parting as he breathed.

Elias looked at him aghast. ‘What has been done to you?’

Erebus tried and failed to answer, spitting up a gobbet of crimson.

Disciple lifted master, carried him in both arms despite the weight of his war-plate, holding his partly insensate form across his body.

Parting with a blast of escaping pressure and the whirr of concealed servos, the sanctum doors opened into a corridor. The apothecarion was close.

‘A lesson…’ Erebus croaked finally, gurgling his words through blood.

Elias paused. Blood was dripping with a steady plinking rhythm as it struck the deck plates underfoot. He leaned in, the stink of copper growing more intense as he closed. ‘Yes?’

‘A lesson… for you.’

Erebus was delirious, and barely conscious. Whatever had been done to him had almost killed him. Whoever had done it had almost killed him.

‘Speak it, master,’ Elias whispered with all the fervour and devotion of a fanatic.

Erebus might have lost favour in some quarters, with his father certainly, but he still had supporters. They were few, but they were also ardent. The Dark Apostle’s voice shrank to a whisper. Even for one with Elias’s enhanced hearing, words were difficult to discern.

‘Sharpen ours, blunt theirs…’

‘Master? I don’t know what you are saying. Tell me, what must I do?’

With a strength belied by his frail condition, Erebus seized Elias by the throat. His eyes, those ever-staring lidless orbs of pure hate, glared. It was like he was peering into Elias’s tainted soul, searching it for any vestige of falsehood.

‘The weapons…’ he gasped, louder, angry. He laughed again, as if this were a truth he had only just realised, before spitting up more blood.

Elias’s gaze went to the athame clutched in his master’s claw-like hand. It was only because the fingers were bionic that he still held the ritual knife at all.

‘Weapons?’ Elias asked.

‘We can win the war. They are all… that matters.’ He sagged, the Dark Apostle’s passionate fire finally usurped by his injuries. ‘Must have them or deny them to our…’ Erebus trailed off, falling into unconsciousness.

Elias was without compass. He didn’t know what to do, but trusted in the divine will of the Pantheon to guide him. Quickly, he took Erebus to the apothecarion and as soon as the Dark Apostle was on the slab and in the tender care of his chirurgeons, Elias opened a vox-channel.

‘Narek.’

The voice that answered was harsh and grating.

‘Brother.’

Elias knew that the athame was powerful. He was not some novice unschooled in the art of the warp. He knew full well what it could do. He possessed his own, a mere simulacrum of the one in Erebus’s clutches, as did his lesser apostles. But he had always wondered if other such artefacts existed in the universe. Other ‘weapons’, he now supposed.

Elias smiled at the thought of obtaining one, of the power he might hold with it.

‘Brother,’ Narek repeated when Elias didn’t answer straight away.

Elias’s smile turned into a broad grin that didn’t reach his eyes.

‘Ready your warriors. We have much work to do.’

CHAPTER ONE

Disciples

‘The struggles of warring gods are oft fought not between themselves, but through their disciples.’

– Sicero, ancient Terran philosopher

Traoris was described by some as a blessed world. Blessed by whom or what was open to interpretation. The facts that were known were simply these. In the year 898 of the 30th millennium of the Imperial calendar, a being came to Traoris who was known as the Golden King.

Hailed as a liberator, he banished the dark cults that ruled before his coming. He slew them with sword and storm, an army of knights at his command that were both magnificent and terrifying. The cabal of sorcerer-lords that the Golden King vanquished had enslaved the Traorans, a people who had not known peace or freedom for many centuries, their ancestors having ventured from Old Earth long ago. Alone, isolated during the time of Old Night, Traoris fell victim to a primordial evil. Sin made the minds of weaker men eager vessels for this darkness and only glorious light would remove it.

And so it was that the Golden King banished darkness, preaching freedom and enlightenment. He touched this world with his mere presence. He blessed it.

Many years passed, and between the Golden King’s departure and the recolonisation that followed, Traoris was slowly transformed. Gone were the bastions of the sorcerer-lords, great factories and mills rising in their stead. Industry came to Traoris and its people.

Eight cities stood upon its grey earth, built upon the ruins of the old, their tenements teeming with workers. Anwey, Umra, Ixon, Vorr, Lotan, Kren, Orll and Ranos – they were islands of civilisation, divided by many kilometres of inhospitable ash desert and storm-lashed lightning fields, raised up where seams of ore coveted by Mars were in their greatest concentrations.

Yes, Traoris was described by some as a blessed world. But not by any who lived there.

Though she knew in her heart it was futile, Alantea ran. It was raining hard, and had been ever since the ships of ebony and crimson had been spotted in the sky over Ranos. Underfoot, the rain-lashed street was slick. She had fallen twice already and her knee throbbed dangerously with the past impacts.

Alantea had been working a manufactorum shift, so was only wearing green-grey overalls and a thin cotton shirt darkened from white to grey by manual labour. A plastek coat kept out the worst of the rain, but parted as she ran. Her hair was drenched and hung down in front of her face in blonde clumps, obscuring her vision in the dark.

Phosphor lamps hissed and spat as the raindrops touched them. Shadows clawed away from the dingy light, revealing square structures of grey granite beneath them. The whole city was grey, from the fog that oozed from the foundry stacks to the stone slabs under Alantea’s feet. Ranos was dark iron, it was industry and strength, it was an engine that ran on muscle and blood.

It was also her home.

The phosphor lamps glared like beacons, hurting Alantea’s eyes. But she welcomed them, because they would lead her to the square.

If she could just reach Cardinal Square…

Heavy footfalls drummed behind her, a noisy refrain against the frenzied beating of her heart, and as she turned down a side street she dared to glance back.

A shadow. Just a shadow, that’s all she really saw.

But she’d seen these shadows tear old Yulli apart, gut her dutiful overseer like he was swine and leave his steaming entrails on the ground for him to look upon as he died. The others had died soon after. Throaty barks, accompanied by harsh muzzle flashes from thick, black guns, had ripped them apart. Nothing was left, not even bodies. The manufactorum floor a bloodbath; its various machineries destroyed.

Alantea had bolted for the gate to the yard. She’d considered taking one of the hauler trucks, until one of the half-tracks exploded, chewed up by a heavy cannon. So instead she ran. Now they chased her, those shadows. Never fast nor urgent, but always just a few steps away.

Fear was in the air that night. Talk was rife amongst the workers that men had been found and arrested in the culverts. Rumours abounded of strange doings, of ritual suicides and other ‘acts’. The clavigers had apparently found a missing girl with the men, or at least her remains. But what was worse was that the men were just ordinary citizens, workers of Ranos just like her.

So when the manufactorum was hit, paranoia and terror were already infecting its workers. The panic had been terrifying. But a different kind of fear seized Alantea now, one fuelled by the desperate desire to escape it and the belief that something far worse than death waited for her if she didn’t.

This district of the city was a warren, full of avenues crowded over with dirty tenement blocks that shouldered up against warehouses and silos. Alleyways and conduits gave way to labyrinthine side streets where even the rats lost their bearings. Except she couldn’t lose them, not her shadows. They had the scent of prey.

Ducking around a corner, Alantea sank to her haunches as she tried to catch a breath. It was tempting to believe she was safe now, or to give up and relinquish the chase. The city was quiet, overly so, and she feared then that she was the last surviving inhabitant, that Ranos was extinct but for her tiny life spark. She’d seen no sign of the clavigers, no dramatic call to arms from the shield-wardens. No response at all. What enemy force in all existence could achieve such a feat of absolute subjugation with barely any resistance?

A harsh, grating voice speaking in a language she didn’t understand got Alantea to her feet. She guessed he was talking to the others. The thought of a noose tightening ever so slightly around her pale, slender neck sprang unbidden into her mind. They were closer than before, Alantea knew it instinctively. She thought of her father, and the slow, cancerous death that awaited him. She remembered better days, still poor, but tempered with happiness when her father had been whole. He needed medicine; without it… A few more precious moments with her father was all she wanted. In the end, that’s all anyone ever really wants, just a little longer. But it was never enough. It was part of the human condition, to want to live, and when faced with our mortal end men rail against it to further that desire. It galvanised Alantea now. Cardinal Square wasn’t far. Another hundred metres, maybe fewer.

Dredging up whatever stamina she had left, Alantea ran.

Even with her injured knee she covered the last few metres steadily and at pace.

Bursting into Cardinal Square, gasping for breath, she saw him.

Rendered in gold – holding aloft a sceptre of command that would later be given to the Lord Excavator General of Traoris, patron of Ranos and the other seven worker-cities – he looked magnificent. He had come to her world, set foot in this very spot after the liberation, after the Traorans had been freed. He had spoken and all had tried to listen. Alantea was not born then. She had neither seen the one they came to know as the Golden King, nor heard his speech during the triumph, but sitting upon her father’s shoulders as he remembered back to what his father and his father before that told him of the liberation, she had felt the Golden King’s power and benevolence.

Something had changed since that day with her father. Standing in Cardinal Square now, she no longer felt that reassurance. It was as if something had arisen to challenge it and was even now worming away at all it represented. She could not say why. Perhaps it was instinct, that unfathomable intuition that only the female of the species possessed. All she knew was that a different blessing had fallen upon Ranos, one that felt far from benevolent, and its nexus was focused on the square.

Five points ran off from the square – though to call it such was a colloquial misnomer for it was actually pentagonal – including the one where Alantea was standing. At each of the other four she saw an armoured form blocking her escape. Phantoms at first, shadows, they advanced slowly out of the darkness. Edged in silver phosphor light their movements seemed almost syncopated and inhuman.

Turning back, realising her mistake, Alantea didn’t know she’d been stabbed until the feeling left her legs and she collapsed. Strong, armoured hands caught her before she fell and she looked up into the face of her rescuer. He was handsome, despite the strange script gilding his cheekbones and the exposed areas of his scalp that hurt Alantea’s eyes to look at. His black hair was short, shorn close to the scalp, and ended in a sharp widow’s peak over his forehead.

His eyes were pitying, but it was a cold pity, one usually reserved for the culling of cattle no longer fit for the herd.

Alantea whispered, using up a good measure of her courage to speak, ‘Let me go.’

The armoured warrior, clad in wine-red plate, festooned with chains and scroll work, slowly shook his head.

‘Now, now, my dear,’ he said, soothing, but seizing Alantea’s arms when she struggled, ‘that’s quite enough of that.’ He caressed her cheek with a long metal nail he wore on one of his gauntlets, drawing a thin line of tiny bloody jewels across her skin.

Whimpering like the animal he regarded her as, Alantea tried to answer, but the warrior shushed her, holding the bloodstained finger up to his slightly curved lips. Exhausted, unaware of the internal trauma her body was experiencing as a result of the knife wound, Alantea was powerless to prevent her head from lolling back. Vision fogging, she saw the Golden King, upside down and lashed by the rain.

As it ran across his face and down his cheeks, it looked as if he were crying. In her delirium she wondered what could have upset him so, what could have instilled in a being such as he such profound remorse.

Chains were being looped around the statue by the other warriors that had entered the square. They heaved, a single gargantuan effort, and brought the Golden King down amid the dirt and the blood.

‘Don’t struggle, you’re bleeding…’ the warrior holding her told Alantea benevolently, before his tone grew darker, ‘and we must not waste a single drop.’

They were in deep, as far down into the catacombs as it was possible to go. The steady thrum of rock-cutters and the heavy bang of blasting charges was a constant and insistent drone and could be heard in the ruins above. It had been a battlefield, or part of one, frozen in time at the point of victory by order of the ruler of this world. The last bastion of anti-Imperial resistance destroyed by a storm of psychic lightning. Nothing had changed since the fortress had fallen. The ruins had been left as they were all those years ago. Untouched. They were a reminder of a glorious past, a place of commemoration and veneration.

Sebaton had violated the sanctity of that, besmirched it with hanging phosphor lamps, industry-grade digging servitors and the cluster of spades, shovels, cutters and excavation kit now strewn about the place. It played little on his conscience. Reality was, his conscience was so blighted already that such minor sacrilege would barely register.

Archaeology was not his strong suit, yet he could play the role, adopt the persona of Caeren Sebaton as needed. He knew they were close. He could feel it, just as he could feel the slowly deepening inevitability of what would follow their discovery and where, ultimately, it would lead him.

Dust thronged the air, making it hard to see in the dirt and the darkness even with the lamps. Surrounded by the reliquary of a time long past, Sebaton began to feel old. He looked up at the cavernous opening above, at the wide cleft of tunnel through which they had bored down to reach the catacombs, at the ramp down which they had ferried their equipment, and felt the desperate urge to climb. He wanted to be in the light, a keeper of shadows and lies no more. He resisted, his pragmatism far outweighing his whimsy, and asked, ‘How much farther, Varteh?’

The ex-Lucifer Black glanced up from the dig site where a pair of servitors were chewing up rock with their manifold tools, a tech-adept looking on.

‘We’re close.’

He spoke through a crackly short-gain vox-link, patched from a unit in his rebreather and received by the ear-bud attached to Sebaton’s own mask. This far down, this much dust, both men would have choked to death by now. The rest of Varteh’s team wore them too. Two men, ostensibly for security, flanked the dig perimeter. Both had lascarbines slung casually over their shoulders. Varteh carried a fat, military-grade autopistol in a holster on his left hip. He also had a long flensing knife strapped to his right boot.

All three men wore simple desert tan fatigues, bleached almost white by the dust, and cracked-leather jackets over plain grey vests. Varteh also wore a grey cowl that covered his ears and came up just over his chin. Sebaton could just make out his eyes through his goggles. They were hard; for Lucifer Blacks, even those who no longer served in the Army, were hard men.

Sebaton knew this from experience.

He was similarly attired, but wore a long damson-red duster coat with black tanker boots that went halfway up his shins. Sebaton’s fatigues were deep tan, pleated at the edges like an equestrian’s. He only carried one visible weapon, a snub-nose flechette pistol that fired tiny razor-edged discs and sat snugly in a shoulder holster concealed by his coat.

Glancing again at the opening that led out of the catacombs, Sebaton beckoned Varteh over.

His tone was insistent, ‘How long, Varteh?’

‘You expecting trouble?’ Varteh jerked his chin at the opening. Falling rain sparkled in the light. ‘Nothing is coming after us, is it? I can only protect you if you tell me what it is you need protection from.’

Sebaton met the ex-Lucifer’s gaze, and smiled warmly. ‘Anything I’m hiding is for your benefit, believe me, Varteh.’

Varteh frowned.

‘Something amiss with that?’ asked Sebaton.

‘Not at all. But ever since we met I’ve been wondering something about you. When I was with the Army, I travelled,’ he said, ‘Met a lot of men from a lot of different regiments, lot of different places. Until I made your acquaintance, I thought my knowledge of accents was fairly broad but I can’t place yours. It’s unique and yet also familiar. Not really one accent, but several. Therefore I’m wondering, where is it from?’

Sebaton’s smile faded. ‘A bit of here, a bit of there. Does it matter? You’re being well paid for your services. And I thought Lucifer Blacks were meant to obey and not ask questions.’

Now it was Varteh’s turn to smile.

‘I did, that’s why I’m in this shit hole with you.’ Varteh let it go. ‘Fair enough. We all have our secrets, I suppose. Yours, I suspect, are many.’

‘It’s because you’re a shrewd man that I hired you, Varteh.’ Sebaton looked back up at the opening.

Varteh took a step towards him and whispered, ‘What’s coming, Sebaton? What is this all about?’

Sebaton was staring. ‘What it’s always been about, Varteh. Weapons.’ He twisted the small ornate ring he wore on one finger, before returning his gaze to the ex-Lucifer. ‘Keep digging.’

CHAPTER TWO

Remembrance

‘What we do defines us. Our deeds are like shadows and depending on whether we run into or from the sun, they either lie behind us or before us.’

– ancient Terran philosopher, unknown

Kharaatan, during the Great Crusade

Smoke hung over Khar-tann City in a dark pall. It seemed to stick to its towers and battlements, drenching them in an oily gloom.

Fifteen hours of bombardment. Its shields had taken quite a battering. Parts of the city were demolished, but its main gates, its core walls and its defenders were still intact. Defiant. It was the first of nine major cities on One-Five-Four Six, or Kharaatan, as the natives called it.

Regarding the shadows that haunted its walls, its people unmoving as they watched the massive force sent to quell them, Numeon hoped the other cities would be easier to crack. He stood just over eight kilometres away on a rough escarpment of dolomitic limestone with three of his closest brothers. The Salamanders stood apart from the rest of the Imperial officers, who were farther back, camped halfway down a ridge that descended into a wide, low basin where their forces gathered.

‘It’s quiet,’ hissed Nemetor, as if to speak any louder would shatter the calm before the coming storm and pre-empt their attack.

‘Wouldn’t you be, facing off against the Legion?’ said Leodrakk. He looked up, craning his neck and pointing the snout of his dragon’s helm to the sky. ‘Two Legions,’ he corrected, though he could see no sign of their cousins.

Both warriors were Salamanders, yet could not be less alike. Nemetor was softly spoken and wore the emerald-green of the Legion, his iconography that of the 15th Company with a white drake head on his left shoulder guard. He was broad, with a thick neck and shortish, stout legs. Even out of his war-plate, he was formidable. It was partly the reason he was also known as ‘Tank’.

‘Perhaps they’re thinking about giving up, Tank,’ offered Atanarius, watching the city’s movements through a pair of magnoculars.

Like Leodrakk, he was armoured in the trappings of the Pyre Guard, a suit of plate fashioned in a draconian aspect with a reptilian battle-helm and scalloped greaves, pauldrons and cuirass. It was permanently blackened from Promethean ritual, and branding marks scored the metal in the Salamanders’ oaths of moment. Both warriors were taller than Nemetor, but lost ground in terms of sheer bulk.

‘Is that what your eyes tell you, Atanarius?’ Numeon asked in a deep voice. He turned, the fire-red crest jutting from the crown of his battle-helm marking him out as their captain. He was also the primarch’s equerry, and that made him unique. Even through his retinal lenses, his gaze was penetrating.

Over the Phatra plain where Khar-tann City presided, night was starting to fall. Like hot embers in a fire, Numeon’s eyes blazed in the pre-dark. All of the Salamanders’ eyes did. It was a part of their heritage, like the onyx black of their skin and the self-sacrificial mindset of their Promethean creed.

‘Even through the scopes, it’s hard to be certain of anything they are telling me, Pyre captain.’ Atanarius lowered the magnoculars, returning them to his equipment belt, before facing Numeon. ‘I can detect very little movement. If they were planning on trying to repel our forces, then whatever measures they mean to use to do it are already in place.’

‘Eight thousand fighting men, plus twice that number again in civilians, some of whom may have been levied to bolster the troops,’ said Leodrakk. ‘Nothing they can do will prevent us knocking down their gate and cleaning house.’ He sounded belligerent as ever. A hot vein of magma ran through his skin and bone, as was often remarked by his brothers.

Nemetor cocked his head. ‘I thought you were planning on burning down their house, not cleaning it, brother?’

Leodrakk glared, cracking his knuckles inside his gauntlets.

‘Temper, Leo,’ Atanarius warned, before turning to Nemetor, ‘but don’t think your familiarity with the Pyre Guard allows you to disrespect us, Nemetor. Even from a captain, that won’t be tolerated.’

Nemetor inclined his head to apologise.

‘If you are finished goading one another then please attend.’ Numeon nodded down the ridge where several Army officers were slogging uphill, ‘I believe we are about to get some news.’

Numeon opened up a vox-link in his battle-helm.

‘Skatar’var.’

A crackling voice answered immediately.

‘Summon Lord Vulkan,’ said Numeon. ‘The Army and Titan legio are ready to march.’

He cut the link, knowing the order was given, so would be carried out.

Below in the desert basin, the Legion waited. A sea of emerald-green, six thousand warriors stood ready to bring a city to its knees. Beyond them, four full regiments of tanks, including super-heavies, a squadron of Infernus-pattern Predators and enough Mastodons to transport every legionary on the ground. Behind the infantry loomed a trio of Warhound Titans from Legio Ignis, nicknamed the ‘Fire Kings’. Traditionally, Warhounds fought alone, but this particular pack was seldom parted.

Khar-tann City was formidable, its armed forces devoted, but it could not outlast this. There was something unsettling about the silence and the way the Khar-tans had given in wholly to alien subjugation.

Numeon snarled, feeling the old familiar call to war. It filled his vox-grille with the reek of ash and cinder from his heavy exhalations. In the end, their resistance mattered not.

‘It’s time to make them burn.’

Vulkan kneeled, head down, inside a cell of obsidian and black metal. What little light penetrated the darkness was from the forge-heat of irons and brands, the warm glow of embers surrounding a pit of coals.

The air was hot, stifling. Seriph was wearing a rebreather, and put questions to the primarch through a vox-coder attached to her belt. It made her otherwise mellifluous voice tinny and marred with static.

‘And so you were raised a blacksmith’s son?’ she asked, wiping away another bead of sweat from her brow, dark patches showing under the arms of her robes and down her back. The remembrancer took a moment to sip from a flask she wore at her hip. Without it, dehydration and acute heatstroke would have occurred in minutes. She wanted longer with the Lord of the Drakes, and if this was the only way then so be it.

‘Is that so hard to believe?’ Vulkan answered as the sound and smell of burning flesh – his flesh – filled the chamber. ‘And he was a blacksmiter and a metal-shaper, a craftsman of consummate skill that I greatly admired.’

A human, augmented to be able to perform his duty and live to do so again, withdrew a burning brand from the primarch’s skin.

‘Noted,’ said Seriph, scratching with her stylus on the data-slate in her other hand. ‘It just seems like a humble origin for a lord of Space Marines.’

The remembrancer was sweltering now, having endured a full twenty-one minutes in the primarch’s chambers, a feat none before her had matched without expiring from the heat.

‘Should I have had a more regal upbringing then?’

The brander picked up a fresh iron, examining the hooked end and imagining the shape of the mark it would make.

‘No, I didn’t mean that,’ said Seriph, wincing as Vulkan’s flesh burned anew, sizzling like meat in a cook-pan. ‘I just assumed all the primarchs came from warlike, vaunted beginnings. Either that or born as orphans on death worlds.’

‘Nocturne is a death world and hardly civilised. But our origins were all very different. I wonder sometimes how we all came back to our father’s service as warriors and generals, but here we stand at the forefront of the Great Crusade doing just that.’

Seriph frowned, then wiped her brow with the sleeve of her robe.

‘What else could you have been?’

‘Tyrants, murderers… architects. It was only fate that made us leaders, and I am still unsure as to how our genetic heritage predisposed us to that calling.’

‘And which would you have been, then?’

Vulkan smiled, though it did little to warm his diabolic voice.

‘A farmer, I think.’

‘You would take your blacksmiter’s anvil and turn a sword into a ploughshare, is that it?’

‘Overly poetic, but yes that’s it.’

Seriph paused. Either she was gasping in the heat or drawing some conclusions.

‘You don’t seem like the others.’

‘And you know my brothers, do you, Remembrancer Seriph?’ There was mild reproach in Vulkan’s tone, just enough to intimidate.

It flustered the remembrancer and she looked on the verge of collapse. ‘No, of course not. I have just heard–’

‘A wise chronicler does not believe all she hears, Seriph.’ For the first time since the interview began, Vulkan raised his head. ‘Tell me,’ he said, his voice deepening, ‘what do you see in my eyes?’

They blazed like the calderas of a volcano.

‘F… fire…’

At last she wilted. Vulkan rushed forwards and caught her so that she didn’t fall.

At the same moment a crack opened in the darkness and Skatar’var stepped through it into the branding chamber.

‘My lord,’ said the Pyre Guard.

Skatar’var was one of two brothers that were now part of the primarch’s inner circle. Like his sibling, he was haughty and proud. A warrior-king of Hesiod, he had learned nobility from his biological father and honed it in the Legion.

The warrior bowed his head a fraction, before realising what he was seeing. ‘Another one unequal to the task?’

A large draconian horn arched from his back, attached to the power generator of his armour. He had ‘won’ the trophy when he had slain Loktaral, one of the deep drakes, and joined his brother at Vulkan’s side. Leodrakk, his hot-tempered younger sibling, bore the other horn. They had killed the beast together.

‘She was strong, and lasted longer than the others. I will speak with her again,’ said Vulkan, cradling the woman and passing her over to Skatar’var like he would an infant to its parent. ‘I assume you come to tell me the Army is ready.’

Skatar’var looked down at the woman like she was a piece of unfamiliar equipment, before answering his primarch. ‘Aye, the Legio Ignis too.’

Vulkan nodded.

‘Very well. Remove her from here and make sure she stays with the medicaes. I have one more oath to take before we can make war on Khar-tann City.’

‘Yes, lord.’

Skatar’var took the woman and his leave.

In the darkness, Vulkan turned back to his brander. The primarch’s onyx-black body was like a muscled slab of granite. Almost every part of his exposed skin was marked. They represented deeds, battles, lives taken and spared. Some even went as far back as Nocturne, before he was reunited with the Outlander. Without exception, Vulkan remembered each and every one in precise detail.

It was ritual, a part of the Promethean creed which was born upon Nocturne many years ago. Method and tradition were important to Vulkan; his teachings to his sons were predicated on these very tenets.

‘So comes the moment, so the brand is burned,’ he said, kneeling as he lowered his head again. ‘Prepare me for war.’

In the shuddering confines of the Mastodon, the hololithic image of Commander Arvek phased in and out of resolution.

‘Once the core wall is breached, we can roll right into Khar-tann and demolish it,’ the Army officer declared, smacking a fist against his open palm for emphasis. Even through the built-in vox-unit, he sounded imperious. He hailed from Vodis, a world of austere military households that could trace their lineage back to the first ancient kings of Terra.

The audio was as bad as the visual, but the commander’s meaning was clear enough.

‘Negative,’ said Vulkan firmly. ‘Breach the wall, then withdraw.’

Arvek tried to mask his surprise. ‘With respect, lord primarch, we can crush them with minimal casualties. I was led to believe–’

Vulkan cut him off. ‘To our ranks, commander, not theirs. There are over fifteen thousand civilians in Khar-tann. I’ve read your collateral damage estimates – they are conservative at best and even that forecast is unacceptable. Make a hole for the Legion, and we will subdue the native soldiery with the minimum loss of civilian life. Consider that an order.’

Arvek saluted sharply, the medals and laurels on his crisp blue uniform jangling as he moved.

Vulkan nodded to him, and switched the link.

The grainy, semi-monochrome image of the tank commander hazed out and was replaced with that of Princeps Lokja. The Titan officer was festooned with mind impulse cables, linking his cerebral cortex to the violent anima of his war machine. Already deep into the mind-link, his brow was furrowed, his curled black moustaches raised in a snarl of concentration.

‘Lord Vulkan,’ Lokja acknowledged in the cultured accent of Attila.

‘Commander Arvek is going to make a hole in the core wall for the Legion. I need the Fire Kings to shepherd them in. Threat response only, do not engage the city’s soldiery.’

‘Understood,’ said Lokja, a blink relaying the orders to his moderati sitting below him in the Warhound’s cockpit.

The princeps cut the feed and the interior of the rumbling Mastodon went dark.

Their eyes ablaze in the hold, seven Pyre Guard awaited their lord and master’s next words.

‘Soon as the gate is down and Arvek has withdrawn, Fifteenth go in as first recon,’ said Vulkan. ‘We follow swiftly, supported by the rest of the Firedrakes.’

Numeon nodded curtly, turning as he opened up a channel to Nemetor.

Vulkan then added, ‘We will lead the spearhead, fighting in pairs, dispersed formation. Suggestions?’

Varrun stroked his chin, smoothing his ash-grey beard. As the oldest amongst the order, he was often allowed to speak first. ‘One point of ingress, we’ll be attracting a lot of fire.’

‘We’ve taken worse,’ said Leodrakk. His eyes flared with fierce pride. ‘The honour of securing the breach should fall to us, and with the primarch leading us they don’t have nearly enough guns on that wall.’

A chorus of nods and muttered agreement went round the warriors.

‘I’d recommend storm shields in the first breach team,’ said Ganne, nodding to Igataron, who sat unmoving at the edge of the group. Both were assault specialists: the former outwardly pugnacious, the latter silent, but ferociously aggressive.

Varrun chuckled. ‘I thought the objective was to minimise civilian casualties.’

Ganne’s slab jaw tightened as he sent a crackle of energy down the haft of his thunder hammer, but he didn’t bite.

‘Skatar’var and I will go in as second wave,’ suggested Leodrakk, ignoring his bantering brothers.

‘Side by side, brother,’ said Skatar’var and the two locked gauntlets, hand to forearm.

‘That leaves you and I,’ Atanarius said to Varrun.

‘Hold the breach, leave it clear for the Legion,’ said Varrun. ‘We’ll keep the gate open for the Drakes.’

Ganne bared his teeth, ‘Rearguard obviously plays to your strengths, Varrun.’

Varrun bared his teeth back.

Inwardly, Vulkan smiled. They were hungry, ready for war. Pyre Guard were not like other Salamanders; they had more fire, more fury. Like the volcanoes of ancient Nocturne, the great jagged chains of the Dragonspike and Mount Deathfire, they were perpetually on the brink of eruption. Even the Pyroclasts weren’t as volatile.

Pyre Guard were chosen warriors, those that displayed a level of self-sacrifice and self-sufficiency that exceeded all others. Like the saburai of old Nihon, they were fighters foremost, who could ally as a unit or function expertly on their own. They were also leaders, and each of the Pyre Guard commanded a Chapter of the Legion in addition to their duties as the primarch’s inner circle warriors. All were Terran-born but still displayed the physical traits of onyx-black skin and red eyes, an irreversible reaction to the unique radiation of Nocturne combined with the genetic heritage of their primarch, which every Salamander, regardless of origin, possessed.

‘Skatar’var,’ said Vulkan. ‘How is Seriph?’

‘The remembrancer?’ he asked, initially wrong-footed by the request. ‘She lives.’

‘Good,’ said Vulkan. He addressed them all. ‘You are my finest drakes, my most trusted advisors. Our father fashioned us as crusaders, to bring fire and light to the darkest reaches of the galaxy. Our task is to protect mankind, shield humanity. It’s important that the Remembrancer Order sees this. Our appearance is…’

‘Monstrous, my lord,’ ventured Leodrakk, eyes blazing through his helm lenses.

Vulkan nodded. ‘We come to Kharaatan as liberators, not conquerors. We cannot forge civilisations out of rubble, out of sundered flesh and bone.’

‘And our cousins, will they hold to that also?’ a voice asked from the shadows.

All eyes turned to Igataron, whose gaze was fixed on the primarch.

‘If they do not,’ Vulkan promised, ‘my brother and I will have words.’

Numeon ended his vox exchange with Captain Nemetor. ‘Fifteenth are advancing,’ he announced, as he turned back to face his brothers.

Vulkan nodded. ‘Commander Arvek will be making contact in less than a minute. Helms on, prepare for immediate embarkation. When the ramp opens we will be ready to advance.’

In clanking unison the Pyre Guard obeyed.

Igataron and Ganne moved to the front, shields up, as Leodrakk and Skatar’var unhitched their power mauls and went in just behind them. Vulkan was next, Numeon at his side clutching the staff of his halberd. Varrun and Atanarius were last; the former holding his power axe high up the short haft near its double-edged blade, the latter unsheathing a power sword to kiss the naked blade.

All seven warriors carried bolters. Save for Varrun, who was an exceptional marksman, they seldom used them. Every one of their weapons was forged by its bearer, every one could spit fire like the drakes of old.

‘Eye-to-eye,’ snarled Numeon, reciting the Pyre Guard’s war mantra.

‘Tooth-to-tooth,’ the rest replied, including Vulkan.

Now they were forged and ready.

The hololith transmitter crackled into life, displaying a head and torso rendering of Commander Arvek.

‘You have your breach, my Lord Primarch. Withdrawing now.’

Through his retinal lenses, Vulkan saw Arvek’s tank formations pushing away from Khar-tann’s core wall. Each engine was rendered as an icon – the display was awash with their signatures. Behind them came the Rhino armoured transports of the 15th and behind that were the Mastodons.

‘Any losses?’ asked Vulkan.

‘None. We met zero resistance. Even when we closed to fifty metres they did not fire on us.’

A tremor of unease entered Vulkan’s mind, but he concealed it at once.

‘Relay to Captain Nemetor,’ he said to Numeon through the vox-feed as he cut the link to Arvek.

‘Something wrong, my lord?’ asked Numeon.

‘I expected some form of counter-attack.’

‘Perhaps they’ve decided to capitulate after all,’ suggested Atanarius.

‘Then why not open the gates?’ countered Varrun.

‘A trap?’ growled Leodrakk, prompting a nod of agreement from his sibling Skatar’var.

Vulkan’s mood darkened, his unease evident in his silence.

Either way, once Nemetor was inside the core wall they would find out.

Captain Nemetor had already removed his war-helm as he met Vulkan at the breach point in the core wall. The broad-shouldered warrior looked uneasy, and a fine sheen of sweat glistened on his forehead.

All lights inside the city were doused; roads, battlements and interior buildings snuffed out by darkness. The only source of illumination came from scattered fires left by the earlier bombardment, but even in this gloom evidence of Commander Arvek’s armoured assault could be seen everywhere.

Bodies of the Khar-tann soldiery were twisted amidst the rubble of the shattered core wall, which had collapsed in on itself from the severe shelling. Several watch towers had fallen into the city itself, lying broken in heaps of rockcrete and plasteel. Corpses lingered here too, already polluting the air around them with the stench of putrefaction. The entire city was rank with it, and stank of death.

Beyond the core wall and the flattened gate, burst inwards by a demolisher shell, there was a long esplanade. From the positions of exploded sandbags and mangled tank traps, Vulkan imagined the Khar-tans might have been staging a second defence line here. In several places he noticed the burned-out shells of pillboxes designed to create choke points and funnel an invading enemy into a kill zone. Punctuating the line of pillboxes were much larger bunkers, solid-form and permanent additions to the city’s defences. Smoke still drooled from the vision slits of some of the bunkers, telltale evidence of a rapid and aggressive clearance.

Of the inhabitants of Khar-tann, there was no sign.

‘Do you see that?’ asked Numeon, nodding to where the primarch had been looking.

‘Yes.’ Vulkan’s earlier sense of unease grew further.

‘A tank bombardment doesn’t do that. It flattens bunkers, it doesn’t cleanse and burn them. A strike team has already been here.’

Vulkan took in the scene of carnage, tried to look beyond the obvious wreckage and mortal destruction. Past the esplanade, the concentration of buildings thickened from initially military to civilian. He saw warehouses, manufactorums, vendors, commercia… homes. Through a gap in the narrow city streets he caught a glimpse of something swinging gently in the breeze.

Nemetor saluted as Vulkan reached him, the sharp clank of his fist striking his left breast enough to get the primarch’s attention. Behind him, the Pyre Guard were spreading out. Strict orders had been given that the rest of the Legion should stand down and wait outside.

‘Captain,’ said Vulkan.

Nemetor was shaken, though it was hard to tell from what. ‘You need to see this, my lord.’

Vulkan spoke over his shoulder to Numeon. The Pyre Guard were to secure the area immediately beyond the breach but advance no farther. Then he nodded to Nemetor, and the captain led them both on.

At the heart of Khar-tann City they found the bulk of the dead. Soldiers in barrack houses, gutted and flensed; pyres of still-burning bodies, impossible to identify from their charred remains, filling the air with greasy smoke; city officials impaled on spikes; civilians hanging by their necks, swinging to and fro in the breeze.

‘They slaughtered them,’ said Nemetor as he surveyed the carnage. Four Salamanders accompanied him, and despite the fact they were wearing their battle-helms they looked just as uneasy as their captain.

Vulkan unclenched his teeth.

‘Where are the rest of your company?’

‘Dispersed amongst the ruins, trying to find survivors.’

‘There’ll be none,’ Vulkan told him. ‘Recall them. We are not needed here. The people of Khar-tann are beyond our help.’ His gaze settled on a bloody symbol daubed on the wall of a scholam. The primarch’s jaw hardened.

‘When did they even make planetfall?’ asked Nemetor, following Vulkan’s line of sight.

‘I don’t know.’

He didn’t speak the language, but he recognised the cursive script, the sharp edges to the graffiti.

It was Nostraman.

Back up on the escarpment, Vulkan was alone but for the distant roar of the flames below.

Khar-tann burned. It burned with the fire of a thousand flame gauntlets, Vulkan having set his Pyroclasts the task of turning the city to ash. He wanted no such monument to slaughter to stand any longer than was strictly necessary. Its very existence had disturbed the Army cohorts especially, and even the legionaries treated it warily.

Vulkan waited patiently, listening to the vox-channel he had just opened. It took several seconds of softly crackling static before Vulkan got an answer. When he did, it sounded like the person on the other end of the link was smiling.

‘Brother.’

Despite himself, Vulkan couldn’t disguise his anger. ‘What have you done, Curze?’

‘Freed you from dirtying your hands. We arrived early, while you were still marshalling your tanks and Titans.’

‘My orders were to take the city as bloodlessly as possible.’

‘I don’t follow your orders, brother. Besides, it’s better this way.’

‘Better for whom? You’ve slaughtered an entire city – men, women, children all dead. It’s a butchery worthy of Angron’s Legion in there!’

‘Don’t confuse me with our hot-headed sibling, though I believe you would run him close at this precise moment. Are you angry with me?’

Vulkan clenched his fists, biting back a retort.

‘Where are you, Curze? Where are you hiding?’

‘I am close by. We will be reunited soon enough.’ Konrad Curze paused, his playful tone ebbed. ‘You and I know this was never going to be a bloodless compliance. One-Five-Four Six is a war world, and no warrior I have ever fought has given up without first shedding a little blood.’

‘A little? You practically exsanguinated the entire populace.’

‘And what do you think that would do to their fighting spirit?’

Vulkan turned sharply at the sound of Curze’s voice. Not through the vox any more – he was here. The Night Haunter was a few paces behind him, standing in the shadows at the edge of the flickering firelight.

‘You are either bold or foolish, meeting me out here like this,’ Vulkan warned, the combination of the flames and his drake-like armour enshrouding him in a volatile aspect. Even the carcass of the great drake Kesare, slung over his right shoulder, seemed animate. His forge hammer was within easy reach but he didn’t so much as glance at the weapon.

‘Why, what are you going to do?’ Curze stepped out of the shadows.

He went without a helmet, the light hitting his features in such a way that where the darkness pooled it made him appear gaunt, almost skeletal. Nostramo, his birthplace – unless one counted the laboratory where he, like all of his siblings, was first created – had been a lightless world. This fact was obvious in the chalk-like pallor of its inhabitants, and Curze was no exception to that. One onyx-skinned, the other alabaster; both primarchs were a study in chiaroscuro.

In stark contrast to Vulkan’s fiery eyes, Curze’s were like thin ovals of jet staring through strands of lank, black hair that hung down across his face. Where Vulkan wore a firedrake hide as his mantle, Curze had a cloak of ragged crimson. One brother had a reptilian appearance in his scaled war-plate of oceanic green, clad with rare quartz; the other was armoured in midnight-blue, inscribed with sigils of death and mortality.

Vulkan kept his voice level, neutral. ‘Are you trying to goad me, Curze? Do you want this to escalate?’

‘That sounded like a threat.’ Curze smiled thinly. ‘Was it a threat, brother? Am I a rough blade to be tempered at your righteous anvil? Do you also think yourself my better and my teacher, then?’

Vulkan ignored him, instead gesturing to the inferno that had been Khar-tann City. ‘Look at what your deeds have wrought.’

‘Ha! What my deeds have wrought? Vulkan, you sound like a poet, and a poor one at that.’ Curze grew serious. ‘I’ve broken this world for you, brother. By culling the city you’re now putting to the torch, I’ve spared us a wealth of blood. What do you think this world’s rebels will do when they see and hear what we’ve done to one of their major cities?’ Defying Vulkan’s palpable anger, Curze took a step closer with every emphasised word. ‘They will cower, and shrink, and weep…’ When the two were face to face, he snarled the last part through a barricade of teeth, ‘Begging for mercy.’ He stepped back, opening his arms. ‘And you can give it to them, that is my gift.’

Vulkan shook his head. ‘Terror is your gift. They were women and children, Curze. Innocents.’

Curze sneered, bitterly. ‘No one is innocent.’

‘You came from the gutters, brother, but our father has raised you up. Stop acting like the murderous swine you inherited on Nostramo.’

‘Raised me, did he? Brought me up from the darkness and into the light? We are killers, Vulkan. All of us. Don’t try and convince me we are noble men, for we are not. My eyes have just opened before yours, that’s all.’

Curze turned and walked away, back down the ridge. ‘Fear, Vulkan,’ he called, disappearing into the shadows, ‘that’s the only thing they understand. You all need to learn that.’

Vulkan did not reply. His body was trembling. Looking down, he saw his forge hammer gripped in both hands. He hadn’t even realised he’d picked it up. He gasped, exhaling to relieve the tension, and fought his body. When he was calm again, he turned towards the inferno. The flames were rising now, touching the sky with tendrils of coiling black smoke. It reminded him of Ibsen, and the jungles they had set ablaze there.

How many more worlds must burn before this is over?

He stood in silence, just watching, and stayed like that for several minutes until a quiet voice from behind the primarch disturbed his reverie.

‘Lord Vulkan?’

It was the remembrancer, Seriph.

‘Your equerry said you’d be up here.’

‘Did he also tell you I did not wish to be disturbed?’

Seriph bowed her head slightly. ‘He was too preoccupied to stop me.’

Vulkan turned his back on her. ‘I’m not in the mood for further questions now.’

‘Sincere apologies, my lord. I had hoped to continue our–’

Vulkan’s head snapped around savagely. ‘I said not now!’

She shrank back, her eyes alive with fear.

Curze’s last words came back to him, almost mocking, but Vulkan was powerless. He glared, eyes burning hot with fury. This was the monster, this was the image he was trying so hard to conceal from the remembrancers. His hearts pulsed, and his chest heaved up and down like a giant bellows. Curze was right – he was a killer. That was the purpose for which he had been bred.

His anger at what his brother had done, the memory of those bodies, the children… It was overwhelming, so consuming Vulkan hissed his next command and filled the air with the smell of ash and cinder.

‘Leave. Me. Alone.’

Seriph fled down the ridge.

Vulkan didn’t bother to watch her go. Instead he watched the burning ruins of Khar-tann.

‘It will all end in fire when the galaxy burns,’ he said, a heavy melancholy settling upon him. ‘And all of us will light the torch.’

Pain awaited me when I awoke. I was no stranger to it, for I was a warrior born, a primarch. And it took a primarch to know how to really hurt another.

Curze must have been well schooled, for my body was alive with pain. It brought me back from a torpor of unconsciousness into a world of nerve-shredding, white-hot agony. Even I, Vulkan, who have stood in the mouth of a volcano, who have endured the nucleonic, cleansing fire of a missile strike and lived. Even for me, this… hurt.

I screamed, opening my eyes. Through vision drenched arterial red I saw a cell no larger than the hold of a gunship. It was black with circular walls, metal-forged and without any door or gate that I could see.

First calming the urgent pulse of blood drumming through my hearts, I then slowed my breathing. Shock and severe injury were retarding my efforts to control my body, but my will was stronger, and I regained some semblance of function.

I blinked, banishing the red rime of clotted blood that had crusted over my iris like a dirty lens. Aching bones and limbs protested, but I managed to rise. It was as if a Titan’s foot was resting on my back.

I took a faltering step but staggered, falling painfully on one knee. I hadn’t walked in a while, I had no idea how long. The cell was abjectly dark despite my enhanced eyesight, and I had lost all sense of time.

Rising to my feet again, I trembled, but stayed upright. Waiting like that for a few moments – it could have been an hour, it was difficult to gauge – the tremors ebbed and then ceased entirely as my strength gradually returned. I got three more steps before the shackles binding me to the wall yanked me back. I scowled, looking down at the chains fettered around my wrists and ankles as if seeing them for the first time. Another was fastened around my neck, attached to a collar. I pulled at one experimentally, assessing resistance. It did not yield. Even with two hands, I couldn’t break the chain.

‘You’re wasting your time,’ a familiar voice uttered from the darkness, making me quickly turn.

‘Show yourself,’ I demanded. My throat was sore from the sharp air in this place, and my voice lacked conviction because of it.

Even so, a face loomed out of the shadows at my command. It was pale, framed by closely cropped black hair, with sunken cheeks and cold, glassy eyes. Sharks have eyes like that – dead eyes. But it was a man, not a shark at all. It was my brother. One I barely recognised.

‘Pleased to see me?’ asked Ferrus Manus, in gravel-raw tones.

‘What? How is this poss–’ I began before the blade slipped into my side. As white fire exploded in my flesh, I realised that my gaolers were here too, waiting silently in the dark. They had brought a great many swords with them. I heard them slip from scabbards before they sank into my body.

Before I blacked out, the charnel stink of Curze’s breath washed over me, and as I fell again I caught a last glimpse of my cellmate.

Those same dead eyes staring, Ferrus lifted his chin.

Around his neck was a bloody scar, partly clotted with his primarch blood. I knew the wound, I had inflicted several during my time as a warlord. It was from decapitation.

‘As you can see,’ he answered, ‘it’s not possible.’

And my world was swallowed by darkness.

CHAPTER THREE

Discovery

‘What is true faith? Is it belief in the absence of empirical truth? No. Faith is a manifestation of will, it is the fealty-price given in the presence of actual godhood and the only protection from its divine wrath. That is true faith.’

– spoken during a meeting of the Lodge
by a Chaplain of the XVII Legion

Sebaton took a deep breath of clean, outside air. Confinement inside the catacombs had begun to manifest as mild claustrophobia and with the night air cooling his skin, he let the relief from being out of the hole wash over him. His heart was hammering so hard, he felt the need to put a hand over his chest just to quieten it. Fear of enclosed spaces wasn’t something he had suffered from before but the sense of creeping dread, that intangible belief that something – or someone – was tracking him like a bloodhound, had unsettled him more than he cared to admit.

‘Get a damn grip,’ he chided.

Despite his promises to the contrary, he was right back where he didn’t want to be. He hoped after the last time that they would have left him alone. He had dared believe he was free, but he would never truly be free, not from them. And so, here he was.

Darkness had fallen completely over the ruins and rain was trickling from bruise-purple clouds above, pattering on the canvas awning of his tent.

They had made camp on a rocky promontory overlooking the dig site. The ruins were behind Sebaton, about twenty metres down, reachable via a slightly inclined slope. The other side of the promontory dropped away into a sheer-sided cliff, below which was a short expanse of grey scrub wasteland that was slowly being eroded by the creeping pipework and industry of Ranos.

It was also the pain that had driven him out. Sebaton had felt it like an ache at the back of his skull, an itch behind his teeth that refused to be scratched, a bitter taste under his tongue that made him feel sick. It hurt to simply be in the hole. The closer they came, the harder it got to be down there. Sebaton wasn’t sure if that boded well or ill for his endeavour. His employers had been detailed about the object of this excavation, providing everything he needed to recognise it, as well as what it did, how it worked and what he was expected to do with it once he had it. This was the worst thing, not the digging, but what came next – his mission.

It had grown colder above the dig site and Sebaton nursed a cup of cooling recaff in one hand in a vain attempt to warm up, kneading his right temple with the other. It didn’t help; he was still cold, and the migraine still lingered.

‘Are you all right?’

Varteh had followed him and was approaching up the slope, pistol loose in the holster, moving with that same soldierly confidence he always had. Sebaton stopped massaging his head, allowing his hand to stray to the pistol he wore, but immediately berated himself.

Got you jumping at shadows, he told himself. When did you become so paranoid?

Who are you kidding, you’ve always been this paranoid. Comes with the territory.

‘Fine,’ Sebaton lied, taking a sip of the brackish caffeine. He grimaced at the taste.

‘Sorry,’ said Varteh, reaching him at the summit of the ridge. ‘My brewing skills aren’t as honed as my ability to kill people.’

‘I’m hoping you won’t need to employ the latter.’

The ex-Lucifer poured himself a cup, but didn’t answer.

‘It’s hot, at least,’ said Sebaton, turning to face the city as Varteh joined him. ‘Well… warm.’

They chinked their cups together.

‘What are we drinking to?’ asked Varteh.

‘Getting out of here.’

The ex-Lucifer’s expression suggested he thought Sebaton meant more than just Ranos. He took a rolled up stick of lho-leaf from his jacket pocket, offering one to Sebaton, who refused.

‘No, thank you. My mind feels overstimulated as it is.’

‘Keeps me sharp,’ said Varteh. ‘Funny what you miss when you’re out.’

Sebaton turned to see the soldier’s profile. ‘Out?’

‘Service, the Army.’

Ah, thought Sebaton, out…

Now it was Varteh’s turn to ask, as he picked up on the change in mood, ‘Something wrong?’

‘Freedom, Varteh. You’re talking about freedom.’

‘Not everyone desires it. And I was thrown out, remember? For some, routine is an anchor that keeps them grounded, stops them from drifting. I’ve met plenty of soldiers who think like that. They can’t function without it. Downtime is like hell for men like that.’

‘Indeed,’ said Sebaton, taking in the sight of labyrinthine industrial works, manufactorums and hab-blocks, ‘I believe you.’ Tiny pinpricks of flickering light emanating from drum fires, cook stands and furnaces illuminated the otherwise drab vista. Sebaton imagined the hordes of indentured workers clustered around them for warmth. It had been months organising this dig, finding the correct site and then the excavation itself. Now, with the object of his visit so close, Sebaton was more than ready to leave.

Varteh thumbed over his shoulder. ‘So, why here? I know you won’t give me details and I honestly don’t care if you’re doing this for profit or prestige, but this place is just rubble. There’s no tomb here, no Gyptian sarcophagus waiting for us to open it. Does it even have a name?’

He wasn’t wrong. Even with the benefit of looking down on the ruins from above, it resembled nothing of the fortress it had once been. Now it was a rotting shell of overhanging beams, like spears of broken limbs jutting from the burned-out husks of long forgotten halls. For many years the people of Ranos, and even Traoris, had been in thrall to the masters of this fortress and the seven others dotted around the planet. This one had been the last, its octagonal border barely visible. Eight, eight-sided fortresses. Even that word was a misnomer. Some had referred to them by another name – temples.

Yes, this place had a name but I won’t speak it. Not here, not to you.

‘Something happened here,’ said Sebaton instead, ‘something important, and a part of it was left behind.’

‘This “weapon” you mentioned?’

‘No, not that,’ said Sebaton, momentarily distracted, regretting even saying that much. He paused. ‘Does it seem overly quiet to you?’

Deep in the heart of Ranos, the tiny lights were going out.

Overhead the thrum of heavy turbine engines invaded the silence. They were distant enough that neither man reached for his sidearm, but close enough that Sebaton went to grab a scope from inside the tent.

‘Landers,’ said Varteh, not needing the benefit of the scope to realise what the engines belonged to.

‘I count three, cutting through the cloud layer,’ Sebaton replied, scope pressed against his right eye. ‘Definitely a landing party.’

‘Of what?’

‘No idea,’ he lied again, shutting the telescopic lens and putting it in his pocket.

They were bulky, heavily armed gunships. The kind used by deadly warriors. He’d met them before, and not enjoyed the experience.

‘I’d like to know what they’re doing here,’ said Varteh.

‘No, you wouldn’t.’

Varteh laughed mirthlessly.

‘Perhaps you’re right. I’ll go and kick our adept up the arse. See if we can move things up a notch.’

‘Good idea.’

Varteh jogged back down the slope, one hand on his holster to keep it steady.

Sebaton lost the gunships a few seconds later as they disappeared below benighted rows of smoke stacks and silos. He swore under his breath.

‘I suppose it was too much to ask that they didn’t show up.’

The cup in his hands grew hot, much hotter than the tepid caffeine within. As he looked down into its brownish depths, he frowned.

‘Oh,’ said Sebaton, ‘it’s you.’

CHAPTER FOUR

Sons of our fathers

‘Of all men else I have avoided thee.

But get thee back. My soul is too much charged

With blood of thine already.’

– From ‘Masbeth’ by the dramaturge
Kristof Mylowe.

‘Do you remember how I found you, alone on the ash plains? I thought you were a miracle, or some devil cast back from the earth to plague us. But you were just a child, an infant. Something so small, so vulnerable, surrounded by so much death. I thought you were dead, burned black from the crash. The sand inside the crater you made had turned to glass… But the fire never touched you, didn’t even leave a mark. You barely cried, and it wasn’t from pain or discomfort. You just didn’t want to be alone, Vulkan.’

‘I remember.’

I smelled smoke and leather, metal and sweat.

‘Wake up, son,’ said a man, and in my half-conscious state I thought I recognised him.

I was back in the forge. I was home.

‘Father?’

Smoke cleared, darkness parted, I blinked and there he was before me. Like it was yesterday.

N’bel.

Face tanned by the Nocturnean sun, hands calloused from metal working, skin that felt rough in my grasp, N’bel was every inch the craftsman. He had the broad shoulders of a blacksmiter, the fuller tucked in his belt providing further unneeded proof of his profession. A coarse overall of dark, heavy fabric was overlaid by a smock of leather. His arms were bare, scarred and tanned like his face, bound with torcs, thick with brawn and ropes of sinew. This was a man who made a living out of honest toil and muscle. He had taught me everything I knew, or at least, everything I cared to remember.

‘You are alive…’

He nodded.

Longing ached in my chest, my eyes tearful. Around me was the workshop, smelling of ash, warmed by fire. Somewhere close by, an anvil chimed out a steady rhythm, the beat of a blacksmiter’s drum, one whose tune I knew very well. It was pure and good, this place. A stone hearth sat in one corner of the room, where a pot of broth bubbled dulcetly above a quietly crackling fire. Here was the earth. Here, I was in my element.

‘I have missed you, father.’

Tears stained my cheeks. I tasted salt and cinder when they touched my lips as I embraced N’bel, a lost son returning home. Despite his brawn and bulk, he was like a child in my arms. We parted as a frown crept upon my face at our sudden reunion.

‘How? What about the war? Is it…?’

Something was clouding my mind, preventing me from seeing clearly. I shook my head but the fog was not here, it was within.

‘All that matters is you are back, my son.’

He clapped me on the arm and I felt the warmth of a father’s respect and admiration spread through me like a balm, washing away all the guilt and the blood.

For so long, I had wanted to come back. After the Crusade was over, and the war was done; in my heart, I knew I would return to Nocturne and live in peace. A hammer can sunder – in my hands it was an incredibly effective weapon – but it was also a tool to craft. I had destroyed populations, razed entire cities in the name of conquest; now I wanted permanence, to fulfil a desire to build, not break.

I helped build this place; not only this forge, but also this city in which I knew it resided, and the other six sanctuary cities besides. Nocturne had ever been a tribal society, the earth upon which it sat, but its trade and lifeblood was also its doom, as the hot and volatile world demonstrated during every Trial of Fire.

N’bel’s eyes were staring, not with paternal joy at being reunited with his son, but in fear.

I held him by the shoulders, firmly, but not so hard that I would hurt him.

‘Father, what is it? What’s wrong?’

‘All that matters is you are back…’ he repeated, and nodded behind me.

I followed his gaze to the door of the forge. It was ajar and the night-time sounds of Nocturne drifted inside on a warm breeze. I could smell the heat of the desert, taste the acid-tang of the Acerbian Sea and also something else.

I released N’bel, turning to the door. ‘What has happened?’

Nearby was the rack of tools my father used on the anvil. I picked up a branding iron shaped like a spear. It was an odd choice; there were several hammers, but for some reason I chose the iron.

‘You weren’t alone,’ breathed my father, his strong blacksmiter’s voice fading to a whimper, ‘when you came back.’

I snarled, advancing on the door, the haft of the branding iron gripped tight in my hand.

‘Father, what has happened?’

N’bel was lost to fear, and a sudden coldness swept through the forge, turning my blood to ice.

In the days before the Outlander, we Nocturneans had fought warbands of dusk-wraiths for our freedom and safety. They were raiders, pirates and slavers. I later came to know them as the eldar, an alien species that had particularly blighted my world, but also countless others.

I had wanted peace, a chance to build, but now I saw that fate would not release me – the galaxy wanted a warrior. My other father was calling and he would not be denied.

‘Stay in the forge,’ I told N’bel and went outside.

The night was coal-black, and a vast pall of pyroclastic cloud moved slowly across the horizon like a dark phantom. All the lights were out. Every home, every forge and furnace was dead.

I had stepped out onto a platform of iron and steel. Gone were the tribal dwellings of my formative years, gone were the simple forges of my forebears. With the coming of the Outlander, and the arrival of the nascent Imperium, Nocturne had changed. Vast mining engines, furnaces and manufactorums replaced the old forges now. Where once there had been humble dwellings, now there were great conurbations of habitation domes, relay stations and vox-towers. The earth-shaman and metal-shapers, even the blacksmiters had given way to seismologists, geologists and manufactorum masters. Our trade had not changed, but our culture had. It needed to. For Nocturne was a capricious world, ever on the brink of destruction.

She was venting now, Mount Deathfire, in all her fiery glory. Pyroclastic cloud obscured most of my view, scudding across the invisible void shield suspended above me. The generators, one for each major city, were another gift from the Imperium. The one above me shimmered violently as pieces of debris flung from the volcano struck it. Fire was raining from the sky, cascading in waves and exploding into sparks as it met the resistance of the void shield.

It was beautiful to behold, nature’s fury viewed in panorama like this. When I finally lowered my gaze from the heavens, that sense of awe and beauty left me. In its place was the coldness I had felt in the forge.

‘You.’ I uttered like a curse as I saw the lone figure with his back to me. He was sitting down, shoulders hunched over something. Dark hair cascaded over his back. He wore a smock of sackcloth. In one hand he carried a knife. Its edge was serrated and in the darkness I thought it had a blacker sheen around its toothed blade.

He was at odds with this place. I knew it in my heart, but also saw it in his anachronistic clothing.

He hadn’t heard me, so I stepped closer, my grip tightening around the branding iron.

The dark figure was sawing, I could hear the rasp of his knife shearing through something. At first I thought it was wood, fuel for the furnace, but then I remembered the blade and the black sheen around the edge. A basket lay off to one side within easy reach. Every time he finished making a cut, he threw something into it.

‘What are you doing?’ Even as I asked the question, I knew the answer. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked again. Rage took hold of me, and I raised the branding iron above my head like a spear.

The black sheen around the blade… It was blood.

No lights, no forge fires – the city was dead, and he had killed it.

‘Turn, curse you!’

He stopped at the sound of his name. Sat up straight, knife held out casually to one side.

‘Murdering scum!’

I pulled back my spear, aiming for his back, where I knew the iron would punch through into his heart. Even primarchs can die. Ferrus had died. He was the first of us, the first I was certain of, anyway. Even primarchs can die…

‘Vulkan, no.’

The voice came from behind me, compelling me to obey.

At first I thought it was N’bel, venturing out of the forge to see what was going on, but I was wrong. I turned, and standing before me, in the same robes he had been wearing on Ibsen, was the remembrancer Verace.

‘Vulkan, he is your brother and I forbid it.’

My grip tightened on the spear. ‘But he murdered them.’

‘Do not kill him, Vulkan.’

Who was this human to tell me my business, to give me orders? He was nothing to me, a memory from the Great Crusade, a– No, that wasn’t right. I shook my head, trying to banish the fog, but it wasn’t out here with me, it was within.

Verace was no remembrancer. He was a cloak, a mask to hide something greater.

Very few mortals could behold the Emperor’s true form and live. Even his voice was lethal. So he wore masks, erected facades that he might move around the galaxy without leaving deathly awe in his wake. I was his son, and as such able to withstand much more than any mortal man ever could, but even I had not seen my father’s true face. He was at once a warrior, a poet, a scientist and a vagabond, and yet he was also none of these things. They were, all of them, merely camouflage to conceal his true nature. And the costume my father chose to wear now was that of an ageing remembrancer.

‘My son, you must not kill him.’

‘He has earned his fate,’ I spat belligerently, not wishing to defy my father but at the same time unable to let the murderer go unpunished.

‘Vulkan, please do not kill him.’

‘Father!’

I felt a hand grip my shoulder, cold and vice-like. The spear was no longer clenched in my fist, its absence like smoke escaping through my grasping fingers.

‘Brother…’ said Curze as he rammed the spear into my back and I saw it punch through my chest a second later.

The world was fading again. I clutched at the iron impaling me, slumping to my knees as Curze let me go.

Verace was gone and left no trace of his parting; so, too, was my brother, though it was the lack of his presence rather than his actual disappearance that I noticed.

Above me, the void shield flickered once and died. Fire rained down, the skies were burning with it. Powerless, dying, I closed my eyes and let the conflagration take me.

The reek of smoke and ash greeted me as I came round. For a moment I believed I was still on Nocturne, trapped in some infernal cycle from which there was no escape, destined to relive my imagined death at the hands of Curze, my brother, and now my captor, again and again.

But when the cell and not N’bel’s forge came into focus around me, I realised I was truly awake and that my return home had just been a nightmare. Feverish sweat lathered my body; it was the first thing I noticed after the smell of the forge dissipated. Darkness reigned, as ever, and steam coiled from my oil-black skin as the heat of my body reacted to the cold. Honour scars stood out, my oaths of moment, etched into flesh and thrown into relief by a harsh light emanating from above. For a moment I thought I saw a marking I didn’t recognise, but lost it in the shadows.

The second thing I noticed was that I was not alone, and this took my mind off the mark. Though the nightmare had left me, my ghastly cellmate had not.

Ferrus was watching from the shadows, his dead eyes twinkling like opals.

‘You are dead, brother,’ I said to him, rising. ‘And I am truly sorry for that.’

‘Why?’ asked Ferrus, the gruesome neck wound adding more gravel to an already rasping cadence. ‘Do you blame yourself, brother?’

It sounded almost like an accusation, so much so that it made me turn to regard him. He was truly a spectre, a shade, a withered version of what Ferrus Manus had once been, clad in my dead brother’s armour.

‘Where are we?’ I asked, ignoring my dead brother’s question.

‘Where do you think we are?’

‘Isstvan.’

Ferrus nodded. ‘We never left, either of us.’

‘Do not pretend to be him,’ I said.

Ferrus opened his arms, looked around as if searching for answers, ‘Am I not? Is it easy to assuage your guilt if you make yourself believe I am not some aspect of him? Do you know where my body is now? It lies headless on a desert of black sand, slowly putrefying in its bloodstained armour. I don’t recall any of the statues erected in my honour bearing such an image.’

I was tiring of this cajoling. It was beneath me, it was beneath Ferrus, and I felt like I was besmirching his memory by the very act of listening to it.

‘What are you, creature? For you are not Ferrus Manus.’

He laughed. It was an unpleasant sound, like the cawing of a crow. ‘I thought I was your brother. Is that not how you addressed me? Am I so easily forgotten, now I am dead?’

Ferrus, or the thing that wore his skin and armour like a man wears a cloak, feigned disappointment.

I was unconvinced.

‘Ferrus was a noble warrior, a good and honest man. He was steel and he was iron, and I will never forget him. Ever.’

‘Yet you let me die.’

Guilt was more painful than any blade, and as it pierced my weary heart I staggered at first, but then righted myself.

‘There was nothing I could do. Nothing either of us could do.’

‘“Either of us”?’ he asked, a look of belated revelation crossing his face, ‘Ah, you mean Corax. You want him to share in your guilt?’ His face brightened, as if enlightened, before it grew abruptly dark, prompting Ferrus to slowly shake his head, ‘No. You own this, Vulkan. This was your mistake. You let me down, not Corax.’

I turned away, even as the spectre’s words cut me without showing any visible trace of the wounds they’d inflicted. ‘You are not real, brother. You’re just a figment of my imagination, a remnant of conscience…’

‘Guilt! I am your guilt made manifest, Vulkan. You can’t escape me because I live in you.’

Trying not to listen, I started to examine the cell. It was circular, the metal used in its construction thick and impenetrable to my fists alone. But it was made in sections, and each of those was betrayed by a welding line that yielded a shallow lip. Fifty metres straight up. I couldn’t jump that distance, but I might be able to climb it. As my lucidity returned, so too did my capacity to plan and strategise. I put those gifts to work on my escape.

An oubliette is a hole, a dungeon in which people are thrown and forgotten about. This was what Curze had done. He had left me in a hole, beaten me, cut me and assumed I would break, that my mind would shatter and I would be forever lost.

Curze was not Nocturnean. Nostramans did not possess our pride, our determination, our endurance.

‘Despair’ was not a word we recognised, nor was ‘submission’.

Purpose providing me with newfound strength, I seized my chains. The iron felt rough against the palms of my hands as my grip tightened. Muscles bunched in my neck, hardened over my shoulders and back. Threads of sinew stood out on my blacksmiter’s chest, cord thick and straining against the chains. And as I pulled, the links began to stretch and open, slowly yielding to my might. With a supreme effort, as much will as it was strength, I wrenched the chains apart and broke them. Each and every one, until their fragments lay scattered upon the cell floor.

Ferrus sneered; I could almost hear his lip curling, ‘So, you are free of those chains. So what? You are weak, Vulkan. And because you are weak, you will fail. Just as you failed me, just as you failed your Legion.’

I stopped for a moment, and bowed my head to remember the fallen.

Nemetor, cradled in my arms… He had been the last.

‘I did not fail you, brother.’

Pressing a hand against the cell wall, I felt for imperfections in the metal, the smallest handhold I could exploit.

The voice behind me interrupted my planning.

‘Do you want to know how I died, brother?’

I did not turn this time, for I had no wish to see the thing that had somehow crept inside my thoughts and was trying to unman me.

My reply was caustic. ‘You are not my brother. Now, shut up!’

Ferrus’s voice grew lower, more sinister, ‘Do you want to know what I realised at the very moment of my death?’

I paused, and cursed myself inwardly for doing it.

‘I bested him, you know. Fulgrim, I mean.’

Now I turned. I couldn’t help it. Deep down, a part of me must have suspected this, otherwise how could this apparition speak to me of it? ‘He was your slayer?’

Ferrus nodded slowly, as a smile crept up over his lips like a spider crawling across a weed.

‘He was.’

‘You hated him, didn’t you? For his betrayal, for the bond of friendship he broke.’

‘We were once very close.’

I felt the weight of the chains anew, their paltry fragments dragging me down like an anchor into the abyssal deep of an ocean. Darkness lingered here in this trench of the mind, all-consuming and endless. I knew that I was succumbing to something – that my will, not my strength, was being tested, and I wondered again at the nature of the darkness in this place that I could not see through it. That I was blind like any mortal man would be.

‘Yes – you are, brother,’ said Ferrus, causing me to start when I realised he had read my thought and turned it to his own ends. ‘Blind, I mean. Blinded to truth, by so-called enlightenment.’ Ferrus’s smile reached his eyes, and it was hideous to behold. All light was drawn to them, devoured by those deadened orbs as a black hole devours a sun. ‘You know of what I speak.’

‘You said you defeated him.’ I felt a weight upon my back, pressing me down to my haunches.

‘I did. I had him at my mercy, but Fulgrim,’ said Ferrus, whilst shaking his head, ‘was not all he appeared to be. You know of what I speak,’ he repeated, and my mind was cast back to when I saw Horus for that second time, when I felt the nature of the power he had cloaked himself with. I could not put a name to it, to this presence, this primordial fear, but knew that Ferrus spoke of the same thing.

He leaned back to expose the neck wound. ‘He cut off my head, slew me in cold blood and left my Legion shattered. You failed me, Vulkan. I needed you at my side, and you failed me. I asked you–’ Ferrus grew angry, ‘–no, I begged you to follow me, to stand by my side!’

I stood, the weight leaving me, the chains losing their power to drag me down into the dirt, into this dark hollow with only an apparition and my eventual madness to keep me company.

‘You lie,’ I told the spectre. ‘Ferrus Manus would not beg. Not even for that.’

I turned back to the wall, took hold as my fingers pressed into the metal, and began to climb.

‘You will fail!’ Ferrus raged below me. ‘You are weak, Vulkan! Weak! You’ll perish in this place and no one will ever know your fate. Unmourned, your statue will be shrouded. Your Legion will diminish and die, lost like the others. Unspoken of, unwanted, a cautionary tale for those that remain behind to spit on your unworthy ashes. Nocturne will burn.’

One hand over the other, I kept on climbing.

‘Shut up, brother.’

Ferrus had never been this talkative before; I wondered why in my subconscious he was now. It was guilt, and the slow erosion of my resolve, that provided his words. They were my words, my fear.

‘I am starting to understand, Curze,’ I muttered, finding all the imperfections in the metal with my fingertips, rising like a feline predator from my prison.

I slipped, fell a half-metre, my knuckles scraping against the wall, but managed to grip where one of the weld points jutted almost imperceptibly in a shallow lip of metal. No one berated me or willed my death. I glanced down.

Ferrus was gone. For now at least.

Making sure of my grip, I set my mind to the task ahead.

Above me, with every painstaking metre I climbed, the oval of light that cast down into my cell widened.

Once I neared the end of the shaft, no more than two metres from the summit, I stopped and waited. Listened.

Two voices, low and grating, emanated from above. The rough tonality came from vox-grilles. Curze had positioned two guards to watch my cell. I briefly wondered if they were amongst the legionaries who had stabbed me so grievously before. I could still feel the presence of the blades as they pierced my body, but it was a phantom pain and no scars marred my skin other than those rendered by the branding iron.

During the Great Crusade, there were few occasions I could remember when the VIII and XVIII Legions had fought together on campaign. Kharaatan was the last time, and that hadn’t ended well for me or Curze. Whatever bonds of loyalty I felt towards him, whatever fraternal love and respect I might have borne for him, ended on Kharaatan. What he did there… What he made me do…

I shuddered, and one of the guards laughed in such a way as to suggest the nature of their discussion: death and torture, and how they had meted it out to those weaker and smaller than them. Murderers, rapists, thieves, the children of Nostramo came from spoiled stock.

I felt my anger boil, but kept my fury in check. This needed to be swift, silent.

From the resonance of their footfalls against the metal floor, I gauged each legionary’s position relative to the opening of the shaft. One was close by – bored, as he shifted around often. The other was farther away, perhaps a few metres between each warrior. Neither of them was watching the opening. I suspected they thought I was dead or dying. Certainly, they had plunged enough steel in me to see it done.

I am a primarch, and we do not die easily… or well, I reminded myself, thinking of poor Ferrus. And for a moment, I felt his presence again below me, but he did not stir or speak.

I eased out of the shaft.

Two guards, midnight-clad in their legionary colours. Night Lords both. One had his back to me. Moving silently I slipped my hand around his gorget, smothering his vox-grille with my palm, and twisted.

The other saw me too late, a little farther down the corridor. He saw my eyes first – he saw them when I chose to open them after I killed his comrade. Two fiery orbs, burning vengefully in the darkness. Shadows were the province of the VIII but they were not the only Legion who could dwell in darkness. Balanced on the edge of the shaft, dropping the body of the first guard to land with a dull metal-hitting-metal thunk, I pounced.

The second guard was raising his bolter. It must have felt like gravity had exerted itself fourfold over his muscles; every movement glacially slow in the face of a primarch’s concerted attack. He aimed for my chest, going for the centre mass as instinct would have urged him to. I carried the guard down as I landed upon him, my fingers clamping around his trigger hand and mashing it into the stock of his bolter so he – and it – would never fire again.

He hit the ground, grunting as my sheer weight and power dented his chest plate and cracked the fused ribcage beneath. I masked his scream with my hand, crushing the vox-grille, breaking teeth. Blood geysered up through his ruined war-helm, splashing hot and wet against my face. I kept squeezing, immune to the guard’s panic.

Then it stopped, and silence followed.

Still straddling the dead guard’s body, I looked up and tried to get my bearings.

A long corridor stretched out in front of me: bare metal, faintly lit, nondescript. I could be anywhere on Isstvan. I remembered little of my abduction from the battlefield. What happened between when Curze appeared and my waking in the cell might never return.

A sense of enclosure as I touched the metal wall on my left made me suspect I was underground. Perhaps Horus had ordered the construction of tunnels beneath the surface. I wondered if there were cells for Corax and Ferrus too. I dismissed the idea almost as soon as it was formed. Horus did not take prisoners of war, it wasn’t in his nature – though I had much cause to question exactly what his nature was over these last few months. This was Curze’s doing.

I knew then he hadn’t forgiven me for Kharaatan, for what I did to him.

My brother was a petty-minded, shallow creature; this was his way of evening things up between us.

Taking the bodies of the guards, one by one, I threw them down into the pit. I suspected much of this place was deserted – after all, Curze had left me here to die – and no one would hear the crash of their broken bodies when they hit the ground, but a pair of dead Night Lords out in the open would arouse alarm immediately. A few seconds gained might be the difference between my escape and continued incarceration.

With the guards dispatched, I padded gently to the end of the corridor, slowing as I reached the junction and listening intently for sounds of disturbance.

Nothing.

Peering around the corner, I saw another passageway, empty like the one I was just leaving.

The peace didn’t last. After a few minutes, I was halfway down the next corridor when a door slid open along the right-hand side and a legionary stepped out.

Acting with greater alacrity than his dead brothers festering in the pit, he opened up a comm-channel and sounded an alarm.

‘Vulkan lives!’ He sounded afraid, and the irony of that fact gave me a cruel satisfaction as I ran at him. I took a glancing hit from a hurried snap shot, before I smashed the flat of my palm against his chest. It was a heart strike, which, if delivered with enough force, can kill instantly. His primary organ collapsed – so, too, the secondary back-up. The legionary crumpled and I left him for dead, racing into the chamber from where he’d come as the sirens started screaming.

Again, I was confronted with more bare metal. No weapons, no supplies, nothing. It was spartan to the point of being deserted. Except I heard them coming for me above the wailing alarms. Some were shouting in that ugly, guttural language of their home world; others hurried in silence, the drum of their booted feet betraying their urgency and panic.

I crossed the room, rushing through the only other exit, and found another corridor. It was shorter than the previous one but just as barren, yet I had begun to feel a familiarity for this place. Around the next junction I almost charged into a pair of guards who were coming the other way. I killed them both swiftly, lethal damage inflicted in less than the time it took for me to blink. I stole one of their chainblades – it was the only weapon I could take and use effectively – wondering how I would escape, trying to formulate some kind of plan.

I needed to find somewhere to stop and think, adapt to the changing situation.

I went up.

The ceiling duct was tight against my body, and I had to discard the weapon I had only just procured, but by replacing the overhead grate I could temporarily mask my point of egress.

It stank in the vent, of blood, of sweat, and I wondered where exactly it was ferrying air from and to. Crawling on my belly, using my elbows and toes for propulsion, I reached another grate that looked down onto a room below.

Banks of monitors surrounding a much larger screen showing a schematic of the prison marked it as a security station. Unaugmented human serfs were in attendance, speaking into vox-units, desperately trying to find me. No legionaries were visible. They were hunting, attempting to establish a trap.

These men and women were not warriors, but they were allied with my enemies.

If I were to escape, none could live.

Quietly removing the grate, I slid through the opening head first and dropped down amongst them. A woman, her face daubed in Nostraman tattoos, cried out and I backhanded her across the chamber. Going for his sidearm, one of the male operators tried to draw down on me but I was faster. Much faster. I killed him, too. In fewer than three seconds, all six human operators were dead. I made it quick, as painless as I could, but failing to salve my conscience in the process.

The schematic on the screen showed only a portion of the underground complex. Again, I was struck with a sense of familiarity concerning the layout and wondered how massive this prison actually was. The other monitors showed pict-feed images of the search teams, linked up to retinal lenses. Data inloaded from the legionaries’ battle-helms ran across the screens. Heart monitors on every Night Lord thrummed agitatedly below the feed from each helm-corder, graphic equalisers slaved to their voice patterns rose and fell as they breathed and hissed orders.

I ignored the pict-feeds, focusing on the half-map instead and committing it to memory.

Two doors led out of the security chamber. I took the one that, according to the schemata, led to an upper level. I had no idea how far down beneath the Isstvan surface I was, or what would be greeting me when I got there, but there was no other course for me to take.

Another corridor faced me, at the end of which was a cross-junction. Halfway down, I paused and shook my head to clear it.

‘Where am I?’ I breathed, not recognising this junction from the schematic. I had an eidetic memory – this should not have been happening. I considered going back but the risk was too great. By entering the ducts above I had gained only a few seconds against my pursuers. I had to move on. And fast.

Reaching the junction, I paused again. Two more corridors stretched away from me, the destination of each concealed in darkness. A faint breeze, detected by the tiny hairs on my bare skin, flowed from the right. I was about to take that branch when I saw a shadow seemingly emerge out of the darkness.

Gaunt, grinning, I recognised the cadaverous features of my brother.

‘Ferrus…’

Placing a finger mockingly to his lips, he beckoned me to follow him into the shadows.

I knew I could not trust my own mind. By manifesting this apparition, here and in my cell, it had already betrayed me.

Weak, he mouthed as I paused before the threshold to the right-hand branch. So weak.

I took the left branch, trusting my instincts over my mind, and as I turned I saw another figure. Incorporeal, a wraith in form and features, it wore gossamer-thin robes that appeared to float as if they were suspended in water. Its eyes were almond-shaped and the runes crafted about its person were eldritch and alien. The eldar flickered once as if captured on a bad pict-cording and disappeared.

My brother or my enemy; it was not much of a choice. I felt the jaws of the rusty trap closing around me again, their teeth pinching my flesh.

I raced down the left branch, finding its terminus was a bulkhead. It was the first of its kind I had seen since my escape, more robust and inviolable than the doors I had passed through so far. Metres thick, triple bolted, I wasn’t able to just rip it from its hinges.

Pressing my hand against the metal, acutely aware of the shouts of my pursuers getting closer, I felt coldness. Then the light glaring from the bulkhead’s inbuilt access panel went from red to green.

Klaxons sounded as the amber strobes above the door kicked in; I noticed the black-and-yellow chevrons delineating it.

Backing away, too late, far too late, realising now where I was and why this place was so familiar to me, I watched as a jagged crack formed diagonally in the bulkhead and its two halves slid apart to reveal a second emergency door.

The coldness intensified. Tendrils of it touched my skin, freezing me. Knowing it was pointless to run, I waited as the second door split just like the first. Invisible force shields collapsed and I was wrenched up off my feet as the pressure inside the corridor began venting outwards, taking me with it.

I was not on Isstvan. I had never been on Isstvan.

It was a ship, Curze’s ship.

The emergency door opened and I had a few seconds to behold the void of deepspace before I was wrenched out.

CHAPTER FIVE

Blood begets blood

Valdrekk Elias crouched at the bottom of the shaft. Masked by shadows, he surveyed the dig site.

‘What were they looking for?’ asked one of the Word Bearers in the hole with him. His name was Jadrekk, a loyal if unimaginative warrior. He was pacing the edges of the site, bolter locked across his chest.

‘Whatever it was, they found it,’ Elias replied.

Tools lay strewn about the subterranean chamber, and doused phosphor lamps were still suspended from cables bolted into the cave roof. A cup of recaff sat next to an upturned stool and there were scuff marks in the dust made by the hurried passage of booted feet.

In the middle of the chamber – some kind of reliquary if the presence of bones and skulls was any guide – the flagstones had been upheaved. They were cracked apart, blackened at the edges and not by the action of any digging tool. Through careful excavation, through the use of micro-trenchers and the application of debris-thinners to gently extract extraneous layers of dirt and granite, a crater had been revealed. And in its core, half a metre down, was a void.

Elias leaned in to the hole cut into the crater, exploring the unusual cleft in the rock where the fortune hunters, or whatever they were, had been digging.

‘And it was removed from here,’ he added, standing and dusting off his armour.

Amaresh dipped his horned helmet towards the mess surrounding the crater.

‘I’d say they left in a hurry.’

He knelt down to touch the cup of recaff.

‘And not that long ago, either.’

‘Agreed,’ said Elias, activating the arcane-looking flask attached to his belt.

‘I have their trail,’ Narek reported without having to be asked.

‘How many?’

‘Not enough.’

‘Don’t kill them all, Narek. Not until we know what they took from the catacombs and why.’

‘I can’t swear to that.’

Narek ended the communion, allowing Elias to appreciate the primitive architecture of the room. Though much of it had been destroyed, collapsing in on itself as entropy was exerted upon stone and steel, he could still discern the eight-sided structure, the weave and weft of the arcane in its construction. Primitive, centuries old, he felt the latent power in this temple. It was nothing but a shadow, the artefact that had been taken from the crater having destroyed it and robbed it of its potency long ago.

Elias felt the distant touch of the Pantheon on this place and knew that whatever secret it held was worth discovering for himself.

‘Come,’ he told the other two. As he ascended the ramp back to the surface, Elias looked up at the light coming down through the opening and the raindrops caught in its shaft, sparkling like stars. It reminded him of the constellations in the night sky, and how they were changing.

‘Brothers,’ Elias said, ‘I sense there is more to do here than taint the False Emperor’s sacred earth.’ He smiled. ‘A revelation is near.’

Above the pit into the catacombs, Deriok was waiting. He had four other legionaries with him. The rest of the landing party were at large in the city; two were hunting with Narek, the others were silencing comm-stations, killing any resistance and otherwise keeping the Word Bearers’ presence in Ranos concealed. There were seven more cities, and in addition to Ranos, their populations might be needed too. For most important of all Elias’s acolytes’ duties here was the procurement of sacrifices.

‘Eight disciples, one for each of the eight points,’ said Elias, emerging into the light.

Like the statue in Cardinal Square, these ruins were a monument to the Emperor’s dominance and former presence on this world. The potency of the effigy that the natives had erected was nothing compared to this place, however. That had been easy to taint. The Emperor had unleashed his power upon the old temple that had once stood here, and reduced it to rubble. He had broken the strength trapped in its walls and overthrown it. He had literally touched it with his godhood, and like a fingerprint it remained still. Indelible, enduring.

Here, in Ranos, did the Emperor’s power manifest and here, in Ranos, at the very site of Imperial victory, would Elias taint that power and corrupt it to the will of the Pantheon. It would take time and patience. Most of all it would take blood. As the first stage of the ritual began, he tried not to be distracted with thoughts of what had been hidden in the catacombs, forcing his mind to the matter in hand, but the mystery of it intrigued him.

‘Gather,’ he said to the other seven, the acolytes forming a circle of eight with their master. Ritual daggers glistened in fists of red ceramite. Seized in each zealot’s other hand was a mortal.

‘Blood begets blood,’ Elias uttered. He barely saw them as people any more. The men and women at his brothers’ mercy were just a simple means to an end. ‘Let the galaxy drown in it,’ he concluded and slashed the throat of the woman he was holding, spilling her blood to profane the earth.

They would need more. Much more. But the harvest of Ranos had yielded a plentiful crop. And as he listened to the plaintive cries of the cattle his warriors had herded, Elias smiled and said to Amaresh, ‘Bring forth the others.’

Varteh’s sense of direction was good, but even the ex-Lucifer Black was struggling to keep his bearings in the warren of Ranos City.

‘Are we lost, Varteh?’ Sebaton glanced over his shoulder and saw his worried expression mirrored by the thin-looking man behind him.

Gollach, the tech-adept, had railed against leaving the servitors behind but Sebaton knew the predators that were hunting them – he suspected Varteh did too – and ended Gollach’s argument at the muzzle of his pistol. The cyborgs would only slow them down. Deployed this way, they might actually prove useful, obfuscating the trail and thus gaining the others vital time on their pursuers.

‘Not yet,’ Varteh replied. He battle-signed to the man alongside him. A mercenary – not ex-Army, but as he peeled off into the shadows in response to the ex-Lucifer’s command, he was obviously well versed in a soldier’s argot.

The other hired gun stayed at the back, behind Gollach. Sebaton knew the mercenaries’ names, but they were as inconsequential as the mud under his feet, now that he had what he’d come for. Even wrapped up in cloth, centuries beneath the earth, it felt warm under his arm and emitted a very faint resonance that slightly pained him. As soon as Sebaton realised that they had been compromised, they had fled. His masters would have to wait to learn of his discovery. So far away, in all respects not merely space, there was nothing they could do to aid him anyway. Besides, he knew what he had to do.

Duugan, one of Varteh’s men, a lean-muscled pugilist with a handle-bar moustache and neck tattoos, had spotted the hunters. He was good, a sniper by trade, but caught only the barest glimpse of the warriors converging on their position. They moved after that. Quick and fast.

It was Duugan who had peeled off from the main group, running point and scouting ahead to make sure they weren’t being encircled.

Trio, so named for the bionics that replaced three of the fingers on his right hand, brought up the rear. He was clean-shaven, and thinner-faced than Duugan, previous profession unknown. He was also the group’s pilot, but then Sebaton had that covered if needed.

‘How close, Trio?’ Varteh said into the vox. They’d ditched the rebreathers, Varteh and his men switching them for throat mics and comm-beads. Up here on the surface, they didn’t need the masks. They’d only hamper their senses and ability to communicate. Sebaton had removed his too, but kept it in case it proved useful later.

‘Haven’t seen anything in the last eleven minutes, sir. Must’ve slipped them.’

‘We haven’t,’ said Sebaton. ‘They are closing on us.’

Varteh’s grim expression hardly inspired confidence. ‘I know.’

It wasn’t a sprint, the streets were too crowded and labyrinthine for that, but the sense of urgency made their flight seem faster. Every shadow held the promise of danger, every doorway or tunnel a freshly imagined terror. Even swaying cables and hanging strips of plastek became potential enemies, transformed by fear and the dark.

Though Sebaton did not necessarily consider himself a brave man, certainly not in the same way as a soldier, he was also not so suspicious that he jumped at shadows, but the quiet, rising tension was testing his fortitude.

It had nearly broken Gollach.

The thin, hunchbacked man was fading, unable to keep the pace. He was used to his workshop, comfortable with his machines and the isolation of that existence. In this life, physical exercise had been confined to scripting doctrine-wafers or light mechanical maintenance. A crook in his spine had developed as a result of constantly stooping over some engine or device. A bad decision – or decisions – along the line had thrust him into Varteh’s employ and turned him into a man so desperate that he had no choice but to step beyond the wreckage of his old life to try and build a new one. Clearly he hadn’t envisaged that part of that would involve running for his life in a strange city, on a world he did not know, from an enemy he could not see.

He kept grabbing his chest, so much so that Sebaton slowed down in case he suddenly expired.

Don’t be stupid. Just let him fall back, maybe buy some more time… Throne! When did I become this callous?

All of his life, or rather lives, Sebaton had done what was necessary to survive. He took what he needed from people and discarded the rest. There was remorse at first, some nightmares even, but that all faded in time and he had become aware of a void developing within him, a slow hollowing-out of his soul. Not literally his soul, of course – as such things were real and could happen – but rather a moral degradation which he didn’t know how to reverse. He had become nothing more than a tool, used at someone else’s bidding. No different to a hammer or a wrench, except more subtle and less obvious. Some would describe him as a weapon.

It was a little late for redemption now, but Sebaton slowed down anyway and urged Gollach to move faster.

‘Why are we running?’ Gollach asked, trying to keep his voice from trembling. ‘I thought this was an archaeological dig. Only of interest to scholars, you said. Who could be after us?’

Sebaton tried to be reassuring. ‘It would not help if I told you. But you have to keep running.’ He looked over to Varteh, who was getting farther ahead and seemed distracted by his vox.

‘How much farther to the ship?’ Sebaton asked, though he knew the answer to that.

Varteh didn’t answer straight away. Something was distracting him.

Sebaton grew insistent. ‘Varteh, the ship?’ He was close to abandoning these men and this pretence to strike for the vessel on his own when Varteh answered.

‘Can’t reach Duugan on the vox,’ he said.

‘Meaning?’ Although Sebaton already knew the answer to that as well.

‘Either something is baffling the signal, or he’s dead.’

‘Oh fugging hell…’ Gollach murmured, stumbling. Sebaton caught his elbow, and righted him so he didn’t fall.

Varteh dropped back, less sure of pushing ahead so aggressively now Duugan was off-vox. ‘Those landers you saw in the sky,’ he asked Sebaton. ‘Is this them? Are they looking for that thing too?’ He nodded to the cloth-wrapped bundle under Sebaton’s left arm.

‘Not sure.’

That was a lie, but as he didn’t know who the ones in the landers were or what they wanted, there seemed no point in saying anything further.

‘Who are they, Sebaton? Duugan said they were massive, armoured to the gunwales. Are we running from what I think we’re running from?’

Sebaton didn’t see the point in lying further. These men in his service had earned some truth.

‘They’re Legiones Astartes.’

Varteh ruefully shook his head. ‘Fugging Space Marines? You whoreson. How long have you known?’

‘Ever since we arrived, it was a possibility they would follow after us.’

‘A possibility? What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

Sebaton was genuinely contrite. ‘I am sorry, Varteh. You don’t deserve this.’

‘I should shoot you in the leg right now, leave you and that–’ he gestured to the cloth bundle again, ‘–and make my getaway with Trio and Gollach.’

‘It won’t help.’

‘It’ll make me feel better, you fugging twist!’ He calmed down, compartmentalising his fear to a place where it couldn’t inhibit his ability to survive. ‘That thing you’re carrying, it’s important isn’t it?’

Sebaton nodded. ‘More than you know, and more than I could ever tell you.’

‘Who are you, Sebaton? I mean really?’

Sebaton shook his head, his rueful expression saying more about his troubled mind that any words ever could.

‘Truthfully, Varteh, I don’t know any more.’

The ex-Lucifer sucked his teeth, having reached an important decision. He stopped running. Sebaton slowed in turn and the others caught up.

‘Time to catch a breath, Gollach,’ he told the man, who seemed both glad and alarmed that they didn’t have to run any more. He sat down.

‘Are we safe?’ he asked in a breathless wheeze, glancing nervously over his shoulder.

‘We’ve lost them,’ Varteh lied, the truth of what he was really doing showing in his eyes and the slight, almost imperceptible shake of the head to Trio that Gollach would never see. He turned to Sebaton. ‘You go on ahead, switch with Duugan.’

Sebaton nodded, and felt his admiration and respect for the ex-Lucifer grow, while his own self-loathing redoubled.

‘I think the Army misses you greatly.’

‘Oh, I doubt that. Just another pair of boots.’

They didn’t shake hands, nothing so trite as that, but a look passed between them and in it Sebaton found some hope that he could be a better man than he was. Perhaps he could be more than a weapon.

‘He’s going?’ asked Gollach, getting agitated again. ‘Where? He’s no soldier. Why is he going? I want to go with him.’ He got to his feet.

Gollach was exhausted, and would only slow Sebaton down. Like an airship struggling for loft, Sebaton needed to drop some ballast. Only in this case, it was the men he had hired.

Holding Gollach by the shoulders, Sebaton spoke clearly and calmly.

‘Stay here with Varteh. He’ll keep you safe.’

A sort of blankness came over Gollach’s face and he nodded once before sitting back down.

Varteh didn’t look surprised. Sebaton knew the ex-Lucifer had suspected that he was a psyker for a while.

‘You need to go,’ he said. Trio was already breaking out a pair of heavy calibre cannons from a case he’d been hauling all the way from the dig site. With the exception of the servitors that they had since abandoned, it was about all they did take with them. Sebaton counted three weapons in total. Duugan wouldn’t need his.

‘You want one?’ Varteh asked. ‘Might come in handy.’

It wouldn’t, not against them.

‘Keep it. It’ll only slow me down.’

‘Is it worth it?’ Varteh asked. ‘What we took from the hole.’

‘Worth all of mankind.’

Sebaton ran.

Though it was hard to tell from his dour demeanour, Narek relished the hunt. He used to be reconnaissance, a Vigilator, until an injury impeded his scouting abilities and saw him fall behind the others in his unit. He’d given up the squad soon after that, and rejoined the Legion proper as part of Elias’s Chapter.

It was on Isstvan V that he had been wounded. In command of a stealth unit, sent to sabotage Legion forces loyal to the Emperor before the attack began and their betrayal was revealed, his unit met some enemy Scouts who saw at once what they were doing. They killed the fledgeling Raven Guard, but at the cost of Narek’s entire squad and his left leg. A bolt shell had shattered it. He’d finished placing the charges, crawling over the bodies of his dead comrades to do so, and found his way back from the dropsite before the firestorm began.

Bionics replaced his bones and his burned-up muscle and flesh, but he wasn’t the same. That battle had left a mark on Narek that went beyond mere injury. It made him morose, prone to angry self-recrimination, even self-doubt, but he served because he was a soldier and that’s what soldiers did – they followed orders.

Elias needed a huntsman, so Narek took up the post, but never divulged how he really felt about what happened on Isstvan. It sat poorly with him, but he understood its necessity and believed in their cause, perhaps less blindly than some of his brothers.

Catching prey was the only time when his mind felt occupied enough that none of his other concerns mattered. Everything else faded back to grey when Narek was on the hunt.

Using the servitors as decoys was smart. The cyborgs went down quickly, without much fight, but the distraction absorbed precious minutes. Narek had let Dagon do it, content to look on before scouring the area for further signs. He sent Haruk on ahead to close the trap he had so artfully set for his prey.

Narek was looking down on them now as he crouched on a rooftop, obscured by steam venting from ceiling ducts and the shadows of the night. All lights were out in Ranos; the rest of the brothers had seen to that. Only this small act was left to carry out now.

A three-man hunting party. Were he younger, and without the bionic, Narek would have done it alone. As he was, he needed the others.

‘A last stand.’ Dagon was on the opposite rooftop, about twenty metres away. Ranos was heavily industrialised, providing an abundance of hiding places from which the Word Bearers could observe their prey.

Below them were two armed men, hunkered down in cover, nervously eyeing the dark. A third man sat apart from the others, unarmed, not a fighter.

‘Another distraction,’ Narek answered Dagon through the vox. ‘One is missing.’

‘Haruk will gut him like the other one he found.’

Such a bloodthirsty warrior was Dagon, perhaps better suited to the VIII than the XVII. But he killed clean and didn’t linger over his prey like some in the XVII were prone to do. Still, Narek knew he wasn’t wrong. Haruk would have silenced the scout. That left these three scalps to him and Dagon.

‘Elias wants that one alive. He has something of value to us.’

‘Does Haruk know that?’

‘He will if he kills him, Elias will make certain of it.’

‘Then let’s make this quick and not keep the Dark Apostle waiting.’

Narek cut the vox-link. He unhitched the sniper rifle slung across his back and brought it up into position. This was a singular weapon. A Brontos-pattern rifle was heavy and difficult to wield, but its heft was backed up with sheer stopping power. It took specially crafted bolt-rounds, with an added impeller in the rifle stock to offset the reduced range with a boost of pneumatic propulsion. A racking handle allowed for manual reload, but that was only useful in an emergency. Narek liked to keep his targets at distance and make use of the weapon’s automatic chambering function.

Pressing his right eye to the scope, he adjusted the targeter until its crosshairs lined up squarely over the head of the man on the right. The rifle stock was cold against his cheek, and he felt the roughness of the grooves he’d made in it to celebrate each of his long-range kills. There were many.

Narek muttered an oath, then, waiting three seconds to control his breathing, he fired.

Sebaton paused when he heard the shot. His breath caught in his chest and he had to make a concerted effort to exhale. He was no stranger to gunfire, but the quietude in the city was so absolute, the avenues and buildings so deserted, that the sudden presence of violent noise alarmed him.

He’d taken a similar route to the one Varteh had been leading them down, only more circuitous. Deliberate detours had taken him farther off the main streets, embedded him deeper into the warren. Arriving on Traoris from off-world with Varteh and the others, there had been no time to reconnoitre properly. Besides, the mission was supposed to have been relatively simple. Find the relic, leave and catch an atmospheric craft from the nearest space port, heading corewards. This side of the rift it wouldn’t be easy, but it was straightforward. The other ‘task’ made it slightly more complex, but Sebaton was a pragmatist, so first things first. He had studied maps of his location, but it was no substitute for seeing, getting a feel.

Deep in the heart of Ranos the habs were more like hives, clustered together in dirty colonies. There were warehouses, silos, smoke stacks and manufactorums, all pressing for space, all suffocating on top of and next to one another. But here he was anonymous. Here, he was nothing more than a rat and he hoped that, like all vermin, his passage through Ranos would go largely unnoticed. It would take him longer to reach the shipyard but at least he would reduce the risk of meeting up with whatever had ended Duugan, for the scout was certainly dead.

So too, Varteh and Trio. He hadn’t heard screams, even from Gollach, but the men were gone.

On reflection, Sebaton thought it might have been two shots, fired in such perfect unison that the first masked the second. Neither was silenced, which meant his pursuers had discarded stealth in favour of intimidation. They wanted him to know they were closing and that they had him in their trap.

It was working. As he ran, Sebaton tried to gauge the distance from which the shot or shots had been taken, but panic was affecting his mental acuity. His legs were burning, lactic acid setting fire to his joints, and his chest ached. Leaden fear was adding to the strain on his body, and even though he regarded himself as fit and strong, the constant changes of direction were becoming taxing. He wanted to stop, get a breather and his bearings, but survival instinct wouldn’t let him. Stop now, die now.

There was no help here, Sebaton knew that. He was alone, although he sensed the presence of something lurking in the stacked domiciles and manufactorums he had passed. Like standing next to a recently dug grave, death lingered about this place and was given form by a palpable sense of outrage and violation that had left a stain on everything around it at the point of life’s ending.

Eyes fixed ahead, he ignored the barren shells of buildings that were not quite empty, fearful that a side glance might reveal to him some revenant of that lingering death. But like a corpse bloated by putrefaction, an old memory rose to the surface of Sebaton’s mind.

He had been a child, no more than eight years standard, in his first life, long before the war. A boy had died in his township, trawling in one of the drainage basins that bled out of Anatol Hive. The boy had waded in too deeply, got snagged on a piece of debris hidden by the murk of the water and been dragged to his drowning as the machine processors that kept the basin churning activated, creating an artificial current.

Though the town’s men had dredged the water, no body was ever found.

It was several months later that Sebaton had gone to the basin to see if there was treasure left to salvage in the water, excited by the dark reputation of the place. Standing at the plascrete bank, all he found was sorrow and an abiding sense of rage. When he walked into the drainage basin, ankle-deep in the water, he saw something small and pale lurking beneath the surface. It filled him with such disquiet that he bolted and never returned, only later swearing that he felt something scrape at his skin and finding five tiny weals left in his flesh afterwards. The wounds never healed. Life to life, he carried them like the growing burden on his conscience, a reminder of his encounter.

The memory had come unbidden, and Sebaton wondered if its resurfacing was a symptom of what was being done to Ranos or had been stirred up by the presence of the artefact wrapped in cloth under his arm.

Staying on the street and in the open suddenly felt unwise. The back of his neck itched, and though he didn’t really want to enter any of the buildings that seemed to slowly close about him, Sebaton had no desire to be next in the hunters’ crosshairs either.

He saw a warehouse, its gate ajar, and headed for it.

As he ducked inside the building, the darkness cloaking Sebaton intensified. He stayed still, allowing time for his vision to adjust. After a few minutes, an expansive storage yard stretched out in front of him. Above, crisscrossing gantries and beams put him in mind of a spider’s web as the moonlight streaming through an upper window hit them. The irony of that was not lost on Sebaton. For he was trapped, his arachnid predator looming close and preparing to pounce.

Staying low, Sebaton ran across the store yard floor into a cluster of packing crates, drums and pipes. He’d seen no door or gate other than the one he had entered by, so he assumed that the exit was somewhere within this maze. He nervously twisted the ring on his finger, pausing at every junction, trying to tell the difference between sounds that were real and imagined.

Halfway down a corridor, flanked on both sides by a rack of heavy pipes that were secured by metal cabling, Sebaton realised he wasn’t alone. An infinitesimal movement, the minuscule shifting of metal as pressure was applied to it had given the hunter away. Most ordinary men would have missed it or dismissed it as cargo settling in its container, but Sebaton was not an ordinary man.

Sebaton stopped and reversed direction, just as something large and heavy thundered down behind him. An instant later massive metallic footfalls clanged in his wake as Sebaton sprinted down the corridor. Spinning around as he reached the end of the corridor, just past the stacked pipes, he uttered a single word.

‘Stop!’

His voice resonated, like it was two voices, one overlaid upon the other, rooting his pursuer to the spot. For the first time, Sebaton got a good look at who was hunting him. He didn’t like what he saw, not remotely.

Clad in crimson and black, the legionary’s war-plate was engraved with scripture. One of Lorgar’s zealots, then. Sebaton had no wish to be taken by this man. He knew enough about how the Word Bearers tortured and killed their prisoners – that even death was not the end of it, but rather the beginning of an eternal torment that threw their immortal soul into jeopardy – to be certain he had to escape.

It was a struggle to hold him. The legionary’s will was immense, straining constantly against Sebaton’s psychic command as a rabid hound does against the leash. Sebaton’s forehead was already layered in sweat. His temples throbbed painfully with the effort of maintaining the mental strength needed to harness this monster. But he only needed a few seconds. He briefly considered using his flechette pistol, but his other weapon was easier to use and fit for the task. He lashed out with his ring and a bright beam of energy lanced from the digi-laser concealed within, severing the cable securing the pipes and sending them crashing down on his pursuer.

Sebaton didn’t wait to see what happened next. He heard the clash of metal against metal, the grunt of the Word Bearer. He knew it wouldn’t kill the legionary but it might give him a few seconds to get away. He ran in the opposite direction, barrelling round another junction and straight through a door just beyond it. Confronted by a stairwell, Sebaton only paused long enough to see how far it went up, then took the steps three at a time. Still dizzy from using his psychic ability, he stumbled and hit the wall hard. The impact jolted his arm and he lost his grip on the cloth bundle, snatching at the air and turning just enough to see it bounce down the stairs and into the darkness.

He cursed loudly but couldn’t go back. There was no time. Glanding a measure of additional adrenaline into his system, he pushed forwards, trying to put as much distance between himself and the Word Bearer as he could.

Head pounding, the extra adrenaline making his heart thump like a cannonade, Sebaton emerged onto an upper floor. It was much more open than the one below, and he suspected it was there for overspill when the lower part of the warehouse got full. There were few places to hide but he noticed a room at the back of the spartan chamber that was partitioned off. An overseer’s office, he assumed. A row of windows to Sebaton’s left looked like they might open easily. If he could reach one, he could scale the roof, drop down in a side alley and–

Who am I kidding, thought Sebaton, this is the end of the game.

From downstairs he heard a crash as the legionary pulled himself from the wreckage of the pipes. Thundering up the stairwell, a battered-looking Word Bearer burst through the door spitting fury and taking most of the wall with him.

‘No more running,’ he said, advancing with the slow finality of a predator who knew he had caught his prey.

Backing up, Sebaton considered his options. Go for the window and he’d be quickly brought down. He was too weak to stop the legionary psychically for a second time and the digi-weapon in his ring was still charging. Even at full strength, Sebaton doubted it would trouble power armour. The flechette pistol was even worse at cutting ceramite and adamantium. He was starting to wish he had packed something a little more serious when the Word Bearer spoke again.

‘It will be slow,’ he said.

Light flashed off the blade of a flensing knife clutched in the legionary’s left hand, an unspoken promise of pain to come.

Nowhere left to turn…

Something whipped by Sebaton’s ear, like an arrow loosed from a bow, only much, much faster.

The legionary stumbled as if struck. It took Sebaton half a second to realise that he actually had been. A burst of dark liquid and bone had exploded from the legionary’s neck. Feebly, the Word Bearer reached up with his hand to try and staunch the wound. A second impact hit him in the chest, fast and hard like the first. It tore open his armoured ribcage and put him on his knees, where he wavered for a few seconds before collapsing onto his side.

Someone else was in the room with Sebaton and they had just killed a Space Marine with the same ease it takes to swat a fly. Equally disturbing was that he had failed to detect their presence. He turned around and saw a hulking figure blocking him.

Sebaton backed up. Too late, he realised a second figure had crept up behind him. The blow came swift and hard, with blackness following close behind it.

CHAPTER SIX

From ice to fire

‘Let me make something clear – death isn’t personal. It isn’t. It doesn’t happen to you, it happens to everyone else left behind after you’re gone. That’s the truth about death. Death’s easy. It’s life that’s hard.’

– Lonn Varteh, ex-Lucifer Black

Kinetic thunder vibrated the air. A storm raged around us. Fire and smoke billowed overhead. A body spiralled through this fog, pinwheeling wildly until arcing downwards to the battlefield where it was lost amongst a host of others. Reeling, struggling to comprehend the sheer depth of this betrayal, I looked upon a sea of ruin…

My sons, carved open upon the dark sands of Isstvan V.

Lifeblood ran in rivers, turning the earth underfoot into a viscous sludge.

It was carnage: armour plate ripped apart, peeled back like a metal rind, exposing fragile flesh beneath; retinal lenses shot out, the head beneath broken and oozing; stray limbs strewn like a butcher’s leavings; a ribcage, split open and wet with crimson. Death screams strangled the breeze, almost as loud as the threats of vengeance.

We were under heavy bombardment. Ordnance struck the ground around the Legion, shaking my very bones. Somewhere in the distance, on a black hill, Perturabo was shelling us. His tanks glowered down ferally, snouts aimed squarely at our ranks.

Impact bursts dug instant craters in the black earth, driving thick dust clouds into the air and spitting up plumes of rock. Flung bodies joined the flying dirt, half entangled in razor-wire, their limbs limp and broken. Emerald-green war-plate turned dark and red, the blood of my sons spilled to satisfy a traitor’s ambition and measure a warsmith’s guns.

I ran, cleaving fury and a righteous sense of retribution to my pounding chest. Not even blood would slake my desire for revenge. Nothing could balance the scales of this perfidious act. I wanted the Iron Lord’s head, and then I’d take Horus’s next.

Time slowed, the ground beneath my boots thickened into a quagmire and I was suddenly waist-deep in sucking earth and bodies.

The storm abated, and slowly the sound of thunder lessened until it was a drumming on the inside of my skull. Growing fainter, the sound rose in pitch until it was reduced to the slow plink of liquid hitting metal. I awoke. The black desert where my Legion’s soul fought a losing battle for its body was no more. Isstvan V was gone.

I heard my breath rattling through my chest, trembling in the aftermath of a nightmare. I grimaced, hurting. My senses were still over-attuned, unable to properly regulate the information being fed into my brain. Sweat and melting ice were rolling off my body. Beads of liquid hit the ground beneath me, not as loud as ordnance any more but still over-pronounced. Pitted steel and mesh felt rough to my touch. A faint heat warmed my fingertips, but burned at first. It was like being born anew, my mind and my body not quite in concert with one another.

A tightness clenched my muscles until I rose up from my knees and flexed, cracking a veneer of void-frost encasing my body. Like a serpent with an old skin, I shed it. Underneath the onyx-black of my body, my flesh was burning as if some profound biological trauma had spurred my physiology into sudden and urgent action.

I tried to recall what had happened to me, but my memory was fragmented. Only pieces of it were connected, the rest adrift in my shattered psyche. I remembered running, the adrenaline rush from my escape attempt. I had climbed from the pit where I’d been cast down. Blood was on my hands, both legionary and mortal. An impression of the tunnels came back. I remembered the sense of rising, the familiarity in form and structure of the bonded cage around me. I knew the hand that had fashioned this elegant prison. In its bowels I had seen a dead man, rendered in my mind’s eye. First my sibling, now also my tormentor; he was the expression of my guilt incarnate. And like a lake mist banished by the heat of a rising sun, my occluded memory cleared. Through the parting haze, I remembered something else too, an alien figure, one revealed to me in aetheric snatches, reminiscent of a bad pict-feed.

A last, final revelation dawned. It visited my mind like a hammer, smashing the hope I’d harboured into dust. I was aboard a ship, a great space-faring vessel. Cold reality asserted itself with that knowledge. I was not on Isstvan. I was no longer on earth of any kind. I was in Curze’s element now and there would be no escaping from it.

A chamber slowly came into focus around me, the frost that encrusted my eyelids cracking as I opened them to see it. This was not the same cell as before. It was much larger, not an oubliette but an octagonal shaft hundreds of metres up and down. No chains; my wrists and ankles were free of any fetters. A circular platform surrounded me instead, not much wider than the span of my feet. Here was the pitted metal I had felt upon waking and the mesh through which I now saw the dull orange glow from where the heat was emanating. Surrounding the platform were my new chains – a gulf, many metres across and a fathomless drop into a scorched black abyss. And at the edges of this prison without walls, this cage without bars, was a thin gantry of steel.

A dull throb invaded my senses, which were slowly returning to normal. Far below, a turbine was whipping currents of hot air up the shaft, foul with the stench of engine wash. In one corner, looking on as I assessed the manner of the trap ensnaring me, was the apparition of my dead brother.

‘You look ill, Vulkan,’ said Ferrus, the shadows in the chamber pooling in his cadaverous features. ‘You’re burning up.’

I didn’t answer. As I reasserted control over my senses, I did the same for my body. My skin was cooling, the intense heat I had previously felt now abating. I smelled cinder and ash like before. An itch on my back irritated, as if a brand had been seared in my flesh. I couldn’t see it but managed to touch the edges of the mark with my fingers, navigating past countless others that I knew as intimately as my own face. This one, however, was unfamiliar and the very fact of its existence terrified me. For what else had I forgotten?

Like a shadow creeping across a lone traveller on a desolate road, I felt another presence in the chamber. As I realised who it was, the chill of the void came back anew.

Like Ferrus, he sat in darkness. But he didn’t just inhabit the dark, he was a part of it, he moulded it and made it his mantle.

‘Curze.’ I didn’t have the strength to force any real vitriol into my voice.

‘I am here, brother.’

His tone was almost soothing. Did he regret this insanity?

‘I have been watching you, Vulkan. You are a fascinating subject.’

No. This was another facet to his game. As my eyes adjusted, I picked out my brother’s form, hunched and squatting like a bat at the edge of the gantry. Curze rested his chin upon his fist, his eyes unblinking as they regarded me.

It was the first time I had seen him since waking to this nightmare.

‘You joined with Horus.’

‘What gave me away? Was it the murdering of your Legion?’

‘My Legion…’ My voice wavered. I had no knowledge of what had become of my sons.

‘Destroyed, Vulkan. They’re all dead. You have no Legion.’

I wanted to kill him. I imagined making the impossible leap and wrapping my hands around Curze’s throat, squeezing until all life had left his eyes. As my fists clenched of their own volition, as my jaw locked tight, I saw the smile on my brother’s face and knew then the lie in his words.

‘No. No, they’re not. They live.’

Curze gave an amused snort.

‘Yes. They are still alive. At least, I think they are. Much diminished, though. And without you to guide them… Well, I fear for them, Vulkan. These are trying times. Our fealty has been besmirched. Our father lied to us. He lied to you. Cleave to His side or cleave open His side, those are the only roads for us now. Which one do you think the Salamanders will choose, brother? After all, you are such a pragmatic race. Honour or survival.’ Curze sucked his teeth. He was mocking me. ‘Difficult.’

‘What have you done?’

‘You sound anguished, brother.’

My teeth clenched, as the image of cradling Nemetor in my arms returned.

‘What have you done?’

The Night Haunter leaned forwards, and the light from the lume-strips above struck the lineaments of his face, describing them in white.

‘We killed you,’ he grinned, eyes mad with glee as he remembered the slaughter. ‘Cut you down like swine. I swear, the surprise on your face was priceless.’

‘We were brothers. We are brothers, still. Horus has gone mad.’ I shook my head, the anger bleeding away like the ice melting off my body. ‘Why?’

‘Because we were sold a false dream, by a false god. We were lied to and–’ Curze’s faked solemnity collapsed into sarcastic laughter. ‘I’m sorry, brother. I tried to maintain the facade as long as I could. I don’t care about any of that, I really don’t. You know, there is a cancer in some men. I’ve seen it. Rapists, murderers, thieves – Nostramo was overrun with them. Even when you try to stamp it out, like a disease it returns. If you’d seen what I’ve seen…’

For a moment, my brother’s gaze went to a distant place as if he were remembering, before his attention came back to me.

‘Some men are just evil, Vulkan. There is no why, it just is. Gluttony, sloth, lust, I am intimately acquainted with the sins of man. Which one do you think we were guilty of? Pride? Wrath? Was it greed that drove our father’s urge to reconquer the galaxy in his name and call it liberation? Terra just wasn’t enough.’

‘I see your sin, Curze. It’s envy.’

‘No, it isn’t. It’s the burden of knowing the future and being rendered powerless to do anything about it. I am cursed, brother. And so I must sin.’

‘And this is your justification for throwing the galaxy into turmoil? You follow a madman.’

Curze snarled, ‘I follow no one! And it was not so long ago, Horus was your brother. Are you so quick to turn your back on him? Did father make you more loyal than he or I? Are you his noble scion, Vulkan?’

I had seen Horus before he rebelled. After the Crusade had begun and we were thrown across the galaxy, twice I had met with him. I loved Horus, I looked up to him. I had planned to show my loyalty in the form of a gift, a weapon to befit his status as Warmaster. After I learned of his heroism at Ullanor, I forged a hammer. It was my finest work, craft I have not surpassed since. But I never gave it to him. Our second meeting did not go well. I sensed something of what Curze had mentioned, the ‘evil’ in some men that cannot be explained, that cannot be reasoned with or excised. Even though I could not answer then why I had withheld this boon, I did so because of the disquiet he stirred in me. I had not thought on it until that moment, and the revelation of it chilled me.

‘You betrayed us,’ I said to Curze. ‘Ferrus is dead.’ Although I could not help glance at his decaying corpse, grinning at me from the shadows.

Curze gave a wry smile. ‘Is he?’ Tapping the side of his head, he added, ‘Not in your broken mind, I think. Who is it you think you’re talking to in the darkness?’

So, he was watching me. And listening. All the time. I wondered what he hoped to learn.

‘You are a traitor,’ I told him. ‘Roboute will not stand by and allow this.’

‘Always Guilliman, isn’t it? What is so lordly about that war-accountant? At least Russ or Jonson have passion. Roboute fights battles with an abacus.’

‘He is rival enough to defeat Horus. His Legion will–’

‘Roboute is gone! That officious little snipe is done. Don’t cling to him for rescue. Dorn won’t help you either. He’s too busy being the Emperor’s groundskeeper, hiding behind the palace walls. The Wolf is too busy cutting off heads as our father’s executioner, while the Lion holds on to his secrets, and has no special fondness for you. Who else will come? Not Ferrus, certainly. Nor Corax either. Even as we speak, I suspect he flees for Deliverance. Sanguinius?’ Curze laughed cruelly. ‘The angel is more cursed than I. The Khan? He does not wish to be found. So who is left? No one, Vulkan. None of them will come. You are simply not that important. You are alone.’

‘I’m not the one who fears isolation, Konrad.’

Curze didn’t bite. He had waited for this meeting between us, planned every word and barb. He sighed.

‘It doesn’t matter why, Vulkan. All that matters is the here and now, what happens next.’

‘And what does happen next?’ I felt no fear or trepidation, only pity for him.

‘You lasted longer than I expected, I will grant you that,’ Curze said. ‘I greatly underestimated you.’

I tried to hide my ignorance behind a mask of defiance. Curze liked to talk. He was no proselytiser like Lorgar, nor was he prone to giving speeches like Horus, but he knew how to use words and liked how the right ones induced fear and uncertainty. Of all my brothers, Curze knew the mind and how to turn it upon its owner. To him, psychology was a ready blade as damaging as any knife or gun.

I said, ‘I am still your prisoner.’

‘Yes, and in that you also surpassed all my expectations.’

Again, I had no idea of his meaning but kept the fact of that hidden. I felt his blade, probing for weakness, searching for a chink in my mental armour. He could break my body, kill me if he wished to. But for some reason, he had kept me alive. I just didn’t know why.

Curze smiled, the shape of his upturned mouth reminiscent of a hooked dagger.

‘Eleven dead, six of those were mortals.’ A slight shake of the head betrayed his sense of admiration at the gruesome deed. ‘The way you swatted that wench…’ Curze whistled then bared his teeth in the light. Their points shone like arrowheads. Curze’s unguarded pleasure revolted me. ‘She broke like a reed, Vulkan. A reed.’ He gave a rueful laugh. ‘And here was I thinking Corax’s claims of your strength merely boasts. Because… you are strong, aren’t you brother? You must be to do what you did.’

‘Murder a woman? What strength does that require?’ I scowled. ‘Slaying the weak and helpless is something only you laud, you coward.’

‘Bloody-minded determination? The single-minded purpose needed to escape from an impossible prison? I’d call that strength.’

‘It’s not your prison, though. Is it?’ I said.

Curze nodded. ‘Very astute of you. You craftsmen do know how to recognise each other’s work, don’t you? It amazes me how you do it, how you can tell one rivet from another.’

He was taunting me again, trying to belittle me. It was petty and Curze knew it, but he did it anyway because it amused him and somehow reduced me in his eyes.

‘No, this prison is not mine,’ he admitted at last. ‘I’ve neither the patience nor the inclination. I had another build it for me.’ He looked around the chamber, and I followed his gaze, noticing the ornate flourishes, the way that function met artistry. Engraved upon the eight walls was a gruesome display, celebrating torture and pain. Agonies described in metal greeted my eyes and I looked away.

‘Beautiful,’ said Curze. ‘I can’t say I appreciate art, but I know what I like. And this… this, I like. Our brother was never really given enough credit for his aesthetic eye.’

It was a pantomime, all of this, a dark performance more in keeping with Fulgrim than the self-proclaimed Night Haunter. I suspected Curze was doing it deliberately, savouring every moment.

Then Curze turned his cold eyes back upon me. ‘It was always you that was hailed as the craftsman, Vulkan. But Perturabo is just as skilled. Maybe even more so.’

‘What do you want with me, Konrad?’

‘You intrigue me. When I said you’d shown strength, I wasn’t referring to you killing that serf…’

He let it hang like that, waiting for a response. I had none to give, so kept my silence.

Curze’s eyes narrowed, like little slivers of jet. ‘Are you really that ignorant? Did our father create you to be blind as well as blunt?’

‘I have sight enough to see what you are.’

My brother laughed, unimpressed at my attempted goading. ‘Indeed. But then, I already know what I am. I am at peace with it. I’ve accepted it. You, on the other hand…’ He gave a slight shake of the head, pursing his pale lips, ‘I don’t think you’ve ever been wholly comfortable in your armour.’

He was right, but I wasn’t about to give my gaoler the satisfaction of knowing that.

‘I am my father’s son.’

‘Which father?’

I gritted my teeth, tired of Curze’s obvious mind games. ‘Both of them.’

‘Tell me, brother,’ he said, changing tack, ‘how well do you remember One-Five-Four Six? I believe you called it Kharaatan.’

I didn’t know what Curze’s purpose was in asking me this, but my eyes locked to his and didn’t waver.

‘I remember it very well, as I know you must do also.’

‘Was it when we fought together during the Crusade? Yes, I believe it was.’

‘Thankfully.’

The dagger smile returned to Curze’s face. ‘You didn’t enjoy that war, did you?’

‘What is there to enjoy about war?’

‘Death? You are a bringer of death, a warrior, a merciless killer that–’

‘No, Curze. You are mistaken. You’re the merciless one, you’re the sadist. I never realised it before Kharaatan. Fear and terror are not a warrior’s weapons, they are a coward’s. And I pity you, Curze. I pity you because you have spent so long languishing in the gutter amongst the filth that you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be in the light. I doubt you can even see it through all that self-loathing.’

‘You’re still blind, Vulkan. It’s you who has forgotten, and don’t realise you’re down here in the gutter with the rest of us, murdering and killing. It’s in your blood. The pedestal you have built for yourself is not so lofty. I know what lies beneath that noble veneer. I’ve seen the monster inside, the one you tried so hard to hide from that remembrancer. What was her name again?’

My jaw tensed.

Curze betrayed no emotion. ‘Seriph.’ He smiled indulgently. ‘Yes, that was it.’

‘So what now?’ I asked, tiring of his game. ‘More torture? More pain?’

‘Yes,’ Curze answered frankly, ‘much more. You have yet to feel the extent of it, of what I have planned. You are, in many ways, the perfect victim.’

‘So kill me, then, and be done with it, or is part of my torture listening to you?’

‘I do not think I will kill you this time,’ said Curze. ‘We’ve tried ice.’ He stepped back, coalescing with the darkness. ‘Now let’s try fire.’

From below, I heard a low rumbling. It trembled the metal platform I was standing on. In seconds it grew into a deafening roar, and brought with it a terrible heat.

I realised then the nature of the prison I was in.

It was a furnace.

Curze was gone, and I was left alone with only the shattered memory of my grim brother for company.

I could hear the fire rising, feel it prickling my skin. Soon those needles would become knives, scraping back my flesh. I was born from fire on a brutal, volcanic world. Magma was my blood, onyx was my skin. But I was not impervious to flame. Not like this. Smoke billowed upwards in a vast and dirty cloud, engulfing me. Through it, as the conflagration followed and turned the air into a vibrating haze, as my screams rang out with the scorching of my body, I saw Ferrus.

He was burning too. The skin of his ghoulish face melted to reveal iron beneath. The silver of his arms, so miraculous, so magnificent and enigmatic, ran like mercury and merged with the soup of his flesh and blood. Bone blackened and cracked, until only a rictus skull mask remained. And as the fire took me, I saw the skull’s mouth move in a last silent condemnation.

Weak, said the fire-wreathed skull of Ferrus Manus.

And then it was laughing as we burned, laughing to our ending and damnation.

CHAPTER SEVEN

We are not alone…

‘In this age of darkness, only one thing is certain. Each of us, without exception, must choose a side.’

– Malcador the Sigillite

Haruk had been dead several minutes. Almost twenty by Narek’s reckoning. He was lying on his side, one arm flung out, still clutching his ritual knife, the other pinned beneath the dead weight of his body. His partially helmeted head lay askew. It had almost been forcibly removed.

He had received two fatal wounds. The first, a bolt-round through the neck, had ripped open Haruk’s jugular and exposed his carotid artery. It had also removed a portion of his lower jaw and vox-grille with it, but had not killed him immediately. The second, to the torso, had caved in most of his chest and destroyed eighty per cent of his internal organs when the mass-reactive shell had exploded on impact. From this, Haruk had died instantly.

Narek had found the wreckage of the body on the upper floor of a warehouse, slowly growing cold in a pool of blood. Kneeling down by his dead brother, he felt no grief for Haruk. The Word Bearer was a true bastard amongst bastards, who liked to make sport of his prey. His predilection had been his undoing this time. Kill quietly, kill quickly – this was Narek’s way. A toy was a thing to be played with, and toys were best left to children. An enemy was not a toy, he was a threat to your life until his was ended. But Haruk was a sadist. So many of Narek’s kin were turning this way. A change had come upon them, and it was not just manifest in the vestigial horns that were more than mere affectation for a war-helm, it was soul-deep and irreversible. This did not sit well with Narek, for he had once believed that the Emperor was a god and served this deity with a true zealot’s fervour. When the Legion erected the cathedrals on Monarchia, he had wept. It was beautiful, glorious. All of that was gone now and an older Pantheon had resurfaced to usurp the supposed pretender.

So, the sight of his slain brother did not hurt him. But, as Haruk was of the Word, Narek would perform the rites over the corpse as required.

Swathed in darkness, he muttered the necessary incantations that would put Haruk’s soul in service to the Pantheon. Now he would become the sport, a plaything of the Neverborn. Narek almost felt them in his veins, pulsing beneath his skin, and in the staccato beating of his twin hearts. They clung to this place, and their grip was ever tightening as Lorgar wrote his song of murder.

Elias had spoken of it one night, when the sky seemed blacker than pitch and the two of them had shared a drink between comrades, if not friends. This was the primarch’s symphony, and it had unleashed a Ruinstorm of such terrible intensity that the very galaxy was cleft in twain by it.

Lifting his hand from Haruk’s corpse, Narek concluded the rites, but felt the hunger of what dwelled in unreality pressing against the gossamer-thin veil of the mortal realm. A barrier can only stretch so much, and this one was near to splitting. Soon two worlds would meet; soon the galaxy would indeed burn.

Lorgar had foretold it in his writings. He had foreseen it in visions, and who was Narek to oppose that?

‘I am but a soldier, who clings to his duty and the bonds he once swore to his brothers,’ he whispered, and felt the weight of melancholy wrap around him like a cloak.

Dagon, returning from below, interrupted him.

‘He chased the mortal up here. But the place is empty. No sign of his killers.’

Dagon was waiting by the ruin of the stairwell, near to where Haruk had met his end.

Narek cast his gaze about the room, a panorama that began and ended with the body beside him.

‘Oh, there are many, brother. I can see two distinct tread patterns in the dust. They were already in here when Haruk followed the human.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Watching. They were using this place as a vantage point to observe our movements.’

‘How could they know we were here?’ A hint of agitation in Dagon’s voice betrayed his sense of unease at hearing this news.

‘How else? They’ve been tracking and following us.’

‘A counter-attack? I understood there were no enemy assets in this region.’

‘There aren’t. None that we know of, anyway.’ Narek regarded the ruin of Haruk’s body, the silenced rounds that had ended him so precisely. ‘I don’t think it’s a counter-attack. They don’t have the numbers. This was quiet, a hunter’s kill. They want to stay covert, whoever they are. And they took the human with them also.’

‘Why?’

‘That’s an extremely good question.’

‘So what now? This changes things.’

Narek looked off into the middle distance. ‘Perhaps…’ He needed to consult Elias.

Narek activated the warp-flask. A foul sulphur stench fogged the air through his rebreather as communion was achieved quickly. Another sign of the veil thinning – the enhanced warp-flasks were proving more reliable than vox-comms.

‘Do you have him?’ asked Elias.

A simulacrum of the Dark Apostle was rendered in violet grainy light emanating from the neck of the flask like a vapour. On the other end of communion, Narek knew his image would also be rendered to Elias in this way.

‘No. Someone else took him.’

‘Someone else?’

Elias was still at the ritual site. In the background, Narek could hear the human sacrifices mewling as they awaited their fate. Elias would bleed the entire city if he had to. The cults too.

‘Yes.’

‘What about Haruk?’

‘He’s dead. I am crouched by his recently ventilated corpse.’

‘Should I be concerned, Narek?’

‘Too soon to tell.’

‘What is that supposed to mean?’

‘It means someone tracked us to Traoris and has shadowed our movements all the way to Ranos,’ Narek said levelly.

‘Who tracked us?’

‘I have a theory. Too early to be sure yet.’

‘I’m sending reinforcements.’

‘Not necessary.’

‘They’re coming anyway.’

‘I want to find out exactly what we’re dealing with first. Dagon and I move faster alone.’

‘I doubt Haruk would agree with that.’

‘Haruk is dead. He won’t be agreeing with anything any more.’

‘Humour doesn’t suit you, Narek. Stay where you are. Wait for the others.’

Elias ended the communion, leaving the huntsmen alone again.

‘So, we wait?’ asked Dagon.

‘No,’ Narek replied, and got to his feet. ‘Search everywhere. Leave nothing untouched. I want to know everything, every scrap of information this warehouse can yield. We are not alone in Ranos, Dagon. Our former brothers-in-arms are here with us.’

Dagon scoffed. ‘To what end?’

‘What else? What would you or I do if we were them? They want vengeance. They mean to kill us.’

Sebaton’s head pounded like he’d drunk too much svod and had woken to a particularly brutal hangover. He was unbound, slumped on a chair, head down. Wincing slightly, but not moving to touch it, he could feel the contusion on the side of his head where something had hit him hard. No, not something, someone.

The encounter in the warehouse came back to him in all its life-threatening glory.

He should be dead right now, or at the mercy of a ritual knife. Instead he was here, wherever here was. He listened, feigning unconsciousness and trying to get a sense of exactly what level of trouble he was in. Harsh machine noise surrounded him. At first he thought he might have been taken to a manufactorum, but if he was still in Ranos that was unlikely, as, from what he’d seen, the city was effectively dead. A low background hum underneath the machine noise put him in mind of a generator, adding weight to a theory about the nature of his captors, if not their identity.

Sebaton put together what he knew. Varteh and the others were almost certainly dead. This meant he was alone. A Legion faction, possibly more than one, was on Traoris. They had found the dig site and had sent scouts to hunt him down and take what he had exhumed from the catacombs. This meant they had some knowledge of what it was, or at the very least realised that it was important enough to divert significant resources to obtain it. At least two others, enemies of the Word Bearer sent to kill or capture him, had intervened and he was now in their custody. What happened next depended on what else Sebaton could discover about his captors’ motives. With that in mind, he stayed still and listened hard.

Half-heard mutterings; the crackle and static of a vox-feed suggested an exchange between at least two people. As Sebaton tried to home in on the conversation and discern some meaning, two others started talking. Obviously standing much closer, their words were easy to understand.

‘He doesn’t look like much,’ said the first speaker, his tone rough with a slight growl adding to its bite. The voice was male, and very deep.

‘That traitor seemed to think he was worth the effort of killing,’ answered another. His voice had a resonance that was almost mechanical, as if re-vocalised and amplified through vox-augmentation.

‘And on that evidence we should take him?’ asked the first. ‘We have more urgent concerns.’

‘Agreed,’ said the second, before a third voice chimed in.

‘I would know why the Word Bearers want this man.’ This one was older, rasping. ‘He is more than he seems, and I don’t think he’s from Traoris, either.’

There was a pause, and Sebaton heard the dulcet whirr of servos connected to a warrior’s gorget as he shook his head.

Then the first said, ‘We’re wasting time. What does it matter if he’s not a native?’

The third continued. ‘Not sure. But the Word Bearers want him, which means we should deny them that. As to their purpose, I also mean to find that out, and he is the answer.’

The conversation paused again, but for longer this time. Sebaton felt his raw nerves bite, and his heart trembled.

‘You’re fooling no one,’ the older one rasped in his ear. It was as if the speaker were standing right next to him, until Sebaton realised the words were spoken directly into his mind.

‘You have uncovered no secrets. Your intent is as obvious to me as that costume you are wearing. Now… awake!’

Sebaton opened his eyes, realising that any further attempts at subterfuge would likely only get him hurt or worse. His vision was blurred, probably from the concussion. He was staring at his feet and a grubby floor underfoot. When he tried to move, to lift his head and rub his eyes, he felt the press of cold metal against his skull.

‘I know you know what this is,’ said the first voice, Sebaton catching the barest glimpse of dirty, emerald-green leg greaves. ‘And what it can do. No tricks.’

Sebaton nodded. The bolter was pressed so tightly to the side of his head that the muzzle would leave an angry red ring in his skin.

He was inside, still in Ranos as he’d suspected. He had been taken from the warehouse, though. The air was musty and reeked of ink. It was a large room; it had to be to accommodate the heavy machinery hinted at in the shadows at its periphery. He noticed a sheaf of parchment on the floor, trapped beneath one leg of the chair where he was sitting, but couldn’t read what was on it. Stacks of this parchment were piled up in three corners of the room. A printing press, then.

‘May I raise my head?’ he asked, spreading his arms in a gesture of compliance. He still had his digital weapon, that was something. But the contents of the cloth bundle he had risked and lost four men’s lives to obtain were no longer in his possession. His captors might have it, although he suspected not. If they were looking for it then why bother to interrogate him? Why bother to pull him from the warehouse and bring him here? That gave Sebaton an advantage – he knew they wanted him alive. How long that situation lasted would likely depend on what he said and did next, and what they could find out.

The pressure against the side of Sebaton’s head eased as the gun was withdrawn. He looked up, gingerly touching the abrasion left behind. Three warriors surrounded him. Two in front, another just visible in his peripheral vision around the side. One more waited farther back, observing.

They were huge, hulking men, clad in full armour that growled as they moved, with the gears and servos engineered into it. It was power armour. Sebaton had escaped one legionary, only to be caught by at least four others.

Now his head was up, he got a good look at his closest aggressor.

The legionary wore emerald-green armour, tarnished by wear and battle-damage. He also noticed rasping marks where the bearer had tried to shave off pieces of rust that had colonised the edges. It was ornate, a battered antique now, with artistic flourishes wrought into the metal that seemed at odds with a warrior’s wargear. He still had his helmet on; a cage of ivory fangs framed the jaw and snout. Behind the red retinal lenses the warrior’s eyes burned. A pelt, or perhaps a hide, hung raggedly from his shoulders. Even this had seen more than its fair share of battle.

He was one of the XVIII. A Salamander. No wonder he looked rough.

‘How many of you are there?’ Sebaton asked him, without thinking.

The Salamander seized him by the chin. The edges of his gauntlets were warm and pinched Sebaton’s flesh.

‘No questions will come from your mouth, only answers.’ Behind the oval eye-pieces of his helmet, his eyes burned brighter as if reacting to his sudden anger. ‘Understand?’

Sebaton nodded and was released.

‘Who are you?’ the Salamander asked, stepping back.

‘Caeren Sebaton.’

‘And what is your purpose here?’

‘Archaeology. I came to excavate relics.’

‘Alone?’

‘No, I had a team.’

Another of the three, armoured in black, muttered, ‘The pair of servitors Pergellen found.’

Like the Salamander, he also looked ragged. His armour was broken, held together by field repairs and, Sebaton suspected, sheer will. He was hard to focus on, blending well with the shadows, and although a lumen strip buzzed and crackled overhead, the warrior’s power armour reflected no light.

XIX Legion. Raven Guard.

This one also gave off an aura. Like knew like. Sebaton realised this was the psyker that had addressed him earlier.

The Salamander nodded to his brother-in-arms.

‘There were four men also,’ offered Sebaton, hoping his unprompted show of cooperation would improve his chances of survival. He had to get away from here, double back somehow and retrieve what he had taken from the catacombs. ‘Dead too.’

‘You know the manner of what is hunting you?’ asked the Salamander.

‘I do.’

‘Then you’ll also know how much danger you are in.’

‘Painfully so, yes.’

‘What do you know about why the Word Bearers are here?’

‘Nothing.’

The Salamander turned. The Raven Guard slowly shook his head, prompting his flame-eyed comrade to bear down on Sebaton again.

‘Don’t lie to me.’

‘It’s the truth. I have no idea what they want, or you for that matter.’

That was bold. A little foolish, too.

‘Well,’ said the Salamander, unhitching the clasps around his helmet, ‘that’s easy to answer,’ he added, removing it and revealing a face as black as jet with two burning orbs for eyes. Even the pict-captures as part of his data inload had not prepared Sebaton for this, and he balked.

‘I want to know everything you know,’ the Salamander said. ‘And I want to know it… right now.’

Something had happened to these warriors, something that had changed them deeply.

‘Who are you? What are you even doing here?’

‘I warned you once not to ask questions.’ Somewhat forebodingly, the Salamander stepped back and gestured to his comrade.

‘Hriak…’

Without seemingly moving, the psyker was upon him. Close up, Sebaton could see that he wore a tattered grey cloak over his power armour and had a fetish of avian bones attached to the conical snout of his helmet. Definitely one of the Raven Guard. Several of the Legions wore black but a closer look had confirmed it. Legionary psyker, known as a Librarian. They were supposed to have been forbidden in the Legions, but evidently circumstances had forced that particular edict into repeal. In the Raven Guard’s outstretched hand, Sebaton could see a thunderhead of dark lightning. It was raging, the force of a storm held in his palm.

Incredible. The sheer will required for that level of mastery…

When Sebaton realised that it was about to be unleashed on him, he flinched, but a steel-fingered hand held him fast. It was a bionic – he could hear the machine parts grinding as they flexed and bit hard into his shoulder.

‘Take it easy, I’m not a threat,’ said Sebaton.

‘We know,’ uttered the warrior behind him, the one who spoke with the strange machine-like cant.

‘If you were,’ said the Salamander, ‘you’d already be dead. And should you prove to be after Hriak has scryed you, I’ll have Domadus pull out your spine.’

Sebaton didn’t doubt it. Domadus was X Legion, Iron Hands. They weren’t known for their compassion. His presence raised further questions. All three legionaries came from forces that had been nearly destroyed on Isstvan V. Yet here they were, together, allied to some common cause.

Sebaton suspected that it might be the desire for revenge.

‘We got off to a poor start, I think,’ he said. ‘There’s no need for any of this.’

‘Your demands fall on deaf ears,’ Hriak rasped. It sounded like some old injury was marring his speech, but Sebaton couldn’t see what because the warrior was wearing his helmet. His voice put Sebaton in mind of a cold wind rustling through dry leaves, of a dead and desolate winter, and bones lying under the snow.

A moment later and the lightning touched against Sebaton’s forehead.

Fire, cold and terrible, burned him. It hollowed Sebaton out, tendrils of flame worming into him, slowly unpicking the mental barriers he had erected to protect himself from incursion. Deeper it went, spreading out, searching. His mind was a labyrinth, but this was a Legion psyker and he moved swiftly through the contours of it on feathered wings.

He thought of the drowned boy, his pale face lurking under the water.

Hriak’s voice penetrated the memory, a distant echo on the horizon that filled the sky with the promise of rain.

‘He’s hiding something…’

Sebaton was standing at the edge of the drainage basin, a hook and net in his hand, ready to scavenge. He rooted himself to that spot, like an anchor in time, and replayed it over and over. Stepping into the water, feeling the brush of fingernails against his naked skin. The burn as they gripped. The five red weals left behind, a hand grasping, entreating another child to come down into the water and join the rest of the damned.

Lightning split the sky, dark and forbidding. Standing ankle-deep in the murky water, Sebaton sheltered his eyes, but the storm continued to rage behind them.

‘Do not resist…’ bellowed the thunder.

Sebaton held on, just as the drowned boy clung to his ankle.

He groaned, ‘Let me go,’ his voice that of a child’s and an adult’s at the same time as two realities collided.

‘Please…’

‘Let him go.’ The voice was distant at first, recalling Sebaton from the brink of unconsciousness. The pain abated, his eyes opened again, but the sense of violation remained.

The Librarian, Hriak, was standing in front of him. The dark lightning had gone from his hand.

He hissed, ‘He’s a psyker, Leodrakk.’

So that was the Salamander’s name then, Sebaton assumed.

‘What did you find, Hriak?’ asked Domadus.

‘Despite trying to obfuscate it with some childhood trauma, he is not who he claims to be. He found something in some ruins, in a sector of the city far from here. But I don’t think he has it any more.’

Leodrakk changed places with Hriak to continue the interrogation.

‘Those traitors are here for a dark purpose. For some reason, they were also looking for you. Now,’ he said, raising his bolter so Sebaton was staring down its ugly, black maw, ‘I will ask you one final time. Who are you and what are you doing in Ranos?’

Sebaton realised then that the situation he was in was much more grave than it had first appeared. He hadn’t been rescued, he had simply traded one potential captor for another. These warriors were loyal servants of the Emperor, but something had broken inside them. They were verging on desperate, even fatalistic. Wounded, and not only physically. They were the kind of scars that would never heal, like the five tiny marks on Sebaton’s leg.

Sebaton sagged in the chair, but looked the Salamander in the eye.

‘I am Caeren Sebaton. I am an archaeologist, and I came here to excavate relics.’

‘No more lies or I’ll kill you here. Now,’ Leodrakk warned, priming his bolter. ‘We didn’t survive the betrayal of Isstvan with a great deal of patience. Speak truthfully!’

Leodrakk’s hand was suddenly around Sebaton’s throat and lifting him out of the chair. As the ground fell away beneath him, Sebaton felt his larynx being slowly crushed.

‘I can’t… speak… with your hand… around my throat,’ he croaked, feet dangling in mid-air.

Snarling, Leodrakk threw the man down. Sebaton sprawled, bouncing hard off his right shoulder but landing with some grace on all fours. Scurrying backwards into a corner of the room, he thought about using the ring, but the three warriors had him cornered.

He saw Domadus properly for the first time. The Iron Hand was heavily cybernetic. Most of his left side had been reconstructed, the mechanism of his body visible through the gaps in his black armour. His throat and lower jaw were completely augmetic, and puckered scar-tissue ringed the area around where his left eye should have been, but where instead a red lens flashed as it refocused on its target.

Mag-locking his bolter to his thigh, Leodrakk advanced on Sebaton. They were in pain, all of these warriors, and like anyone in that position they wanted to lash out.

‘I’ll crush the truth out of you.’

A fourth figure stepped into the light, the one whom Sebaton had seen observing from the shadows. ‘Stop.’

Leodrakk faced the legionary angrily. ‘It’s under control.’

Now Leodrakk had turned, Sebaton saw the chunk of bone tusk jutting from his armoured hide. It was split, little more than a stump.

The legionary who had interrupted was a Salamander too, and wore fine-crafted armour like his comrade’s, but had his helmet clamped to his thigh. His hair was cut into a red crest that perfectly bisected his scalp. A scar throbbed under his right eye, but he wasn’t blind in it, nor did it ruin his noble countenance.

‘No, you lost control when you nearly choked him, brother.’ He gestured to the door. ‘Shen’ra is outside. Something tripped the sentries.’

Leodrakk suddenly looked concerned.

‘Both guns?’

‘Sensors, Tarantula sentries. Everything.’

‘How far out?’

‘First marker.’

Sebaton had no idea what they were talking about, but it sounded serious.

Leodrakk’s anger returned with interest. ‘All the more reason to put this one in the fire.’

‘I hope he’s speaking metaphorically,’ said Sebaton.

‘He is,’ said the other Salamander, but Leodrakk didn’t give that impression at all.

‘We make him talk. Tell us everything he knows,’ he snarled, clutching the grip of his sidearm.

‘By force-feeding him your bolter?’

‘If necessary!’

‘Out,’ the other Salamander said, flatly.

‘What?’

‘You heard me, Leo. You’ll kill him if you stay in this room. I can see it in your eyes.’

Leodrakk’s eyes were burning with the heat of a firestorm. His knuckles cracked and for a few seconds he stood his ground before capitulating.

‘Apologies, captain. I forget myself.’

‘Yes, you do, Leo. Now leave us.’

Leodrakk did as ordered, prompting Domadus to guard the door behind him.

After watching his brother go, the other Salamander crouched down at Sebaton’s eye level.

‘You seem a little more civilised than your companions,’ said Sebaton without a trace of belief.

‘I am not,’ the other Salamander assured him. His voice was deep, cultured. It shared some commonalities with Leodrakk but possessed the authority of true command. ‘As you can see,’ he gestured to his visage, ‘I am a monster. Much worse than Leodrakk. He is more temperate than I.’

‘What about your psyker?’ Sebaton nodded to the Raven Guard, who had folded his arms and taken to watching quietly from a distance. Sebaton still detected some latent psychic activity, like a mental polygraph gauging his every response.

The Salamander looked askance at the other legionary.

‘No, his manners are worse than my own. Given his own way, you’d be dribbling the last dregs of your sanity into your lap right about now.’

‘I would prefer to avoid that.’

‘That’s up to you. We are now being hunted, just like you are. Our time here is finite before we’re discovered. Our enemy’s scouts have already tripped the first of our alarms. So, you can appreciate I would prefer this to be concluded quickly. My name is Artellus Numeon, and I lead this group. The lives of the men in it are my responsibility, which is why Leodrakk would not have killed you without my say so. It’s also why Hriak hasn’t cored out your head like a piece of fruit. I, however, answer to no one in this place and I will kill you in the next four seconds unless you give me a reason not to.’

Sebaton’s head still hurt from the psychic probe and between this maniac and the psyker preparing to eviscerate him mentally, he was running short of options.

Just like Nurth all over again. Stepping out of that airlock, he’d thought that was an end to it but they brought him back. Again. To do this.

I am a spy, not an assassin. And as for the mission… Well, that would require something incredibly special.

Sebaton knew he really had no choice. Trust this Numeon, or die here. But then would that really be so bad? Even if he did, would that really be an end to it? He suspected not.

‘We were excavating, that much is true. We found something. An artefact. It’s very old, very powerful, and your enemies want it.’

Numeon exchanged a glance with the others.

‘What kind of artefact?’

‘A weapon. Like a spear.’

‘Like a spear?’

‘To call it thusly would be overly prosaic, but it’s the closest word I can think of that still accurately describes it. It’s smaller, more like a spearhead with a short shaft.’ Sebaton indicated the approximate size with his hands.

‘Why were you looking for it? What is so important about this spear that the Word Bearers sent hunters after you to get it?’

Sebaton sighed. ‘May I at least sit down?’

Numeon backed off and nodded to the chair.

‘Before I tell you,’ said Sebaton, once he was seated, ‘there is something else you should know first. My name isn’t Caeren Sebaton. It’s John Grammaticus.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

Shattered

‘When brother fights brother, it is called rivalry. When brother kills brother, it is called succession.’

– Valdrekk Elias

Eighteen dead bodies cluttered the street below.

Fifteen of those bodies were Traoran, and were wearing black and red robes over their urban attire. Narek barely noticed them, but the three warriors clad in power armour that joined the cultists in death sent a tremor of consternation across his jawline.

The quiet hunt was over. Despite Narek’s misgivings, Elias had gathered his dogs from sects around the city and unleashed them without thought or knowledge of what fate he had consigned them to. Cultists were everywhere within Ranos. They had paved the way for the Legion’s arrival, softened the prey before the kill. It was a task well suited to their limited talents.

Against legionaries, however, they had come up drastically short.

One of the humans had tripped a hidden wire alarm, unleashing a chain of explosives embedded in the road. Flash bangs went off simultaneously, filling the narrow street that was crowded by buildings either side with light and smoke. A secondary group of incendiaries went live three seconds later, front and back of the patrol, effectively bracketing them into a kill box. In the last short minute that remained of their lives, the cultists panicked and the legionaries fell back on training, forming a defensive perimeter in the middle of the street. The saboteurs had factored this reaction into their trap as a pair of auto-slaved sentries cycled up.

Muzzle flash had cut into the smoke as heavy fire chugged relentlessly from the pair of Tarantula mounts secreted at either end of the street. The concealment of the guns was effective, as was the entire trap. Even Narek hadn’t seen the wire or the sentries and wondered privately if he was actually losing his edge.

Disorientated, some of their dead already lying broken before them, the cultists were ripped apart in seconds. Narek’s brothers didn’t last much longer. Power armour was staunch protection but even it couldn’t hold up against enfilading fire at close range from a pair of autocannons.

The end result was bloody and quick.

Narek and Dagon survived by virtue of the fact that they were above the metal storm, maintaining overwatch from a rooftop. Narek had been about to make contact with his brothers when the trap was sprung and death was unleashed.

As he looked down on the carnage, Narek scowled.

‘Beliah, Zephial, Namaah, all dead. Haruk also. Tell me, brother,’ he said, turning to Dagon, who had just returned from street level, ‘who must I kill to avenge them?’

‘The trap was good,’ Dagon replied. ‘Very good. Even on the ground, I would have had difficulty seeing the wire.’

‘Frag-belt?’ asked Narek.

Dagon nodded. ‘And some heavier explosives too. Armour-breaking.’

That would be the secondary burst they had seen and felt from the rooftop.

‘Naturally. And the sentry guns?’

The two tripod-mounted Tarantulas were spewing smoke. Tiny sparks erupted sporadically around the gimbal joint that linked the tripod mount to the gun stock. Narek had disabled them, but not before they had shredded Beliah, Zephial and Namaah.

‘Slaved to an automatic firing routine, based on motion detection,’ said Dagon.

‘So they had no intention of staying to watch the bloodshed.’

‘No, but I found this.’

In Dagon’s open palm was a small metallic device. It was disc-shaped and a red light in its centre winked rapidly.

A sensor.

Narek took it, examining the device in his hand.

‘They might be few but they are certainly well equipped.’ He glanced back down at the street. ‘And have a talent for disruption.’

‘Saboteurs?’ Dagon asked.

‘Definitely. The broken Legions have turned to guerrilla tactics to prosecute their war.’

‘They might just be a vanguard. How can you be certain?’

Narek’s eyes returned to regard the sensor.

‘Because it’s what I’d do.’ He paused, turning the sensor disc over in his hand as if scrutinising it would reveal his enemy’s secrets. Narek surveyed the urban skyline, paying close attention to the nearest buildings.

‘What is it?’ asked Dagon.

Narek’s gaze lingered on the shadow of a cooling tower in the distance.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Watch the street, I have to tell Elias what we’ve found.’

Dagon nodded and headed back down.

When he was alone again, Narek activated the warp-flask. After a few seconds, Elias’s warp-form materialised. He was cleansing his ritual knife, preparing it for the next kill.

‘You interrupt me with good news, I hope. Sacrificing an entire city is painstaking and I have a lot of work to do yet before we’re done.’

‘Your reinforcements are all dead.’

‘A little profligate, don’t you think? Those were the only warriors close to your location.’

‘It wasn’t my decision to send them.’

Elias’s tone grew suddenly barbed. ‘Remember who you’re talking to, Narek.’

A vein in the hunter’s neck throbbed but he held back his anger.

‘You are my master, Dark Apostle.’

‘I gave you purpose, huntsman. Don’t forget that.’

‘It is a worthy one. I will not.’

‘What of the cults? They should have risen up by now. Use them. The city is in my thrall.’

‘The mortals are dead too.’

Elias looked displeased, but kept his agitation checked.

‘What happened? I thought you were just tracking the human.’

‘We were. But that “someone else” I mentioned decided to get in our way.’ His gaze went back to the cooling tower. ‘One of your worshippers sprung a trap our enemy had laid for us. They’re of the Legions.’

‘You’re certain of it?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve seen them?’

‘No, but every sign points to our former cousins. No human kills Beliah, Zephial and Namaah like that. It just doesn’t happen. Not to them. Even I didn’t see the tripwire.’

Elias sneered. ‘You’re losing your edge.’

‘That is possible, I suppose.’

‘There are no Legion forces concentrated in this region of space. It’s precisely why Lord Erebus sent us here. We were supposed to be undisturbed. Who are they?’

‘Remnants, I think. Survivors banded together and performing their own operations.’

‘Dregs from Isstvan?’ Elias sounded nonplussed.

‘I believe so, yes. I want to take a closer look to be sure.’

Elias paused, as if weighing up the import of that.

‘Nothing can prevent what we’re doing here, Narek. The outcome of the war could hinge on the cosmological shift we effect here.’

‘It’s fortunate that I am not empty-handed, then.’

‘You have what they took from the catacombs?’

Narek held it up in his other hand.

‘It’s a spear. At least the tip of one.’

Elias’s eyes seemed to brighten. ‘Sharpen ours, blunt theirs…’

Narek frowned, confused.

‘Bring it to me at the ritual site,’ said Elias. ‘The rest of our brethren are returning with fresh mortals to blood, and I would examine it before they arrive.’

‘What should I do about the Legionary infiltrators? They still have the human we were tracking.’

‘They are of no consequence for the moment. Bring me the weapon, Narek. We will run down these broken wretches later.’ Elias smiled with self-indulgent malice. ‘We will make them wish they had died on the plains of Isstvan with the rest of their kin.’

‘Of course.’ Narek was about to sever their connection when Elias interrupted him.

‘What’s it like?’ he asked.

Narek turned the spear over in his hand. It was short, the spearhead not much larger than a combat knife in terms of its length and width, with a broken shaft that was roughly half that. To look upon it, it was unremarkable, a perfect mineral fossil fashioned into a single spear-like fork. Grey, almost metallically smooth, with a sharp edge. But when Narek held it, he could feel the thrum of power contained within and see the flash of energy coursing continually along its length as the light touched it.

‘Godlike…’

Communion ended and Narek was left alone with his thoughts. It did not anger him that three of his brothers were lying dead in the street below him; to call it anger was too simple a word for his emotional state at that moment. Even the death of Haruk, who he despised personally, required response. It was more like an itch, a sense of something unfinished, an imbalance to redress.

He decided he would not return with the spear straight away. It went against orders, but it was duty that motivated Narek, not the whims of the Dark Apostle. First and foremost, he owed something to his brothers. Besides, he wanted to see the face of his enemy.

Unsheathing his gladius and putting the spear in the empty scabbard, Narek opened a vox-feed to Dagon.

‘I tire of this rooftop, brother.’

‘What do you suggest?’

‘Beliah, Zephial, Namaah and Haruk are slain. We should honour the dead.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘Let’s go hunting.’

Numeon looked unimpressed.

‘Is that name supposed to mean something to me?’

‘No, it isn’t,’ said Grammaticus. ‘Not to you. But what I am doing here should.’

‘And what is that, exactly?’

‘I think I know why the Word Bearers are here, and why you’re here too.’

Domadus twitched, his hand straying to a bolt pistol holstered next to his right hip before a shake of Numeon’s head stood him down.

‘Keep talking,’ said the Salamander.

‘Are we in danger here?’ Grammaticus asked. ‘Your… friend seemed agitated when he left.’

‘Immense danger, but I told you to keep talking,’ said Numeon. ‘What do you know?’

Grammaticus dragged his attention back, trying not to imagine what could present immense danger to a Space Marine, and said, ‘I think they are defiling this place. I think the Emperor came here long ago, and they are tainting that with their craft.’

Numeon came closer, until Grammaticus could smell the ash on his breath.

‘And what craft is that, John Grammaticus?’

‘Am I right?’

Numeon narrowed his eyes. ‘What craft?’

‘You know of what I speak. You want to stop them, don’t you? You are no longer Legion, that much is obvious from your battered weapons and armour. I doubt there are more than twenty of you. I saw your landers. How many can they carry? Enough for a ground war?’

‘Ninety men at capacity,’ Numeon replied, ‘but their holds were sparsely occupied when we made planetfall, you’re right about that.’

Numeon stooped to grab the scrap of parchment still wedged underneath the chair leg.

‘We are here to disrupt their efforts but have no plans to fight a war.’ He showed Grammaticus the paper. It was a propaganda poster, one denouncing the rule of the Imperium and citing Horus as the true Emperor of the galaxy. ‘Rebellion was festering here long before the Word Bearers came. We must prevent them from tainting it further.’

So Traoris was in the thrall of the enemy. But revolt was very different to willing service to the Primordial Annihilator. Grammaticus imagined secret cults, formed over years of Imperial rule, slowly chipping away at the foundations of society, and their sudden and terrifying rise when Horus defied his father’s will and embraced an old evil.

‘Rebellion is one thing,’ said Numeon. ‘Conversion to the dark power Horus now serves is another. I don’t understand it fully but I have seen some of what it can do. Turn men into monsters, and twist once noble hearts to baser instincts. Every world liberated during the Great Crusade is facing a battle for its soul. Traoris teeters on the brink of an abyss. I am here to ensure it doesn’t fall in.’

‘That seems a difficult aspiration.’

‘And yet, here we are.’

Grammaticus was emphatic. ‘I need that spear.’

‘Even if I wanted to, there’s no going back for it now.’

‘Have you considered that you could serve a greater purpose?’

‘And help you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And why, John Grammaticus, would I do that?’

‘Because what I’m doing here concerns your primarch.’

‘What did you just say?’ Numeon’s eyes narrowed.

‘Vulkan.’

The Salamander bunched his fists. ‘I know the name of my primarch. Explain yourself.’

‘The spear I found is not a spear as such. It’s a fulgurite, a fork of lightning crystallised in rock.’

‘I also know what a fulgurite is,’ said Numeon. ‘Tell me now what this has to do with Vulkan.’

Grammaticus licked his lips. ‘Do you believe that your primarch is dead?’

Numeon did not hesitate. Something akin to hope flickered in his eyes. ‘No.’

‘He lives, Numeon. Vulkan lives.’

‘How do you know this? Where is your proof?’

‘You said you believed he was alive.’

Numeon’s patience was ebbing and he snarled, ‘There is a difference between belief and fact. Why would you say this if you have no evidence?’

‘Because it is true, and because I am giving you my word.’

‘Which is worth what?’

Grammaticus held up his hand, as if surrendering.

‘Please. You asked for the truth and I am giving it to you.’

‘You would say anything to save yourself.’

‘True, but I am not lying to you. Have your psyker scry me again if you like – you will see I don’t speak falsely.’

Numeon looked like he was considering that, when he asked, ‘What does this spear have to do with Vulkan?’

‘I honestly don’t know. It is tied to his fate somehow. I was merely tasked with coming here to retrieve it.’

That was a lie; at least part of it was, but Grammaticus knew his masters had given him all he needed to shield his mind.

Numeon frowned. ‘Tasked by whom?’

‘It’s difficult to explain.’

Domadus’s vox crackled and Grammaticus caught the murmured intonation of a voice on the other end of it.

‘Try,’ said Numeon and was about to say more when Domadus approached him.

‘Pergellen is back with Shen’ra and wants to see you.’

Numeon nodded in return. ‘Say nothing of this to anyone else.’

Domadus nodded. ‘And what of him?’ he asked, drawing a short-bladed sword from his belt. Grammaticus didn’t like the cold look in the Iron Hand’s eye. ‘I could silence him now. It would end his seditious talk. He also knows our whereabouts, some of our strength.’

‘I’m not sure yet if it is seditious…’ Numeon paused, thinking. ‘Besides, he knows nothing, not about us anyway.’

‘He would complicate our mission,’ said Domadus.

‘It’s a risk I’m prepared to take. He knows something, Domadus. I want to know it too.’ He turned towards the Raven Guard.

‘I will watch him,’ said Hriak, unfolding his arms slowly like he was unfurling his wings.

‘Domadus,’ Numeon added.

‘No one gets in or out unless it’s with your say so.’

‘No, I was going to say, don’t let Hriak hollow the human out. I want his mind intact for questioning later.’

‘You wound me deeply,’ uttered the Raven Guard.

Numeon frowned. ‘Was that sarcasm, Hriak? You sounded almost as warm as Domadus.’

The Iron Hand laughed loudly and stepped aside.

Numeon nodded to them both, turned his back and left the room.

‘I felt safer when I was on my own,’ Grammaticus said with half-hearted humour, glancing from the stoic figure of the Iron Hand to the menacing spectre of the Raven Guard.

Hriak didn’t share Sebaton’s humour and glared back at him through the slits of his battle-helm.

‘You were,’ he rasped.

After a short walk through an access corridor and the old manufactorum bunk room, Numeon arrived at the printer’s abandoned refectorum. It was a largely barren space, tiled grey underfoot and with a few benches and tables upturned at the room’s edges. A short skirmish had unfolded here, the loyal citizens of Ranos ultimately on the losing side. Amidst the spilt food stains, there were also patches of blood.

In the middle of it all, waiting for the Salamander, stood Pergellen.

The Iron Hand was lean-faced, his eyes concealed behind a steel visor with a single retinal band across its surface. The lights were out in the refectorum, making the visor glow lambently in the darkness. Pergellen’s only other bionic was his left hand, which ground noisily as he used it to grip Numeon’s wrist. His hair was black like jet, and cut close to his scalp in the same manner as his deceased lord and father’s had been.

Over his shoulder on a strap Pergellen had a long-barrelled sniper rifle. It was his deadly aim that had killed the Word Bearer in the warehouse, although from such close range that wasn’t exactly a challenge. He’d wanted to use the warehouse as his nest from which to keep a lookout, but hopes for that were ruined as soon as the human had burst in.

‘You looked troubled, Artellus,’ he said to Numeon.

‘It’s nothing.’ Numeon smiled to cover the concern that had obviously crept over his face, and returned Pergellen’s grip in formal but comradely greeting. ‘I’m glad to see you back. Where’s Shen’ra?’

‘In the yard with the others,’ he said flatly.

Pergellen was a serious soul, rarely given to humour. But he had also saved Numeon’s and Leodrakk’s lives on the plains of Isstvan V. So few of the Morlocks had escaped, so very few of the Clan Avernii left to continue its great and noble legacy.

When the shells were falling and the full horror of the betrayal revealed, it was Pergellen who had fought his way back to the drop-ships when others were losing their minds at the death of Ferrus Manus. It was Pergellen who had dragged Domadus’s unconscious form across the black sand, and he who had kept open a path to the transport. Many didn’t make it.

He and Leodrakk would have died on that field were it not for Pergellen. Their brothers in the Pyre Guard might well all be dead, but Numeon clung to the hope that they were not, just as he believed that Vulkan, too, still lived.

If what the human had said was the truth, then perhaps… He dismissed the thought at once, knowing it was foolish to place his hope in such a man.

Instead he asked, ‘How many days were we on that drop-ship, Pergellen?’

It was often where their conversations went at some point.

‘Fifty-one days, eight hours and four minutes,’ the Iron Hand replied.

They had been a mess of disparate units and Legions back then. Not all had survived the escape. Some were simply too badly wounded or had been dead when they were dragged aboard. Of the forty-seven legionaries that took flight on that vessel, only twenty-six survived.

They lived long enough to be reunited with the Fire Ark, a strike cruiser that had escaped the carnage – one of the few. It had not done so unscathed. Many of the crew were killed during that desperate flight. Wounded, weary, they had levelled what guns they had on the drop-ship emerging from that self-same chaos, not realising they were friends, not foes.

There were no legionaries aboard, not one. Every single able-bodied warrior that could don war-plate had been sent to bring the disgraced Warmaster to heel. It was extravagant, Numeon realised in retrospect – a means of showing force to force and hoping the latter balked in the face of the former. How wrong they were. It didn’t seem like extravagance now; instead, it smacked of ignorant sacrifice. And how Horus had prepared his altar for their willing offering. The blades of his traitors were sharp indeed on that slab of Isstvan V.

Since finding the Fire Ark and the brave but depleted crew aboard, they had lost three more legionaries. Numeon had allied them together, given them back some semblance of purpose. But it did not come without risk, and a vein of fatalism was growing in this company. He had expected it of the Iron Hands, but they bore the loss of their primarch with a quiet and steely determination that did the Medusans much credit. No, it was the Nocturneans, the sons of Vulkan, that suffered most. Of all the Salamanders, only Numeon believed. In his heart, he knew that his father had survived. The rest, despite his impassioned arguments, were not so convinced, and fought for vengeance instead of hope and a desire to serve.

Numeon knew these men were broken. Bereft of leadership, they would have destroyed one another, and with no way to return to their Legions they were cut adrift and aimless.

Yes, Pergellen had saved his life, but Numeon had to believe he could save this shattered Legion too.

‘What did you learn?’ he asked the scout.

‘Nothing good. Shen’ra’s sensors were tripped by a small patrol. I shadowed it for a while before the sentries cut them all down. It will certainly alert the enemy to our presence here.’

‘We knew the Word Bearers would find us eventually. What else?’

‘In addition to their legionaries, which I believe are significant in number, they also have many cultists. Seeds were sown here long before we arrived on the Word Bearers’ heels. The cults control most of Ranos now, and more Stormbirds are coming in from other parts of the city to reinforce the legionaries already on the ground. They are mustering close to this district. Too many for us to engage.’

Numeon cursed under his breath, ‘Vulkan’s merciful wrath…’ He did not want to abort the mission, but it wasn’t too late to signal to the Fire Ark waiting in high orbit. If they moved now, they could reach the gunships and their cruiser, but what then?

‘There was something else, too,’ Pergellen said, arresting Numeon from his thoughts.

Numeon narrowed his eyes, ‘More good news?’

‘Someone was watching.’

‘They saw you?’

‘Not us. They were watching their allies get gunned down by the sentries.’

‘Friendlies?’

‘No, I don’t think so. They disabled the Tarantulas. Shen’ra and I left shortly after that. I think they may have caught our trail from the warehouse and followed us.’

‘So, in all likelihood, they are coming here.’

‘Yes.’

Numeon’s face darkened. They had spent some time choosing a secure location to act as a base of operations. This district was mostly deserted. The gunships were far away, well outside the habitable zone. It was believed that at the edge of the city they would remain largely unnoticed by the enemy until they chose to act. Much of their plan hinged upon this assumption.

‘Any sign of their cleric?’ Numeon asked.

Pergellen shook his head. ‘No.’

The Salamander grew stern. ‘We’ve seen this before, brother. We failed at Viralis…’ As he spoke the name of this world, an image of corpse-filled streets, bodies defiled and mutilated in service to dark powers, came back to him. The traitors had left something else behind, too. The few survivors had been greatly changed, human no longer. They had become… things. Monsters, sleeved in flesh, that had crawled into mortal vessels and hollowed them out from within. The people of Viralis, an entire colony, were people no longer. Something else had taken their place, wearing them as a man might wear a suit.

‘We were too late for them,’ Numeon said, grimly.

‘We are not too late for Traoris,’ said Pergellen. ‘The cleric will die, but without the element of surprise we will need to draw him out. We won’t fail, Numeon.’

‘Ever since Isstvan. Since Vulkan…’ Numeon faltered.

Pergellen gripped his shoulder.

‘You told me you believe he still lives, Numeon. Don’t abandon your faith in that belief.’

‘I haven’t, even if I am the only one. I wish bitterly, though, that there was some sign, anything to give us hope.’ Again, he reminded himself that he could not trust the prisoner. ‘I have never felt this before… this… doubt that I feel now.’

‘I have lost my progenitor. His body lies headless amongst a field of our dead. You give me hope now. I follow you as my captain. You gave us all a purpose beyond vengeful fatalism. If you must believe in something, believe in that.’

Numeon smiled – wearily, but honestly. ‘I do. I hold to it. How many times I wished I had died on Isstvan Five with my brothers and instead ended up here, trying to make sense of this madness, trying to do something that still matters.’

‘This, here, now – this matters.’

Numeon nodded, finding strength.

The Iron Hand released his grip as the need for it faded.

‘I assume we are not staying here,’ he said.

Numeon shook his head. ‘This place is compromised. We’re moving.’

‘Will you inform the Fire Ark?’

‘No. It’s possible atmospheric communication could be intercepted. Then the zealots really will know where to come and kill us.’

‘Then I’ll summon our quartermaster to come and break down our gear.’

‘Thank you, brother. Tell Domadus I’ll be in the vehicle yard.’

‘What’s to be done with the human?’

‘He comes with us. He’s keeping secrets.’

‘Couldn’t Hriak prise his mind open and wrench them out?’

Numeon shrugged. ‘If we wanted him dead, I dare say he could. He’s watching him now.’

‘And do we not? Want the human dead, I mean. He’s a liability and will slow us down.’

Numeon shook his head. ‘You are a cold breed, you Iron Hands.’

‘I saved your life, didn’t I?’

Now the Salamander laughed, though Pergellen wasn’t making a joke. ‘You did, yes. I want to speak to the human again. He knows something. Besides, the cleric wants him. We might be able to use that.’

‘So he’s not a prisoner at all then,’ said Pergellen, ‘he’s bait. And you say I’m cold.’

Numeon replied without humour. ‘I’m pragmatic, brother. And I will do anything to kill this Word Bearer cleric.’

‘Even if it means our lives and the life of this man?’

‘Yes, even that. I would sacrifice all of it to stop them, to prevent another Viralis.’

‘And that, Artellus, is why I saved you.’

The two warriors parted, the Iron Hand headed for the printing works where they were holding the prisoner.

As Numeon returned to the vehicle yard, he tried to remain focused on his address to the other legionaries, but two words kept repeating in his mind. He barely dared to hope they were true. Vulkan lives.

CHAPTER NINE

Honouring the dead

‘Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, nor breath nor motion;

As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean.’

– From ‘The Rhym of the Ancyent Starfarer’
by the bard Colwrit

Twenty-three legionaries comprised Numeon’s company, himself included. It was barely more than two squads. The majority were Salamanders, mainly line warriors with a few Pyroclasts, as well as himself and Leodrakk from the Pyre Guard. A pair of battle-brothers and Codicier Hriak represented the Ravens. And of the Iron Hands Legion, there were only Domadus and Pergellen. Ever since the evacuation from the Isstvan killing fields, there had been no contact with any other Legion force.

Their vessel, the Fire Ark, had been badly damaged in the exodus from Isstvan V. Some weapon systems were still functional, though these were insufficient to last long against a fully operational ship of the same calibre. Life support, power for lighting on certain decks, the engines and warp drive still worked, albeit at a reduced and unreliable capacity. Communications were another matter, however. Shipboard vox worked well enough but long-distance augurs and the sensorium arrays were beyond repair and use. Even ship-to-surface vox was extremely patchy. Captain Halder had achieved the near-impossible in effecting a successful escape, but they had limped on ever since and knew nothing of the greater war. Or even if there was a greater war. For all they knew, everyone was dead and Horus had won.

Numeon refused to believe that. Just as he refused to believe that Vulkan had died along with Lord Manus. He hadn’t seen the primarch fall, but the news from their fellow survivors who had was as compelling as it was grim. They fought on, hoping that others did too.

In the vehicle yard, his broken company were currently stood down.

Some were sitting on storage crates, checking weapons, aligning targeters or reloading. He recognised Daka’rai, K’gosi and Uzak huddled around a fire. The three Salamanders weren’t keeping warm, they were speaking oaths and blackening their gauntlets in the flames to seal each pact. More than ever, the different legionaries fell back on their native rituals and customs to give them resolve and purpose.

Others were less clandestine and spent their downtime making battlefield repairs on armour, or testing and refocusing retinal lens resolution, or running biometrics. One legionary, a Salamander called Helon, was performing field surgery on one of the Ravens who’d been injured when a gunship had crash-landed during planetfall. The gunship was no longer operable, but Shaka would live. Helon was not a trained Apothecary, but in the absence of such a specialist he had adapted.

The Raven’s rookery brother, Avus, was squatted atop an iron gantry that overlooked the yard, keeping watch. Hriak was nowhere to be seen, but Numeon knew that the Librarian would be close by if he were needed.

Leodrakk had been waiting for Numeon to appear, and left his guarded conversation with Kronor to go and speak with him.

‘Pyre captain,’ he said, crafting a small bow. ‘How fares our prisoner?’

‘He lives, no thanks to you.’

Leodrakk had removed his battle-helm. It was sitting in the crook of his arm, so Numeon saw him lower his eyes at the mild reprimand from his captain.

‘You have heard Pergellen’s news,’ he offered, changing the subject.

‘I have.’

Leodrakk smiled coldly. ‘I wished for this moment. We will finally get our deserved revenge.’

‘We’re leaving, Leo.’

‘What?’

‘We can’t stay here, not now our enemies have learned of us.’

‘What does it change? Let them come. We shall be waiting.’ He clenched his fist in emphasis.

‘No, brother. We won’t be. They have many times our numbers. This place is hardly a fortress. We could not hold it against an army, and besides, we did not come here to die a vainglorious death.’

Leodrakk stepped forwards, prompting Numeon to do the same until their breastplates almost touched.

‘Yes, brother?’ asked Numeon levelly, breathing in the scent of hot ash drifting from Leodrakk’s mouth.

For a moment Leodrakk looked as if he were about to say or do something foolish. Numeon had to remind himself that Pyre Guard were not like other Salamanders. They were forged of a fierce, independent spirit; it was how Vulkan had shaped them.

‘I have Ska’s blood on my hands,’ Leodrakk whispered, but backed down. ‘Literally, brother.’

In the face of his brother’s grief, Numeon relented. He gripped Leo’s shoulder guard as Pergellen had done for him.

‘I know, Leo. I was there.’

Numeon glanced down at the vambrace and gauntlet on Leodrakk’s left arm and hand. It was still stained with Skatar’var’s blood.

‘Then tell me what else other than revenge are we fighting for?’

‘A greater purpose.’

‘What purpose? To kill a cleric, and achieve what?’

‘No, not just that. I am talking about the Eighteenth, the Legion.’

‘There is no Legion, Artellus.’ Leodrakk gestured agitatedly behind him. ‘We are all that remains.’

Numeon saw the anger and doubt in Leodrakk’s eyes. He’d seen it mirrored in his own many times since their escape. Something else filled them now, though. Hope.

‘Vulkan lives,’ Numeon said.

Sighing ruefully, Leodrakk shook his head. A little mirthless laugh passed his lips.

‘This again. He is dead, Numeon. He died on Isstvan like Ferrus Manus. Vulkan is gone.’

Numeon’s eyes narrowed with certainty. ‘He lives.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I feel it,’ said Numeon, tapping two fingers against his left breast, ‘in here.’

‘I want it to be true, brother. I want it more than anything, but he’s dead. So is Ska, so are all of them. We are the only Salamanders that now live and I would rather die in vainglory, killing our betrayers and those that murdered our kin in cold blood, than wither away and run like cowards.’

Leodrakk walked away. Numeon let him go, having no argument with which to recall him. Belief and the desperate testimony of an already proven liar were no grounds to convince anyone of proof of life.

‘Not like him to lose his temper,’ said Domadus, having just come from where they had been keeping the prisoner. He came into step beside Numeon. Numeon looked at him askance. ‘Are you sure you’re Tenth Legion?’

‘My overly augmeticised appearance suggests otherwise?’

‘Your sarcasm does.’

‘We all have our coping mechanisms, brother-captain.’

‘Seems Leodrakk’s is rage,’ Numeon murmured, watching the other Salamander storm out of the vehicle yard and into the city street beyond.

‘He would not be alone.’

‘Aye, a fact of which I am all too aware, Domadus.’

‘Then let us put these warriors to purpose. Pergellen informs me we’re striking camp.’

Numeon nodded. ‘Yes, the Word Bearers know we are here and are coming. We need to be gone when they arrive.’

‘Ah,’ said Domadus, realising, ‘and hence the stoking of Leodrakk’s ire.’

‘Indeed.’

‘How long?’

‘Ten minutes. Pergellen thinks he and Shen were followed. I won’t take chances.’

‘It will have to be light arms only then. Spare ammunition, grenades, anything that can be carried easily. We’ll need some firepower, though.’

‘Take the heavy bolter – suspensors should make it light enough to bear at speed.’

‘To be honest with you, captain, I hadn’t considered leaving it behind. Besides, it will make an excellent mess of those traitors.’

Numeon allowed himself a wry smile as he caught the flash of amusement in Domadus’s eyes.

‘Aye, that it will, quartermaster. Det-cord everything else. No weapon we leave behind will fall into enemy hands.’

‘Or we could cache the spares close by,’ Domadus suggested. ‘An ammo dump could prove useful against numbers. Strike and fade, resupply then repeat?’

‘A valid tactic, but no. It’ll take too long. Disable anything extraneous.’

‘Very well.’ The quartermaster nodded his understanding. ‘You want me to pass the word to the others?’

‘No, I will do it.’

Numeon mounted a storage crate. Some of the other legionaries were already turning towards him when he began.

‘Gather…’ Numeon’s powerful voice carried across the vehicle yard with strength and authority, demanding attention. The legionaries drew in to listen. ‘Brothers, the Word Bearers are amassing a large force in this part of the city. Needless to say, we are not equipped to engage such a force. If they discover this location we’ll be overrun, so we’re moving out. Immediately.’

Numeon’s announcement provoked mutterings from some quarters, but none gainsaid him.

‘Domadus will redeploy weapons and kit. No heavies unless it’s suspensored. Only what can be carried. Rifles, pistols, blades, grenades. Anything else, leave behind. Our mission is unchanged. Killing the enemy cleric is our primary. Secondary is to cause as much damage as possible then egress off-world.’ He raised his fist. ‘For the blood of our fallen.’

‘We remember them and their sacrifice,’ twenty-one legionaries replied, mirroring Numeon’s salute.

‘And vengeance for Lord Manus,’ muttered Domadus, slamming his gauntlet against his breastplate. ‘You’ll need to talk to Shen’ra.’ He gestured to the back of the vehicle yard.

Numeon looked at the Iron Hand as he was climbing down. ‘Is there a problem?’

‘Not yet. But there will be.’ said Domadus, before heading in the opposite direction to carry out his orders. ‘As his commanding officer, he’s less likely to hit you,’

Numeon exhaled a long, calming breath.

‘Vulkan grant me strength,’ he muttered, and went over to the Techmarine.

Shen’ra was stooped over a long, rectangular packing crate inspecting the contents as Numeon approached. The box was gunmetal grey and Munitorum-stamped. Like his brothers, he wore emerald-green battle-plate but his right shoulder guard was red and carried the icon of the Cog Mechanicum to show his allegiance to Mars. He had no helmet; the left hemisphere of his skull had a plate bolted to it which interfered with the armour sync-up, and he was bald-headed. Over his left shoulder hung the stump of a servo-arm that had been wrecked during the massacre. Some of the tools in the lower branch still functioned, however, so he had yet to dismantle it.

Shen’ra still felt the pain of its loss. It woke him sometimes during meditation, together with the after-image of a dark dream. He was beset by phantoms, the memory of his cleft servo-limb and the remembrance of dead brothers killed in front of his eyes.

‘Do you know what’s in this crate?’ Shen’ra asked as Numeon came to stand behind him.

‘A tracked weapons mount.’

Shen’ra straightened up and ran his hand over the barrel of the cannon contained within.

‘It’s a half-tracked, up-armoured, Rapier semi-automated heavy weapons platform with onboard targeting systems and power generators.’ He half glanced at Numeon over his shoulder. ‘This one carries a laser destroyer array. It is one of the single most devastating mobile weapons in the entire Legiones Astartes arsenal. We have it at our disposal, and you want me to leave it behind?’

The Techmarine turned to meet Numeon’s gaze, his armour’s servos growling in mechanised empathy with their wearer.

Shen’ra was a Nocturnean, native to the Sanctuary City of Themis. He was a giant; broad-shouldered and a head taller than Numeon. But the captain of the Pyre Guard was undaunted as he looked up at the Techmarine.

‘We’re striking camp. Anything larger than a bolter stays behind, and in no fit repair. Our enemies won’t be able to use our own weapons against us.’

‘Look around, Numeon.’ Shen’ra gestured to the vehicle yard.

Every warrior was being strapped up with grenade bandoliers, their belt pouches rammed with spare clips. They looked determined, well armed, but they were few, and a ragged few at that.

Shen’ra spoke in an undertone. ‘This is no Legion, and according to Pergellen that is what faces us.’

‘I know you’re not suggesting we abandon this world,’ said Numeon, his tone dangerous.

‘I’m insulted you’d even mention it,’ Shen’ra replied.

‘Apologies, Techmarine.’

‘I can have the Rapier assembled and armed in under thirteen minutes. Let me take it with us. The half-track can easily match our ground speed and we’ll need its killing power if we’re to have any chance of achieving our mission.’

‘Ranos is a labyrinth, Shen. What if it gets snared in wreckage? Speed it might have, but there are places we can go where a weapons mount cannot.’

‘Let that be my concern. If we have to leave it then so be it. I’ll wreck the weapon myself, and we’ll have lost nothing. What we scavenged from that drop-ship is all we have, Numeon.’

‘Each other, Shen, that is all we have.’

‘Agreed,’ said the Techmarine. ‘All the more reason to bolster that with a track-mounted cannon.’

Numeon shook his head at Shen’ra. Between Leodrakk’s petulance and the Techmarine’s tenacity, he wondered which would get him killed first.

‘You have ten minutes,’ he said, and went to assist Domadus in coordinating the rest of the breakdown.

‘They are leaving,’ Dagon hissed over the vox.

Narek had the vehicle yard under surveillance through his scope. As suspected, remnants of the three Legions they had helped decimate on Isstvan V had been responsible for the deaths of four of his brothers.

A reinforced gate separated the vehicle yard from the street. It was roofless but walled. Beyond it there was an outer yard, a tarmac apron upon which traffic could be logged in and out. It too was walled, but peaked around waist height and crested by a wire mesh that wouldn’t stop an arrow, let alone a mass-reactive shell.

He’d just seen a Salamander slam through the gate. He looked unhappy.

‘Tempers are fraying,’ he muttered to himself, before answering Dagon, ‘Someone must have spotted us at the ambush site and guessed we’d follow.’ Narek remembered the cooling tower, and the sense of someone watching. Now he knew his instincts hadn’t been lying. Perhaps he was not as blunt as he first thought.

‘Do we engage?’ Dagon asked.

‘Not yet. I’ll advance, get a closer look. You stay high and maintain overwatch.’

Narek reattached the scope to his rifle, slung it over his shoulder and began to move. Just before entering the street, he cast a quick glance at the smoke stack where Dagon was positioned far above him and then headed out.

Crouched low, Narek moved quickly and stuck to the shadows. The enemy might have sentries, or the one that had seen them earlier might be watching. Having gained a distance of two hundred metres up the street, he ducked into a side alley and from there a domicile, breaking in quietly through a back door.

There were bodies inside. Dried blood painted the walls, dark and shiny. The lights were out, smashed. Furniture was upturned. An elderly man and a young woman had been cut open. Viscera glistened in the ambient light flooding in from outside through a smashed window, the blinds designed to shroud it bent and broken.

A marking was described in the blood. The octed – a star with eight points.

Elias had ensured that the cults were well secreted until their calling came. Narek could see the look of surprise and horror still etched on the young woman’s face. The older man wore a death grimace. Heart attack, he presumed.

Staying low, Narek advanced to the broken window. Vantage was good. Nothing in the way of line of sight. He had an uninterrupted trajectory to the vehicle yard. Cover in the room was satisfactory too. He pulled over a section of the broken blind to further conceal his presence. Then he crouched on one knee, bracing the muzzle of his rifle on the window lip, and aimed down the scope. The errant Salamander slipped straight into his crosshairs.

He reopened the vox-link.

‘In position.’

‘Orders?’

‘Four kills for four kills. Wait until they make egress out onto the street, then I’ll give the signal.’

‘Confirmed.’

Dagon cut the link.

Now all they had to do was wait.

The shot, when it came, was muffled by the explosion from the det-cord.

At first it appeared as if the medic had slipped, but for the geyser of blood erupting from his ruined gorget.

The Salamander crumpled to his knees, gurgling and frothing through his vox-grille, the warrior nearest to him reaching for his comrade’s flailing arm and simultaneously alerting the others to the attack.

Grammaticus felt a strong pressure against his back as the psyker, Hriak, pushed him to the ground.

The assertion that time moved slowly during a crisis was actually true. It was the way that the brain managed to order and cope with the ensuing trauma, enabling the body to react as quickly as it could to protect itself from harm.

In the glacially slow seconds that elapsed between Grammaticus being upright and then taking stock of his new situation, several things happened at once.

Numeon shouted the order to grab cover, pointing to the low wall surrounding the tarmac apron where the company had assembled. A data-slate on which he’d been reviewing a secondary base location was mag-locked to his thigh plate, whilst the other hand reached for a sidearm holstered at his belt.

Domadus went into a brace position, slowly turning his heavy cannon so it faced outwards towards the street and the buildings beyond.

Pergellen had been on point with the Techmarine. Both stayed down, the former scanning the darkened city for suppressed muzzle flash; the latter putting his back against the wall and lighting up a control panel on his gauntlet. The two were exchanging curt responses but, deafened by the shouting and the strange, almost subterranean filter his brain was putting on his hearing, Grammaticus could discern none of it.

He hit the ground a fraction later than the shot Salamander. The legionary dropped hard, like a felled tree, spitting blood, a pool of which was expanding from the shattered artery in his neck.

‘S-t-a-y… d-o-w-n…’

Hriak shouted at him, the pysker’s words slowed by sensory distortion.

As soon as he felt the earth beneath his hands and elbows, time resumed at its normal pace for Grammaticus.

‘Don’t move from here,’ said Hriak, drawing a weapon as he moved up to support his brothers. Grammaticus watched him, followed him all the way to the low wall where another Salamander was hunkered down.

The Salamander popped up, bolter flaring in an effort to provide covering fire. A second shot pinned him as he rose, jerking his aim and piercing his chest. He fell back, perforated and unmoving.

More shouting, this time from Numeon to Leodrakk, who was edging closer to the end of the wall, shaping like he was going to attempt a dash across the street into deeper cover and then seek out their attackers from there.

‘Hold!’ Numeon bellowed at him, his voice tinny and urgent through his vox-grille.

Domadus was still scanning, the concentric scoping rings in his bionic eye whirring as they focused and refocused on different targets.

The Salamanders medic was being dragged away by two other legionaries when a third shot came from the darkness. It pitched one of the Raven Guard over, spinning him with the force of entry, ripping a death shriek from his lips.

‘Stay down,’ called Hriak, putting out his hand, telling Grammaticus not to move.

‘No arguments from me,’ muttered Grammaticus, and threw himself flat.

‘Glint of metal. I see him, on the rooftop. Thirty degrees east. Range, eighty metres.’

Pergellen’s assessment came through Numeon’s vox.

There were seven metres between them, and Numeon saw the scout was dirtying up his scope, trying to hide the tells that had exposed the enemy sniper.

‘Difficult to get line of sight in this warren. We’ll come around, take his blind side.’

‘Wait,’ warned Pergellen. He glanced at the three dead legionaries, now alone and bleeding out in the open. ‘Trajectories suggest two firing positions.’

‘Two gunmen,’ Numeon replied grimly.

Pergellen nodded.

‘Permission to return fire,’ shouted Domadus. He was standing against a pillar just inside the vehicle apron, heavy bolter primed for auto-fire.

‘Negative. You’ll be cut down before you can engage the trigger.’

‘We can’t stay pinned like this,’ snapped Leodrakk, six metres from Numeon on the opposite end of the wall.

‘I have the other one in my sights now,’ Pergellen returned, scope pressed against his eye. He relayed coordinates, turning again so his back was facing the wall, and began to prep his rifle.

Numeon peeked above cover to gauge the snipers’ relative positions but was forced back when a bolt shell clipped the wall.

Breathing hard, furious at their impotence to do anything, he opened up the vox.

‘Hriak.’

The Librarian shook his head. ‘They’re too far away, and without a target I can see, there’s little I can actually do.’

Numeon snarled. ‘Damn it.’

He noticed Shen’ra working at the panel on his gauntlet, his haptic implants making the data connection between the Techmarine and his Rapier.

‘Get me a precise vector for both targets,’ he voxed.

Leodrakk overheard and called to Pergellen.

‘If I draw them out, can you track them?’

The scout nodded, ditching the rifle but keeping the scope.

Realising what his brother was about to do, Numeon shouted, ‘Leo, no!’ and began to move just as Leodrakk stood up with bolter ready.

Grammaticus had his head down as instructed, facing the Techmarine and the scout.

He heard Numeon shout his brother’s name, felt the tremor of motion as both rose to their feet.

Two shots followed in rapid succession, a carbon copy of the ones that heralded the deaths of Varteh and Trio.

A half-second later, he read the following words on the Techmarine’s lips, ‘Engage forty-seven point six by eighty-three. Strafe.’

The churn of servos activating cut the tension as the Techmarine’s tracked cannon cycled up. A burst of incandescent light from its weapon array was pre-empted by a hot flare of pain and the searing white magnesium flash that accompanied being shot.

Grammaticus knew he was hit even before he felt the blood seeping through his clothes, and the chill as his frail human body was torn open.

The cityscape erupted in a series of explosions as domiciles, manufactorums and other structures were ripped apart by the Rapier’s laser destroyer mount. Debris cascaded in chunks like heavy hail from shattered facades, ruptured pillars and thoroughly gutted interiors.

Emitting a high-pitched, staccato drone, the laser destroyer stabbed a continuous barrage of beams into the area designated by its operator. It didn’t stop until the Rapier powered off for emergency cool-down.

Dust clouds were still dissipating, the odd section of debris belatedly collapsing onto the street below by the time Numeon and the others surfaced from cover.

Helon, Uzak and Shaka were all dead, their bodies littering the apron outside the vehicle yard.

Domadus stomped forwards through the narrow gap between the outer wall sections. His bionic eye was still scanning, exothermic and motion detection.

‘There’s nothing out there. No visible threats.’

Pergellen agreed, snapping his scope back onto his rifle, but adopting overwatch all the same.

‘Keep eyes on, both of you,’ said Numeon, going over to help Leodrakk to his feet.

Numeon had tackled him to the ground when he’d tried to bait the shooters, sending them both sprawling.

Leodrakk had a mark down the flank of his battle-plate where something had scored a shallow groove into the metal.

‘Ricochet,’ he said, grunting as he got up with Numeon’s assistance. ‘Lucky.’

‘Luckier than them,’ said Numeon, and as he turned to gesture to their dead comrades he noticed the prone form of John Grammaticus.

The human was lying with his face to one side, clenched in a mask of pain. He clutched his side, his hand and most of his arm drenched in blood.

Numeon scowled, realising where the errant shell had deviated.

‘Damn it.’

Narek yanked Dagon clear of the rubble. It looked as if several storeys had collapsed on top of him whilst the sniper was making his escape.

‘I warned you not to linger,’ Narek told him, letting go so that Dagon could dust off his armour and cough the grit up out of his lungs. His helmet was wrecked, dented by a stone slab or a girder. Both retinal lenses were smashed, Dagon had a deep gash above his left eye where the impact had pushed inwards, and the vox-unit was in pieces. Taking a last look at the snarling, daemonic visage on the faceplate, Dagon discarded his helmet.

His true face, Narek decided as Dagon looked at him, was entirely more disturbing.

The brow, nose and cheekbones were raised, the skin in between sunken as if drawn in by age. It had a slightly coppery tinge, but not like metal – more like oil, and the colour changed subtly depending on how the light struck it. Most disturbing of all, though, were the two bony nubs either side of Dagon’s forehead. In their infancy right now, Narek knew they would only grow, the longer Dagon was in Elias’s presence.

Here, on Traoris, in Ranos, he felt the shifting of reality. It trembled, affecting him on an internal level, like maggots writhing beneath his skin.

Narek betrayed none of this to Dagon, who smiled, revealing two rows of tiny fangs instead of teeth.

‘Four kills, you said.’

Narek checked the load in his rifle before slinging it back over his armoured shoulder.

‘I counted a tally of three,’ he replied.

‘The human was caught by a stray.’

‘You should have killed the legionary as instructed.’

‘He shifted.’

‘Then compensate,’ said Narek, and headed out of the wreckage.

‘He was ripped open, brother. No human could survive his injuries. Four for four.’

‘No, Dagon. We scratched three. Even if the human dies, it’s blood for blood. Legionary for legionary.’

Dagon nodded and followed his mentor back through demolished streets.

‘We’ll be back for the fourth,’ Narek called over his shoulder. ‘And then we’ll take the rest.’

CHAPTER TEN

Burning flesh

‘We have all burned. Down in the fire pits, or from the brander’s iron in the solitorium, we have all touched the fire. It leaves scars, even for us. We carry them proudly, with honour. But the scars we took that day on that battlefield, we bear only with shame and regret. They are a memorial in flesh, a physical reminder of everything we have lost, a burn even we fire-born cannot endure without pain.’

– Artellus Numeon,
Captain of the Pyre Guard

I lived.

Despite the fire, I had, against the odds, survived. I remembered the furnace, or at least fragments of what it had done to me. I remembered my skin blistering, the stench of burning fat, the smoke from cooking meat filling my eyes as the vitreous humour boiled within them.

Scorched black, rendered to ash, I was nothing but dust. A shadow without form, not unlike my gaoler-brother’s favoured aspect.

And yet…

I lived.

The furnace was gone. Ferrus was gone. All was darkness and cold. I remembered that I was on a ship, somewhere in deep space. I remembered the prison that my iron-hearted sibling had made for me, a cage strong enough to hold a primarch.

I was still weak. My limbs felt heavy and my hearts were beating furiously in my chest as some act of enhanced physiology worked to keep me alive. Perhaps I had healed, some regenerative gift I didn’t know I possessed. More likely, the furnace was not real, nor my ordeal in it. I had been seeing the grim corpse-visage of my dead brother, after all. Who knew what traumas my mind had endured?

For a moment I considered the possibility that all of this was fabrication, that I was lying on Isstvan V, wounded and in a sus-an membrane coma. Or that I had been recovered and my body laboured to revive itself in some clinical apothecarion chamber, my mind struggling to catch up with it.

All of this, I dismissed. My abduction was real. Curze was real. This place, this prison that Perturabo had made for me, was real. There was no waking up from a nightmare – this was the nightmare. I was living it. Every tortured breath.

But it was hard to think, to reason. Ferrus’s very presence and everything I had seen or not seen made me question myself. It was harrowing enough to have flesh and bone rent, split and cleaved, but what was truly terrifying was the slow erosion of sensibility, of self and the trust in my capacity to tell reality from fantasy. How can you defend yourself against your own mind, what your senses tell you? There was no armour for that, no shield or protection save strength of will and the ability to reason.

I didn’t try to rise. I didn’t voice my defiance or anger. I merely breathed and let the coolness of my darkling cell wash over me. I tried to recall everything I knew of my gaoler, everything I could accurately remember.

And then, closing my eyes, I allowed myself to dream.

Kharaatan, during the Great Crusade

Unwashed, malnourished, the soldiery of Khartor City were a sorry sight. Like an ant horde, dressed in carapaces of dirty red, they filed from the open city gates with their arms held above their heads in surrender.

The wall guard had come first, escorting their captains and officers. Then the first line troopers from the courtyard, and the second barricaders, the tower sentries, the inner barracks troopers, the reserves, the militia. They piled their weapons in the city square as instructed by the loudhailers of Commander Arvek’s black-jacketed discipline masters. By the time the city had been emptied of its warriors, the surrendered materiel reached into a mighty black pyre.

Civilians came next.

Women pressed infants to their chests, wide-eyed men tramped in solemn procession, too afraid to cry or wail, too broken to do anything beyond stare into the rising dawn that crept across the sand dunes like a patient predator. Canines, cattle led by farmers, labourers, fabricators of every stripe, vendors, clerks, scribes and children. They vacated Khartor, their home and solace, in a great and sullen exodus.

Vodisian tanks flanked battalions of Utrich fusiliers and Navite hunters, crisp in their Imperial Army uniforms. Even Commander Arvek himself leaned from the cupola of his Stormsword to watch the throng of natives tramp past. Several stopped at the feet of their oppressors, pleading for mercy until the discipline masters moved them along. Others balked in the shadow of Princeps Lokja’s Fire Kings, believing them gods rendered in iron. When aggression and intimidation could not move them, these poor individuals had to be carried by teams of orderlies from the medicae. There was little else to use these surgeons and hospitallers for – the Imperial force had ended the conflict unscathed. And this was despite the presence of xenos amongst the dirty hordes.

It was a fact that both pleased and irritated the Lord of the Drakes greatly.

‘He was right,’ Vulkan muttered, watching Khartor City from a distance as it gradually emptied.

‘My lord?’ asked Numeon, standing beside his primarch in the muster fields. Nearby, on a plain of earth flattened by Imperial pioneers, the Salamanders were re-embarking their Stormbirds for immediate redeployment. Compliance was over. The Imperium had won.

‘Bloodless, he said,’ Vulkan replied, surveying the human masses as they left the city.

On the walls of this last bastion, cannon embrasures lay empty, watch towers stood like impotent sentinels and only shadows manned the battlements. One by one, soldier and civilian alike, the entire populace of Khartor submitted to the will of the Imperium.

Numeon frowned. ‘Was it not?’

For the first time in almost an hour, Vulkan turned his fiery gaze on his equerry. Numeon did not so much as flinch. Even his heartbeat did not betray him.

‘You are a brutal warrior, Artellus,’ said the primarch.

‘I am as you need me to be, my lord.’ He bowed his head just a little, showing deference.

‘Indeed. All of the vaunted Pyre Guard are without equal in the Eighteenth. Like the deep drakes, you are savage and fierce, sharp of claw and tooth.’ Vulkan nodded to the blade affixed to his equerry’s back. It had yet to be bloodied on this campaign and judging by the utter capitulation of the Khar-tans, it would remain unsullied. ‘But would you slaughter an entire city, soldier and civilian alike, just to send a message and spare further bloodshed?’

‘I…’ There was no right answer, and Numeon knew it.

‘The scales are in Curze’s favour. Blood for blood. Yet, I am left with a cloud of compromise and guilt over my conscience.’

Numeon looked down as if the earth at his feet could provide an answer. ‘I feel it too, my lord, but what is there to be done?’ He spared a glance at the rest of the Pyre Guard, who were waiting solemnly for their captain and primarch a little way back, separate from the Legion.

Vulkan looked over to where one army was met by another as several of Commander Arvek’s battalions joined up with swathes of Munitorum staff to receive the natives and accept their surrender. The Army troopers did it with their lasguns held ready; the Munitorum officers greeted them with mnemo-quills and data-slates instead.

‘I don’t know yet, but had I realised how deep Curze’s malady went, I would not have agreed to this compliance.’

Numeon regarded Vulkan. ‘His malady? You think the primarch ill?’

‘In a manner of speaking, yes. A sickness, and a most insidious one. The darkness of his home on Nostramo – I think he never really left it.’

‘You could take these grievances to Lord Horus or Lord Dorn.’

Vulkan nodded. ‘I have always valued the counsel of my elder brothers. One is close to the Crusade, the other to Terra. Between them, they will know what to do.’

‘You still sound troubled, my lord.’

‘I am, Artellus. Very much so. None of us wants another sanction, another empty pillar in the great investiary, another brother’s name excised from all record. It is shame enough to bear the grief for two. I have no wish to add to it, but what choice do I have?’

Numeon’s reply was muted, for he knew how it grieved Vulkan to speak ill of his brothers, even one such as Curze. ‘None at all.’

Nestling in a shallow desert basin by the muster field, the Munitorum had assembled an armada of transportation vessels. Gunmetal grey, stamped with the Departmento sigil and attended by a flock of overseers, guards, codifiers and quartermasters, the ships were being prepped for immediate atmospheric embarkation. Unlike the Stormbirds, these vessels were not bound for fields of war. Not all of them, not yet.

They were vast, cyclopean things, far larger than the legionary drop-ships or the tank transporters utilised by the Army. Designated for recolonisation, Army recruitment and, in some instances, potential Legion candidacy, the fate of every Khar-tan man, woman and child would depend on how wholly they embraced their new masters. Certainly, none would return to Kharaatan again; only the manner of their departure and their onward destination were in question.

After several hours of slowly denuding the city of its occupants, two camps had begun to form comprised of Khartor’s citizens: those who had fought alongside the xenos willingly and those who had fought against them. Establishing the guilt or innocence of either was taxing the Munitorum staff in the extreme, and herds of people were amassing in a sort of limbo between both whilst a more thorough assessment could be made. Pleas were made, bribes ignored under the watchful eye of Munitorum overseers, but one by one they were codified and hustled aboard ships.

It was tight. Between the sheer number of bodies, the pre-fab Munitorum herding stations, tanks and landers, there was little room to move or breathe. Processing was taking too long, but still more were fed into the codifying engine of the Departmento. Hundreds became thousands. Choke points began to form. Unrest developed, put down by vigilant discipline masters. Order held. Just.

Within the gaggle of Imperial servants, the Order of Remembrancers was also represented. Cataloguing, picting, scribing; some rendered the scene in art that would later be confiscated, others took personal testimony of the liberated where they could – this too would be redacted. No images or reports of the Crusade escaped into the wider Imperium without first being sanctioned. Capturing glory, the gravitas of the moment, that was the purpose of the remembrancers. Nothing more. Vulkan saw Seriph amongst the throng, carefully staying out of the way behind a squad of Utrich fusiliers.

Following his primarch’s eye, Numeon asked, ‘Isn’t that your human biographer, my lord?’

‘We parted poorly when we last met. Another effect of Curze’s presence on me, I am ashamed to admit. I will redress that.’ Vulkan started off towards the Munitorum encampment. Despite the cramped conditions, none stood in his way. ‘Have the Legion ready to depart when I return,’ he called to his equerry, who saluted behind him. ‘I wish to linger here no longer than is necessary.’

‘Yes, my lord,’ Numeon replied, and in a lower voice added, ‘You will find no argument here.’

Numeon’s gaze strayed from his primarch to the edge of the camps where a squad of Night Lords looked on. Wisely, they had chosen to pitch their landers far from the Salamanders’ muster field and were represented by a token force yet to join the others. There was no sign of Lord Curze.

The VIII legionaries mingled with the Munitorum officers, who gave every one of them a wide berth. This was also wise. Even with their skull-faced helmets concealing their expressions, Numeon could tell that the Night Lords were enjoying this petty act of intimidation. More than once, a legionary deliberately strayed needlessly close to the path of a busy clerk or scribe, forcing the poor individual to alter his course lest he be harassed or called to account under the glare of retinal lenses. The others not involved in these ‘games’ muttered snidely with one another at the obvious sport.

‘They’re goading us,’ said Varrun, appearing quietly at Numeon’s side with the rest of the Pyre Guard.

‘Our primarch,’ said Atanarius, noble chin lifted in the face of the VIII, ‘how does he fare?’

Numeon answered honestly, ‘The same as us. The Kharaatan compliance has left a bitter taste.’

‘They revel in it,’ offered Ganne, only half holding back a snarl.

‘I would see the smirks wiped off their faces,’ said Leodrakk, prompting a slow nod and muttered agreement from his brother, Skatar’var.

‘Aye,’ Varrun agreed. ‘In the duelling cages, I would measure their true worth as warriors.’

Only Igataron said nothing, silently glowering at the Night Lords.

‘They are still our brothers-in-arms,’ Numeon reminded them. ‘Our allies. Their cloth is not so different from ours.’

‘It is of a darker hue,’ snarled Ganne. ‘We all saw the slain in Khar-tann City.’

Numeon gestured to the human rebels being herded slowly into the Munitorum’s pens.

‘And here, the very much alive citizens of Khartor. It is a fact difficult to ignore.’

No one spoke, but the heat of anger was palpable between them and directed at the VIII Legion.

The Night Lords were not just there to cajole, however. Their legionaries ringed a third, much smaller encampment. This one was a prison of enclosed ceramite, warded by no fewer than three Librarians. It surrounded the xenos overlords who had enslaved this world.

Khartor had been the greatest of Kharaatan’s cities, its planetary capital. And it was here, when the Imperium returned with flame and retribution, that the aliens had chosen to make their lair. A coven of twelve had subverted the will of Kharaatan, a cautionary tale of the dangers of xenos collusion. Xenographers codified them: eldar. Long-limbed, almond-eyed and smouldering with arrogant fury, the XVIII knew this race well. They were not unlike the creatures they had fought on Ibsen, or the raiders that had once plagued Nocturne for centuries before the coming of Vulkan. The Pyre Guard were Terrans by birth, they had not experienced the terrors inflicted on their primarch’s home world, but shared his ire at the aliens in spite of that.

The natives of Kharaatan had worshipped these witch-breeds as gods, and would pay a price for that idolatry.

‘What persuasion could the xenos have used to press an entire population into service?’ Numeon wondered aloud.

‘Psychic subversion,’ said Varrun. ‘A trick to bend weak minds, favoured by the witch. How many worlds have we seen undone, thusly?’

Grunts of agreement from the other Pyre Guard met this proclamation from the veteran.

‘I can think of one very recent in the memory,’ uttered Ganne.

‘The tribes of Ibsen were victims, not cohorts,’ Numeon corrected him.

‘But how to choose which from which amongst this sorry lot?’ said Varrun, smoothing his ashen beard as if contemplating that very conundrum.

Army troopers and Munitorum staff were thronging the camps now as the citizens of Khartor were steadily divided. A sea of desert-tan fatigues and grey Departmento-issue uniforms swept between the Salamanders and the Night Lords, parting them. The legionaries could still see one another, as they towered above the humans, their upper torsos, shoulders and heads still visible.

Numeon had seen and heard enough.

‘Get to the ships and finish the muster. All shall be in readiness for the primarch’s return.’

The Pyre Guard were moving out when Numeon saw a flicker of activity in the third camp enclosing the xenos. He was half-turned when he noticed the flash of light in his peripheral vision, harsh against the setting sun, that described the Night Lords in monochrome. Suddenly, they were moving. Someone cried out and fell, his voice too deep and vox-augmented to be human.

Another flash came swiftly. Lightning. And not a cloud in the sky.

‘The psykers!’ snapped Leodrakk.

A muzzle flare erupted, the deep, staccato report of a bolter echoing across the muster field and the encampments at the same time. It traced a line through the masses, shredding blood and bone, sundering flesh as the hail of shells reacted.

A second flare was born, chasing the quarry of the first. Then a third and a fourth.

Numeon saw their prey, just as he saw the numerous Vodisian troopers and Munitorum clerks destroyed as they fell beneath the guns, collateral damage to the Night Lords’ efforts at recapture.

The eldar were loose.

Somehow, they had slipped the psychic noose put about their necks by the VIII Legion Librarians and were now running amok.

In the face of this unexpected carnage, panic swiftly followed. In seconds, the close confines of the camps became a crush.

Khar-tans fled, leaping over the barriers intended to funnel them towards their new lives, only to be gunned down as discipline masters shouted orders to open fire. Others fought, tearing at their new oppressors with bare hands and teeth. Cudgels and shock mauls were unsheathed. Some wept, the terror for them not yet over. Many were trampled in the stampede, taking Imperial servants with them. One clerk, slow to realise what was happening, disappeared in a surging mass of shrieking Khar-tans. A trooper was knocked aside accidentally, crushed against a ship’s hull. Blood fountained up its grey flank in an arterial spray.

‘Into the crowd!’ Numeon bellowed, leading the others in to restore order.

Behind them, the rest of the Legion had begun to move.

‘Brother?’ It was Nemetor, hailing Numeon over the vox-link.

‘Breach the Munitorum’s cordon,’ Numeon shouted. ‘Get their pilots to move those ships. Tell them if they don’t, their precious mortal cargo will be crushed to death.’ He cut the link, letting Nemetor get to work.

The Pyre Guard formed up quickly into a spear shape, piercing the morass of bodies the Munitorum and Army seemed adamant would not spill out onto the desert.

‘Break your ranks,’ Numeon snarled at a Vodisian lieutenant, yanking the young officer off his feet.

His brothers did the same, ripping out the herding pens the Munitorum had put in place and relieving the pressure on the deadly crush that had begun to form.

‘Arvek,’ Numeon voxed, grunting as a Khar-tan man was floored as he bounced off the Pyre Guard’s war-plate. Leodrakk hauled him to his feet, sending him on his way. ‘Tell your men to break ranks.’

The Vodisian commander sounded fraught when he replied. ‘Negative. We have the situation contained. None of these rebels will get past our cordon.’

‘That is the problem, commander. Kharaatan native and Imperial servant alike are being crushed in this chaos. Break your ranks.’

Upon seeing the commotion, Arvek had brought his armoured companies together, plugging gaps in the Munitorum’s encampments, closing off escape, herding the frightened natives back onto themselves.

Officials farther back, confused by the commotion at first, had not realised what was happening and had continued to feed more natives into the grind. By the time they had taken stock of the situation, hundreds more had added to the pressure. Fearing for their lives when the crowd had realised their fate and their potential salvation, the Munitorum clerks had sealed the natives in behind a wall of tracked steel.

‘They will escape,’ Arvek countered, voice echoing in the confines of his Stormsword.

‘And will you unleash your guns next if they try to scale your hull?’ Numeon batted a discipline master aside with the back of his hand.

Together, the Pyre Guard had made a small vent. Their brothers in the XVIII were now working hard to widen it. People began to spill free – exhausted, bleeding, halfway dead. The presence of the Salamanders kept them rooted, however. None were willing to transgress and attempt escape with the red-eyed devils watching them.

But deeper into the camp, people were dying, smashed against the armoured prows of Vodisian tanks.

‘I will do what is necessary to maintain security.’ Arvek cut the feed.

‘Bastard…’ Numeon swore. A discussion with the commander would have to come later.

‘It’ll be a massacre…’ said Varrun.

Numeon eyed the static Vodisian armour that had now engaged loudhailers and search lamps as additional deterrents. People staggered back into one another, blinded and deafened. Arvek was employing riot control tactics where the rioters had no room to back down.

‘We need to move that armour.’

Through the thickening mob, it might as well have been leagues away.

Then Numeon saw the primarch, towering above the madness.

Realising the danger presented by the tanks, Vulkan had raced towards them. Not slowing, he shoulder-barged Arvek’s Stormsword at full pelt and began to push.

Grimacing with effort, booted feet digging trenches in the earth, he heaved the super-heavy back. Its sheer bulk dwarfed the primarch, the veins cording in Vulkan’s neck as he exercised his prodigious strength. Even Arvek dared not defy the will of a primarch and could only look on as Vulkan hauled the Stormsword’s dead weight across the sand. He roared, body trembling as he forced a gap wide enough for the trapped masses to escape.

Without waiting to recover, Vulkan was moving again, fleeing Khar-tans flowing around him in a flood of mortal desperation. The primarch barged his way through them towards the escaped xenos, using his size and presence to make a path. He had yet to draw a weapon, instead focusing on cutting off the eldar as they sought to run into the desert.

No, Numeon realised as the Pyre Guard waded through the sea of bodies, still fighting to reassert some order; he was going for Seriph. Several of the remembrancers were already wounded, possibly dead. Abandoned by the Utrich fusiliers, they clung to each other, striving not to be dragged into the chaos, holding close to ride out the sudden storm.

Yelling Nostraman curses, the Night Lords closed on the xenos from behind, firing off their bolters indiscriminately in the hope of hitting an eldar.

Five of the witches were already down, one with a still-churning chainblade embedded in its chest. Another two threw up a kine-shield of verdigrised light to absorb the chasing bolt-rounds.

A hot shell grazed Vulkan’s cheek, searing it as he was caught in the crossfire. Reaching the remembrancers, putting himself between them and the Night Lords’ heedless fury, he raised his gauntlet.

Thanks in part to the VIII legionaries’ bloody efforts but also because of the breach left by Arvek’s forcibly reversed Stormsword, the area around the eldar had cleared. Staring down a primarch of the Emperor did not seem to give the xenos pause, but before they could cast their lightning arcs, Vulkan unleashed a storm of his own.

An inferno burst from his outstretched hand, the in-built flame units in his gauntlet reacting to their master’s touch. What began as a plume of flame expanded quickly into a conflagration of super-hot promethium. The eldar were caught by it and engulfed, their bodies rendered in heat-hazed, brownish silhouettes as they shook inside the blaze. No kine-shield could save them; their robes and armour burned as one, fused to flesh until all was reduced to ash and charred bone.

Vulkan relented. The fire died and so too the riot, which was now being wrestled under control.

A single eldar witch remained, her face blackened by soot, her silver hair singed and burned. She looked up at the Lord of the Drakes, eyes watering, rage telegraphed in the tightness of her lips and the angle of her brow. The faltering kine-shield that had spared her life crackled and disappeared into ether.

She was not much older than a child, a witchling. Teeth clenched, fighting the grief at the death of her coven, the eldar offered up her wrists in surrender.

Numeon and the others had just breached the crowds, which were now slowly dissipating into the wider desert and being mopped up diligently by Nemetor and the rest of the Legion. In the wake of the fleeing civilians, the true cost of the eldar’s escape attempt was revealed.

Men, women, children; Khar-tans and Imperials alike, lay dead. Crushed. Blood ran in red rivulets across the sand, the death toll in the hundreds.

Amongst them a solitary figure was conspicuous, crowded by a clutch of battered remembrancers unwilling to let anyone close, desperate to defend her unmoving body.

Vulkan saw her last of all, the shock of this discovery turning to anger on his noble face. His eyes blazed, embers flickered to infernos.

The eldar child raised her hands higher, defiance turning into fear upon her alien features.

Numeon held the others back, warning them with a look not to intervene.

Glaring down at her, Vulkan raised his fist…

Don’t do it…

…and turned the air into fire.

The eldar child’s screams didn’t last. They merged with the roar of the flames, turning into one horrific cacophony of sound. When it was over and the last xenos was a smoking husk of burned meat, Vulkan looked up and met the gaze of the Night Lords.

The legionaries had stopped short when the flame-storm began. They stood and watched the primarch of the Salamanders at the edge of the scorched earth he had made. Then, without uttering a word, they turned and went to retrieve their wounded.

Ganne muttered something and made to go after them.

Numeon barred his path, his gauntlet clanking against Ganne’s breastplate, ‘No, go to the primarch,’ he said to all of them. ‘See him away from this place.’

Ganne backed down and the Pyre Guard went to their lord.

Only Numeon stayed behind, opening a channel over the vox to Nemetor.

‘Prepare the primarch’s transport. We’re coming in,’ he said, and cut the link.

Vulkan was standing over the lifeless body of Seriph. A stray bolt-round had grazed her side. It had been enough to kill her. There was a lot of blood – her robes were sodden with it; so, too, were the robes of the other remembrancers who had tried to save her.

Despite the primarch’s presence, his obvious threat, the other remembrancers did not shrink away from Seriph’s side.

An elderly man with rheumy eyes and wizened features gazed up at the Lord of the Drakes.

‘We’ll see her back to the ships,’ he said.

Vulkan opened his mouth to say something, but could find no words to express his feelings. Instead, he nodded before replacing his helmet, but found it could not hide his shame as well as it could his face. Turning, he became aware of his warriors gathering next to him.

‘The Legion awaits you, my lord,’ said Varrun humbly, and gave a slight bow of his head.

About to respond, Vulkan stopped short when he felt someone watching him from afar. Looking around, he caught sight of a dark and distant shadow out on the dunes. A second later and his helmet vox crackled to life.

‘See brother, I knew you had it in you. A cold-hearted killer, just like me.’

Vulkan replied, ‘I am nothing like you’, and severed the link, yet the stench of burning alien flesh remained.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Mortal pillars

‘To be more than human is; at the same time, to be less than human. Within us is the capacity for greatness. We are warriors, but we must also be saviours. Our ultimate goal is self-obsoletion, for when our task is successful and peace, not war, reigns in the galaxy, our usefulness will be ended and with it us too.’

– Vulkan, from the Trials of Fire

The dream ended and I shuddered myself awake.

Curze’s last words on the outskirts of Khartor had unsettled me and forced me to look within myself for evidence of the monster he claimed me to be. They echoed in my skull like old bones, unearthed from an old grave thought long forgotten.

The past will always come back. It never truly stays dead.

The first thing I realised upon opening my eyes was that this was not my cell.

The chamber was small, and yet expansive at the same time. Its walls were white, glowing, smooth like bone. I heard voices within them, and as I strained my eyes saw tiny circuits of light rushing like shoals of minnows with the river’s flow.

There was no smell, no taste. As I moved, rising to my feet, I made no sound. I could detect no air and yet I still breathed, my lungs functioning as they always had. Evidence of my previous tortures could not be seen, my body as unblemished and bereft of scars as when I had first arrived on Nocturne.

‘What is this place?’ My voice echoed as I asked the question of the figure standing opposite me.

Its face was hooded, and the rest of its body draped in robes, but I could tell immediately that it wasn’t human. Too tall, too slight. I knew an eldar when I saw one. This one was a farseer.

‘Nowhere of consequence, a meeting place is all,’ he said in a low, mellifluous voice.

‘You speak Gothic?’ I asked, though he had just given me the answer to that question.

The eldar nodded.

He wore black, with strange sigils and eldritch runes stitched into the slightly iridescent cloth. A weeping eye, a pyramid, a pair of bisected squares rendered into an angular figure of eight – I could not read them but suspected they were symbols of the farseer’s power and even origin. Though his face was concealed by the hood, and perhaps an even more effective and unnatural concealment, the edges of his aquiline features were suggested where the shadows lessened.

In his right hand, which was hidden beneath a black glove, he clutched a staff. Like the runes described on his robes, the figure’s staff was fashioned from the same strange bone-like material forming the chamber. Its peak was a simple eye and teardrop design.

I believed that this too was a glamour, in the same way that the eldar had masked his true appearance from me.

‘You are dreaming, Vulkan,’ he said, not stepping towards me, not moving at all, not even breathing. ‘That isn’t air you are taking into your lungs. That isn’t light making your pupils retract. You are not really here.’

‘Who are you?’ I demand, angry at being manipulated by this psychic passenger.

‘It doesn’t matter. None of this is real, but what is very real is what I am about to impart to you. The very fact you have not chosen to attack me suggests I chose wisely.’

‘You make it sound like you’ve tried this before,’ I said.

‘Not I, one of my kindred. Despite my warning not to, he proceeded anyway.’ There was resignation in the eldar’s voice, changing its melodic tone into something approaching regret. ‘It went poorly, I’m afraid, and so we are here. You and I.’

My eyes narrowed, the words of the alien coiling in my mind, unfathomable and deliberately obscure.

‘Are you a spirit, a wraith followed me from Kharaatan?’

I sensed the ghost of a smile in my strange companion’s reply.

‘Something like that, but not from Kharaatan. Ulthwé.’

‘What? Why am I here?’

‘It’s not important, Vulkan. What is important are my words, and the matter of earth.’

‘The matter of earth?’

‘Yes. It is tied inextricably to your fate. You see, I needed to speak to you. While you were still able to heed me, before you were lost.’

‘Lost? I am already lost. A prisoner aboard my brother’s ship, at least…’ I looked down at my bare feet, ‘I think I am.’

‘Are your thoughts so confused already?’

Looking up again, the eldar had drawn closer to me. His eyes, oval and lambent with power, bored into me.

‘I saw you, didn’t I?’ I asked. ‘On the ship, before I realised where I was.’

‘I tried to make contact before, but your mind was reeling, overcome with rage and a desire for freedom. You were also not long recovered.’

‘Recovered from what?’

‘As I say, it is the matter of earth upon which I must speak to you.’

‘You’re making no sense, creature.’

‘This might be the only chance I get to contact you. After this, I may not be able to return. You must live, Vulkan,’ the alien told me, ‘you must live, but stand alone as a gatekeeper. You are the only one who can perform this duty. You alone are the hope.’

I frowned as the words spilling from this alien’s lips made less and less sense to me. I shook my head, believing it to be another trick of my gaoler, albeit an extremely elaborate one.

‘My duty? A gatekeeper? This is meaningless.’ As a cloud creeps over the sun, my face darkened and I made fists of my hands.

Sensing anger, the farseer retreated back into the light.

‘It is not a trick. I speak the truth, Vulkan.’

I grabbed for him, trying to snatch the edge of his robes and shake this illusion to dust, but there was nothing to hold on to.

‘When the time comes…’ uttered the eldar, his voice and form becoming one with the light as the entire chamber brightened like a sun, ‘you will know what you must do.’

Falling to my knees, I roared, ‘Get out of my head!’

Pressing the palms of my hands against my temples, I tried in vain to push the interloper out and return myself to reality.

‘No more,’ I cried, shutting my eyes to the light as it burned them. ‘No more!’

‘No more…’ I whispered.

The light had gone. The chamber, the alien, everything. Gone.

Reality reasserted itself, and, as I opened my eyes again, for real this time, I saw it was made of dirty stone and dark iron.

I was standing, the chains around my wrists taut as they took my weight. On my forearm a fresh mark was branded into my flesh. Like the others I had noticed, I couldn’t place its origin. The mystery of it would have to wait. Cruciform, I stared out into a different prison. Not the bottomless oubliette from before or even the furnace where Curze had tried to burn me to ash as I had burned the eldar on Kharaatan. This place was new, and yet entirely old.

A long hall stretched in front of me. Embedded in either flanking wall were mechanisms of an esoteric design – great gears and cogs fashioned alongside smaller and more intricate servos. Antiquity met modernity and became a fusion of genius so prevalent in the tech-craft of old Firenza.

Perturabo’s work. I knew it instantly.

Flagstones had been laid along the floor. They were grimy and slick. I suspected that whatever this room’s intended purpose was, Curze had thoroughly tested it before my incarceration. The stone was but a veneer, a grubby falsehood to give this hole a darker, more medieval atmosphere. Sconces set into alcoves along the flanking walls flickered with the torches within. To the naked eye they appeared to be wood, but this too was a lie. They were springs and clockwork, just like every other half-shrouded machine in this dungeon.

The change in surroundings was not the only thing that differed about this particular cell.

Unlike before, this time I was not alone.

At the opposite end of the long hall, huddled together and barred from me by a screen of dirty armourglass, were human captives.

In the gloom I saw Army uniforms, civilian trappings. Men and women both. I was not Curze’s only prisoner in this place and as an unpleasant sensation arose in my gut, a voice uttered beside me, ‘You can see them, but they cannot see you.’

I scowled. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be dead?’

Ferrus chuckled – it was an ugly sound – his ghoulish eyes fixed on the other prisoners.

He extended a bony finger; part of his gauntlet had rusted. Even the miraculous living metal that once coated his arms and hands had sloughed away.

‘Their fate,’ he croaked, jabbing the skeletal digit in the direction of the human prisoners, ‘lies in your hands.’

A dull clunk of metal heard from somewhere deep within the chamber’s unseen artifice heralded the first motion of the machinery embedded in the walls. One of the larger gears creaked, overcoming inertia, and started to move. Others followed, their teeth interlocking, an engine noisily cranking into life before my eyes.

With the action of the gears, the servos started up, too. Pistons exerted pressure as they expanded pneumatically with an unseen hiss of compressed air. Vents opened, momentum built. The exposed clockwork churned and finally there came a louder, heavier clank of metal as some mechanism I could not see disengaged.

Immediately, a savage strain was placed upon my arms as the chains retracted violently into recesses in the walls on either side of me.

I grunted in pain, but my eyes snapped forwards when I heard the cry of terror from the other cell. The prisoners were looking up. Some of the men had got to their feet as the ceiling came down at them. Too heavy for them to bear, the brave men who had stood up were quickly crushed to their knees.

A child screamed. A child. In here.

Above the ceiling line, hidden from the eyes of the other prisoners but clear to me through the dirty glassaic, was an immense weight. And as the chains pulled at my arms, I realised to what they were both attached.

Despite the agony it caused, I heaved and pulled the chains back in.

In the other cell, the ceiling stopped falling.

‘As I said,’ uttered Ferrus, ‘their fate lies in your hands. Quite literally, brother.’

I held on, the muscles in my neck, back, shoulders and arms screaming at me to let go. My teeth were locked together in a grimace of defiance. Sweat drenched my body and trickled through the channels of my bunched muscles.

I screamed and the people who neither saw nor heard me screamed as well. My grip was slipping; the ceiling and the weight bearing down to crush the others was slipping too.

More of the prisoners got to their feet and tried to push back. Their efforts were utterly futile, no strength they possessed would prevail. Through the red rime clouding my vision as capillaries burst in my now bloodshot eyes, I saw those too weak or injured to stand wailing at their fate. Others trembled or clung to each other in the desperate need not to die alone.

One sat by himself. He was calm, accepting of his inevitable death. Though it was hard to tell, I thought I recognised him. I could not be certain but he resembled the remembrancer, Verace. And it appeared as if he were looking at me.

The terrible strain came on anew as the machine exerted even greater pressure.

Legs braced, arms locked, I closed my eyes and held on.

I stayed like that for hours, or so it seemed, my world a prison of constant pain and the plaintive mewling of the men and women I knew I could not save.

When finally it came, the silence was both sweet and bitter.

I was screaming, spitting defiance, half delirious from what I’d been forced to endure.

‘I will not yield,’ I roared. ‘I will never yield to you, Curze! Show yourself, stop hiding behind your victims.’

‘Surrender, Vulkan,’ Ferrus answered. ‘Let go. You can achieve nothing here. There is no victory to be had. Let go.’

‘Not while there is still strength…’

I stopped, realising that I was the only one screaming. The prisoners in the other cell, their voices were silent. Opening my eyes, I saw what had ended their pleas. Through the glass a solid slab of dark iron had filled the cell completely.

I sagged against my bonds, arms upright, my legs buckling beneath me as the last of my strength ebbed from my body.

‘Where are they?’ I asked the apparition beside me, despite the fact I knew he was only a figment of my imagination.

‘Look…’ said Ferrus, a rictus grin enhancing his ghastly features. With each fresh visitation he was becoming more emaciated, more skeletal, as if decaying in my mind’s eye.

Gears churning again, the iron slab slowly rose. It had but to creep a few centimetres before I saw the visceral red that adhered to its underside. Strands of it clung to the deadly weight, stretching and splitting as gravity exerted itself. Fragments of bone and biological matter came unstuck with the resonance fed through the slab by the machine lifting it. They splashed into a lagoon of guts and blood covering the cell floor.

As the chains slackened, my arms fell too, and I with them onto the ground, my face landing hard in the dirt.

Ferrus chuckled, his voice a little reminiscent of Curze, before he sank back into the shadows and left me to my failure and guilt.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Fulgurite

The excavation site had become a pit for ritual sacrifice. A fresh crop of less than willing supplicants brought from the other districts of Ranos surrounded it on their knees, staring into blood-soaked darkness.

As soon as he had first descended into the pit, Elias had felt the significance of this place. A temple to the Pantheon, raised on blessed stone, fashioned into the holy octed.

Eight walls for the eightfold path; eight temple cities erected around the globe.

‘Eight times eight,’ muttered the Dark Apostle, revelling in the divine provenance of it all.

Elias looked down upon his fell works from a pulpit wrought from piled stone. Black robes entwined with the scripture of his lord and primarch overlaid his war-plate, and he had removed his battle-helm so all could see the mark of the faithful upon his patrician face.

Sixty-four men and women knelt before and below him, their faces pressed to the earth. Some wept or shook, others did nothing but stare as if they had perceived their ending and knew there was no averting it.

Behind them, clad in crimson war-plate, were the legionaries of the XVII. They had borne the Word, and the Word was sacrifice.

Not their blood, but the blood of Ranos and all Traoris when Elias’s ritual was fulfilled.

He muttered incantations, invoking the Pantheon, entreating the Neverborn, guiding them with the bright soul-fires of the cattle he was about to harvest. The Word ran thick and heady from his mouth, uttered in ancient Colchisian, every syllable an affirmation to Chaos.

As the eighth verse began and the shaking supplicants trembled in ever greater fear and fervour, spittle flecking from their lips, tears of blood streaming down their cheeks, limbs jerking in spastic tremors, the legionaries took up the chant. As one they unsheathed their blades, one each for the souls about to be cast unto the aether.

Below them, the abyssal shaft yawned. Above, the sky crackled with hellish energy. A metaphysical event was taking place, a cosmological alteration that had much in common with the Ruinstorm, albeit on a much smaller level. Darkness clung to this place, tendrils of it were returning as the ritual advanced in potency. They had only to extinguish the remaining light to bring the night forth.

Here was the Emperor’s power, Elias reminded himself. Here, he, Valdrekk Elias, would see it broken and supplanted. The fabric of reality was diminishing, like a film of skin stretched over a skeleton too large for it. Patches of it were thinning, allowing the light – and what was drawn to that light – to peer through.

As he spoke, he reached up with his dagger, his words echoing below through his disciples, and could almost touch the beyond…

It had visited Dagon, Amaresh, Argel Tal… Even Narek possessed some measure of its influence, regardless of his denial. Now, Elias would receive its boon for loyal and faithful servitude. It was his due. Erebus had promised it.

The eighth verse drew to a close and Elias brought his gaze downwards towards the pit and the mewling creature clenched firmly in his grasp.

Eight times eight blades were touched to eight times eight throats. The cut was made in unison, the robed disciples acting on their master’s signal as the last words were spoken and sacrificial blood was released, for the glory and sustenance of the Pantheon.

Narek saw the storm several kilometres out. He and Dagon were travelling apart, so if one was discovered the other could better effect escape or counter-attack.

It troubled him, the storm. Narek could see it even above the tallest smoke stacks, billowing in clouds of eldritch lightning. He hoped that Elias knew what he was doing. As he picked his way through the deserted streets, he could imagine Dagon’s beseechments and zealous babbling. He was spared that trial on account of the fact that, without his battle-helm, Dagon was no longer linked to him by vox.

‘We were once warriors,’ he said to the lonely wind, swearing there were voices trapped in it. ‘When did we become fanatics?’ Phantom pain in his missing leg throbbed and he clutched the bionic that had replaced it, feeling only cold metal and the touch of flesh no longer.

His lip was curling with displeasure when he felt something warming his side. His retinal display had triggered no alarms concerning his suit’s efficacy, so Narek assumed that it was undamaged. When he looked down, he found that the source of the heat was his scabbard. For a moment he forgot that he had replaced his gladius, and wondered what the object was that glowed faintly within it.

The fulgurite. The lightning spear.

Narek stopped, gazing in sudden wonder at the sublime artefact in his possession. He hesitated to draw it, and found his hand trembling as he reached to do so.

‘Godlike…’ he whispered, repeating the same word he had used to describe it to Elias.

Finding his resolve, he clutched the haft of the spear and was about to draw it when Dagon’s voice interrupted him.

‘Brother,’ Dagon called to him, ‘why have you stopped? Are you injured?’

Narek released the haft at once, only half turning towards Dagon and clutching his leg.

‘Old wounds, slowing an old soldier,’ he lied.

Dagon approached, only a few metres away when he had called out, and gestured towards the storm. ‘I can feel it, brother.’

Narek’s eyes narrowed behind his faceplate. ‘Feel what?’

‘The touch of the Neverborn, the whispered promise of the Pantheon…’

Narek recalled the voices and realised they were no trick of the wind. Elias was literally reshaping reality, bending it to his will in his attempt to fashion something akin to a gate. Narek wondered briefly if, when that gate was opened, what was on the other side would recognise friend from food.

‘You are more gifted than I, Dagon,’ he replied, though he felt the ripple of the warp’s presence under his flesh, just as he always had. It was an itch, a reminder of what they had all given up in pursuit of so-called ‘truth’.

Dagon clapped Narek on the shoulder, drawing an unseen snarl from the veteran huntsman.

‘We shall all be beneficiaries of the Gods’ boons when this night is done,’ he smiled and walked on ahead. ‘I will take point, brother. Rest your leg, knowing your spirit will soon be nourished.’

My spirit is likely to be nourishment, not nourished, thought Narek.

Glancing at the spear one more time, he waited for Dagon to be lost from sight and followed in silence. The warmth at his side did not abate, but throbbed, reminding him of his every doubt.

Their numbers had swelled since they had first made planetfall. Almost a hundred legionaries and twice that amount in simpering cultists were arrayed before the great ritual pit where Elias sermonised and proselytised. His bombastic doggerel did little to move Narek, who had been last to join the gathering, having followed on behind Dagon, who had already taken his place with the devout.

Offered robe and cowl by a mortal wearing a graven mask and attired in the same priestly vestments, Narek found his place amongst the throng. He watched in mute fascination and revulsion as Elias preached his dogma from on high, standing aloft like a deacon of old Colchis. Narek thought him a petty demagogue, bereft of honour or true purpose. He was Erebus’s puppet, but then Narek supposed that only made him Elias’s hound.

A life given for a life spared, he reminded himself, and barely noticed the humans with their throats slit, cascading into the dark abattoir that awaited their flesh. Their souls… Well, that was another matter.

Many more cattle trembled in their pens, awaiting execution by Elias’s ‘divine’ hand. The efforts of the other legionaries had yielded a ripe harvest. Narek could smell the mortals’ fear, just as he could detect the Dark Apostle’s greed and ambition. Both sickened him.

On Monarchia, they had erected monuments, great citadels of worship. It was worthy endeavour – it was refulgent and glorious. This was grubby and base. The XVII had sunk low, squirming on their bellies, not much better than the vermin they preyed upon. Yet, he could not deny the sense of power. They all felt it, the warriors of the Legion, the cultists, the other humans in their thrall. It was potent and it was also imminent.

The ritual ended. Elias descended from his pulpit, a prophet to his devoted following, his communion with the Gods over for now.

‘Narek,’ Elias said, his eyes finding the huntsman in the throng, warriors parting with muttered benediction as he approached him through the crowd. ‘Do you have it?’ he asked, eyes still bright from the borrowed power he had siphoned through the ritual.

Narek nodded, fighting a sudden reluctance to relinquish his hold upon the spear.

‘Come,’ Elias beckoned, keen to be away from the others when presented with his prize.

A small encampment had been established in close vicinity to the pit; tents, a shrine at which to worship, flesh-pens to harness the cattle. Elias had deemed it necessary to erect a commune. Narek joined him inside one of the tents. After dismissing a pair of hooded cultists, they were alone.

‘It smacks of more permanence than I thought was needed for this,’ said Narek, indicating the encampment.

‘Blood begets blood, brother, but much must be spilled in order to taint this place.’

‘And is there enough, amongst your cattle and your slaves?’

Elias scowled, unused to being questioned by his disciples in such a manner.

‘What concern has that ever been of yours, Narek? You are a soldier, are you not? A warrior-zealot, devoted to the Word. I am the Word in this place, so your fealty is to me. Is it not?’

The mood had soured quickly, Elias brought down from his euphoria to the canker of mistrust and doubt.

‘I serve you as always, Dark Apostle.’ Wisely, Narek bowed.

A small dark bowl at the back of the canvas chamber was put there for Elias’s ablutions after spilling sacrificial blood. He went over to it now and began cleansing his hands so that he could begin the next octed circle unsullied by the previous one.

He didn’t have an accurate count, but Narek estimated several hundred mortals awaiting slaughter in the pens. Hemmed in by sharp stakes and spools of razor-wire, they reminded the huntsman of wide-eyed swine fearful of the culling to come.

‘Pure, it must be pure, Narek,’ Elias muttered, his back to the huntsman. ‘Now,’ he added, fastidiously cleaning his fingertips, fingers, palms and knuckles, ‘I would see the weapon.’

Shaking off his hands, drying them on a cloth, Elias turned with hands open and ready to receive.

Narek gave a second’s pause, not so much to make the Dark Apostle concerned but enough to realise he resented giving up the spear. Fluidly, he drew it from his scabbard and watched Elias’s eyes widen at the sight of it.

‘Godlike,’ he breathed – that word again – ‘you were not exaggerating.’

Narek placed it reverently in Elias’s hands, where he could examine it more closely.

‘So this is what they withdrew from the ruins?’ He exhaled, his craving for the power contained within this shard self-evident. ‘I can sense its strength.’

‘It is divine…’ murmured Narek, briefly forgetting where he was and who he was with.

Elias looked up sharply. ‘The Pantheon is divine – this is but a means through which to manifest their beneficence. I must profane it, curb its strength to my own ends.’

‘Your ends?’ asked Narek when Elias had returned his gaze to the spear again.

‘Indeed.’

So, that was it. The Dark Apostle meant to try and yoke the spear’s captured power for himself, either as a way to enhance his standing with Lord Erebus or perhaps even to usurp him. Elias was certainly ambitious, but that was bold even for him.

‘Are you intending to harness it then?’ Narek asked, choosing to leave his suspicions unspoken.

Elias regarded him sternly again.

‘You are… overcurious, Narek.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Is something amiss?’

‘I…’ Narek began. ‘It is divine, this thing.’ He gestured to the spear, eyes drawn to its fulgurant glow which even now threw back the shadows inside the tent. ‘Does it not make you…’

Elias had not lowered his gaze, and listened intently to his huntsman.

‘Make me what, Narek?’

‘Question.’ He barely whispered it, for fear that to speak it aloud was part of some blasphemy.

‘You have doubts?’

‘I am merely seeing what is in front of my eyes. Here, in your hands, lies a piece of the Emperor’s will. It is lightning, cast from His fingertips and forged into a weapon.’

Elias was nodding. ‘Indeed it is a weapon, one I mean to wield. I see now that was Lord Erebus’s plan for us all along.’

‘When we raised those cathedrals to His honour and glory, all the years we spent extolling His holy church and divine right to rule mankind, did you think we served the needs of a false prophet?’ Narek asked. ‘I am talking about faith, Elias.’

‘He has denied it, denied our worship and faith. He spits on us, and in so doing are the true gods of the universe revealed unto us. And your words border dangerously close to sedition, not revelation.’

‘The revelation is before us, brother. The Gal Vorbak, they are men no longer–’

‘They ascend!’

‘No! They merely harbour sustenance for the monsters dwelling within and wearing their flesh.’

‘I would welcome such a union, to be so blessed. This here,’ he brandished the spear like he was considering stabbing it into Narek’s heart, ‘is my path to that glory.’

‘I see only damnation, but I am bound to it, as are you. And don’t threaten me with sedition. Your words smack more thickly of betrayal than mine.’

Elias, realising he had revealed too much of his ambition, backed down.

‘It is… a suggestion, nothing more than that.’

‘To do what, exactly?’

‘Elevate us, you and I, Narek,’ he said, his voice low enough to be mistaken for a conspiratorial whisper. ‘Erebus spoke of it. Weapons to win the war. This is clearly what he meant, and it obviously has power. I merely need to harness it.’

‘You can do that?’

Elias mistook Narek’s incredulity for eagerness.

‘Yes, brother,’ he hissed. ‘You will be restored, better than you were before. I…’ He smiled a viper’s smile. ‘I will have what I’ve always sought, a patron in the Pantheon.’

Smile widening into a feral grin, he waited for Narek to see this vision as he did.

He was to be disappointed.

‘You invite destruction upon yourself, Elias.’

And like the viper that is suddenly threatened and prepares to fight back, Elias recoiled. ‘Remember the debt you owe to me, Narek,’ he warned, appealing to the huntsman’s sense of honour.

‘Like I say, I am bound to this fate as I am bound to you. Do not worry, I have no urge to enhance my own standing. I merely wish to fight and die in this war. But by turning a blind eye, my debt is paid in full. Are we in agreement?’ Narek held out his hand for Elias to take it.

Instead, the Dark Apostle merely nodded.

‘Good,’ said Narek. ‘Once this is done, you and I will part company, our alliance ended.’

‘Agreed,’ said Elias, ‘which leaves from now until then.’

‘The shattered legionaries have amassed to disrupt our plans here. The human with them is very likely dead, shot by Dagon’s deflected bullet, so they’ll be coming, one way or another.’

‘You need men?’ asked Elias.

‘All hand-picked by me. No hoods.’ He referred to the cultists. ‘Legion only. Seven will suffice.’

‘Including yourself, an auspicious number.’

‘Not really. I need twenty others, two more squads. Whoever you can spare from the rituals. That’s how many I will need to stop them. And by stop them, I mean kill every one of our enemies.’

Elias smirked at him, as if amused by his soldier’s rhetoric, and turned away dismissively.

‘Take what you need from the ranks, including your seven. Get it done.’

‘This is my last hunt, Elias,’ Narek warned.

‘I really think it might be, brother,’ Elias replied, but when he turned around he was alone.

Narek had gone.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Ritual

The white-tiled floor was steadily turning to grey with the accreted grime of neglect. It was also covered in blood. They had moved him from the factory to an infirmary. Presumably, it had been used to tend the injuries of machine workers sustained through accident or misadventure. It was a modest size, and modestly stocked. A work bench served as an operating table. The drug cabinet had been raided, but there were bandages and gauze left behind.

Shen’ra was using them to try and staunch the bleeding.

The man, Grammaticus, if that identity was to be believed, had fared poorly during the rapid relocation to this secondary hideout. Despite Leodrakk’s protestations and even Domadus’s murmured counsel that to put him out of his misery was not only the logical thing to do but also the most humane, Numeon had insisted Grammaticus be taken with them.

Helon, Uzak and Shaka had come as well. Their bodies, anyway.

Leodrakk would not leave them, nor would Avus, who had shouldered the burden of his Legion brother all the way from the printing house. The Raven Guard had refused all offers of help, even from Hriak, who was a distant figure to Avus, anyway. Helon and Uzak had many volunteers to bear them and were dragged hurriedly between two of the fire-born.

Numeon had carried the human, allowing Pergellen to lead the company in his stead.

‘I am not Helon, I am no Apothecary,’ Shen’ra griped, up to his vambraces in gore.

‘Nor was Helon, brother,’ said Numeon, looking askance at the pyre his brothers had erected outside on the factory floor. ‘He adapted, as we all must.’

‘Life signs are beyond faint. He barely draws breath,’ said the Techmarine. ‘If he were a servitor, I would see his parts rendered down for scrap. That is what remains now.’

‘But he is flesh,’ insisted Numeon. ‘And I would see him restored if it is within your considerable abilities, brother.’

‘Faint praise will not alter the course of events here,’ Shen’ra reminded the captain.

‘Just do your best,’ said Numeon and left the Techmarine to grumble in peace.

Leodrakk was waiting outside.

‘He fades?’ he asked.

‘Was it etched upon my face?’

‘Actually, yes. Coupled with the fact that when he went in there, the human was almost cut in half by that deflected shell.’

‘Prognosis is bleak,’ muttered Numeon, starting to walk. ‘Even if Helon had lived…’ His eyes strayed to the pyre. ‘I doubt we would have had any better chance of saving the human.’

‘Is it wise?’ asked Leodrakk, following his captain’s gaze. ‘The smoke may signal to our enemies.’

‘We aren’t staying for long,’ said Numeon, ‘and, besides, there are fires burning throughout the city. How could they tell one from another?’

Leodrakk agreed, before his expression darkened.

‘May I speak my mind?’ he asked, walking in lockstep with his captain.

‘I suspect you would anyway.’

Leodrakk didn’t bite, his thoughts were elsewhere. At a belated nod from Numeon, he gave voice to them.

‘Is he really that important? The human – this Grammaticus, or so he claims.’

‘I would dearly like the answer to that question, but unless he pulls through I fear we will never have it.’

‘I don’t understand, why does this mortal possess such meaning to you?’

‘I don’t know. I feel something…’ Numeon pressed his hand to his stomach, ‘in my gut. An instinct.’

‘A belief?’ Leodrakk assumed.

Numeon met his questioning look with one of determination. ‘Yes. The same belief. That Vulkan lives and this man, however insignificant, seems to know something of that.’

Leodrakk scowled. ‘What?’

‘He told me Vulkan is alive.’

‘Where? On Isstvan?’ Something as dangerous as hope affected Leodrakk’s tone.

‘He didn’t say. Or at least, I have not had a chance to ask him yet.’

The other Salamander’s mood rapidly soured. ‘And when did he say this?’

‘During interrogation, after you left.’

‘You cannot believe this,’ he scoffed, disbelief obvious on his face.

Numeon remained sincere. ‘I do,’ he said, with certainty.

Leodrakk was unconvinced. ‘An act of desperation, brother.’

‘I thought so too, at first, and dismissed it, but I went over his saying it again and again. I can tell a lie from truth, Leo. Humans in the presence of legionaries tend not to be very good at it.’

‘Then he is a rare breed, this Grammaticus. He’s probably had training. It doesn’t make what he said true.’

‘Then why say it? Why that, specifically? I went over it in my head and could find no legitimate reason for the nature of this lie. A dozen other stories would have been more effective for any other legionary, but he chose specifically to tell me this, as if he knew it was what I, and only I, would want to hear.’

‘Then there is your answer. He’s a psyker. Even we can be read by telepaths. Evidently he’s a powerful one.’

‘Hriak was there throughout. If my thoughts were being read, he would have known. So I ask, how?’

‘I don’t know. But does it matter? I know you haven’t forgotten what happened at the dropsite – our brothers were lost. The only survivors are those warriors who boarded ships. I saw Vulkan engulfed in conflagration. It killed Ska, and it most likely killed the rest of our kin too. This mortal knows he is in trouble. Likely he is from one of the cults, a defector or a supplicant. He wanted to spare his life. He would’ve said anything to keep us from silencing him.’

‘Is that what we are now? Murderers?’

‘We’re warriors, Artellus. You and I, peerless amongst them. But we are not a Legion, not any more, and we do what we must to survive, for our own protection.’

‘But to what end,’ Numeon urged him, ‘if there is no hope?’

‘To the only end left to us, brother. Vengeance.’

‘No. I have to believe there is more than that. I do believe it.’

Leodrakk smiled, but his mood was melancholy.

‘You always were the most devoted of us. I think that’s why he made you captain, Artellus. It’s your spirit. It never falters.’

Further debate would have to wait for another time. They had reached the edge of the pyre where the rest of the company, barring Hriak, Pergellen and Shen’ra, had gathered in a broken circle.

Numeon was left alone to ponder Leodrakk’s parting words as the other Salamander took his place in another part of the circle. But he was unconvinced by any of the arguments he had heard, and hoped the human would survive, so he could understand the full truth of what Grammaticus knew. With K’gosi igniting a torch with the dulled fire of his flame gauntlet, thoughts turned to the imminent cremation.

Not only Uzak and Helon, but Shaka also lay in silent repose at the summit of the pyre. All would burn, die the warrior’s death. For the sons of Corax, tradition demanded they be divested of all trappings and left for the birds to pick clean, but tradition was in short supply and fire was readily available. An even compromise was reached, so all three would become ash together.

As K’gosi knelt down to light the base of the pyre, he began to incant words of Promethean ritual as described by Vulkan in the earliest days and adopted from the first tribal kings of Nocturne. This recitation spoke of ending and the return to the earth, of the circle of fire and the belief of all Nocturne-born Salamanders in resurrection and reincarnation.

The mood was sombre, heads were bowed throughout, helmets clasped under arms, the eyes of the sons of Vulkan burning with sober intensity.

As the fire grew, quickly burning through pallet stacks, wooden beams and broken furniture the company had scavenged for the rite, so too did K’gosi’s voice grow louder and more vehement. The final verses were spoken by the throng and interspersed with words spoken by Avus alone, of the raven taking flight and the great sky death that was the sacred right of all Corax’s sons.

The blaze swallowed the warriors swiftly, burning hungrily through the gaps in their armour, made all the more intense by the measure of promethium dousing the pyre before it was lit. This was a sacrifice – it would mean K’gosi and the other Pyroclasts would have to share the remaining ammunition, but all deemed it a worthy cause.

Until the moment when the ritual was ended, Domadus stood apart from the circle and looked on stoically. When there began talk of bonds deeper than blood, forged through mutual suffering and the shared desire for retribution, then he rejoined them.

The pyre shifted and cracked, fell apart under the weight of the armour at its summit and the wood slowly disintegrating beneath. A few seconds later it collapsed in a flurry of scattered sparks, the flames flickering dulcetly as a narrow pall of smoke rose into the air above. Ash was falling, and it covered all the legionaries on the factory floor in a fine, grey veneer like a funerary shroud.

‘And so it is done,’ intoned K’gosi and a moment of silent reflection prevailed.

It was broken by Shen’ra emerging from the infirmary. The Techmarine looked less like he had been operating and more like he had been in battle. Both, in fact, were true.

From his place in the circle, Numeon turned, his eyes intense and pressing for an answer.

Shen’ra gave him one, solemnly.

‘He’s dead. The human didn’t make it.’

The low thwomp of turbine engines on minimum rotation provided a balm to Narek’s troubled thoughts. He was crouching in the troop hold of a Thunderhawk, leaning from one of its open side hatches and surveying Ranos through a pair of magnoculars. Two other gunships followed behind, similarly quietened.

‘Any sign?’ grated Amaresh. The Word Bearer sat with his long flensing blade in his lap, sharpening the edge.

He was a beast, Amaresh, literally, with those horns sprouting from his skull and through his battle-helm. One of the touched. An Unburdened in the making.

‘Many,’ Narek replied, lowering the scopes to signal to Dagon, who was leaning out the opposite side of the transport, looking through his rifle’s targeter.

The other hunter slowly shook his head.

‘Any of our quarry?’ Amaresh pressed, annoyed at Narek’s little games.

‘I have their trail. It won’t be long now.’ He voxed fresh coordinates to their pilot and there was a slight change in engine pitch as the Thunderhawk shifted course.

Narek had taken the gunship along with the men.

Amaresh, Narlech, Vogel and Saarsk were all brutal warriors, bladesmen every one of them. Some had fought in the pits with the XII, locked swords with the likes of Kargos and Delvarus. That left Dagon, Melach and Infrik as snipers, along with himself. Infrik had cut out his own tongue, convinced it was babbling dark secrets to him in the night hours and during battle; whereas Melach found speech difficult with the growth of skin colonising his neck, slowly hardening to a brownish carapace, so said little.

The rest, those following in the other two gunships, were less significant to Narek’s plans.

He knew that they were unbalanced individuals, the seven he had chosen, but mental stability wasn’t amongst his criteria for selecting them. He wanted killers, specifically warriors who had slain other legionaries. The tally between this particular group was in the hundreds. That made them uniquely suitable for this mission.

With the exception of Dagon, whom he could tolerate, Narek hated every one of these bastards. Elias had cultivated a crop of dishonourable, wretched legionaries. Gone were days of righteous purpose and holy service. This slow mutation into devilry and aberration was all that was left now.

Narek meant to extricate himself from that as soon as he was done with this mission. Never once, not even when his leg was in bloody tatters, had he reneged on an oath. That was not about to change now.

As he hung on to the guide rail inside the hold, leaning out a little farther and allowing the wind whipping past to buffet him and howl around his battle-helm, he found that he missed the presence of the fulgurite and wondered just how the Dark Apostle would subvert its power.

Where once there was warmth at his side, a reminder of the existence of the divine, now there was only cold. Narek could feel it creeping further into his body, attaching its talons around his soul. And yet, so far he had resisted damnation.

Something on the darkened skyline got his attention and he quickly went back to the scopes for a better look.

‘There,’ he said, pointing.

Vogel got up and went to stand beside him. ‘I don’t see it.’

‘Look closer.’

Vogel’s eyes narrowed. One was not like the other. It was a fiery slit in an otherwise black retina, blind to one world but not the other.

‘A plume of smoke? There are fires burning everywhere in this city.’

‘It’s them,’ Narek assured him, opening up the vox again to converse with their pilot. ‘Saarsk,’ he said, ‘find us a place to land nearby.’

‘Why don’t we simply strafe their new stronghold,’ suggested Narlech, ‘then rake through the rubble to finish them?’

Narek shook his head. ‘No. I want to be sure they’re all present. Besides, ramping up our engines to attack speed would alert them to our presence. They have a weapon mount that took out two buildings. It would have no difficulty shooting us down, and then we would be the ones being searched for amongst the wreckage. We set down near here,’ he decided. ‘Go in slow and quiet on foot.’

Narlech muttered his agreement. Vogel sat back down.

‘It matters not to me,’ uttered Amaresh, who had not ceased sharpening his ritual blade since they had taken off. ‘So long as we get to cut them open and spill their fears at their feet, a feast for the Pantheon.’

Dagon snarled in pleasure at the thought. The others, too, all revelled in this idea.

Only Narek looked away, out into the dark, and wondered what would await them when they arrived.

Numeon sat in silence next to the slowly dying embers of the pyre. Tendrils of smoke were coiling from inside the armoured husks of his former brothers. He wondered how long it would be before it was him lying amongst the flames, burning and ending.

He was alone and the manufactorum floor was dark, barring the glow that remained in the ashes and charred pieces of wood. Only pausing to lay their dead to rest, the others were getting ready to move.

News of the human’s death had done little to affect the company. Most were in private agreement with Leodrakk. Now, this man, this John Grammaticus, would be left behind like the rest. And his secrets would die with him.

Numeon clasped an icon of a small hammer in his fist. It was partly fire-blackened, and the piece of chain that had once attached it to a suit of armour was broken.

‘I still have hope. I still believe you live…’ he said to the shadows. His eyes then strayed to the fire that filled the air around him with its crackling, reminding him of the day they had been wrested apart.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Misgivings

‘I can scarcely imagine what inspired Horus to this madness. In truth, the very fact of it frightens me. For if even the best of us can falter, what does that mean for the rest? Lord Manus will lead us in. Seven Legions against his four. Horus will regret this rebellion.’

– Vulkan,
Primarch of the Salamanders

Isstvan V

No one had seen Vulkan since he had returned from the meeting with his brothers aboard the Ferrum. Upon re-docking with the Fireforge, the primarch of the Salamanders had removed himself to his private chambers without a word of explanation.

Artellus Numeon had expected a briefing, even an address. Something. The ways of his primarch were as inscrutable as the very earth he was bound to. Numeon dearly wished that he could read Vulkan now, and wondered what had transpired aboard the Ferrum that had vexed the primarch to such a degree. Less than an hour from planetfall, a veritable armada of Legion drop-ships berthed aboard the flagship vessel preparing to pierce Isstvan V’s upper atmosphere, it perturbed the Pyre captain greatly that his liege lord had absented himself.

Walking hurriedly down the shadowed corridors of the Fireforge, Numeon had yet to encounter a single soul. Vulkan had dismissed his chamber guards, all serfs and even his brander. So when the doors to Vulkan’s solitorium appeared through the soot-choked darkness of the ship’s lowest hold, barring the enginarium decks, Numeon did not know what to expect.

Though sealed, the entrance to Vulkan’s private chamber was not locked. Flickering lumen-torches cast a reddish haze over the doors, which parted at Numeon’s approach, revealing a deeper shadow within.

Crossing the threshold into the room, Numeon tried to still his thundering heartbeat as the reek of cinder and ash enshrouded him. Like the corridors outside, the solitorium was dark, but abjectly so. Numeon felt Vulkan’s presence before he saw him, as a man feels the presence of a monster when he is let into its cage.

The door sealed shut behind, and the dark became absolute.

‘Come…’ uttered a deep, abyssal voice.

It came from the centre of the room, a circular vault made from obsidian. Around the edges, Numeon heard the crackle of coals, the embers within their brazier-troughs casting off a faint glow. In this wan light he discerned the shape of a large kneeling figure, its head bowed so that its chin was leaning on its fist.

Even in the utter darkness of the branding chamber, Vulkan was resplendent. Clad in his full panoply of war, a sublime suit of power armour forged by his own hand, the Lord of the Drakes was immense. Studded with quartz, rubies and gems of every hue that had been dredged from the Nocturnean earth, the primarch’s battle gear flashed with captured fire. On one shoulder guard he wore a massive drake skull, whereas the other was affixed with the jade-coloured hide of a second beast. Without his helmet, Vulkan’s glabrous scalp shimmered in the lambent forge-light.

As he stepped farther into the chamber, Numeon caught his reflection in the obsidian’s black surface, wreathed in mirrored flame. Like his lord, he was wearing his full battle-plate. A long drake-hide mantle cascaded from his shoulders and a snarling war-helm sat in the crook of his arm. In his other hand, he clasped the haft of his glaive. The volkite weapon attached just below the blade was chromed and ready-charged.

‘You seem anxious, Pyre captain,’ Vulkan breathed, intensifying the fuliginous pall around him.

‘Orbital bombardment is due to commence in less than an hour, my lord.’

‘And you request my presence on the muster deck.’

Breathing slowly and deeply, Vulkan released another heavy exhalation, renewing the volcanic stench cloying the air. Such strength and savagery clothed in armour and flesh, Numeon could almost believe that beneath the onyx-black skin Vulkan was a drake, a beast of primordial myth trapped in a man-shaped vessel of bone and blood.

‘I have prepared the Legion. They are oathed to the moment and await your order,’ Numeon said, unable to hide his agitation.

Vulkan sensed it at once.

‘Speak freely, Artellus. I won’t have secrets between us.’

Numeon cleared his throat, and came a step closer into the light.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Ah.’ Vulkan smiled. Numeon caught it in the change in his voice, ‘That’s better.’

The hide of Kesare hanging from Vulkan’s armoured shoulder unfurled as he stood, giving it the illusion of reanimation. Kesare had been a monstrous beast, one of the deep drakes. Vulkan had slain him as part of a contest against another warrior, a stranger to Nocturne, one who had called himself the Outlander. It was only later revealed that this strange visitor was in fact the Emperor of Mankind, a being of such immense power and wisdom as to defy definition.

Everything had changed that day. Truths kept from Vulkan had been revealed; his destiny and purpose. His father had come, his creator in the truest sense, and Vulkan had been cast unto the stars where he was reunited with his intended Legion.

Numeon had rejoiced at the primarch’s return. Lost on such a remote and volatile world, Vulkan had nonetheless been amongst the first of the Emperor’s sons to be found. Even so, the Salamanders had suffered in the Great Crusade before that, as a desire to prove their worth almost resulted in their extinction.

‘You think this is a poor time for self-reflection,’ said Vulkan.

It wasn’t a question, but Numeon gave the only answer he could.

‘Yes. You are needed. We are on the brink of war, about to engage warriors in battle that we have fought beside – warriors we once considered allies.’

‘And this troubles you, Artellus?’

‘Greatly.’

‘It should, but do not let that rush you into ill-considered action.’

‘No, of course,’ Numeon answered, himself now bowing in response to Vulkan’s chastening remarks.

‘Raise your head, captain. Did I not teach you to meet me eye to eye?’

Numeon lifted his chin.

‘I remember, my lord. You remade us, alloyed us even as we looked into the very abyss of self-annihilation. Without you, we would not have survived.’

Before Vulkan, like all the Legions, the Salamanders had hailed from Terra. The very fact that there were so few Terran Salamanders left alive was testament to how close the XVIII had come to destruction. Being reunited with their primarch had saved them, and with the hardy people of Nocturne already students of Vulkan’s teachings, it was not long before the Salamanders saw their numbers swell again.

Numeon was a Terran by birth, like all the Pyre Guard. They were the few, the chosen, and they remembered well the disaster that had very nearly befallen them. How easily their legacy could have ended short like the others of whom no one now spoke.

‘I saved you because in you I saw a great potential. My father knew I was the perfect son to temper this Legion and forge it strong again. So then, be assured that there is no better time to reflect than when we strike our oaths and brand them into flesh before battle, Artellus. Temperance in the face of war is not only prudent, it also saves lives. To my mind, it is a practice my brother Ferrus would benefit from greatly.’

Vulkan’s gaze was suddenly far away, as if remembering.

Numeon frowned. ‘Did all not go well aboard the Ferrum? I understand a plan of attack was being devised.’

‘It was.’ Vulkan returned his gaze to the Pyre captain. To Numeon, he looked almost regretful.

Vulkan went on. ‘The Gorgon has always been volatile, but the words he spoke against Fulgrim aboard the Ferrum were embittered and wrathful. Like the magma which churns below the surface of both our worlds, Ferrus is on the brink of violent eruption.’

‘His anger is justified,’ Numeon asserted. ‘Former allies or not, this rebellion must be stopped.’

‘Yes, it must. But I fear Ferrus’s choler bodes ill for what is to come,’ said Vulkan. ‘He isn’t thinking clearly and acts rashly, out of anger. Corvus felt it too, I am certain, but the Ravenlord conceals his emotions as carefully as his presence. He said nothing of his own misgivings during our brother’s impassioned briefing.’ Vulkan sighed, a weariness affecting him. ‘To rush in against a foe like Horus… It smacks of madness and rage.’

Numeon’s brow furrowed, ‘Madness?’

Vulkan slowly shook his head. ‘To even think of Horus as an enemy seems like insanity. Rebellion, it is said. And not the Sons of Horus alone, but three other formerly loyal Legions as well. I apologise for my candour, Artellus – you should not have to shoulder these burdens. They are mine to bear alone, but what other word is there for it, except madness?’

Numeon was at a loss to answer at first. It would not be long before the bombardment began and the Legion embarked on drop-craft for an immediate, aggressive ground deployment. If it was madness they had come too far to turn back from it now.

‘I can think of no other word. Yet what else can we do but follow Lord Ferrus into battle? Here is where we will end it. Seven Legions against his four. Horus will be brought to heel and made to answer for his sedition.’

Vulkan laughed, but it was a sad sound, bereft of humour.

‘You remind me of Ferrus. Such belligerence.’

‘How else do we meet our enemies but thusly?’ Numeon asked.

Vulkan considered that, before lowering his gaze again.

‘Do you see this?’ he said, gesturing to a hammer cradled in his gauntleted grasp. The primarch did not grip the weapon, rather he allowed it to rest, his fingers barely wrapped around the haft and neck.

‘Magnificent,’ said Numeon, confused as to his lord’s meaning.

The warhammer had an immense double-head. Each head was based on three square wedges, rotated at angles to produce an almost flanged finish. Bisected by a long metal haft, crosshatched at the handle and ending in a gem-studded pommel, the weapon’s killing end looked weighty, but Vulkan held it like it was nothing. Ostensibly it was a master-crafted and much upgraded thunder hammer, possessing both a power generator at the top of the haft and another device Numeon did not recognise just below it.

‘It rivals Thunderhead,’ Vulkan told him, gently turning the hammer around in his loose grip. ‘It wasn’t intended as a replacement. It was meant as a gift. And even now, as we follow in the wake of my brother’s tempest, I am struck by the import of the decision in holding on to it.’

‘A gift,’ said Numeon, fighting the sense of unease growing within him, ‘for whom?’

‘You have always served loyally and faithfully as my equerry, Artellus. I trust your counsel. I would have it now.’

Numeon thumped his fist against his breastplate in crisp salute. ‘You honour me, my lord. I am yours to command.’

Vulkan’s eyes narrowed, the fire burning inside them reduced to hot, red slits as if measuring his equerry and deeming him worthy of what he was about to say next.

‘What I tell you now, I have told no one before this moment.’

‘I understand.’

‘No,’ said Vulkan sadly, ‘you don’t. Not yet. After Ullanor, I began forging a weapon to honour Horus’s achievement and our father making him Warmaster. This,’ he said, now holding the hammer in a firm grip and raising it aloft in one hand, ‘is Dawnbringer. It was meant as my gift to my brother.’

‘But you chose not to give it to him. Why, my lord?’

Vulkan lowered the weapon, regarding the exquisite craftsmanship of his labours before going on.

‘That is what vexes me, Artellus. Horus and I spoke privately only twice after he replaced our father at the head of the Crusade.’

‘I remember, my lord. After Kharaatan, you consulted both Lord Dorn and Lord Horus.’

‘Yes. Konrad’s… behaviour concerned me greatly and I was in need of guidance. At the time, the forging of Dawnbringer was unfinished. I wanted the gift to be a surprise, a token of our brotherhood and my respect, so I said nothing of it.’

‘I am still unclear as to why this is on your mind now, my lord.’

‘Because when the hammer was finished, I spoke to Horus for the second time. His advancement to Warmaster had placed a great strain on his time and attentions, so I wanted to arrange a meeting when I could present my gift to him.’ Vulkan paused, his expression darkening as he recalled the exchange.

‘My lord?’ said Numeon, as the same cloud cast its shadow over him too.

Vulkan kept his eyes down as he remembered, and did not raise them as he concluded his account.

‘Horus was much changed from the brother I knew, and had looked up to. Even across our hololithic link, I felt it… A presence that had not been there before.’

‘What kind of presence?’

‘It is difficult to describe. He seemed… distracted, and at first I thought it was merely matters of the Great Crusade that preoccupied him, but as our conversation went on, I realised it was something else.’

‘Do you think he was planning this rebellion even then?’

‘Perhaps. Now, I wonder if it was always in my brother’s heart and simply had to be teased out of him for it to flourish and bloom. Either way, I knew there was a canker within Horus that had not been there before, a shadow upon his soul like a cancer. And it was growing, Numeon, the host embracing this parasite in front of my eyes. I do not possess the prescience of Sanguinius, nor the mental acumen of Guilliman or the psychic gifts of Magnus, but I know my instincts, and they were screaming at me in that moment. Horus has fallen, they were saying to me. In some way, he had slipped and the pit had taken him. Even though I could not put meaning or evidence to any of this, it unsettled me. So I decided not to tell him of the gift I had fashioned, instead keeping it for myself. And it concerns me still,’ he said to Numeon, looking up again. ‘Because the same misgivings I had that day, I feel now. They warn me to be cautious, to heed the disquiet in my soul.’

‘I will be ever vigilant,’ said Numeon, though he didn’t yet know for what.

Vulkan nodded. ‘Be mindful, Artellus. On the dark sands of Isstvan far below, we face a foe unlike any other. But it is an enemy, and one we can afford to give no quarter. Whatever bonds of loyalty you may once have felt to these warriors, forget them. They are traitors now, led by a warrior I no longer recognise as my brother. Do you believe we are right in this, and that our cause is a just one?’

Despite the bitter taste that the other Legions’ treachery had left in his mouth, Numeon had never been more certain of anything.

‘I am sure of it. Whatever sickness has come upon our old allies, we will burn it to ash.’

‘Then we are as one. Thank you, Artellus.’

‘I did nothing, my lord.’

‘You heeded me when my mind was troubled. You did more than you realised.’ Vulkan gave a feral smile, his misgivings transformed and reforged into purpose. ‘Eye-to-eye, Pyre captain.’

‘Tooth-to-tooth, my lord.’

‘The bombardment is soon?’ Vulkan asked.

‘Imminent,’ said Numeon, reassured and galvanised by Vulkan’s revivified demeanour. He realised, as Vulkan attached Dawnbringer to his belt, that it wasn’t weakness he had seen in his primarch, but humanity. It was the genuine concern that his brothers had fallen to darkness, and the emergence of the resolve he would need to fight them. He should doubt the justness of this fight, and he should stop to consider the consequences of it. Only by doing so could a warrior be sure that he drew bolter and blade in good cause and against a true enemy.

This, Numeon realised, was Vulkan’s teaching.

Morality, conscience, humanity, these were not flaws; they were strengths.

‘Take me to the muster deck,’ said Vulkan, donning his war-helm. ‘When we make planetfall, I would look my brother in the eye and ask him why he did this, before he’s taken to Terra in chains.’

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The dread feast

‘If music is nourishment for the soul, what then of screaming?’

– Konrad Curze,
the ‘Night Haunter’

After the shame of my defeat, I became lost for a time. Curze did not visit me, Ferrus’s malignant presence was conspicuous by its absence, and I even started to miss the shade of my dead brother. There was only the stench of the dead, rising over the hours and days to a noisome fume that filled my senses with the stink of failure.

Ferrus had been right; I was weak. I could not save the mortals from their fate, I could not beat Perturabo’s death trap. Curze had changed tactics. I had no idea why. Instead of trying to punish my body, he had decided to punish my conscience.

The effects were enervating.

Cut adrift amongst my fractured thoughts, I sat unmoving in the darkness of my cell and in that moment I am not too proud to admit that, for the first time, I truly knew what it was to despair.

Suns rose and fell, stars were born and died again. The cosmos shifted around me, and after a while time ceased to have meaning. I was as a statue of onyx, my arms hanging by my sides, my forehead touching the ground. Arch-backed, too wounded to do anything but breathe, I felt the slow atrophy of my limbs and the hunger in my chest. Vigour was leaving me, as steam flees cooling metal, and I welcomed it.

To die would be a mercy.

A legionary can live for many days without sustenance. His physiology is enhanced to such a degree that he can be practically starved and still march, fight and kill. Our father made His sons even stronger still, but I knew, as a man who knows he is dying of cancer, that I was not myself. My humours were out of balance; the many woundings Curze had subjected me to, the mental tortures, were beginning to take their toll. At my lowest ebb, when even my will was fading, I slipped into blessed oblivion and let it take me in.

My peace was not to last.

A sound like a distant stream trickling next to my ear brought me to my senses. I realised as I opened my eyes that I was still in the deathly chamber, but that now it was filling with water. It chilled my face, lapping up against my cheek. Lips parched, tongue leathern, I tried to drink but found the water brackish and metallic tasting. My guts churned, hunger gnawing, threatening to devour me from within. Too weak to stand, to even lift my body, I could only watch, and see the open sluices at the base of the walls admitting this languid torrent.

I saw the spark of electricity a moment later and had only a few seconds of realisation before the shock hit and I was jerked off the ground in a bone-wrenching spasm. My wretched frame, emaciated from lack of food and water, groaned; my muscles, partially atrophied from lack of use, burned. My throat, dry as desert ash, could barely muster a scream.

‘Vulkan…’

As if I were trapped in a deep well, my saviour calling down to me from above, I heard my name.

‘Vulkan…’ it repeated, only this time the voice was clearer. I was reaching for the light, kicking hard to breach the surface and end my submergence.

‘Vulkan, you must eat.’

As my eyelids snapped open, I discovered that I must have passed out, and had regained consciousness in a different part of the ship.

I was sitting down; my hands and feet were bound.

Opposite me, sitting across a broad banquet table, my dead brother grimaced at me.

‘Take your fill,’ he said, hollow eye sockets gesturing to the feast arrayed before us. ‘You must eat.’

We were sitting in a long gallery. Ornate candelabras, steeped in dust, provided a flickering luminescence. Above us, silver chandeliers swayed lightly on a stagnant breeze. Gossamer-thin strands conjoined them like the webs of some ancient and long dead arachnid. Similarly, the feast itself was swathed in a fine and farinaceous veneer of grey-white.

I smelled meat, but here and there the scent was somehow wrong, as if some of it were spoiled or raw. There were fruits and bread that both bore the suggestion of mould despite their ostensible freshness. Carafes of wine littered the table in abundance but in some the grapes were bad, the vintage corked and unpalatable.

Despite the decaying feast, I salivated at the prospect and struggled impotently against my bonds to taste it.

‘Eat, Vulkan,’ Ferrus urged. ‘You are wasting away, brother.’

I tried to speak, but my throat was so raw I barely managed to croak.

‘Speak up,’ said Ferrus, his lipless mouth champing open and shut, the darkness of his tongueless mouth gaping and black but somehow still able to form words. With a skeletal hand, he made an expansive, sweeping gesture. ‘We all want to hear what you’ve got to say.’

Until that moment, I had not noticed the other guests.

Seventeen men and women sat around the banquet table. Like the other prisoners Curze had shown me, these humans were both Army and Imperial citizenry. I even saw some remembrancers amongst the host, and one who bore a resemblance to Verace. Of all the guests, he was the only one who seemed calm and unaffected by it all. It could not be the remembrancer, of course, for Verace was not a man in the strictest sense. He was merely a mantle, thrown about the shoulders of a being who wore it like a cloak.

Skin stretched across their bones like thin parchment, lips were drawn back over their gums, eyes hooded with dark rings of fatigue – the mortals were evidently being starved too.

Unlike me, though, they were not bound.

Instead, I noticed their hands had been removed at the wrist. Impaled in the cauterised stumps were long, jagged knives and trident-pronged forks. A few of the humans had managed to spear hunks of meat or carve into wedges of bread but could not bring these victuals to their mouths, the length of their concomitant utensils preventing them.

This great feast was laid out before them and they could only watch as it decayed and festered whilst they starved.

Ferrus got my attention by raising a goblet.

‘Should I toast, brother? It seems in order, before this greedy rabble devours everything.’

Again, I tried to speak, but my throat felt as if it had been scoured raw by razor blades and all I achieved was an aggravated rasp. I clenched and unclenched my fists, straining weakly against my bonds. I stamped my feet, feeling the bone bruise and crack.

‘To you, dear Vulkan,’ said Ferrus, raising the goblet to his lips and draining it. Dark red wine cascaded down his throat, through the ruin of his neck and out again via the cracks in his ribcage where his armour and flesh had begun to crumble away with the onset of decay.

As if bemused, Ferrus looked around at the other diners.

‘Perhaps they are waiting for you, brother?’ he suggested. ‘They have yet to consume a single morsel.’

The bindings around my wrists were beginning to bite into skin now. I ignored the pain, my jaw locked in anger and my entire body trembling.

‘F… e…’ I croaked. ‘F… e… e…’

Ferrus turned his head as if trying to listen, but his ears had shrunk into nubs of rotten flesh.

‘Speak up, Vulkan. Let’s all hear what you have to say.’

‘F… e… e… d. Feed. Feed! Feed each other!’

I roared and struggled but still couldn’t break free.

Slowly, certainly, Ferrus shook his head.

‘No, Vulkan. I’m sorry, but they cannot hear you.’ He pointed a bony digit at one thrashing individual, a dried rivulet of blood having crusted from his ear and down the side of his head.

Deaf.

As the poor man turned to face me, I noticed the milky consistency of his iris.

Blind too.

Only smell, touch and taste remained. So cruel to be so close to what the body craves and the mind imagines, only for it to be denied.

‘The greedy cannot listen, won’t listen,’ said Ferrus. ‘Nor can you make them. Humankind’s greed will eventually destroy it, Vulkan. By aiding them you are only prolonging the inevitable.’

I stopped listening and ignored my dead brother’s babbling mouth. Instead, I roared. I cursed Curze’s name until I no longer had voice to speak it.

And then I sat there, a king at his dread feast as his guests slowly starved and died.

My constitution, however weak, kept me going. Curze knew I would survive longer than the humans and when the final one breathed his last, I was alone.

I wept as the candles bled down to nubs and the accumulated dust snuffed them out as well as the chandeliers above me, throwing the hall into darkness.

‘Curze…’ I sobbed.

‘Curze!’ With greater vigour this time, my anger lending me much-needed strength.

‘Curze!’ I shouted it, bellowing at the shadows. ‘Curze, you coward. Come out! Finish me if you can. Even like this, I will not yield.’

A slow sigh made me start, so close that I knew it came from the seat next to me.

‘I am here, brother,’ said Curze, seated by my side. ‘I have always been here, watching, waiting.’

‘Waiting for what?’ I hissed, the effort to speak after my outburst taxing me.

‘To see what happens next.’

‘Cut my bonds and find out, brother…’

Curze laughed. ‘Still fierce, eh, Vulkan? The monster within isn’t cowed quite yet, is he?’

I growled, ‘Kill me or fight me, just get it over with.’

Curze shook his head.

‘I didn’t want you to beg. I don’t want you to beg. I would not have you brought low like that. You are better than that, Vulkan. Better than me at least. Or so you think.’

‘I’m not begging, I’m giving you a choice. One way or the other, you will have to kill me. As a dog or as your equal.’

‘Equal?’ Curze snapped in a sudden burst of apoplexy. ‘Are we peers then, you and I? Are we princes of the universe, bonded by common cause and blood?’

‘We are warriors and still brothers, despite how far you have fallen.’

‘I have fallen nowhere. My perch is as lofty as it ever was. You. You are the one who is brought down from grace. Not so noble in the shadows, are you? Tell me, Vulkan, now you inhabit the gutters as I do, what do you see in the black mirror before you? Are we all our father’s sons, or are some of us just a little better than the others? Do you think he made all twenty of us believing we each would have a purpose beyond making his favourites shine that little bit brighter?’

‘Envy? Is that still it? Is that why I am here?’

‘No, Vulkan. You are here for my amusement. I cannot be jealous of someone who is only as great or weak as I am.’

‘Cut me loose, face me without these games, and we shall see who is weak.’

‘I would slay you where you stand, brother. Have you seen yourself, lately? You aren’t looking so formidable.’

‘Then what is the purpose of all this madness and death? If you want to kill me, just do it. Get it over with. Why won’t you just–’

Shadow-fast, Curze snapped the fork off one of the dead human’s wrists and rammed it deep into my chest.

I felt it pierce the breastbone, the dirty metal driven into my heart to impale it. Crouching over me, Curze proceeded to drag the blunt implement up through my ribcage, tearing through the chest and neck as I jetted blood across his breastplate in arterial black.

‘I tried,’ he told me, snarling through his anger as the fork reached my chin and blackness began to intrude at the edge of my vision. ‘I cut off your head, pierced your heart, crushed your skull, impaled every major organ in your body. I even burned and dismembered you. You came back, brother. Every. Single. Time. You cannot die.’

Aghast, mind reeling with my brother’s confession, I died.

Curze had done as I asked, as I begged, and killed me.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Burned

Though the spearhead felt light in his grasp and cold to the touch, Elias knew the weight of the moment and the weapon’s part in it before him.

He had returned to the pulpit, choosing to be divested of his armour and coming to his altar of sacrifice wearing only his priestly vestments.

Eight fresh supplicants stood ready around the pit, including the one waiting on his knees before Elias on the stone pulpit. Behind them, seven of the Dark Apostle’s most devout disciples loomed. These men and women were not the sacrificial lambs of Ranos – they were adherents to the cult, true believers. They had given themselves willingly, to become part of the Pantheon’s great weft and weave. Not a one amongst them quavered or wept; they merely prayed, and it gave Elias’s heart such joy to hear it.

‘Reveal your devotion!’ he cried to the eight, prompting the cultists to disrobe and expose their carved flesh.

Skin profaned with dark and fell sigils was revealed from under crimson cloth. Using ritual blades, the cultists had marked themselves with a serpent that uncoiled across all of their bodies. Elias’s supplicant was the eighth and his chest bore the serpent’s head, described in his own partially clotted blood.

‘It is good,’ he muttered, becoming lost in reverie.

Hell would come to Traoris and he would be its gatekeeper, admitting it into the mortal plane.

Chanting the names of the Neverborn, Elias began the ritual. He felt the thrum of power in the spearhead, saw its fulgurant glow between raptures and knew that this was the tool of his elevation. Not Erebus, not even Lorgar, but he would be the one.

Valdrekk Elias would receive what he had always craved. Ascension.

Beseeching the daemons of the aether to hear him, praying for them to be attracted to the spear’s psychic resonance, he felt the heat from the blade begin to intensify. At first it was just uncomfortable, a necessary forbearance to yield the greater prize, but then it became painful. Looking down at the weapon in his grasp, Elias realised it was aflame and his skin with it.

He uttered the cursed verses faster, prompting his disciples to chant with ever greater vigour. Still it burned.

The glow was so bright that it lit up the sacrificial site, chasing back the shadows that had been slowly creeping from the old ruins like spilled ink. They seemed to recoil, as did the supplicants, smoke rising from their mutilated bodies.

One woman cried out, and Elias almost faltered in his well-practiced dogma before a Word Bearer held her steady. Others were showing signs of displeasure too, writhing and coughing as their forms were devoured by cleansing flame. It spread, the burning light, crawling inexorably over the disciples.

The names of the Neverborn, so crucial to the ritual, slipped from Elias’s memory. The agony in his arm was such that he clutched it. Rendered down to blackened flesh, he balked at his sudden dis-figurement and realised that harnessing the power of the spearhead was beyond him. Like a horse that has slipped its reins, it was wild. But it was also vengeful.

‘Kill them!’ Elias cried, with more fear than he intended, but it was too late.

Unfettered, the power contained within the fulgurite broke free of its shackles and coursed out in a flood. It sprang from Elias, a storm seeking to earth itself in a lightning rod.

It found seven.

Sinking to their knees, their ritual daggers now forgotten, the disciples died quickly and in agony. Their battle-plate was no protection.

Furcas clutched at his throat, a death scream issuing from his mouth in a plume of smoke. Dolmaroth, his hands held up to his head, became fused in a solid mass of flesh and metal. Imarek managed to wrench off his helmet before he died, but took half of his face with it as it stuck to the inside. Eligor shuddered and melted like wax through the vents in his armour. The others fell in similar fashion, prompting the Word Bearers watching from behind them to recoil for fear of sharing their brothers’ fate.

The supplicants were already charred meat and bone before the first disciple fell, and they were blasted to ash by an unfurling wave of fire.

Realising his peril, teeth clenched with the pain of his arm, Elias rammed the spearhead into the stone dais of his pulpit and fell back as the fire returned.

The Dark Apostle bounced off one step then another, tumbling into a wretched heap.

Of his pulpit, only a jagged spur of burned rock remained, with the still-glowing spearhead lodged within it.

Breathing hard, acutely aware of the trauma his body had suffered, Elias screamed. Not in pain, but in anger and frustration. He had expected ascension, revelation, not to be thwarted.

Jadrekk was the first of his followers to reach him.

‘Dark Apostle…’ he began, but shrank back at the sight of Elias’s wounds.

His arm was completely burned, all the way from his shoulder to his fingertips. The bones had fused, a crooked and malformed limb in place of what was there before.

‘My armour,’ snapped Elias, standing up unaided, snarling at any attempts at assistance. ‘Bring me my armour.’

Jadrekk obeyed and hurried off into the camp.

Elias didn’t notice. Instead, he glared at the spearhead still embedded in the rock. His gaze went from it to the legionaries, then his flock of cultists and finally the remaining citizens of Ranos.

‘Round them all up,’ he said to his warriors, burning with shame and fury. ‘I want them executed. No knives, no rituals, just kill them.’

Elias turned away, his ruined limb clutched close to his chest as the pronouncement was met first with stunned silence, then fear, as the mortals realised what they were fated for. Shouts and grunts for order competed with wailing protestation and begging.

Elias sneered at the sound. It disgusted him, as did the fact he would now have to go to Erebus and plead for his life.

‘And someone bring me that spear,’ he said, almost as an afterthought, before staggering back to his tent.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The face in the blood

When he blinked, a thin crust of dried blood parted and flaked away off his eyelid.

His back hurt from an hour spent lying in the cold and on this slab. Vaguely aware of remembered pain down his side, he reached over to explore the injury but found only reknit skin and bone.

‘Not again…’ groaned Grammaticus, and heaved himself up.

He was sitting on a makeshift operating table in some kind of infirmary. So they had moved him then. At least that boded well, he supposed. The lights were out, but a glow was coming through a portal window in the door from a much larger room beyond the infirmary. Despite the gloom, Grammaticus could see that there was blood everywhere. The reek of it was heady and unpleasant. In particular it spattered a grimy-looking side bar where a selection of rough tools and ripped bandages lay discarded. Not a surgeon’s work, then. He found no stitches, but he was still badly bruised despite his new sleeve of flesh.

Slau Dha, you wretched alien bastard…

A metal bowl close to hand, filled with his blood and draped with the half-cut leavings of the butcher’s bandages, caught Grammaticus’s attention. The liquid was perfectly still and unusually reflective. As it shimmered, he realised what was happening and fought the urge to kick over the bowl and upend its contents onto the floor. It wouldn’t help. If he didn’t flect they would just find another way to make contact. It would go badly for him if he refused.

So instead he leaned over and waited for the face to appear.

He’d been expecting Gahet, as before, but instead the haughty yet severe features of the autarch started to resolve instead. For a fleeting moment, Grammaticus thought Slau Dha had somehow ‘heard’ his earlier remarks. But he was mistaken, as he also was about the identity of the face in the blood.

‘You are not Slau Dha,’ he said to the eldar regarding him from across time and space.

‘An astute observation, John Grammaticus.’

‘Humour? You surprise me. I didn’t think your kind possessed it.’

‘My kind? Are you really so jaded, John Grammaticus?’

‘I am the herald of destruction for my entire race,’ answered Grammaticus. ‘Jaded doesn’t even begin to cover it.’

The eldar didn’t respond to his sarcasm. He was male, dark hair scraped back over his forehead to reveal an inked rune on the skin. Only his face and shoulders were visible and described in red monochrome, the rest lost beyond the edges of the bowl.

‘Seems you know my name,’ said Grammaticus. ‘What’s yours? Are you another agent of the Cabal?’

‘Your association is how we have come to be in communion, John Grammaticus. And my name is unimportant.’

‘Not to me it isn’t. I like to know who my handlers are before they jerk my strings.’

The eldar pursed his lips. ‘Hmm. I detect some bitterness in your tone.’

‘How astute of you,’ Grammaticus mocked. ‘Now, what do you want?’

‘The question is, John, what do you want?’

‘Who are you?’

‘I am not with the Cabal, and I know that you wish to extricate yourself from their “strings”, yes?’

Grammaticus didn’t answer.

‘Why are you here, John Grammaticus?’ the eldar went on. ‘What is your purpose?’

‘You seem knowledgeable, more so than me at least. Why don’t you tell me?’

‘Very well. You are seeking a fragment of power, weaponised in the form of a fulgurite spear. Your mission also concerns the primarch, Vulkan. I too am concerned with him as well as the matter of earth. I came to you because I need your help, and you are in a unique position to give it.’

‘And what makes you think I would be willing to exchange one puppeteer for another?’

‘You want to be released. I can give that to you, or at least show you how to release yourself. You are… long-lived, are you not?’

‘I suspect you already know the answer to that, too. Although, I think you’ve got me confused with a friend of mine. I would say I have had many lives rather than one that is especially long.’

‘Yes, of course. You perpetuals are all different, and not all human in the strictest sense either.’

‘You are referring to the Emperor?’

‘You met him once, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, briefly.’ Grammaticus did not know who this being was, but whatever his other claims, he was certainly powerful to be able to contact him in this way and knew a great deal of the greater stakes at play in the war. Long ago, during the Unification Wars when he had been part of the Caucasian Levies, Grammaticus had learned to be wary of those who possessed more knowledge than himself. When in such circumstances, he found it best to say little and listen intently.

The eldar went on. ‘Many years ago, wasn’t it? Several lifetimes, in fact.’

Grammaticus nodded.

‘No,’ said the eldar flatly. ‘I do not mean him, I refer to Vulkan. He also cannot die as such, but you already knew that, didn’t you? As you and I speak, he is in terrible danger. I need your help to save him, if you are willing?’

‘If I am willing?’ Grammaticus scoffed. ‘Do you even know why I am here, what I’ve been charged to do? So you are giving me a choice then, assuming I believe all I have been told?’

‘I am certain you know I speak with veracity, just as I am certain you will take up this cause.’

‘Then why ask, if it’s predetermined?’

‘Politeness, illusion of free will. Invent whatever rationale you choose, it does not matter.’

‘You say choice, but it still feels like manipulation. For argument’s sake though, tell me what you want me to do.’

‘Place your hands against the conduit,’ the eldar instructed.

Grammaticus was about to ask him what he meant by ‘the conduit’ when he guessed it was the bowl, so did as asked.

‘Now prepare yourself,’ said the eldar, not needing to be told that Grammaticus had done as requested.

‘Why?’

‘Because this will hurt.’

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Dropsite

‘When the traitor’s hand strikes, it strikes with the strength of a Legion.’

– Warmaster Horus,
after the Isstvan V massacre

Isstvan V

Clouds roiled across the sky, presaging a storm to come. They were a mix of deep red and umber, turned that way by the planetary bombardment unleashed from warships at anchor in the upper atmosphere, and so thick they clung to the vessels ploughing through them at speed in billowing streamers.

Thrusters blazing, the combined loyalist force led by Ferrus Manus surged through the fog, bent on retribution. The Gorgon’s drop-pod joined thousands of others, just as Vulkan’s Stormbird flew at the spear-tip of a vast flock of vessels.

Seconds after the first drop-ship pierced the cloud layer, batteries of emplaced guns erupted across metres of earthworks dug along the Urgall Depression. Flak fire filled the sky like upwards-pouring rain, chewing through wing and fuselage, detonating arrow-headed cocoons of metal and spilling their lethal payloads into the air.

It barely dented the assault, and when the Imperial loyalists finally made planetfall, over forty thousand legionaries tramped out upon the scorched earth.

Numeon sat mag-harnessed in the Stormbird, trying to track the unfolding carnage. His battle-helm was firmly clamped and he cycled through the various force commanders in his retinal display as the ship bucked and shuddered with its evasive actions.

A close impact prompted a rapid course correction, and he felt the sudden exertion of gravity as they pitched. Unperturbed, the captain of the Pyre Guard kept working through the Salamanders officers, committing their positions and statuses to his eidetic memory.

Heka’tan, 14th Company Fire-born…

Gravius, Fifth Company Fire-born…

K’gosi, 21st Company Pyroclasts…

Usabius, 33rd Company Fire-born…

Krysan, 40th Company Infernus…

Nemetor, 15th Company Reconnaissance …

Ral’stan, First Company Firedrakes…

Gaur’ach, Fourth Cohort Contemptors…

Chapter Masters, lieutenant commanders, company captains.

It went on.

More than a hundred names and faces scrolled across Numeon’s vision as he sought to follow the ever-shifting engagement. Thus far, they had only lost a dozen ships and eight drop-pods. In his mind’s eye, formations adapted, battle plans subtly altered, all to accommodate the violent landscape that was steadily unfolding above and below.

The Stormbird they rode in was a Warhawk IV. It could carry up to sixty legionaries and also had some capacity for transporting armour. During the apex of the Great Crusade, the Stormbird had been as ubiquitous as the stars in the night sky but its favour was fading. This one was an antique, having been usurped by the smaller and more agile Thunderhawk. Numeon liked the solidity of the Warhawk IV, just as he liked the fact he was harboured alongside fifty Pyroclasts, led by Lieutenant Vort’an. With chain face-masks that hung below the eye slits of their battle-helms and long surcoats of drake scale, they cut a stern figure in the hold. Unlike assault troopers of the line, Pyroclasts each wore a pair of flame gauntlets, slaved to a reservoir of promethium contained in canisters attached to their armour’s generator. Few warriors were as unyielding, as vengeful. In the old Gothic, their name literally meant ‘break with fire’. On the Isstvan killing fields, that was exactly what they would do.

Numeon could feel their hunger; the flame troopers were eager for battle.

In contrast, the Pyre Guard were still and calm like their lord. Vulkan’s eyes were closed, the retinal lenses of his helmet extinguished, as he meditated on what was to come. Numeon was reminded of their conversation aboard the Fireforge just moments before they had gone to the muster deck and the primarch had addressed his warriors. His words were brief but poignant. They spoke of brotherhood and loyalty, they also referenced betrayal and a fight the Legion had not seen the equal of since the earliest days of its formation. They would be entering a caldera in the midst of violent eruption, and none amongst them would emerge from that unscathed.

Alert sirens screamed into activity, strobing the inside of the dingy hold in amber light.

‘One minute to planetfall,’ the pilot’s voice issued through the vox.

Of their initial complement, only fifteen ships and eleven drop-pods would not make the surface intact. Nigh-on full Legion strength would be levelled against Horus and his rebels.

The Salamanders would hit along the left flank, the Raven Guard the right and Ferrus Manus with his Morlocks dead centre.

In Numeon’s retinal display, the roll call of Salamanders officers was replaced by a data-feed from the other two Legions which he relayed at once to Vulkan.

‘Nineteenth and Tenth confirm assault vectors and imminent planetfall,’ Numeon said.

‘Any word from the other four Legions?’ asked the primarch.

He referred to the Word Bearers, Iron Warriors, Alpha Legion and Night Lords. Since Kharaatan, relations with the VIII had been strained, but Numeon would rather have them fighting with, and not against, them.

These Legions, led by their primarchs, would form a second wave to relieve those making first planetfall. According to their last communications, which were well before the commencement of planetary bombardment, the other Legion fleets were inbound. Without them, the scales were evenly balanced between Horus and the loyalists. With them, it would be a massacre for the errant Warmaster and his rebels.

‘None, my lord.’

Any response to that from Vulkan was cut off as a second alert sounded, higher pitched than the first.

Thirty seconds.

‘Prepare yourselves,’ the primarch growled, opening his eyes at last.

Across the hold, power weapons energised, bolter slides were racked and igniters at the mouths of flame gauntlets lit up in whoosh-ing unison.

Screaming retro-thrusters kicked in, jolting the Stormbird hard. Mag-harnesses disengaged but the legionaries stayed steady, locked to the floor with their boots.

‘Eye-to-eye!’ Vulkan shouted as the ship touched down, hard and hot.

‘Tooth-to-tooth,’ the Salamanders roared as one, as the embarkation ramp opened to admit them onto Isstvan.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Trench warfare

‘Say what you like about the Fourteenth Legion. They are mean, ugly bastards but tenacious. There’s no one else I’d rather have by my side in a war of attrition, and almost anyone else I’d rather have against me.’

– Ferrus Manus, after the compliance of
One-Five-Four Four

Isstvan V

Black sand cratered by ordnance made for uncertain footing. As the vast armies of the three loyal primarchs ran from the holds of ships or emerged through the dissipating pressure cloud of blooming drop-pods, several legionaries faltered and slipped.

Sustained bolter fire met them upon planetfall, and hundreds amongst the first landers were cut down before any kind of beachhead could be established. Fire was met with fire, the drumming staccato of thousands of weapons discharged in unison, their muzzle flashes merging into a vast and unending roar of flame. Dense spreads of missiles whined overhead to accompany the salvo, streaking white contrails from their rockets. Sections of earthworks erupted in bright explosions that threw plumes of dirt and armoured men into the air. Las bursts lit up the swiftly following darkness, spearing through tanks and Dreadnoughts that loomed behind the foremost ranks of enemy defenders, only for return fire to spit back in reply. Flamers choked the air with smoke and the stink of burning flesh, as yet more esoteric weapons pulsed and shrieked.

It was a cacophony of death, but the song had barely begun its first verse.

The right flank was swollen with warriors of the XVIII.

Salamanders teemed out of their transports, quickly coming into formation and advancing with purpose. The black sand underfoot was eclipsed from sight, as a green sea overwhelmed and overran it. Vexilliaries held aloft banners, attempting to impose some order on the emerging battalions.

Methodical, dogged, the XVIII Legion found its shape and swarmed across the dark dunes.

At the forefront of this avenging wave was Vulkan, and to his flanks the Firedrakes. Lumbering from the metal spearheads of drop-pods, the Terminators amassed in two large battalions. They were dauntless, dominant, but not the most implacable warriors in the Salamanders’ arsenal.

Contemptors, striding through the smoke, laid claim to that honour. Great, towering war engines, the Dreadnoughts jerked with the savage recoil of graviton guns and autocannon. Not stopping to see the carnage wreaked, they slowly tramped after the rushing companies of legionaries in small cohorts, attack horns blaring. The discordant noise simulated the war cries of the deep drakes and was pumped through vox-emitters to boost its volume.

Disgorged by Thunderhawk transporters, Spartans, Predator-Infernus and Vindicators disembarked at combat speed, tracks rolling. The battle tanks rode at the back of the line with a steep ridge behind them, anchoring the dropsite with their armoured might.

Three spearheads were driven at the traitor’s heart, two black and one green, all determined to bring down the fortress squatting at the summit of the Urgall Hills that overlooked the expansive depression.

In seconds the shifting sand became as glass, vitrified by the heat of tens of thousands of weapons, and cracked underfoot.

The percussive thud of mortars sounded overhead. Moments later and a line of explosions stitched the right flank, green bodies borne aloft on clouds of dark earth and smoke. Answering it, the plosive exhalation of a tracked-mounted siege gun. Part of the embankment was ripped up by the massive cannon shell, the mortar battery destroyed with it.

On the opposite side, a spit of flame from an Infernus lashed across an enemy squad lurking in a clutch of foxholes with grenades primed. The small explosives cooked off before they could be thrown, their fury turned upon their wielders, who were blasted apart. From an upper echelon, a lonely missile streaked across the smoke-choked field and cracked against the Infernus’s hull. Its turret split, a second flame burst already building as its side sponsons chattered and its tracks clanked. The tank went up in a loud ball of flame, killing a swathe of legionaries advancing beside it and staggering a second vehicle in its squadron.

All of this Numeon perceived in his peripheral vision and the frantic data inload from his retinal display. They all did.

‘To the ridge line,’ Vulkan shouted above the clamour, ‘and gain the higher ground!’

Withering fire hailed down on them from above, chugging from bunkers and murder-slits cut into the earth. Larger fortifications had been constructed farther up the bank, where it grew steep and was plugged with iron spikes meant for the disembowelling of tanks. In front of that was the first trench line, shouldered with sandbags and supported by jagged revetments, crowned with spools of razor-wire.

Shells pranging off his armour, the primarch took up the vanguard position, whilst his chasing Pyre Guard tried to keep pace. Numeon had no desire to see Vulkan’s back and would prefer to be his primarch’s shield than his rearguard. Roaring them to greater effort, he urged his six brothers to charge faster. They had yet to be measured against this battle’s fury, save for enduring its guns, and Numeon would have it that they close with their enemies before they were but smears on the black sand.

Behind the Pyre Guard, the stoic advance of the Pyroclasts struggled to keep up as they laid down sheets of burning promethium in front and to the flanks. The Terminator-armoured Firedrakes were also slipping back, unable to compete with the primarch’s speed, and Numeon began to see that there was a realistic danger of becoming estranged from the rest of the Legion.

But rather than suggest caution, he called in support to fill the gap instead.

‘Captain Nemetor,’ he rasped into his vox-feed, hoarse from shouting commands.

Above, the steady cascade of fire went on without cessation.

Two seconds of whispering static lapsed before Numeon got an answer.

‘Commander…’

‘Lord Vulkan makes for the ridge line intent on clearing these trenches in advance of our tardy brother Legions’ arrival. I would see him reinforced.’

‘Understood.’

Adding their strength to the spearhead the primarch was forging, the 15th Company reconnaissance took up fresh position. Their charge line would take them in alongside the Pyre Guard, able to maintain pace where the bulkier Firedrakes and Pyroclasts could not.

Numeon opened up a different channel. ‘Captain K’gosi, burn us a path to that first trench line. I want it aflame before we break it open.’

‘Much closer and you’ll be the ones lit up and aflame,’ replied K’gosi, but gave the order.

‘Fire above!’ hollered Numeon, prompting the Pyre Guard and Nemetor’s company to crouch, still running, as a wave of flame streaked overhead and spilled into the edges of the first trench-works. The trammelling revetments burned, their spikes reduced to molten slag along with the razor-wire.

Ahead of the charging legionaries, Vulkan finally drew his sword. It shone in the visceral light that had stained the clouds above, a tongue of flame whipping down its edge. As if sensing that his Legion was losing him, he slowed but a fraction as the fire-blackened lip of the outermost trench drew close.

Hunkered within the partially sundered defences, the legionaries of the Death Guard brought guns to bear.

‘Into the fires of battle,’ Vulkan cried as a second flame-salvo spat from the advancing Pyroclasts. ‘Unto the anvil of war!’ he concluded, caught in the backwash of the flame storm but barrelling through it and into the trench.

Vulkan’s words still ringing in his ears and echoing from his own mouth, Numeon saw a Death Guard section leader rise up to challenge the Lord of Drakes. A hefty power maul crackled lightning in the formidable warrior’s left hand.

Vulkan split him in two before the blow could fall and smashed through the still-flailing corpse into his next opponent. Three more Death Guard warriors met similar fates before the Pyre Guard charged into the trench alongside their lord.

The XIV Legion were hardy fighters – the Salamanders had fought alongside them at Ibsen, but those days were gone and now allies had turned into enemies.

The flame storm and the ferocity of Vulkan’s attack had scattered the defenders but they were rallying quickly and now counter-attacked from three separate channels. Although the trench network was wide enough for three legionaries to stand abreast, the fighting was thick and fierce. A glaive swing took the head off one legionary, the dirty-white Maximus-pattern helmet spinning away into the churned up dust and smoke. More advanced through the gloom and Numeon angled his glaive to unleash a focused beam from his volkite, cutting through the traitor ranks.

For a few seconds his tunnel section was clear. Above him, the battle still sounded. Under his feet, the earth shook with every Titan salvo. But it had dulled and become almost a step removed as a strange sense of muted submersion fell upon Numeon. It gave the Pyre captain opportunity to gauge the status of his brothers.

Atanarius was advancing down the right-hand channel, reaping limbs and cleaving bodies with his double-handed power sword, as deadly as any of Dorn’s praetorians. Varrun followed a few paces behind the swordsman, laying down covering fire with his bolter. Igataron and Ganne went down the left spoke, storm shields locked in an impenetrable wedge, thunder hammers swinging. Leodrakk and Skatar’var stayed close to Numeon, the three of them holding the breach.

‘Such death…’ breathed Skatar’var, horrified at the slaughter.

‘Not ours, brother,’ Leodrakk reassured him.

Numeon envied a bond such as theirs, one he had never known himself, but now was not the time for such thoughts.

As the Death Guard poured in more troops from other parts of the trench-works, the eerie solemnity broke and battle resumed.

‘Should we follow?’ asked Leodrakk, gesturing to where Vulkan stormed up the middle trench.

Wilting before his charge, the defenders sensibly chose to hang back and harry the primarch with a welter of bolter fire. Meeting it head on, the primarch shrugged off the shell damage as the brass casings broke apart against his near-inviolable armour.

Shouting a fresh challenge, Vulkan threw himself into them.

Numeon shook his head in answer to Leodrakk.

‘We hold here and keep the breach open.’

To the left and right, the others were already in a staggered retreat. With the initial shock and awe of the assault now spent, the Death Guard were showing signs of recovery and the mettle Numeon knew they had in abundance. Droves of them came down from the upper slopes, filing into the trenches with sterner weapons than bolters.

Ganne took the burst from a plasma gun against his storm shield and he staggered, until Igataron hauled him up off one knee. Atanarius looked hard-pressed as he swung in a wide arc to avoid being overwhelmed. Varrun was falling back and urged his brother to do the same as the swordsman finally deigned to yield. Only Vulkan was undaunted and released a burst of flame from his gauntlet to cleanse the middle channel for a few seconds.

Reading the relative positions of their forces on his retinal display, Numeon ordered the others to regroup and rejoin the primarch. In their wake came Nemetor and the 15th, who had held on for further support just outside the trench. Coming up behind them were the Pyroclasts, surging left and right as the reconnaissance company pushed up the middle and went after the Pyre Guard, where heavier resistance was amassing.

Behind a flak-board palisade, a gun crew hurried to bring a mounted Tarantula to bear.

Leaping the barricade, Atanarius ran the first gunner through. A second drew a knife, but Atanarius blocked that and punched the legionary so hard that it cracked his faceplate. A third he decapitated, hacking around in a circle that ended in a downwards thrust to finish the warrior he had only stunned. It was over quickly, the cannon and its crew silenced before they could act. Igataron and Ganne repulsed a second squad who were moving in to an enfilading position from a narrow trench tributary spilling off the main course. Taking a flurry of snap shots against their storm shields, they then rushed the warriors and broke them with their thunder hammers.

The victories were bloody, but small and insignificant when compared to the larger conflict.

Across the entire Urgall Depression, hundreds of battles between legionaries were being fought. Some were company-strong, others were squads or even individuals. There was no scheme to it, just masses of warriors trying to kill one another. Most of the loyalist troops had moved on from the dropsite and were engaging Horus’s rebels at the foot of his fortifications, but a few still occupied this beachhead. Scattered groups of traitors had spilled out as far as the dropsite but were quickly destroyed by the troops holding it. These were skirmishes, though, and nothing compared to the greater battle.

Death Guard forces were spilling out of their tunnels now, and roamed down the slopes, bolters chattering. One of the reconnaissance company, pausing to sight down a sniper rifle, took a lucky shell in the neck and crashed back into a trench. Apothecaries moving amongst the Legion army were already hard-pressed, and the lone sniper was lost in the morass before help could reach him.

Knowing his men were taking fire, Nemetor had his company rise up to meet the counter-attacking Death Guard and the lower hillside was instantly swamped with clashing, armoured bodies. Close combat and short-range firefights erupted in their hundreds and the ridge practically undulated with their furious ebb and flow.

Tramping over the scorched remains of the Death Guard brought down in the inferno from Vulkan’s gauntlet, Numeon and his brothers kept to the middle trench and soon found themselves reunited with their primarch.

In a brief moment’s respite, Vulkan stared to his left in the direction of a distant battle where the Morlocks fought and died.

‘Ferrus drives hard up the centre,’ he said as Numeon drew to his side. The Pyre captain had followed his primarch’s gaze but could not discern Lord Manus amongst the embattled warriors.

‘It is as I feared, Artellus,’ Vulkan went on, lost briefly in remembrance. ‘He acts without thought or concern.’

Varrun gave Numeon a questioning look.

‘It is a private matter,’ he hissed curtly, making clear that was an end to it.

‘I would not have him fight alone,’ said Vulkan, ‘but nor should we give up what we have bled to obtain. Have K’gosi maintain position here. The Pyroclasts will hold the breach and this section of the trench. Relief is coming and we must be ready to clear the way for it when it does.’

Numeon gave a quick nod and saw it done. He also saw Nemetor and the 15th still driving up the ridge, becoming stretched. By now, the bulk of the Firedrakes were deep inside the trenches and coming up in support.

‘Nemetor,’ voxed Numeon, ‘you are pulling your company out of position. Regroup and return to the command battalion. Firedrakes are inbound.’

Nemetor was quick to reply. ‘The Death Guard are on the run. Have switched to short-scopes and blades. If we pursue now we can destroy them so they can’t regroup.’

‘Denied, captain. Pull your forces back.’

‘I can press the advantage, brother.’

Nemetor had ever been a fierce warrior. He drove his troops hard, leading by example, and smashed into the fleeing first defenders with irresistible momentum. Short-scoped, the legionary sniper rifle was deadly and incredibly powerful. It was a credit to Nemetor’s company that they could adapt their tactics so fluidly in the face of opportunity. At short or long range, the Reconnaissance Marines excelled, but if they kept pushing it would get them all killed or overrun.

Numeon was about to give the captain a direct order to fall back and regroup when he saw something in the distance that made the words catch in his throat.

Rolling down the slope was a dirty cloud, too thick and too low to be fog. It spilled into the myriad trench-works, funnelled by the conduits of hewn earth.

And it was fast. In seconds it had cleared the no-man’s-land between the previous trench and the next bank of fortifications and was hurtling at Nemetor and his warriors. It overtook the Death Guard first, who adjusted respirators before the miasma hit as if they knew it was coming.

Which, Numeon realised, they did. The retreat was a feint, a trap, and Nemetor’s company were in it.

‘Gas!’ cried Numeon, but by then it was too late. Though the other legionaries switched their respirators to maximum filtration, Nemetor and the bulk of his company were engulfed before they could act. Still chasing down the retreating warriors, they suddenly found themselves enveloped by a poison cloud and surrounded by rapidly regrouping Death Guard.

The Legion armoury was vast, and not all of its weapons were as obvious as a bolter or as noble as a sword. There were those who wielded devices of much more insidious potency – the slow and agonising ones, the weapons that forever scarred both the bearer and the victim. They did not discriminate and made no allowance for even the strongest armour. From the vaunted champion to the lowliest mortal, they were the great levellers and their works were terrible to behold.

Numeon saw them now and swore an oath that he would kill the one that had unleashed such terror on another legionary.

Whatever contagion the Death Guard had used, it was potent. Moreover, it had been designed to be specifically effective against the Legiones Astartes. Through the breaks in the cloud where the dirt-haze thinned to a sickly, sulphurous yellow, Numeon saw his brothers dying. Power armour was little defence against it. The few that had managed to engage their respirators would perhaps last a minute, maybe more, but the rest were dead men. Metal corroded against the cloud’s necrotic touch, rubber mouldered and split, flesh and hair burned. More than a hundred of the reconnaissance company collapsed, choking and spitting blood. Dozens more were hacked apart or shot down by resurgent Death Guard attacking in the confusion.

Igataron went to wade in, the cloud still creeping down the slope and less than fifty metres away, but Numeon stopped him.

‘We gain nothing by condemning ourselves too,’ he said, then voxed to one of the pilots riding strafing runs across the battlefield. ‘R’kargan, bring your bird in on our position to blow away some of this filth.’

R’kargan replied with a clipped affirmative before seconds later a throbbing engine sound came into sharp focus above. Several of the reconnaissance company looked up at their salvation as R’kargan brought the gunship low. Turbines burring, the Thunderhawk’s downdraught hit the cloud and spread it out, reducing its potency, if not dispersing it completely.

The gunship was rising again, returning to strafing altitude, when a missile caught its left wing and sent it reeling. A whip of black smoke unfurled from its damaged engine, coiling up and then back upon itself as R’kargan was forced to bank. He crashed into the side of the ridge a few moments later, the gunship’s fuselage torn up and burning. Scurrying from their holes, the traitors were quick to fall upon it.

There was no time to mourn. R’kargan had made his sacrifice and saved what was left of the reconnaissance company. Now those that yet lived had to make that worth something.

‘To your brothers!’ roared Vulkan and stormed up the ridge. He let off small gouts of flame from his gauntlet, burning back what pestilence remained to further weaken its effects. The Pyre Guard followed, ploughing into the slowly dissipating cloud, turning the scales back into the Salamanders’ favour and breaking their beleaguered company brothers out of the trap.

Many of the 15th didn’t wear battle-helms, preferring to be unencumbered for the stealth work at which they excelled. These warriors had suffered the worst. Skin sloughed away by virulent acids, ravaged by pustules and choking on vomit, eyes drowning in pus from the dirty bomb, there was almost nothing left of them but half-armoured carcasses. As he drove hard into the few remaining Death Guard who had attacked inside the cloud, Numeon heard something scraping at his leg. He turned, glaive angled to thrust downwards, expecting to face a desperate enemy, but instead saw a dying Reconnaissance Marine. Blood was trickling freely from the ruin of the legionary’s mouth, sticking to his chin and neck in a viscous film. The dying legionary grasped feebly at Numeon’s greave. His fingers had been reduced to stumps, the tips of his gauntlets eaten away, and he left ruddy tracks in the metal. He was trying to say something, but his vocal cords were all but liquefied and the sound that came from his mouth was an agonised gurgle.

‘I’ll grant you peace,’ Numeon murmured and thrust with his glaive to end it.

‘Such horrors…’ said Varrun after he’d just finished off an enemy that was still twitching, and casting around at his plague-eaten battle-brothers. ‘Tell me no such weapons exist in our arsenals.’

Vulkan did not answer. Numeon tried not to meet the gaze of either of them.

‘We’re not done with this yet,’ he said, jutting his armoured chin up the slope where a second Death Guard battalion had converged on the weakened reconnaissance company.

Amidst the carnage, several squads, including Nemetor’s command section, had become separated from the main battalion and were facing off against a superior force.

Despite his company’s mauling, Nemetor was still on his feet. His armour had been badly damaged from the gas attack, entire sections of it eaten through to reveal the seared mesh underneath. It didn’t stop him. With thoughts only of revenge, Nemetor and the survivors charged up at the emerging Death Guard.

Numeon and the others were still finishing off the remnants of the ambushers. The Firedrakes were close but would not be able to intervene. Even Vulkan could not reach the vengeful Salamanders in time.

A fire exchange lit up the slope, casting the acid-ravaged dead in grim monochrome. Where the Death Guard unleashed an indiscriminate bolter hail, the Reconnaissance Marines advanced in a staggered pattern, stopping and sighting with their rifles, shooting and then moving again. They were efficient, cohesive, but taking punishment.

A Salamander went down clutching his shattered gorget. Another spun, a gaping cleft in his torso. A third’s head jerked back, his battle-helm’s eye slit ventilated and a plume of matter bursting out of the back.

One of the oncoming Death Guard took a hit to the shoulder that blew off his pauldron. A second punched through his chest, a third his right leg greave. He grunted, stumbled but kept on coming.

‘Blades!’ yelled Nemetor, stowing his sniper rifle and drawing a chainsword when he realised they were about to engage hand to hand, and saw his men do the same.

A well-drilled phalanx came down at them, roughly ninety warriors against forty, tugging axes and mauls from their belts. There was enough time to roar a challenge, before the clash. Nemetor barrelled into his first opponent, using his bulk to topple the legionary. A second went down to a heavy blow from the Salamander’s chainblade. A third he head-butted, making his enemy crumple. Even Barbarus-born Death Guard couldn’t resist Nemetor’s sheer physical strength.

It struck Numeon as he watched that the honorific of ‘Tank’ was well deserved. But it might also prove the captain’s epitaph, as the numerically superior Death Guard had already overrun the smaller reconnaissance company and were attempting to encircle them.

Vulkan single-handedly prevented that, hitting the overlapping warriors and cutting them apart with his flaming sword. Numeon and the Pyre Guard joined him fractionally later and a dense, chaotic melee erupted.

Further Death Guard reinforcements were entering the fray. They were well drilled and led by a hulking warrior in heavy armour. Numeon caught site of the section leader striding down the slope. Thick plates banded the Terminator’s shoulders, a rounded war-helm sitting like a bolt between them. A metal skirt of horizontal slats protected the warrior’s abdomen and in a gauntleted fist, he clenched a pole arm with an arcing blade at its summit.

His men gave their commander a wide berth, inviting a clutch of Salamanders to attack him. The brute lashed out with the power scythe, and four legionaries fell back with limbs and heads cleaved off. He advanced, an upwards swing bifurcating his next opponent. As he moved on he crushed the stricken Salamander’s head underfoot and left a dark smear in his wake.

This was one of Mortarion’s chosen, his elite cadre. The Salamanders had encountered them before, during the Great Crusade, in the joint campaign to settle the world of Ibsen. They were the Deathshroud, and had no equals amongst the XIV Legion.

Chainsword snarling, Nemetor met the formidable warrior in single combat.

It was a fight the brave captain was unlikely to win.

‘Nemetor!’ Numeon roared, pushing to even greater efforts as he fought to reach his brother-captain.

Death Guard and Salamander exchanged blows, the combat already lasting much longer than any previous engagement of Mortarion’s chosen warrior. It took eight seconds for the Deathshroud to cut Nemetor down. His scythe blade sheared the Salamander’s chainsword in half, the teeth exploding from the still churning belt and embedding in Nemetor’s armour. The backswing raked his chest, opening up ceramite and smashing Nemetor off his feet. He was about to be subjected to the same desultory end as his battle-brother with the crushed skull when Vulkan intervened.

The primarch parried the scythe with his sword blade before reaching inside the Deathshroud’s guard to land a blow with his gauntlet. One of the warrior’s retinal lenses cracked on impact, revealing a bloodshot eye, burning with hate. Half of the legionary’s war-helm was badly dented and a dark fluid was leaking out from under his gorget.

He roared, putting his anger into a two-handed swing that Vulkan stepped aside before cutting horizontally with his sword and slicing clean through the Deathshroud’s waist. Coughing blood against the interior of his half-crushed helm, the dying legionary reached for a canister mag-locked to his belt. It was another of the dirty bombs that he had unleashed on Nemetor and his company. Vulkan crushed the Deathshroud’s fingers under his boot. Sheathing his sword, the primarch wrenched the power scythe from the legionary’s grasp and snapped it over his knee in a flurry of agitated sparks.

It was enough to break the spirit of the Death Guard, who were now engaged by assaulting Firedrakes and fell back in good order. The Pyre Guard were putting the others to the blade when Numeon leaned down to rip off the Deathshroud’s helmet.

A pallid-skinned, mashed-up face greeted him. To Numeon’s surprise the warrior did not spit or curse – he grinned, exposing a raft of broken teeth. Then he began to laugh.

‘You’re all dead men,’ he whispered.

‘Not before you,’ replied Numeon, and ended him.

He looked up again when he heard screaming. Not from the dying, but savage and guttural war cries. A ruddy smog was sweeping across the battlefield, fashioned from blood-drenched mist and the smoke generated by thousands of fires. Caught in a crosswind, it slashed in from the east and brought with it the brutal challenge of a Legion that revelled in war. It was air to them, sustenance.

World Eaters.

Their brownish-red silhouettes materialised in the smog like phantoms, along with something else.

Something big.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Immortal

‘You have a fine mind, John. We should talk, and consider the options available to beings like us.’

– The Emperor, the Triumph at Pash

When he heard the screaming, Numeon drew his weapon.

It was coming from the infirmary, a gut-wrenching cry of agony that shook the legionary from a dark reverie. He’d heard screaming like that before, on a plain of black sand. And it chilled him, the symmetry he found in the remembrance of one held against the reality of the other.

The cry of agony ceased almost as soon as it began. A noxious stench permeated the air – whether from whatever had just happened in the infirmary or a false sensory remnant from his bleak imaginings, it was hard to be sure. Numeon didn’t move. He kept his eyes on the infirmary door, glaive levelled at waist height with the volkite primed.

Behind him, the dying embers of the pyre crackled into extinction. He paid them no heed, his attention fixed. Others arrived onto the manufactorum floor, drawn by the scream. Numeon kept them back with a warning hand gesture, before nodding in the direction of the infirmary.

‘What was that?’ he heard Leodrakk hiss, and caught the sound of the Pyre Guard’s bolter slide being racked.

‘Came from in there,’ murmured Numeon, maintaining his aggressive posture. ‘Who’s here, besides Leo?’ he asked. He had taken off his battle-helm; it was sitting by the side of the pyre dappled with soot. Without it, he had no visibility of his comrades’ positions relative to his own.

‘Domadus,’ uttered the Iron Hand.

‘K’gosi,’ said the Salamander, just above the quiet rumble of his flame-igniter.

‘Shen?’ asked Numeon, aware of four legionaries in total, and swearing he could make out the growling undertone of the Tech-marine’s cybernetics.

‘He was dead,’ said Shen’ra, announcing his presence with his answer. ‘No man could survive those wounds. No man.’

‘Then how?’ said Leodrakk.

‘Because he isn’t a man at all,’ muttered K’gosi, raising his flame gauntlet.

‘Hold,’ Numeon told them all. ‘Approach no closer. Out here, at a distance, we have the advantage over whatever is in that room. Domadus,’ he added, ‘get Hriak. No one else enters. Leodrakk, guard the door.’

Both legionaries did as ordered, leaving Numeon to maintain watch.

‘We wait for the Librarian, find out what we’re dealing with.’

‘And then, brother-captain?’ asked K’gosi.

‘Then,’ Numeon replied, ‘we kill it, if we have to.’

All of them had heard rumours. War stories. Every soldier had them. They were an oral tradition, a comradely means of passing on knowledge and experience. What lent these tales credence was that veteran officers of the Legiones Astartes had attested to facts and given them, in detail, in their reports. To falsify an account of a battle or mission-action was no minor infraction in either Legion or Army. All military bodies took such things incredibly seriously. But facts, explainable through scientific means or not, could not accurately and convincingly reference ‘abominations’ or even ‘physical possession’ without coming across as suspect. These were the words of vaunted, trusted men. Captains, battalion commanders, even Chapter Masters. Such testimony should have guaranteed veracity and credence.

And yet…

Creatures of Old Night and evil sorcery had been confined to myth. It was written, in ancient books, that they could reshape men and assume their forms. Towards the end of the Great Crusade, evidence that was concealed at the time – but later brought to light – gave claim that such creatures could even turn a legionary’s humours against his brothers.

In Numeon’s darkest nightmares, the name Samus resonated with eerie familiarity. Here, on Ranos, it had visited him more frequently. It had been the same on Viralis. They were not xenos, and he had seen and exterminated enough aliens to know this was the truth. Numeon knew an old word for them, one that if spoken a few years ago would have earned derision, but that now carried a ring of bitter and forbidding truth.

And, if further rumours were to be believed, the patronage of such beings was sought out and courted by the Word Bearers. They had found a different faith, the followers of Lorgar. In his gut, Numeon knew that was why they were here. He felt it.

‘Something comes!’ hissed K’gosi.

The Salamanders aimed weapons as a man-shaped figure staggered through the infirmary to reach the door to the manufactorum. It was dark inside and only a silhouette was visible through the window.

‘If it is allowed to speak, it might be the end of us,’ said Shen’ra.

‘Agreed,’ said K’gosi.

‘Wait…’ said Numeon. For despite those misgivings and the threat of something unknown gnawing at the resolve of every legionary in this war, this felt different.

With a low creak, the door opened and the man they knew as John Grammaticus stepped through its open frame. His hands were raised, and when he was no more than a metre beyond the doorway he stopped.

‘Who are you?’ Numeon demanded in a belligerent tone.

‘John Grammaticus, as I told you.’ He seemed calm, almost resigned, despite the fact he faced off against four battle-ready Space Marines.

‘You could not have lived,’ Shen’ra accused. ‘Your wounds… I saw you die on that slab in there. You could not have lived.’

‘And yet, here I am.’

‘Precisely our problem, Grammaticus,’ Numeon told him. ‘You live when you should be dead.’

‘I am not the only one.’

The slightest pause betrayed Numeon’s doubt before he answered. ‘Speak plainly,’ he warned. ‘No more games.’

‘I haven’t been entirely honest with you,’ Grammaticus confessed.

‘We should kill him now,’ said K’gosi.

Grammaticus sighed. ‘It would do no good. It never does. May I put my arms down yet?’

‘No,’ said Numeon. ‘You may talk. If I deem what I hear to be the truth, you may put your arms down. If not, we’ll bring you down a different way. Now, how is it you are still alive?’

‘I am perpetual. That is to say, immortal. Your primarch is, too.’

Numeon frowned. ‘What?’

‘Kill him, Numeon,’ K’gosi urged, ‘or I’ll burn him to ash where he stands.’

Numeon put out his hand to ward the Pyroclast off. ‘Wait!’

‘He’s lying, brother,’ murmured Leodrakk, edging up beside Numeon.

‘I’m not,’ Grammaticus told them calmly. ‘This is the truth. I cannot die… Vulkan cannot die. He lives still, but he needs your help. I need your help.’

Shaking his head, Leodrakk said darkly, ‘Vulkan is dead. He died on Isstvan with Ska and the others. The dead don’t come back. Not unchanged, anyway. Just shells, like on Viralis.’

K’gosi was nodding. ‘Fire cleanses this filth, though…’ He advanced a step, close to touching Numeon’s outstretched hand with his breastplate.

‘Stand down.’ Numeon saw the Pyroclast in his peripheral vision, the chain mask and scale long-coat lending him the appearance of an executioner. It might yet be his role.

‘I want to believe him as much as you do,’ said Leodrakk, switching to Nocturnean, ‘but how can we? Vulkan alive? How would he even know? We’ve already lost enough to treachery.’

‘We all wish the primarch were still with us,’ added K’gosi, ‘but he’s gone, captain. He fell just like Ferrus Manus. Let this go.’

‘And you, Shen?’ asked Numeon. ‘You have said little. Am I deceived, a fool to believe our lord primarch yet lives?’ He risked a side glance and saw the Techmarine’s face was pensive.

‘I can’t say what Vulkan’s fate is. I only know we fought hard and bled greatly on Isstvan. If anyone could have survived, it would have been him.’

‘Brother…’ snarled Leodrakk, unhappy at what he saw as Shen’ra’s capitulation.

‘It’s true,’ the Techmarine replied. ‘Vulkan could be alive. I don’t know. But this man was dead. He was dead, Numeon, and dead men do not speak. You are our captain and we will follow your orders, all of us. But don’t trust him.’

Before Numeon could answer, Leodrakk made one last plea. ‘It’s likely we’ll die here. But I won’t have us killed because we were too credulous to act against the danger in our midst.’

‘I am not the one who is in danger,’ said Grammaticus, in perfect Nocturnean.

The shock around the legionaries was masked but noticeable.

‘How do you know our language?’ asked Numeon.

‘It’s a gift.’

‘Like coming back from the dead?’

‘Not one of mine, per se, but yes.’

Hriak entered the room. Behind his retinal lenses, lightning streaked the pale sclera of his eyes and formed into a dark tempest.

‘Lower your weapons,’ he rasped, stepping into Numeon’s eye line and in front of him.

No one questioned him. They lowered their weapons.

Domadus came in just after, taking up position at the door. His bolter wasn’t aimed at the human but it was in his hand and ready.

‘Are you going to try and prise my head open again?’ asked Grammaticus, warily eyeing the approaching Librarian.

Hriak regarded the human silently for a beat. ‘For a man, you are… unusual. And not just for your ability to cling tenaciously to life.’

‘Interesting way of putting it. But you’re not the first legionary to remark on that,’ Grammaticus replied.

Ignoring the attempted wit, Hriak went on. ‘I have heard of biomancy that can knit skin, mend bones,’ he reached out to touch Grammaticus’s healed body, ‘but nothing like this. It could not bring men back from the dead.’

‘It wasn’t me,’ answered Grammaticus. ‘I serve a higher power who call themselves the Cabal.’

‘A higher power?’ said K’gosi. ‘Do you believe in gods then, human?’

Grammaticus raised his eyebrow. ‘Do you not, even after all you’ve seen?’ He continued, ‘They gave me eternal life. It’s them whom I serve.’

Numeon detected the bitterness in his reply and, coming up alongside Hriak, asked, ‘To what end, John Grammaticus? Evidently you are no creature of Old Night, else my brother here would have urged us to destroy you at once. Nor do I think you’re an alien. So, if not malfeasance, what is your purpose?’

Grammaticus met the Salamander’s gaze. ‘To save Vulkan.’

The tension in the manufactorum suddenly went up several notches.

‘So you’ve said,’ Numeon replied. ‘But I thought he was supposed to be immortal, like you? What need of saving would our primarch have?’

‘I said save him, not save his life.’

Leodrakk sneered, his displeasure at this exchange obvious, ‘And what makes you think you can succeed where we, his Legion, failed?’

Numeon bit back the urge to tell his brother they had not ‘failed’, and let Grammaticus continue.

‘Because of the spear. I need it, the artefact your enemy took from me. They are my enemy, too. With it I can save him.’ Grammaticus turned to the Librarian. ‘Take a look if you don’t believe me. You’ll find I’m speaking the truth.’

Hriak gave Numeon an almost imperceptible nod.

Grammaticus saw it too. ‘So, help me. We have a common foe in this, as well as a common goal.’

‘An alliance?’

‘I’ve been proposing one ever since you captured me.’

‘Where is he then?’ asked Numeon. ‘Where is our primarch that we might save him? And how can a mere human, albeit an immortal one, hope to achieve such a feat? You say you need the spear to do it, but how? What power does it possess?’

‘He’s far from here, that’s all I know. The rest is still a mystery, even to me.’

‘Have Hriak tear his skull open,’ snapped Leodrakk. ‘He’ll unlock what he knows.’

‘Please… Help me to the spear and off Ranos. I can reach him.’

Numeon considered it but then gestured to Hriak.

‘Tells us what he knows,’ he said darkly.

The Librarian took a step forwards so he could press the palm of his right hand against the man’s forehead.

‘Don’t do it…’ murmured Grammaticus. ‘You don’t know what–’

He convulsed as the pain of mental intrusion hit him. Then Hriak jerked, and a grunt of agony escaped through his vox-grille.

Numeon reached out to him. ‘Brother…?’ The Raven Guard warded him off with an outstretched hand.

He couldn’t speak. Hriak was breathing hard, the throaty sound affected by exertion as his powers were tested. He fell down to one knee, but maintained eye contact and kept his hand up to show the others he was all right. He let it drop to his gorget, then detached his helmet clamps, releasing a small plume of pressurised gas into the air. Then he lifted the helmet free. Underneath, his skin was pale, almost bone-white. Ravaged by injury, one half of the Raven Guard’s face was pulled up in a permanent grimace. His neck bore the scar of a grievous throat wound. It was deep, and looked grey and ugly now that it had healed. Grammaticus balked at the grim apparition. Since Hriak’s discomfort had begun, his own pain had visibly eased.

Hriak let him go, relieved no longer to be in contact.

‘Do you see now?’ said Numeon. ‘We have suffered much and have little left to lose, save for our honour,’ he told Grammaticus. ‘I would have no compunction killing you now or later if you lie to us or obfuscate the truth again.’

‘I am not lying. Vulkan lives,’ Grammaticus said simply.

‘He doesn’t know anything else,’ rasped Hriak, taking Numeon’s arm as it was offered and getting back to his feet. He had yet to put his helmet back on, even though he was clearly uncomfortable with his comrades seeing his damaged face. Breathing was obviously easier without it, though. ‘Or at least, not yet. His instructions have been imparted psychically. Some are locked. I cannot reach them.’

‘He’s preventing you?’

‘Someone is.’

‘This Cabal, his masters?’

Grammaticus interrupted, ‘They guard their knowledge well. No amount of digging around in my skull is going to unearth what you’re after.’

‘I have to concur,’ Hriak conceded, reaching for his helmet.

‘Either help me or let me go,’ said Grammaticus. ‘This stalemate achieves nothing for either of us. Let me save him.’

‘How?’ asked Numeon, suddenly angry. ‘I need to know. I have to know.’

Grammaticus sagged, defeated. ‘I don’t know. How many times must I say it? I only know it concerns the spear.’

Numeon calmed down, but his frustration was still bubbling under the surface. He turned to the others. ‘The cleric likely has the spear now,’ he said. ‘We’ll take it from him.’

‘From his dead hand,’ put in Leodrakk as he saw the chance for petty revenge.

‘One way or another,’ Numeon replied. He glanced at Grammaticus. ‘Bind him. I don’t want him trying to escape.’

Domadus nodded and began uncoiling a length of rappelling cable from his belt.

‘This is a mistake,’ said Grammaticus.

‘Maybe. Either way you are not leaving us just yet. I want to see what happens when you are reunited with the spear, see what fresh secrets tumble from your mind. Then I’ll have Hriak pry open your skull and extract whatever is hidden within.’

Grammaticus hung his head, let his arms fall by his sides and cursed whatever fates had delivered him to the Salamanders.

Eighty metres from the manufactorum, Narek hunched low behind a half-collapsed wall and peered in awe through his scope.

‘Impossible…’ he breathed, adjusting the focus, enhancing the image through the shattered window-glass.

He saw six legionaries, the guerrilla fighters from before, just as he had predicted. What surprised him was the sight of the man he had killed, the one who could not have survived his wounds and yet stood unscathed in the middle of the manufactorum floor. Standing. Breathing. Alive.

Narek opened the vox to Elias, vaguely aware of his companions around him and knowing the rest were converging from separate angles on the manufactorum.

‘Apostle…’ he began.

Things were about to change.

Despite the attentions of his Apothecary, Elias was in excruciating pain. After a struggle, two legionaries had managed to get him back into his power armour but his burned arm remained unclad. It was black and almost useless. The wounds from the godfire that had seared him seemed unaffected by his enhanced physiology or any healing skill his Legion possessed. Only a rival patron could restore him, and as he sat clenched with agony in his tent, Elias thought bitterly on the failed ritual.

The spear was nearby, lying on a table within reach. It no longer glowed, nor burned. It simply appeared to be a spearhead fashioned from rock and mineral. But that simple shell contained something much more potent.

Elias was considering when to apprise Erebus of his progress, but wanted to be in a clear frame of mind first. His master would have questions, questions Elias wasn’t sure he had the answers to just yet. So when the vox crackled to life, his mood was particularly fractious.

‘What is it?’ he snapped, wincing at the pain in his arm.

It was Narek.

At first Elias was annoyed. How many more times would he have to tell the huntsman what was required of him? It was a simple task, a well-trained dog could do it. He was considering in what manner to sever his ties with Narek when what he heard changed his mind on the subject. The contortion of Elias’s face, a grimace of pain and snarl of anger, turned to interest and machination.

Suddenly the pain seemed to diminish, his maiming become less significant.

The ritual had failed. Not because of the spear, or the words. It was the sacrifice that he had got wrong. Now he knew why.

Elias rose from his seat and reached for his battle-helm.

‘Bring him to me. Alive, so I can kill him.’

Fate and the Pantheon had not abandoned him after all.

He smiled. Erebus would have to wait.

Something had happened. Narek could tell from the tone of Elias’s voice. He sounded in pain, and the huntsman wondered what Elias had tried to do with the spear. Something foolish, driven by hubris. He put it out of his mind. Amaresh was waiting. He could almost hear the eager rush of blood in the other Word Bearer’s veins.

‘What are we waiting for?’ he growled.

Narek didn’t bother making eye contact. He lowered the scope.

‘Plan’s changed,’ he said, relaying his orders across the vox to his men. ‘Our orders are to extract the human. Alive.’

‘You are not serious,’ snarled Amaresh, grabbing for Narek’s shoulder guard. In a single movement, the huntsman twisted the other Word Bearer’s armoured wrist and smashed him down onto the ground. He did it so quickly that the others had barely noticed. Amaresh went to rise, but found the blade of Narek’s knife pressed at his throat. One thrust and it would pierce gorget, neck and bone.

‘Deadly serious,’ he told him. ‘Dagon,’ he began after a few seconds, once he was sure that Amaresh would follow orders. ‘Maintain eyes on all the exits.’

Dagon gave a clipped affirmative.

‘Infrik, come around the front and– Wait, there’s something…’ Narek had looked up to gauge the relative positions of his men. That was when he saw the smallest glint of metal, reflected from a scope lens. ‘Clever…’

Amaresh had only just risen to his feet when the bolt-round entered the back of his battle-helm, into his head, and exited through his left retinal lens in a welter of blood and bone. Even a legionary as gifted as Amaresh couldn’t survive that.

Narek hit the deck.

He doubted that the sniper would take another shot, at least not a meaningful one. He knew the shooter. It was the one from the cooling tower, the legionary who had seen him and Dagon before. Amaresh was a jerking corpse as the last dregs of nervous convulsion left him. Narek found himself liking this enemy.

The plan changed again.

He reopened the vox, relaying calmly, ‘Full attack.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Torment

‘I have seen darkness, witnessed it in my dreams. I am standing at the edge of a chasm. There is no escaping it, I know my fate. For it is the future and nothing can prevent it coming to pass. So I step off and welcome the dark.’

– Konrad Curze,
the ‘Night Haunter’

I returned from the darkness again, only now I possessed the knowledge of how and why. To most men, learning that you are immortal would be the cause of unbridled euphoria. For is it not the ambition of mankind to endure, to live on, to eke out more years? Cryogenics, rejuvenat, cloning, even pacts with fell creatures… Through science or superstition, mankind has always sought to avoid the end. He will cheat it if he can, devoting the resources of his entire existence to just a little more.

I cannot be killed. Not by any means known to me, or to my vicious brother. It would not end. Ever.

To know you are immortal is to know that time is meaningless, that every ambition you ever aspired to fulfil could be, one day, within your grasp. You would not age. You could not be maimed or debilitated physically. You would never die.

To know immortality was, for some men, to know the greatest gift.

I knew only despair.

As I came round, the phantom pain in my chest reminded me of the blade my brother had rammed into it. Curze couldn’t kill me. He had tried, extremely hard. It begged the question of what he would do next.

The answer to that would not be long in coming.

When I tried to move my arms, I found that I couldn’t. Disorientated, I was slow to realise that I was neither chained nor back in the dread chamber where my weakness had consigned so many to death; I was in an entirely different trap.

At first I felt the weight upon my shoulders, heavy and biting. Bolts and nails had been hammered into my flesh, pinning them. The device of my apparent crucifixion was some kind of metal armature, humanoid in shape but armoured in barbs and spikes that both extruded from and intruded upon the wearer. A crude mechanism locked into my jaw and chin, forcing it up. My lips were wired together. My legs and arms were sheathed in metal, the latter ending in a pair of blades. Stooped, I felt the first jerk of my marionette’s strings and saw my left leg rise and fall in a single step.

‘Hnngg…’ I tried to speak but the razor in my mouth muffled any protests.

I was in a corridor, the ceiling low enough that my armoured chassis just scraped it. The metal bulk of the death machine I was wearing filled its width. Ahead of me, partially shrouded by the gloom, I saw their eyes. They were wide, and widened further when they saw me, or what had become of me.

‘Run!’ a man wearing a dirty and tattered Army uniform said to another. They fled into the dark, and with the sound of my metal skull scraping the ceiling above, I gave chase. My strides were slow at first, but built with a steady, loping momentum. Rounding a corner, I caught sight of the men. They had taken a wrong turn and were trapped at a dead end. I could smell ammonia and realised that one of the troopers had soiled his fatigues. The other was wrenching a pipe off the wall, trying to make an improvised weapon and a last stand.

He swung it experimentally, like a man standing next to a fire who wields a burning torch to fend off a predator. I heard a low shunk of metal as a switch was thrown remotely. Harsh light suddenly filled the corridor from the search lamps on my chassis, blinding the two men. I tried to resist but my armoured frame propelled me after them, the serrated blades at the ends of my arms blurring into life with a throaty roar.

I tried to stop it. I heaved and thrashed, but could barely move. A passenger of the machine, I could only watch as I turned the men to offal and listened to their screaming. Mercifully, it ended quickly and the air grew still again. Only the sound of my desperate breathing and the gore dripping off my spattered frame in fat clumps disturbed the quiet.

Something scurried past behind me and my deadly armour turned as if scenting prey. I was moving again, striding down the corridor on the hunt for fresh victims. I struggled, but could not stop or slow the machine. Along the next stretch of tunnel, I saw three figures. More of my brother’s slaves. I had been unleashed upon them in this pit, clad in death. Curze was making me kill them.

My lumbering gait turned into a frenzied run, the clanking footfalls like death knells to my ears. Up came the search lamps again, hot and buzzing next to my face, and I saw three men. Unshaven, brawny, they were veterans. As I bore down on them, they grimly held their ground. One had fashioned an axe from a section of plating, a taped-up rag around the narrow end for a handle; another had an improvised club like my last kill; the third just clenched his fists.

Such defiance and insane valour. It would not avail them.

‘Come on!’ the one with the axe shouted down at me. ‘Come on!’

My armoured frame obliged, responding to the goad with chainblades spinning.

When I passed another corridor that crossed with the one I was in, I realised what the veterans had done. My puppeteer did not.

As I reached the crossroads, heading blindly at the three men who were shouting and jeering a few metres beyond the junction, a second group of prisoners sprung the trap. A spear thrust grazed my ribs and I grimaced. It went on into the metal vambrace encasing my left arm, severing some cabling. Oil and fluid began to vent furiously.

Just as I was turning to face my first attacker, a second axe weighed in and embedded itself in my right hip. It bit into my flank but the armour bore the brunt. My chain-blade tried to lash out but the cabling snapped and the armature fell limp.

A stern-faced legionary looked up at me, pulling his spear back for another thrust. He wore the black and white of the Raven Guard, through his armour and iconography had seen far better days. My still functional right arm whipped around and took off the warrior’s head before he could attack again.

As the black, beak-nosed helmet bounced off into the darkness, my search lamps flickered and all of the ambushers attacked me at once. I spun, opening up two of the veteran troopers and spilling them out onto the metal deck. The third stooped to pick up his comrade’s fallen club, but my leg snapped out before he could grab it. The impact hit him square in the chest. I heard ribs break and watched him half spiral down the corridor before crumpling in a lifeless heap.

My last opponent struck again, focusing on the damaged arm, which was spitting sparks and spraying oil. Another legionary loomed into my eye line. My heart sank when I saw the colour of his battle-plate.

Emerald-green.

He was broad-shouldered, the faded insignia of the 15th company emblazoned on his dented pauldron.

Nemetor…

I had believed he was dead. Curze had saved him. He’d done it so I was the one that butchered him.

Entombed in the machine, I was unrecognisable to my son. Ducking a hopeful swipe of my remaining chainblade, he hacked into my left arm and jolted some of the pins impaled in my nerves loose. Some feeling returned, and I found I could move the arm again. Watching Nemetor’s hope turn into horror as the weapon he thought he’d destroyed began to move as I lifted it, I then turned the buzzing chainblade on myself. Momentum from my frenzied machine’s attacks drove the saw into my body, first cutting metal, then flesh.

I let it gore me until darkness began to crouch at the edge of my vision, until death, however brief, reclaimed me.

‘Clever,’ I heard the voice of my brother say.

I blinked, opening my eyes and saw the death machine had been removed and that I was back in my cell.

‘I stand both impressed and disappointed,’ he said.

At first I saw armour of cobalt-blue, trimmed with gold; a firm and noble countenance, framed by close-cropped blond hair; a warrior, a statesman, my brother the empire builder.

‘Guilliman?’ I breathed, hoping, my sense of reality slipping for a moment.

Then I knew, and a scowl crept onto my face.

‘No… it’s you.’

I was sitting with my back against the wall, looking up murderously at my brother.

Curze laughed when he noticed my expression.

‘We’re getting close now, aren’t we?’

‘How long?’ I croaked, tasting ash in my mouth and feeling a fresh brand in my back.

‘A few hours. It’s getting faster.’

I tried to stand, but was still weak. I slumped back.

‘How many?’

Curze narrowed his eyes.

I clarified my question, ‘How many times have you tried to kill me?’

My brother crouched down opposite, within my reach but betraying no concern about retaliation for what he had done to me, what he continued to do to me. He nodded to the wall behind me.

I turned to see my reflection mirrored in obsidian. I saw Curze too, and Ferrus Manus, now little more than a walking cadaver in his primarch’s armour, standing just behind him.

‘You see them?’ He pointed to the numerous honour scars branded into my back. Some stood out from the others, a clutch of more recent brandings that I had no memory of and could attribute no oath to.

Curze leaned in and whispered into my ear, ‘A fresh scar every time, brother…’

There were dozens.

‘Every time, you returned to torment me,’ he said.

I faced him. ‘Torment you?’

Curze stood, his armoured form casting a shadow over me from the low light in the cell. He looked almost sad.

‘I am at a loss, Vulkan. I don’t know what to do with you.’

‘Then release me. What is the point of killing me over and over again if I cannot die?’

‘Because I enjoy it. Each attempt brings with it the hope you will stay dead, but also the dread that we shall be forever parted.’

‘Sentiments of a madman,’ I spat.

Curze’s eyes were oddly pitying. ‘I think, perhaps, not the only one. Is our dead brother with us still? Is Ferrus here?’

At the mention of his name, the cadaver’s mouth gaped as if amused. Without eyes or much flesh, it was hard to tell.

I nodded, seeing no point in hiding the fact I saw the undying effigy of Ferrus Manus.

‘I thought so,’ said Curze, unable to shake his melancholy. ‘Our father gave you eternal life. Do you know what he gave me? Nightmares.’ His mood darkened further, his face transformed into genuine anguish. For a moment I caught a glimpse of my brother’s true self and despite all that he had done or claimed to have done, I pitied him.

‘I am plagued by them, Vulkan.’ Curze was no longer looking at me. He regarded his reflection in the obsidian instead. It appeared to be something he had done before, and I imagined him then, screaming in the darkness with no one to hear his terror.

The Lord of Fear was afraid. It was an irony I thought Fulgrim would appreciate, twisted as he was.

‘How can I escape the dark if the dark is part of what I am?’

‘Konrad,’ I said. ‘Tell me what you see.’

‘I am Night Haunter. The death that haunts the darkness…’ he answered, though his voice and mind were far away. ‘Konrad Curze is dead.’

‘He stands before me,’ I pressed. ‘What do you see?’

‘Darkness. Unending and eternal. It’s all for nothing, brother. Everything we do, everything that has been done or will be done… It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. I fear. I am fear. What kind of a knife-edge is that to balance on, I ask?’

‘You have a choice,’ I said, hoping that some fraternal bond, some vestige of reason still existed in my brother. It would be buried deep, but I could unearth it.

He turned his gaze upon me – so lost, so bereft of hope. Curze was a mangy hound that had been kicked too many times.

‘Don’t you see, Vulkan? There are no choices. It is determined for us, my fate and yours. So I make the only choice I can. Anarchy and terror.’

I saw it then, what had broken inside my brother. His tactics, his erratic moods, were all caused by this flaw. It had led him to destroy his home world.

Dorn had seen the madness lurking within him. I suppose I had known it was there too, back on Kharaatan.

‘Let me help you, Konrad…’ I began.

Pale like alabaster, eyes dark like chips of jet with about as much warmth, Curze’s face changed. As the thin, viper’s smile crawled over his lips, I knew that I had lost him and my chance of appealing to what little humanity still remained.

‘You would like that, I think. A chance to prove your nobility. Vulkan, champion of the common man, most grounded of us all. But you’re not on the ground, are you brother? You are far from your beloved earth. Is it colder, here with me in the dark?’ he asked, bitterly. ‘You are no better than me, Vulkan. You’re a killer just the same. Remember Kharaatan?’ he goaded.

I remembered, and lowered my head at the memory of what I had done, what I nearly did.

‘You weren’t yourself, brother,’ hissed Ferrus, his graveyard breath whistling through skeletal cheeks. ‘You had a backbone.’

Curze seemed not to notice.

‘Our father’s gifts are wasted on you,’ he said. ‘Eternal life, and what would you do with it? Till a field, raise a crop, build a forge to make ploughshares and hoes. Vulkan the farmer! You sicken me! Guilliman is dull, but at least he has ambition. At least he had an empire.’

‘Had?’

‘Oh,’ Curze smiled, ‘you don’t know, do you?’

‘What has happened to Ultramar?’

‘It doesn’t matter. You’ll never see it.’

I suddenly feared for Roboute and all my loyal brothers that fell beneath Curze’s notice. If he had done this to me, then what could he have done to the rest of them?

‘Nemetor…’ I said, as parts of my most recent ordeal came back to me, including the appearance of a son I had thought dead. ‘Was he…?’

‘Real?’ Curze suggested, grinning.

‘Did you kill him?’ I pressed.

‘You’re dying to know aren’t you, brother?’ He held up his hand. ‘Sorry, poor choice of words. You’ll see him again, before the end.’

‘So, this will end then?’

‘One way or another, Vulkan. Yes, I sincerely hope it will end.’

He left me then, backing off into the shadows. I watched him all the way to the cell door. As it was opened, I saw the slightest shaft of light and wondered how deep my prison went. I also half caught a hurried conversation and got the sense of a commotion outside. Though I didn’t hear his muttered words, Curze seemed irritated in his curt responses. Booted footsteps moved quickly, hammering the deck, before they were cut off by the cell door shutting.

Lumen-globes burning in the alcoves in the flanking walls died, darkness returned and with it the faint, mocking laughter of my dead brother.

‘Shut up, Ferrus,’ I said.

But it only made him laugh louder.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Egress

The north-facing aspect of the manufactorum was a broken ruin. Outside, the dead and injured littered the streets.

Narek had lost eight legionaries in the frontal assault, not including Amaresh, who had been cut down by their sniper. Despite the losses, he appreciated the symmetry of that, one hunter pitched against the other. He decided that he would have a reckoning with this warrior – see how sharp his own edge was and if, despite his grievous injuries, he could still consider himself worthy. It was an honourable contest, not like the bloodbath he had left behind.

Distasteful and profligate as it was, it was also necessary. Discovered in the midst of stealthing to their gate, Narek had no other choice but to push down the throat of the loyalists, knowing full well that they had a track-mounted cannon and a defensible position. Admittedly, he hadn’t predicted they would open fire straight away – the bulk of his troops were still vaulting barricades and running stooped-over to the next scrap of cover when the world lit up in actinic blue – but it had served its intended purpose. Dagon, Narlech and Infrik had circled around the rear egress. That left Melach, Saarsk, Vogel and himself skirting the flanks; two on the right, two on the left.

Head down, hugging the edge of the street as the gun battle to the front of the manufactorum raged, Narek hissed down the vox to his elite, ‘Close the trap, find the human and bring him to me alive.’

‘And the rest?’ Narlech voxed back.

Narek could already hear the bloodlust in his voice. ‘Kill anyone that gets in your way. I don’t want prisoners, give me corpses.’ He cut the feed.

Nearby he could hear that his enemies had broken out of the back of the building.

‘How did they find us?’ Leodrakk had to shout to be heard, bolt shells and chips of rockcrete from the manufactorum’s slowly disintegrating structure raining all around them.

Numeon shook his head. ‘Could’ve been the pyre smoke or we may have been under watch already.’

‘But why come at us like this, straight at us?’

‘Pergellen forced their hand.’

‘Doesn’t make sense. They would have hunkered down, circled us and called in reinforcements.’

Numeon paused, eyeing the gloom beyond the walls. Behind him, he heard Domadus shouting orders between the percussive reports of his heavy bolter. As soon as word came from Pergellen that the XVII had found them, all legionaries inside the manufactorum had formed up into a firing line. Only Numeon, Leodrakk and two in raven’s black moved through the back of the building to the manufactorum’s rear exit. It was no fortress, and they couldn’t stay here, but what Leodrakk was saying made sense. Why not lay siege and wait until they could storm the barricades in force?

‘It’s a distraction,’ he decided. ‘Keeping our attention front.’

The rear exit to the manufactorum was a depot strewn with the half-blasted carcasses of freight-haulers. Lots of cover, lots of places to hide.

‘You see that?’ said Numeon, crouching down by the rear door and gesturing outside.

‘There are three of them,’ whispered Hriak, his hand firmly gripping the human’s shoulder.

‘You aren’t seriously considering going out there?’ asked Grammaticus.

Numeon ignored him. He caught the slight movement again. Whoever they were, they were using the haulers to get close.

‘They’re after the human,’ he said. ‘Capture, not kill, this time.’

‘How can you be sure?’ asked Leodrakk.

‘The frontal assault was to flush us out. They knew we’d try and bolt with the human. Because if they have been watching us, it’s likely they saw what we saw.’

Hriak looked down at Grammaticus. ‘Your apotheosis…’

‘No explanation was needed,’ Grammaticus replied snidely. ‘It doesn’t matter what I say, does it? You’re going to carry on blindly like this, regardless of consequence, aren’t you? You’ve lost your faith in everything.’

Leodrakk snarled. ‘We’ve lost much more than that.’

‘Be calm,’ Numeon told him, giving Grammaticus a quick glance to shut him up before going on. ‘We’re wasting time. Get him out of here. We can draw these three off.’

He looked at Avus crouching next to him, the foils of his jump pack folded back for now. The legionary had kept his own counsel until that moment.

‘I’ll have weregeld for Shaka, measured in blood. And when my corvidae hangs in memory of the sacrifice I made, and I become part of the raven’s feast, only then shall I know peace,’ he vowed. ‘Victorus aut Mortis.’

Hriak bowed his head in solemn respect. ‘Victorus aut Mortis, brother.’

Numeon nodded to all three.

‘We’ll rendezvous in the tunnels. All of us. May the Emperor go with you.’

Elias felt restive, and not only because of the dull agony in his arm. Outside the tent, the sacrificial pit was quiet, though the air still trembled with the urgent fury of the Neverborn. He could sense their anger. It mirrored his own. To be thwarted so close to his goal, and for what? Some human he had let slip through his grasp.

The overeager hand snatches air, where the considered one holds on to substance.

He had heard Erebus use these words before. They echoed mockingly back at him through the years.

Ranos was dead. His Word Bearers had effectively denuded the city of all life and now only these loyalist dregs and their prisoner remained. But still he was denied the prize he so coveted. Weapons, Erebus had told him. Half dead, his face a bloody ruin, he had uttered this truth. Elias was certain that the spearhead was one such weapon of which his master had spoken. It was raw power incarnated in a fulgurite. Any doubts he may have had about that died along with his arm and the seven acolytes that had burned to ash earlier.

Warily he reached out to touch the spear. It was surprisingly cool and certainly inert, whatever past reaction it may have undergone now dormant but not yet spent. It hummed with a faint vibration, and the blade still threw off a lambent light that suggested its godlike provenance.

Monarchia… Yes, Elias remembered it well, too. He had wept that day, first tears of zealous joy as the cathedra had risen to the sky then righteous anger when the XIII had shamed his Legion and his primarch. He scarcely remembered the human dead, and felt the Emperor’s snub more keenly. Erebus had counselled him that day. He had counselled many. His master had seemed oddly sanguine, as if he knew some measure of what was going to happen before it had actually transpired. That was power. To see fates, to bend and shape them to your will and benefit. Why Erebus had always skulked in the shadows, the power behind the throne instead of its incumbent king, Elias would never understand.

‘What does Erebus know that I–’

The thought was interrupted by the activation of his warp-flask.

Even in the eldritch fire of the flask, Erebus looked crooked and broken. He was dressed in dark robes with a deep cowl hiding his face and head.

Elias bowed at once. ‘Master… you are recovered?’

‘Evidently not,’ said Erebus, gesturing to his bent-backed form, ‘but I am healing.’

‘It is glorious to behold, my lord. When I left you in the apothecarion–’

Erebus interrupted. ‘Tell me what is happening on Ranos.’

‘Of course,’ said Elias, bowing again so he could unclench his teeth without his anger being seen. He held up the spear. ‘The weapon,’ he announced proudly, ‘is in my possession.’

Erebus looked at him in silent incredulity.

Elias could not hide his confusion and said, ‘To win the war. Your last words to me before I left with my warriors.’

‘Your warriors, Elias?’

‘Yours, my lord, humbly appropriated for the task you gave me.’

‘You have nothing but a spear, Elias. I mean weapons. That with which we shall win this war for Horus and the Pantheon.’ There was a slight angry tremor in Erebus’s voice when he mentioned the Warmaster’s name, and Elias briefly wondered what had happened between them. ‘Sharpen our own, blunt theirs,’ Erebus told him. ‘Whoever has the most weapons wins. Don’t you understand that yet?’

Elias was confused. He had done all that was asked of him and yet his master was obviously displeased. Erebus had also neglected to mention his injury, as if perhaps he already knew of it…

‘I… My lord?’ Elias began.

Erebus didn’t answer at first. He was muttering something as if speaking to someone Elias could not see, but the image in the flask showed a chamber that was empty save for Erebus.

‘Where is John Grammaticus?’ he said at last.

‘Who? The human, you mean?’

‘Where is he, Elias? You need him.’

‘I have men hunting for him as we speak. They are bringing him to me.’

‘No,’ said Erebus. ‘Do it yourself. Find John Grammaticus and hold him for me. Do not sully him in any way, that is my only warning to you.’

Elias raised an eyebrow, and tried to keep the fear out of his voice. ‘You are coming here?’

Erebus nodded. ‘I have seen the mess you have made on Ranos.’

Fear turned to anger in Elias. ‘I could not have predicted the other legionaries’ presence here. Nor can I leave the ritual site. The Neverborn are–’

Erebus cut him off for the third time with a swipe of his hand. Elias noticed that it was a bionic and appended to his master’s severed wrist stump. ‘As usual you have failed to grasp the subtleties of the warp. No more blood or further entreaties will get you what you want, Elias.’

‘I only serve you, my lord.’

Erebus chuckled. It was an unpleasant, throaty sound, like he was the victim of some pervasive cancer with only hours to live.

‘I have matters to attend to here, but be ready for my coming. Be sure that Grammaticus is in your hands by the time that I arrive, or a fire-blackened limb will be the least of your concerns…’

The warp flame evaporated as quickly as it had manifested, leaving Elias alone. Despite the pain in his arm, his entire body tensed with barely contained anger.

‘I am your disciple…’ he gasped at the uncaring air. ‘Your follower. I saved you, took you from that chamber where you would have died without my help.’ His jaw clenched, so tightly that he could no longer utter words. All that came from Elias’s mouth was a spitting, frothing snarl. He fought for calm, found it in the dark pit of his rotten soul.

Elias called out to summon his equerry. ‘Jadrekk…’

The warrior appeared at the tent mouth almost immediately, bowing low.

‘We are leaving. Gather everyone, but leave two squads to maintain vigil over the pit. We are rejoining Narek and the others.’

Jadrekk bowed again and went to carry out his orders.

Thirty-seven legionaries awaited Elias beyond the confines of his sanctum. Twenty of those would stay behind, whilst the rest would reinforce Narek. It had never been intended as a battle force. It was an honour guard, Elias’s own personal cult. Mortals were but lambs to slaughter in the Pantheon’s name. Legionaries demanded sterner attention. Elias had thought the loyalists nothing more than an inconvenience, sustenance for the Neverborn when he unleashed them upon this world and forever tainted it for Chaos. Now they stood in the path of his deserved glory. They had proven resourceful so far, but their resistance was at an end. Sheathing the fulgurite spear in his scabbard, he lifted his mace with his good arm. It was heavy, but it felt good to wrap his fist around the skin-bound haft.

It would feel even better when it was cracking skulls, every blow a step towards his eventual apotheosis.

Erebus severed the psychic communion to his disciple and staggered. Reaching out, he supported himself against the wall of his cell and exhaled a shuddering breath. Even imbued by the power of the warp, his regeneration was slow. He looked down upon the bare metal of his bionic hand. It was already clenched in a fist, as if his will alone could sustain and restore him. The grimace on Erebus’s face was transformed into a smile. He saw it reflected in the metal floor of his sanctum, just as he saw the slow creeping of flesh that had begun to colonise his flayed visage. It was harder, darker than before. Tiny bone nubs protruded from his skull. His eyes took on a visceral cast. It was the favour of the gods, Erebus knew it. Lorgar and Horus might have forsaken him for now, but the Pantheon had not. He could feel their restlessness, however. Despite the Dark Apostle’s knowledge and manipulation of the fates, Horus was not the pawn that Erebus had claimed him to be.

In the earliest days, when sedition was muttered in whispers and the warrior lodges were in their infancy, there had been other choices. It need not have been Horus. None of that mattered now. Erebus was, above all, a survivor. His ravaged face and body bore testament to that.

‘I am still the architect of this heresy…’ he hissed to the darkness, which had been listening eagerly ever since he arrived.

His mistake was at Signus. Had he known, had he caught the slightest inkling of Horus’s jealousy… Sanguinius was supposed to have turned and become a Red Angel. Instead, he lived, and neither Horus nor Erebus had got what they wanted. He would be subtler next time. But he needed answers. The Angel and the Warmaster were not his concern now. Erebus’s eye had fallen upon another.

It took some effort, but he raised his head to meet the gaze of the other being in the room.

‘Can it kill him?’ he asked.

The creature manifest in a pall of roiling smoke opposite nodded its feathered heads. Its beaks chattered, incessantly mumbling. Erebus forced his mind to shut out these words, for they were madness and to hear them was to be damned to the same fate.

He bowed as the smoke faded, taking the daemon with it. The great pressure upon Erebus was relieved, and he could straighten his back. He breathed for the first time in a long time without it feeling like a saw was ripping through his chest.

‘Then it shall be done, Oracle,’ he said to the ghosting smoke, and left the sanctum.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Penumbra

His breathing gave my brother away.

‘Ferrus, leave me alone…’

Since my last encounter with Curze, I had sunk into a deep melancholy, struggling to put together what was real and what I only imagined. Each time I returned from death, I felt a piece of my mind slip away like a shed scale or flake of ash. And the harder I tried to grasp at it, the more it fragmented. I was breaking – not physically, but mentally. Yet I was not alone in that. Curze too had showed me some of his inner doubt, his pain. Whatever he had witnessed in the visions he described had disturbed an already fragile mind. The sadistic tendencies, his obvious nihilism, were both symptomatic of that. I didn’t know if he meant to share his trauma to make me pity him or somehow lull me into trusting him as part of some longer torture, or whether his mask had simply slipped and I had been treated to his true image. Both of us had been reflected in the obsidian glass and neither of us liked what we saw.

‘Ferrus is dead, brother,’ a voice answered, prompting me to open my eyes.

The cell of volcanic glass hadn’t changed. In its walls I beheld my reflection, but could see no other, despite the fact that whoever was in here with me was close enough that I could hear them whisper.

‘Who are you?’ I demanded, standing. My feet were unsteady but I held my ground. ‘Ferrus, if this is some trick–’

‘Ferrus died on Isstvan, as I once thought you had done.’

My eyes widened, I dared to hope. I recognised the voice of my unseen companion.

‘Corvus?’

From the darkness, I saw a shadow that bled outwards into a silhouette before finally resolving into Corax, my brother. It was as if the Ravenlord were wearing a long cloak that he had suddenly cast off to reveal his presence. Despite the fact that he was standing in front of me, he still portrayed no reflection in the glass, and as I regarded him I found it difficult to pinpoint his exact location in the room. He was shadow, always within the penumbra even in the harshest daylight. It was his gift.

I reached out to touch his face and whispered, partly to myself, ‘Are you real?’

Corax was clad in black power armour of an avian aspect. With two taloned gauntlets he disengaged the locking clamps that affixed his war-helm to his gorget. The beaked helmet came loose without a sound. Even the Ravenlord’s power generator from which sprouted his jump pack’s incredible wings functioned almost silently. It was only by the virtue of my primarch’s hearing that I could detect the lowest, residual background hum.

‘I am as real as you, Vulkan,’ he said, lifting the war-helm to reveal a slightly aquiline face framed by long, black hair. There was a quiet wisdom in his eyes that I recognised, as well as the greyish pallor common to inhabitants of Kiavahr. A pelt of raven feathers ringed his waist and there was a large skull that rested above his armoured pelvis from some great prey-bird that he had once stalked and killed.

‘It is you, Corvus.’

I wanted to embrace him, to embrace hope in the form of my brother, but Corax was not as tactile as Ferrus had been. Like the bird from which he took his name, Corax did not like his feathers to be touched. I saluted him instead, pressing my clenched fist against my bare chest.

Corax saluted in return before replacing his helm.

‘How?’ I asked. ‘We are aboard Curze’s ship.’

‘I can explain how I found you later.’ He clapped me on the shoulder, a rare concession for him, and for the first time in what felt like years I experienced a lost sense of brotherhood and comradeship. ‘Now I need you to come with me. We’re getting you out of this place.’

As he spoke, my eye was drawn to the half-light spilling into my cell. Through the open door, I saw a dimly lit corridor and a strike team of Raven Guard surrounded by dead Night Lords.

‘Can you fight?’ Corax asked me, glancing over his shoulder as he led me to freedom.

‘Yes,’ I replied, and felt some of my faded strength returning. I had been a long time from earth and beaten constantly as I was, my fighting prowess was far from its height. I caught a bolter in mid-flight. It felt good to wrap my hand around the trigger, feel its heft. I racked the slide. It was Corax’s own weapon, not his favoured armament but a back-up. I was glad to receive it.

I had questions, many of them, about the war and Horus. But this was not the time.

As my brother reached the doorway, he said something to his Raven Guard in Kiavahran that I didn’t understand before unfurling his power whip and letting the three barbed tips crackle with energy as they touched the ground. Four silver claws extended from his other hand, their blades wreathed in actinic fury.

‘Our ship is close, but these corridors are swarming with Eighth Legion filth. We can bypass them easily enough but we’ll need to take a different route with you, brother.’

Corax was about to lead us out when I gripped his forearm.

‘I had almost given up hope,’ I said quietly.

Corax nodded. ‘So had I, of ever finding you alive.’ He held my gaze for a second, before turning towards the corridor. ‘Follow me, brother.’

He swept out of the cell and though I was close on his heels, I almost immediately lost in the gloom. The corridor was wide, but low and well enough lit, yet Corax and his kin were hard to locate.

‘We cannot wait, Vulkan,’ my brother whispered.

‘I can barely see you.’

‘Make for the end of the corridor. Kravex is there.’

My eyes narrowed and I found the legionary, just as Corax had described, waiting at the end of the corridor. His appearance was a fleeting shadow, for when I reached the point where he had been standing, Kravex was gone again.

It continued like this for what felt like hours, moving unchallenged and unheeded through myriad tunnels, vents and ducts. Sometimes the way led us down or crawling through some narrow conduit or climbing up some claustrophobic shaft. Always Corax was nearby but never close enough to actually feel like he was there. He was a shade, moving through the darkest fog, cleaving to the shadow’s edge and never quite stepping into the light.

I followed as best I could, catching glimpses of Kravex or one of the other Raven Guard when my sense of direction faltered and they had to put me back on the path. I think there were five in all, not including Corax, but I could not swear to that. The XIX were experts in subterfuge. Ambuscade and stealth fighting were an art form to the Ravens. I felt woefully under-schooled.

Several times I was stopped suddenly – my brother, though still occluded, hissing a warning to make me pause. Legionaries were looking for us. We heard their booted feet, caught snatches of their passage, through the vents and iron grilles of the vast ship.

Deeper now, into its bowels, we found ourselves in the ship’s bilge. Effluence ran in a thick river and the walls were crusted with grime and other matter. It was a vast and cyclopean sewer, wrought of dark metal, crosshatched with girders and hanging chains. Heat from the enginarium decks wafted down through slow-moving turbine fans, churning up the vile stench of the place. The toxic air would have killed lesser men, and I suspected that the uneven floor underfoot was actually bone.

‘Through this channel,’ said Corax, stepping down into a sloping aqueduct and keeping his voice low as a search team rattled the deck grille far above our heads, ‘we can bypass a heavily guarded part of the ship. A hatch at the end leads out to an ancillary deck where we breached.’

‘And what if your ship has already been found?’ I asked, following my brother and his warriors as they waded into the murky sewer. It was dark in the tunnel, only illuminated by the fizzing glow of phosphor lamps.

‘Unlikely,’ Corax answered. ‘It is masked beyond the means of this vessel’s sensorium to detect. Come on.’ His warriors were ranging ahead, and I soon lost them in the gloom.

We tramped on through the filth in silence, the disturbed waters only making the fumes more noisome. As above, below it was a labyrinth and I had the distinct feeling we were heading down towards its core. A part of me yearned to find Curze waiting there, so I could inflict upon him every act of retribution I had dreamed about since being incarcerated at my mad brother’s pleasure.

It would be so easy… His skull in my hands, the bone cracking as I slowly crushed it.

The long stretch of straight bilge pipe was finally giving way to a sharp bend when I caught the stark muzzle flash in my eye line and heard the grunted accusation of discovery.

Corax was already moving, several metres ahead of me, power whip cracking in his gauntleted fist. ‘They have found us!’

I heard one of the Raven Guard fall, but didn’t see it. Our vanguard was beyond the bend; so, too, was Corax now, and I could only hear the battle. There was a loud splash and I assumed that the warrior had sunk into the water.

I reached the turn but found only darkness in front of me. Even with the phosphor lamps, spitting and flickering in the rank air, I could see neither friend nor foe.

Another flash set me to purpose, a fleeting pict-capture of monochrome grey lodged in my retina of two legionaries clashing with blades. I roamed towards them, finding sludge under my feet and progress slow. The next section of pipe was equally as long as the first and my allies fought some way down it, far from my aid.

I stopped, trying to ascertain how many enemies we were facing, and where. Without the muzzle flash my sight was hindered again. I set the bolter I had been given under my chin, resting the stock against my cheek as I slowly panned it around the sewer. Weapons fire reverberated off the vaulted ceiling, echoing loudly, making it difficult to pinpoint. I realised the pipe in this part of the sewer was far from straight. Columns supported it, their foundations beneath the rancid waterline. There were alcoves and sub-ducts, maintenance ledges and antechambers. Without a bearing I could quickly lose my way, and my rescuers with it.

Somewhere in the distance, Corax was fighting. I heard the crack of his power whip, and could smell the ozone reek of his lightning claws even above the rancid fluid slowly riming my waist. I broke through the viscous skin that had started to encircle me, wading quickly through the morass as I fought to reach my brother.

In shuddering silhouette I saw another Raven die, his wings bent outwards as a bolt shell tore him open.

‘Corax!’ I called out, still panning with my bolter, concerned that any snap shot might hit my brother or one of his sons.

I heard the clash of steel, a burst of bolter fire, but got no answer.

‘Corax!’

Still nothing. The tunnel yawned in front of me, a diseased and gaping maw, and the darkness closed like a storm. I caught flashes, muzzle fire and the ephemeral flare of power weapons. Nothing more than silhouettes greeted me, the after-image of a blow already struck, a kill already made.

In the foulness sloshing around my waist, I caught a brief sight of an armoured corpse. In the dark, face down, it was hard to discern who it belonged to. I forced my way over to it through the mire, but was too slow. Trapped air escaping from the gaps in its armour, the corpse sank without trace. I plunged my hand into the filth, reaching and grabbing for it. I needed to see it, to touch something undeniably real. Something scraped against the tips of my fingers. Delving deeper, the rank waters lapping at my face, I grasped the object. Bringing it up into the light, I saw a skull. Sewer-filth peeled off bleached bone like a sloughing skin. It grinned, as all skulls do, but I found some familiarity in its macabre visage.

Ferrus Manus’s cleaved head stared up at me.

Recoiling, I dropped the skull and was about to reach back down for it when I heard Corax shout out.

‘Vulkan!’

A small spherical object, its activation stud flashing, arced overhead. Its parabola took it down into the waters, almost on me.

I turned, taking a sharp breath and closing my eyes as a concussive blast pushed me down into the mire. Skin stinging with the host of shrapnel embedded in my back, I touched the floor of the tunnel, my head and shoulders completely submerged. The spike of a rib, a jutting femur, the ridged line of a spinal column – I scratched at the underwater boneyard in a desperate attempt to gain purchase and rise above the water.

Then I was rising, carried along in the sudden swell caused by the explosion, before breaching the surface. Thrown into the air, chased by a gush of filth, tendrils of it clinging to my body, I hit the wall hard and slid down against it.

I had lost my bolter, the weapon slipping from my grip during the fall. Gagging, coughing up filthy water from my lungs, I heard approaching footsteps splash through the mire.

Dazed, my vision blurring, I looked up and saw a hand proffered towards me.

‘It’s over,’ said Corax.

‘I didn’t even see them,’ I gasped.

‘Trust me, brother, they’re dead, but more will be coming after that explosion. We have to move.’

With Corax’s help, I got to my feet and together we reached the end of the sewer tunnel, where a maintenance ladder led up and out.

‘Where are the others?’ I asked, not seeing Kravex or any of the other Raven Guard.

‘Dead,’ Corax replied grimly, and kept his eyes front. ‘Here,’ he said, gesturing to the ladder. ‘I’ll go first. Follow me closely.’

I nodded and tried not to think about what my brother was feeling at that moment.

Halfway up the ladder, Corax said, ‘They knew the nature of this mission, and accepted its risks.’

I didn’t reply, merely followed in silence.

Though thick with fumes emanating from the enginarium decks, the air beyond the sewer was almost cleansing by comparison.

Another large chamber stretched out before us. It was cluttered with machinery and packing crates. Cranes loomed overhead and a gantry overlooked the space on one side. It appeared to be empty.

‘Ancillary deck,’ Corax explained, breaking into a steady run, ‘mainly used for storage and repairs. Relatively small. Difficult to breach.’

‘Your ship is close?’ I asked, keeping pace.

‘This way…’

Corax reached the junction first. As he stopped dead, I knew something was wrong. When I caught up to him, I realised what.

Pressure vented from a tear in the Thunderhawk’s fuselage. A jagged hole punched inwards, scorched marks radiating from the breach. It was still seized in its locking clamps, though one of its stanchions was twisted. The glacis plate in the nose cone was shattered, its prow-mounted guns wrecked.

‘Looks like your flight will have to be aborted,’ a low voice declared from the shadows.

The lumen strips overhead were extinguished with the sharp thunk of a thrown switch.

Darkness prevailed for a few moments until twin ovals of crimson light from a warrior’s retinal lenses pierced the gloom. He was joined by twenty more, fanning out from alcoves and behind the scuttled gunship where they had been lying in wait, assembling in front of us to block off the deck.

Corax and I stood our ground.

‘So few of them…’ he remarked to me.

Ten more legionaries clanked into position behind us.

‘So very few,’ I agreed.

A warrior in Terminator armour, one of the Atramentar, stepped forwards. ‘Lay down your arms.’

I recognised his voice as belonging to the one who had addressed us earlier.

‘I don’t take orders from Nostraman gutter scum dressed as soldiers,’ Corax replied.

Behind us, a further ten warriors cut off our escape.

I glanced at them, smirking. ‘Only forty? Curze has overestimated your ability to stop us.’

The Atramentar laughed; it sounded dull and grainy through his vox-grille. Spikes protruded from his shoulder guards and painted-on lightning bolts livened up the drab metal of his midnight-blue armour. In one gauntleted fist, he clutched a heavy-looking maul.

‘Night Haunter told us to take you alive,’ he said. ‘He didn’t say you were to be left unscathed.’

All around the four Night Lords squads, blades and cudgels were drawn.

‘His mistake,’ muttered Corax, soaring into a turbine-boosted leap. A shriek ripped past his lips, an avian war cry that stunned the Atramentar for a precious half-second. Steel wings spread, an angel of death’s shadow bearing down, Corax impaled the warrior on his lightning claw, and I saw the Atramentar’s body slide to the deck where the Night Lord died, gurgling blood.

The Ravenlord lashed out with his whip as he landed, snaring a charging legionary around the waist, yanking him off his feet and smashing him into the wall.

I turned, tearing down a tower of crates that crashed into the path of the warriors behind us. It would hold them for a few seconds, but it was all I needed.

Barrelling into the Night Lords coming at us from the front, I met two legionaries in mid-charge and swept them up off the deck with my sheer bulk and momentum. I hurled one like a discus, my arm around his waist, and saw him pinwheel into three others. The second of them I seized around the head and pile-drove into the floor. The deck bent and split under the impact, several of its rebars impaling my opponent through the back to jut out from his chest.

Panicked, some of the remaining Night Lords drew bolters. I felt a shell score my side, leaving a burn. It barely even slowed me down. I backhanded the shooter, snapping his neck at an awkward angle before hoisting another above my head and bringing him down across my knee, breaking his back.

I seized the generator of a fifth, dragging him towards me and caving in his stomach with my fist. With the blade of my hand, I shattered the clavicle of a sixth. Someone got a sword thrust in and I felt it pierce my midriff with a sudden sawing motion. I snapped the blade off at the hilt, and scooped up my attacker by the chin, gripping his jaw before swinging his flailing body overhead and slamming it into a heavy crate. The legionary’s head punched right through it and I left him there, hanging by his neck, dead.

Killing was not akin to revelry for me, but I revelled in this. Every torture I had endured, every injury against my men, I visited back upon the Night Lords. As the barricade broke down behind us, I welcomed my enemies. A host of corpses lay around me. Blades and bolters were within easy reach, but I had no need of them. Clenching and unclenching my hands, I wanted to tear these warriors apart in the most intimate way possible.

‘Come unto my anvil,’ I challenged, a feral snarl curling my lip.

The fact that the ship was gone, our only means of escape lost with it, didn’t even enter my mind. I craved this violence. I desired nothing more than to break these warriors, who would suffer for the deeds of their father.

My fists were like hammers, my fury blazing like forge-fire.

One by one, the Night Lords died and I rejoiced in their destruction.

By the time it was over, I was breathing hard through clenched teeth. Spittle flecked my trembling lip. My entire body quaked with the violence that was slowly bleeding from my every pore. In my mind’s eye I beheld an abyss. It was red-raw, the colour of blood and death. I stood upon its edge, looked down into the chasmic black at its nadir. Madness waited there for me. I heard its calling and reached out to touch it…

Corax brought me back.

His hand upon my shoulder. The urgent tone in his voice.

‘Are you all right, brother?’

It took me a few seconds to realise he was referring to the sword still impaling me.

I yanked out the blade. A welter of blood came with it to paint the deck, soon lost on an already blood-soaked canvas.

‘Believe me, it’s nothing,’ I said, steadily regaining my composure.

Corax nodded, betraying no sense of what I had shown to him, expressed in the charnel leavings on the deck around me.

‘What now?’ I asked, the wrecked Thunderhawk before us.

‘Delve deeper, penetrate the ship’s core. There’ll be other vessels we can commandeer.’

It was a small hope at best. I knew Corax realised that, but chose not to say it out loud.

‘Failing that, we could fight our way to the bridge,’ I replied. ‘And take our wrath out on whoever we find enthroned upon it.’

‘Agreed.’

Corax jerked his head up, listening.

‘More are coming.’

‘Let them.’

His cold retinal lenses regarded me. ‘Does it end here, or on the bridge with Curze’s beating heart clenched in your fist?’

I nodded, though I thought our chances of reaching the bridge and Curze were remote at best. ‘The bridge. Lead on, brother.’

Leaving the massacred Night Lords in our wake, Corax took us through several more chambers until we entered a warren of sub-tunnels reached through a service hatch. The confines of the tunnels were close, and my brother was forced to leave his beloved jump pack behind. Despite his efforts at obscuring the trail, our pursuers were always close behind us. Snarled Nostraman curses followed us down vents and pipes, the din of scraping power armour echoed. I imagined Curze’s men on their knees and elbows, crawling after us.

But however deep we went, however many the turns we took, the Night Lords stuck to us like our shadows. They knew this ship, its every inch. I felt the trap again, its rusty teeth closing around my neck. Escape or capture, there was no other way for this to end for me. I feared for Corax, though. Curze would not be kind to him for this affront.

After an hour of scurrying through the service tunnels like rats, Corax found another access hatch. Kicking it through, the grate landing with a clatter below, my brother dropped from sight for a moment before calling up to me to follow. I went after him and plunged from the lightless warren into a barren chamber. It was dimly lit, fashioned of dark iron like so much of this desolate place, and I discerned blade marks in the floor. There were bloodstains too, but it was empty. It was strangely familiar, though I had never been here before.

A single archway led further, though it was beyond the weak corona of light cast by the lumen orbs ensconced in the walls, and therefore heavily shadowed.

‘See, the way is unobstructed,’ Corax hissed, gesturing to the archway and the darkness beyond it. ‘I’ll make sure we were not followed. Here.’ He tossed me his gladius, the last of his secondary weapons. I caught it and nodded, hastening to the archway, but could see and hear no danger.

‘There are steps leading down,’ I called. ‘And I can feel a breeze.’

It was artificial of course, and the air was musty, but it could indicate that we were close to a deck with atmospheric recycling, which almost certainly meant a human presence.

Corax waited under the gaping hatch for a few more seconds before joining me.

‘What of your helm sensors?’ I asked, knowing that my brother was already cycling through the visual spectra of his retinal lenses.

‘Shadows…’ he hissed, his tone leaving me slightly unnerved.

If I didn’t know my brother better, I would swear he sounded concerned about that.

‘Only way is down,’ I muttered, levelling my gladius at the darkness as though it were a foe I could engage.

Corax agreed, unsheathing his talons, and together we descended the steps.

At the bottom, the darkness was just as thick and abject. It was like trying to see through pitch. I knew it wasn’t an ordinary absence of light. Our eyes would have penetrated that easily and left us in no doubt as to our surroundings. This was different. Viscous and congealing, here the shadows clung to us like tar. As I stared into the oily depths, I saw the vague adumbration of what appeared to be a coliseum. We were standing back to back in its arena. Beneath our feet were sand and earth.

‘It’s a trap!’ I cried, but too late.

Corax was halfway up the steps when a sliding blast door sealed us in. A step behind him, I turned to face the arena as the unnatural darkness bled away through vents in the floor and a chill I hadn’t realised was affecting me melted from my body. Flaming torches delineated an eight-sided battleground where the skeletal remains of gladiators and their shattered trappings still lingered like unquiet spirits. I recalled where I had seen the antechamber before. It was in Themis, a city of Nocturnian warrior kings who engaged in gladiatorial contest to prove their prowess and choose their next tribal leader. Before each fight, the combatants would wait in barrack rooms to sharpen their blades or their minds before the upcoming contest. Corax and I had done neither. I suddenly wondered what our gaoler had in mind for us.

‘It’s a little archaic, I admit,’ said Curze, our attention drawn to him. He was standing above us, looking down from the pulpit of an amphitheatre. ‘But I think Angron would have appreciated it. A pity he isn’t here to see it. Your paths almost crossed on Isstvan, didn’t they, brother?’

I arched my neck, meeting Curze’s gaze in the highest echelons of the amphitheatre. He was not alone. Thirty of his Atramentar Terminators encircled the arena, the threat of their reaper cannons obvious.

‘A pity ours did not,’ I replied.

‘You had your chance on Kharaatan and didn’t take it.’

‘You will wish I did when this is over.’

Curze smiled thinly. The two Atramentar flanking him proffered arms, a sword and trident.

‘On Nostramo, we had no grand theatres like this. Our gutters and hives were our arenas, but offerings of bloodsport were plentiful.’

He tossed the sword down to us. It impaled itself in the ground, up to a third of its blade deep.

‘Gang culture ruled our streets and everyone wanted to be a part of the strongest gang.’

The trident followed, striking the earth with enough force to send vibrations all the way down its haft.

‘Even murderers and rapists have ritual,’ Curze went on. ‘Even to scum like them it’s important. Opportunities were always limited, often only enough for one. First thing,’ he said, looking down at Corax, ‘the fight must be fair. Remove your armour, brother. Vulkan stands unequal to it.’

‘I didn’t think you approved of holding court, Konrad,’ I replied, stepping forwards as I challenged him. ‘Isn’t that why you butchered your world’s overlords and spire nobles?’

‘They did not lord over me, nor were they noble,’ Curze uttered darkly. ‘Now, Corax will remove his armour or condemn your own sons to death.’

From the back ranks of the Atramentar, two warriors were brought forwards on opposite sides of the amphitheatre. On one side there was Kravex, my brother’s errant son that he had believed dead; on the other was Nemetor.

Both warriors struggled vainly against their captors, not to escape but rather to make clear their defiance.

‘Nemetor…’ How one wounded son had come to mean so much… Curze had not told me what had become of the rest of my Legion, and I had not the heart to ask him. I believed they still lived, though in what numbers I could not say. Had they perished completely on Isstvan, Curze would not have passed up the opportunity to twist that particular knife. And for all the deception of his trials, Curze had not yet lied to me in anything he had said. The Salamanders yet lived. I yet lived. I had to save Nemetor.

Evidently, Corax had reached the same conclusion and quietly removed his armour until he was standing alongside me in the arena with only the lower mesh of his leggings, greaves and boots. His magnificent war-plate lay discarded on the sand like worthless chaff.

Curze had brought us low, and I felt the gnawing guilt of bringing my brother into this crude pantomime.

‘I am sorry, Corvus. For all of this.’

‘Put it from your mind, Vulkan. I made my decision free of will, as I know you would have done also.’

‘But there is something you don’t understand, brother…’

Two gladiatorial helms thrown in our midst interrupted my confession. One was black, fashioned into the likeness of a bird of prey; the other was dark green and draconian. It was obvious what Curze wanted us to do.

‘Are we to dance next?’ I said, stooping to retrieve the helmet intended for me.

‘In a manner of speaking,’ Curze replied. ‘Put them on.’

The inside of the helmet was rough. It felt heavy.

‘One lives, one dies,’ said Curze, his voice channelled to me through a reedy vox-link inside my armour. ‘Gang culture is brutal, brothers. But I wouldn’t expect you to understand that yet. You will.’

I looked up at Nemetor, my son seeming oblivious to his surroundings, then back to Corax, seeing him do the same with Kravex.

I felt the presence of the abyss again, my bare feet teetering on its edge, looking down into hell and darkness. Pain seared my skull from everywhere at once and I realised the helmet was rough because its interior was studded with a host of tiny nails. Curze had just embedded their points in my skull. The abyss throbbed in my mind’s eye, urging me to act, to step off and be lost to its heat.

I fought to stay calm, to rein in the madness threatening to turn me raving.

Corax hadn’t moved yet, though only a few short seconds had lapsed.

‘Survivor goes free, as do his men,’ Curze gave his last edict to us out loud. ‘For let me say now, I have several more drakes and ravens in my rookery. Now, fight.’

Curze had yet to lie to me. If the game was to have meaning, he would tell the truth here too. But I could not kill Corax. I would sacrifice Nemetor for that, though it would hurt me to do so. I would not bow down to barbarism and become like him. Insanity clawed at the edges of my consciousness but I refused to submit to it. Curze would not win. I would not let him.

Corax would defeat me, Nemetor would die, but at least Corvus would live. I could make that sacrifice, I could do that for my brother.

I reached for the sword.

‘And, Vulkan…’ Curze whispered through the vox-link, a final instruction just for me, ‘I lied. Beat Corax, render him unconscious or I kill him and his Ravens, letting you watch as I do it.’

I tried to shout out, but a wedge of steel slammed into my open mouth from a device wrought into the helm, muting me.

Corax had yet to move. I wondered if Curze had told him the same thing as me, only the reverse of the scenario I had been presented with.

‘Still reluctant to fight?’ asked Curze. ‘I don’t blame you. It’s a heavy thing to have to kill your brother to survive. But trust me when I tell you that hungry dogs have no loyalty when the prize is survival. I remember a family on Nostramo. Their bonds were tight and they fought tooth and nail for one another, gutting entire gangs that dared raise a hand against them.

‘One winter, one particularly bitter and frigid winter, they went to war with a rival gang. Territory and status were the prize. It became about honour, if you can believe that? Such a lofty and costly ideal. It took them far from what they called home. It was war, only much grubbier than you have ever experienced.

‘Towards the end, food ran short, when the rats were gone and the litter in the streets bereft of sustenance. Desperation breeds desperate men. The loyal gang, the one whose blood ties were so strong… they fell upon each other. Murdered each other. One side wanted to keep fighting, the other just wanted the war to end. You see, brothers, sometimes the enemy is just the person preventing you from getting home.’ Curze stepped forwards, put his hands on the rail in front of him. ‘No more delays. Only one of you is getting out of this. Only one gets to go home.’

Corax picked up the trident.

‘I am sorry, Vulkan.’

I could give him no answer.

Curze retreated into the shadows again.

‘Remember what I said, brother,’ he whispered to me.

I had barely wrapped my hand around the sword’s hilt when Corax lunged. His feet left the ground, his leap taking him halfway across the small arena. Dragging the blade free, I rolled and felt the trident punch the earth where I had been standing. A second blow darted past my cheek, tearing it open and flecking the sand with blood. I parried, smashing a third trident thrust aside and landing a heavy punch to Corax’s midriff, staggering him back. I had a second’s rest but he came at me again, crafting a series of small but piercing jabs against my improvised defence.

I had never fought Corax before, but had seen him in battle often enough. His fighting style was not unlike the avian creature from which he took his honorific. Deft, probing attacks like the snapping of a beak assailed me. He was swift, with an ever-shifting combat posture, attacking my blind side and often moving into peripheral assault patterns.

I turned and blocked, took small cuts on my arms, torso and legs. He was relentless, and had not spent the last few months or years of his life trapped in a cell. Furthermore, he was willing to kill me. There was a fury to his attacks, something I had not yet embraced for the duel. Since picking up his trident, a change had come over my brother – one that I was unprepared for.

The abyss returned in my mind, beckoning as the hot nails pushed deeper into my skull, stimulating my anger and need for violence.

Was I the monster that Curze had described all those years ago on Kharaatan? When I had burned that eldar child to ash for her part in killing Seriph, was it retribution or had I just used that to justify an act of sadistic self-satisfaction?

I reeled, feeling my sanity unpicking at its already frayed seams.

Corax landed a telling blow, the trident lodged in my left pectoral, digging into muscle and below. I would have screamed were it not for the wedge in my mouth gagging me.

Rage.

I cut a savage wound across Corax’s torso as he found his guard compromised with the trident still impaled in my body.

Rage.

I snapped the trident’s haft in two, leaving the fork still embedded in my flesh.

Rage.

I threw down my sword and hurled myself at Corax.

I am strong, perhaps the physically strongest of all my father’s sons. Corax had claimed as much once. Now he felt it first-hand. With a single blow of my clenched fist I smashed apart his helmet’s grille, revealing his anguished mouth beneath, spitting blood. I landed a second punch around his left ear, snapping his head to the side and denting the helm inwards. Corax shrieked like a bird. I wanted to break his wings, fracture that weakling skull. Despite his attempts to fend me off – a knee into my chest, a heavy jab to my exposed kidneys, a throat strike – I overwhelmed him. With sheer bulk, I bore him down to the earth. He grunted as his back hit the ground hard, and I punched the air from his lungs. Like a vice, my hands were around his throat. Straddling him, Corax’s arms pinned by my knees, he couldn’t move. All he could do now was die.

During the savage assault, his helmet had come apart. I saw his dark eyes staring at me, that quiet wisdom turned to terror.

I squeezed harder, feeling his toughened larynx giving way to my fury as I slowly crushed it. His eyes bulged in their sockets and through blood-rimed teeth he choked two words.

‘Do it…’

At my side, I felt the presence of Ferrus, his skeletal form hovering in my peripheral vision.

‘Do it…’ he rasped.

Above me in the amphitheatre, held fast but still struggling, I heard Nemetor whisper.

‘Do it…’

It would be so easy. I had but to tighten my grip a fraction and…

I stopped. Fingertips still clinging to the edge of the abyss, I hauled myself up and rolled away from its burning depths. In that moment, I knew that I would not be granted my freedom. I wanted to kill Corax to sate my rage.

‘Kill him, Vulkan!’ Curze snarled, rushing up to the rail. ‘He’s finished. Claim your freedom.’

‘Return to your Legion,’ urged Ferrus. ‘It is the only way…’

I released my grip around Corax’s throat and let him go. Exhausted, physically and mentally, I rolled off my brother and onto my back.

‘No. I won’t do it,’ I gasped, breathing hard. ‘Not like this.’

‘Then you have damned yourself,’ hissed Ferrus.

Not knowing what had happened, Corax got to his feet, picked up my fallen sword and stabbed me through the heart.

I came round screaming. I had returned to my cell, but still lay on my back. The door was intact and there was no evidence of my recent escape. I was strapped down to a metal slab, arms, legs and neck. I couldn’t move and there was a metal wedge in my mouth, gagging me. Surrounding me was a coven of human psykers, feral-looking with strange sigils daubed on their bodies and robes.

‘Davinites,’ Curze explained as he walked into my eye line, before killing every one of the witches in a sudden and violent blur. ‘They have served and failed their purpose,’ he said when he was done butchering them.

It was all a lie – visions implanted in my mind.

Curze removed the wedge from my mouth.

‘Did you expect me to kill him?’ I snarled.

My brother looked profoundly unhappy.

‘You are not noble. You are no better than me,’ he muttered, before killing me again.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Sacrifices

‘You have suffered. I know this. You have come to the abyss, and almost surrendered yourselves to it. That changes now. I am father, general, lord and mentor. I shall teach you if I can, and pass on the knowledge I have gained. Honour, self-sacrifice, self-reliance, brotherhood. It is our Promethean creed and all must adhere to it if we are to prosper. Let this be the first lesson…’

– Primarch Vulkan in his inaugural address
on Terra to the survivors of the XVIII Legion

Numeon didn’t know who had survived the battle. He was lying face down, his armour’s sensors screaming in a rash of red warning icons. Undoubtably, the fall had saved his life. He hoped it had taken others with him. Groaning, he rolled onto his back and fought to bring the physical trauma under control. Pulse was returning to normal. Breathing also. He waited, in silence and in darkness, for his body to repair and his armour systems to reboot and stabilise.

Someone stirred in the darkness next to him.

Shen’ra’s battle-plate was split, gored by blades and shell holes. His cybernetic eye flickered and went dead.

‘Lost the half-track…’ he croaked.

Numeon managed to nod.

‘Lit those traitors up well though, didn’t it?’ said the old Techmarine, smiling as he passed out. His vital signs were holding; Shen’ra yet lived.

There were others too, some less fortunate than Shen’ra. After Leodrakk and Hriak had escaped with the human, Numeon had returned to the manufactorum. Avus was dead, giving up his life so that his kinsmen could get away. He had saved Numeon in the process, then killed the other Word Bearers into the sacrificial bargain. A melta bomb at close range.

The third legionary, another sniper and probably one of those responsible for the shooting of Helon, Uzak and Shaka, had fallen back before the Raptor’s impassioned onslaught. Avus was another kill-notch on his rifle now, the Word Bearer’s disengagement from the fight leaving Numeon impotent to enact vengeance or make his own sacrifice.

By the time he got to the others, the fight had spilled out onto the streets. Domadus was down, Pergellen nowhere to be seen. K’gosi and Shen’ra remained, surrounded by the dead and dying. In desperation, the Techmarine set off a seismic charge, hoping to take their enclosing enemies with them. He succeeded in part, but collapsed the manufactorum’s already weak foundations.

Numeon remembered the ground coming apart beneath him, the sense of weightlessness akin to the last moments of a drop-pod insertion. Debris was coming down on top of him. A chunk ripped off his right pauldron and sent radial fractures up his arm. He clutched the sigil, Vulkan’s sigil, as they touched down in water. A sewer pipe, running fast, carrying them away from the battle, cheating them of the honourable death they had all earned.

Half submerged, the air rank with the stink of effluvia, Numeon stared up at the ceiling as crawling sewer vermin came to inspect the latest offerings from above but found them brittle and tough.

‘K’gosi…’ he breathed.

‘I am here.’

‘Can you move?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Then wait for a time, wait until you can,’ said Numeon.

‘I’m not going anywhere, Pyre captain.’

‘Good,’ Numeon answered, half dazed and drifting in and out of consciousness. ‘That’s good.’

He still clung to the sigil and lifted the hammer icon into a shaft of light lancing through a crack in the wall to inspect it. It was smeared with grime; Numeon used his thumb to clean the sigil and was reminded of when he saw it last on Isstvan.

Isstvan V

The Contemptor lumbered through a pall of smoke, blood flecking its blue-and-white paintwork. Numerous blade and shell scars marred its armour, the true laurels of battle by which all warriors were ultimately judged, or so the XII Legion believed.

Ash-fall from the many thousands of fires was turning the sky grey. It baptised a cohort of warriors, clad to various degrees in ancient gladiatorial trappings and wielding ritual caedere weapons. They were the Rampagers, a deadly breed even amongst the Eaters of Worlds, and a throwback to Angron’s incarceration as a slave-fighter. Bellowing guttural war cries, they charged ahead of the Dreadnought to engage the Salamanders.

Numeon balked at what the battle-maddened World Eaters attempted. He counted no more than thirty men. Just three squads. Yet they charged over a hundred. Several went down to sporadic bolter fire. Some were clipped by shrapnel but kept on coming. Only those too injured to fight, unable to run because of missing limbs or critical wounds were halted. Something urgent and terrible spurred them on. Numeon had read reports of the ferocity of the XII. Even when they were the War Hounds, their reputation in battle, particularly close-quarters, was fearsome. As the reborn World Eaters under Angron, they had become something else. Rumours abounded within the ranks, of arcane devices that manipulated the legionaries’ tempers, simulacra of the ones embedded in Angron’s skull by his slavers.

Now he saw them, ignoring pain and injury, frothing with frenzy, Numeon believed those stories to be true.

A howling berserker, a falx blade in either hand, leapt at the primarch. Vulkan swatted him aside, but the crazed warrior managed to parry a killing stroke and came up fighting as he landed. A second Rampager whirled a chain with a barbed hook around his head. Lashing out, it snared Atanarius and dragged the swordsman into the World Eater’s killing arc.

Numeon had no time to react as he threw himself aside from a massive hammer smashing down at him. Driven by a small rocket-propelled ignition system, it struck the ground with meteoric force and trembled the earth underfoot. Varrun stepped in to engage the warrior but was taken off his feet by the hammer’s backswing. Trying to rush to Varrun’s aid, Numeon found the falx-armed legionary in his path. The Salamander blocked one swing of a curved blade, barely turning it aside as he felt the hook of the other rake his armoured face. One of the lenses cracked and he lost resolution in it. Ganne bore the frenzied legionary down and pummelled him with his storm shield, whilst Igataron crushed the World Eater’s shoulder to disarm him of the falx. The blood-splashed legionary was about to lunge, ignoring the excruciating pain he must be in, when Numeon impaled him through the chest with his glaive.

‘They are insane,’ growled Ganne.

Numeon nodded, and in the brief respite searched for the rest of his Pyre Guard to see how they were faring.

Varrun was still down but at least moving.

Atanarius was on his knees, butcher’s hooks digging into his armour, still snared by the chain. Skatar’var was trying to release him as Leodrakk fought the chain-wielder, but was finding the Rampager’s fury hard to counter. He staggered, on the defensive, and would have fallen if Vulkan hadn’t lifted the World Eater off his feet and rammed him head first into the ground to silence his screaming.

Another hammer-bearer smashed aside three of Heka’tan’s Fire-born, the Fourteenth and Fifth Companies having found a way through the trenches to engage the World Eaters. Gravius’s troops were still catching up. Below them, K’gosi and the Pyroclasts held the trench-works. Elsewhere on the slope, a much larger force of Firedrakes fought Angron’s Devourers to a bloody stalemate.

For once, the Lord of the Red Sands was close to his honour guard. Numeon heard him bellow a challenge, heard Vulkan’s name amongst the guttural syllables of his native tongue. The ash and smoke were thickening; down to one retinal lens, the other a static-veined mess, it was difficult to get a visual. He caught sight of Vulkan.

The primarch was trading blows with the Contemptor. Though it dwarfed him, the hefty war machine was slowly being taken apart. Vulkan had fought it back and was amongst the Firedrakes in the heart of the battle.

Torn between rejoining the primarch and gathering his brother Pyre Guard, Numeon ran to Varrun, who was still down.

‘Get up! This is far from over.’

Varrun muttered something, but did as he was told.

As he hauled his brother to his feet, Numeon found Vulkan again through the throng.

The Contemptor towered over him, twin power claws trailing jagged loops of energy. Its chest plate was badly dented and cables in its neck spat dangerously.

A dense muzzle flare erupted from Vulkan’s pistol. It had been a gift from Lord Manus, a gesture the primarch of the Salamanders had reciprocated. Discharged at close range, it severed the servos in the Dreadnought’s right arm, rendering one of its weapons limp and useless. Vulkan clambered up the Dreadnought’s torso and when he reached the summit rammed his sword downwards into its armoured head. Like a beast felled but still catching up to the realisation that it was slain, the Contemptor sank to one knee. Its dead arm hung loose by its side whilst the other gripped its knee, struggling for purchase.

Numeon rejoiced as the war machine collapsed, triumph turned to anguish when he saw the pair of Rampagers closing on the primarch. Vulkan was pinned, unable to release the weapon he had sunk so deep to kill his enemy. With a savage twist, the primarch snapped the blade and hurled its jagged remains at one of the Rampagers. It struck the savage gladiator in the face, goring out an eye and killing him instantly. Pushing back off the Dreadnought’s corpse with his feet, Vulkan dodged the eviscerator meant for his skull. It chewed into the Contemptor’s metal chassis instead, grinding metal and spitting sparks before getting stuck.

Yanking at the eviscerator’s hilt but unable to release the weapon, the Rampager roared and abandoned it, intending to take Vulkan on with his bare fists. The primarch had drawn Dawnbringer and took the Rampager’s head off with a desultory swing. Blood was still fountaining from the World Eater’s ragged stump of a neck when a shadow loomed on the ridge-line above.

Anointed in blood, partially obscured by scudding clouds of smoke and shimmering heat haze, Angron bellowed.

‘Vulkan!’ His voice was the like fall of cities, rumbling and booming across the vast battlefield.

Angron jabbed down to his brother with one of the motorised axes he carried. Its blade was burring, roaring for blood. ‘I name you high rider!’

Spittle frothed the red primarch’s lips. His oversized musculature, seemingly too tight for his vein-threaded skin, rippled. Thick ropes of sinew stood out on his neck. A scarred and war-beaten face, framed by the nest of cybernetic scalp-locks snaking back across his head, tensed as Angron’s eyes widened.

Farther down the slope, Vulkan gripped the haft of his hammer and went to meet his brother’s challenge.

Numeon saw it all, and almost urged his primarch to hold.

An arcing missile salvo from one of the traitor gun emplacements forced the Pyre captain’s attention skywards. He tracked the spear-headed missile all the way down, following its trajectory until it struck part of the slope between the two primarchs.

A firestorm lit the hillside, several tonnes of incendiary ordnance expressed in the expansive bloom of conflagration. It swept outwards in a turbulent wave, bathing the lower part of the slope in heat and flame. This was nothing compared to its epicentre. Firedrakes were immolated in that blast, blown apart and burned to ash in their Terminator armour.

A hundred dying sunsets faded from Numeon’s sight. Blinking back the savage afterglow he saw Vulkan wreathed in flames, but stepping from the blaze unharmed. The remaining Firedrakes gathered to him, tramping over the dead where they had to.

Badly burned, the Ravagers were still fighting. The Pyre Guard and some of Heka’tan’s men finished them before Numeon led the warriors after their lord. Varrun was limping. Atanarius clutched his side, but clung to his blade determinedly with one hand.

‘Are we whole, brothers?’ Numeon quickly asked.

Atanarius nodded.

Varrun gave a mocking laugh. ‘Perhaps we should look to increasing our ranks when this is over?’

Ganne came to his side, not supporting the veteran but keeping watch.

‘Are you my protector, brother?’ Varrun asked.

‘Not remotely,’ snarled Ganne, but didn’t leave him.

Igataron said nothing, and merely glowered. His eyes behind his retinal lenses always seemed to burn brighter than his brothers’.

Mauled as they had been by the World Eaters, Numeon knew that his warriors had suffered but would not stop until they were dead or the battle was over. But it was grievously attritional, and he was not ashamed to admit relief when he heard that the reinforcements coming in to make planetfall behind them.

Hundreds of landers and drop-pods choked the already suffocating sky, emblazoned with the iconography of the Alpha Legion, Iron Warriors, Word Bearers and Night Lords. Even the sight of Konrad Curze’s Legion gave Numeon hope that the battle could be won and Horus brought to heel at last.

Vulkan had seen the arrival of his brothers and their Legions too, though he gave no outward sign of relief or premature triumph. He merely watched impassively as the manifold shuttles touched down and the loyalists took up position on the edge of the depression. Of Angron, there was no sign. The firestorm had beaten him back, it seemed, and now with the arrival of four more Legions, the Lord of the Red Sands had ordered a retreat.

Grainy static preceded the opening of the vox-link. All the Pyre Guard heard it, too, though it was on Vulkan’s channel, the primarch’s view that there could be no secrets from his inner circle. Through the choppy return, the Gorgon’s voice thundered.

‘The enemy is beaten!’

His anger was obvious, his desire for retribution palpable. Lord Manus wanted blood to salve his wounded pride.

‘See how they run from us!’ he continued, an eager fervour affecting him. ‘Now we push on, let none escape our vengeance!’

Numeon exchanged a glance with Varrun. The veteran was badly wounded but able to fight on. Atanarius was also struggling, whilst Skatar’var stayed close to his brother Leodrakk on account of his injuries. With reinforcements ready to deploy, it made sense to fall back and consolidate. Pressing the advance now yielded only glory and profligate death.

Vulkan was impassive, betraying none of his thoughts as he allowed Corax to speak up.

‘Hold, Ferrus! The victory may yet be ours, but let our allies earn their share of honour in this battle. We have achieved a great victory, but not without cost. My Legion is bloodied and torn, as is Vulkan’s…’

Again, the primarch kept his own counsel, as the Ravenlord concluded his speech.

‘I cannot imagine yours has not shed a great deal of blood to carry us this far.’

Lord Manus was belligerent. ‘We are bloodied, but unbowed.’

Making the most of the enemy’s retreat and the brief cessation in the fighting, Vulkan chose that moment to give voice. ‘As are we all. We should take a moment to catch our breath and bind our wounds before again diving headlong into such terrible battle.’ The cost of which lay all around, clad in bloody green armour.

‘We must consolidate what we have won,’ Vulkan suggested, ‘and let our newly arrived brothers continue the fight while we regroup.’

But the Gorgon smelled blood and would not relent.

‘No! The traitors are beaten and all it will take is one final push to destroy them utterly!’

Corax tried a last attempt at reason.

‘Ferrus, do not do anything foolish! We have already won!’

It was to no avail, as the link to the Iron Hands’ primarch went dead.

‘Our brother has overmuch pride, Corvus,’ said Vulkan candidly.

‘He will get himself killed.’

‘He is too tough for that,’ Vulkan said, but Numeon heard the lie in his words, the hollow tone of his voice.

‘I won’t be dragged in with him, Vulkan. I won’t lead my sons into another meatgrinder for the sake of his pride.’

‘Then hope reinforcement reaches him quickly, for he won’t be dissuaded by you or I.’

‘I am converging on the dropsite. Will I meet you there?’

Vulkan paused and it felt like the few seconds stretched into minutes before he gave his answer. Numeon was reminded of their words aboard the Fireforge, of Ferrus Manus’s wrath being his undoing, of the foreseen distemper in Horus and the profound disquiet about this very battle. They rose up in the Pyre Guard captain, threatening to choke him with their sense of foreboding.

‘Aye,’ said Vulkan at length. ‘We shall consolidate at the dropsite. Perhaps Ferrus will see sense and muster with us.’

‘He won’t.’

‘No, you’re probably right.’ Vulkan ended the transmission. It was as if a mantle of grief lay about his shoulders, heavy with the burden of a fear that had been confirmed in what he’d just heard or felt. Numeon could not explain it.

‘Order all companies to fall back to the dropsite,’ Vulkan told him.

Numeon voxed down to K’gosi at once. The Pyroclasts had all but cleansed the trenches of the enemy, leaving the route back clear and open.

Whilst the retreat of Horus’s rebels was ragged and disorganised, the warriors of the XVIII and XIX Legions fell back in good order. Tanks returned to column, rumbling slowly but steadily back down the slope. The scorched trenches emptied as legionaries filed out in vast hosts, company banners still flying. They were battered but resolute. The dead and injured came with them, dragged or borne aloft by their still standing brothers. It was a great exodus, the black and green ocean of war retreating with the tide to leave the flotsam of their slain enemy behind it.

Most of the fortifications were destroyed. Huge sections of earthworks and spiked embankments lay open like rotting wounds. Bodies were impaled upon them, some clad in dusky white, others in arterial red or lurid purple. It was the evidence of fratricide a thousand times over, and it was this that Vulkan lingered behind to look upon before he quit the field.

‘This is not victory,’ he murmured. ‘It is death. It is bonds broken and bloody. And it shall mark us all for generations.’

On the northern side of the Urgall Depression, a fresh sea made ready to sweep in and carry all of the mortal debris away.

Across from the muster field of the Salamanders, which was little more than a laager of drop-ships, were the Iron Warriors. Armoured in steel-grey with black-and-yellow chevrons, the IV Legion looked stark and stern. They had erected a barricade, the armoured bastions of their own landing craft alloyed together, to bolster the northern face of the slope. Great cannons were raised aloft behind it, their snouts pointing to the ash-smothered sky. A line of battle tanks sat in front, bearing the grim icon of a metal-helmeted skull. And in front of that, Iron Warriors arrayed in their cohorts, thousands strong. They held their silence and their weapons across their bodies, with no more life than automatons.

The drop-zone was flooded with warriors now, as a makeshift camp materialised to serve the injured and secure the bodies of the dead. Tank yards manifested as labour teams of Techmarines and servitors assembled to make standing repairs. Multiple triage stations were being set up in the lee of the larger Stormbirds, whilst the holds of some Thunderhawks acted as emergency infirmaries. The able-bodied looked to their armour and weapons. Quartermasters took stock, replenished ammunition and materiel where they could. Officers reorganised in the face of casualties. Subalterns and equerries gave brief reports to line officers, and standard bearers acted as rally points as the entire Vexillarius was put into motion organising for the second assault.

Not a single legionary about the XVIII stood idle.

Yet the Iron Warriors, the entire muster on the northern slope, neither spoke nor moved beyond what was necessary to assemble.

Chief Apothecary Sen’garees voxed through to the command echelon, including Vulkan and the Pyre Guard, complaining of the lack of reply regarding requests for aid, specifically medical.

Numeon felt a grim silence descend across the whole Urgall Depression like when a storm eclipses the sun, as he saw Captain Ral’stan of the Firedrakes raise his fist in salute to their iron allies.

Not one responded to his hail. Only the wind kicking at their banners gave any sense of animus to the IV Legion throng.

‘Why do they ignore us?’ asked Leodrakk openly.

Vulkan was staring in the direction of his brother, Perturabo. The Lord of Iron returned the Lord of Drakes’ gimlet gaze with one of his own.

‘Because we are betrayed…’ said Vulkan, disbelieving, horror turning to anger on his face, ‘To arms!’

More than ten thousand guns answered, the weapons of their allies turned on them with traitorous intent.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Reunited

‘Though the battle had ended and the enemy was far from the reach of our blades, most of us didn’t come back from the Urgall Depression. Even those men who escaped, those pitiful few, even they didn’t come back. They’re still there now. We all are, fighting for our lives.’

– unknown legionary survivor of the Isstvan V massacre

It looked bad. There was no other way to describe it. Definitely bad. Nurth was bad, but this was a whole other pit of groxshit that Grammaticus had found himself in. And then there was the alien. Not Slau Dha, or Gahet. Certainly not anyone affiliated with the Cabal. Here was a different player entirely, an eldar whose agenda was as inscrutable as his identity.

And then there was Oll.

But he couldn’t worry about that now. He’d done everything he could on that front, and as much as his old friend had clearly resented being reached out to, what other choice did Grammaticus have?

The universe suddenly felt very small, and Grammaticus was somehow at its beating heart and under intense scrutiny from all interested parties. Insects on microscope slides had more privacy. He thought of Anatol Hive, and wished that he had been allowed to die in the Unification Wars.

Fate had other plans for him, though. If asked at the time, he doubted he would have said that that fate included a battered group of legionaries and running for his life down a sewer tunnel. If they knew of his true mission…

His two minders looked tired, and fraught. The one called Leodrakk, the Salamander, had eyed him several times since they had reached what Grammaticus assumed was a rendezvous point. He also assumed that whoever Leodrakk was meant to be rendezvousing with was late. This would be Numeon, his captain and the legionary in charge. It didn’t bode well. What boded worse was if Numeon was dead. That left Leodrakk running things, and he looked about ready to charge to his glorious death, killing Grammaticus into the bargain. Not that it would matter, but then his mission would effectively be over. He also feared to imagine what the Word Bearers would do to him.

He didn’t know what the Salamanders and their allies in the other broken Legions had intended to achieve here on Traoris. Whatever it was, it had gone awry, and he suspected that he carried some weight of blame in that.

Leodrakk’s eyes told him all of this. They spoke of grief and a dangerously fatalistic desire for revenge. Grammaticus had seen men like that in the united armies, when they were fighting Narthan Dume. He’d never seen it in a Space Marine before, and he wondered just what these warriors had lost to transform them so egregiously.

‘What are you staring at?’ snarled the Salamander. He was crouching down, and had been looking at his helmet, facing him on his lap.

‘I’m wondering what happened to you,’ said Grammaticus.

‘War happened to us,’ he replied curtly.

‘You are made for war. There is more to it than that.’

Leodrakk looked into the stinking filth that streamed beneath their feet, but found no answers in the dirty water.

Instead, the Librarian spoke up.

‘We were betrayed,’ he rasped, ‘at Isstvan. It was worse than atrocity. The massacre we endured was only the physical manifestation of our collective trauma. The real pain was to come, and it was a malady of the mind. Not everyone survived it.’

Hriak, the Raven Guard, paused as if trying to see into Grammaticus’s mind for the source of his curiosity. It was deeply unsettling, and Grammaticus fought to keep his hand from trembling. Many years ago he believed that a very close friend of his had succumbed to a psyker’s mental intrusion. It was all lies, of course. Everything about it had been a lie, one way or another. It had still unnerved him, though, the sheer destructive potential of battle psykers. No wonder the Emperor had removed them from the Legions.

‘From the horror of Isstvan, we escaped aboard a drop-ship,’ Hriak continued, ‘but the horror did not end there. All of us were changed by what we had witnessed, the sight of our brothers slain in droves beside us, our former allies turning their guns on our backs while at the same time known traitors to our fronts opened up with their weapons in vicious concert.’

Grammaticus looked askance at Leodrakk for a reaction as Hriak related their story, and found him to be deeply uncomfortable at the retelling, but content to let it go on.

‘Some of the survivors aboard our drop-ship were not themselves,’ said Hriak. ‘When a man is heightened to a certain point of battle fervour, it can be difficult for him to come down from that. Sometimes, if the experience is particularly traumatic, he can never fully recover and a part of him will always be at war, in that self-same conflict. Such men, blinded by this trauma, have killed in error, believing friends to be foes. It takes a great deal for the Legiones Astartes to succumb to such a trauma. Our minds are much stronger than ordinary mortals, but it is possible.’

And then Grammaticus knew. He knew how Hriak had sustained the wound to his neck, the one that had very nearly slit his throat completely. It wasn’t actually on Isstvan that he’d received it, it was on the drop-ship. It was inflicted by–

‘That’s enough, Hriak,’ whispered Leodrakk. ‘We don’t need to remember that, and he doesn’t need to hear it either.’

‘My presence here has complicated things for you, hasn’t it?’ said Grammaticus.

‘You have undermined our entire mission.’

Grammaticus shook his head, nonplussed at the mordant Salamander. ‘What the fug did you intend to achieve, anyway? What were you, twenty-something men against an entire host, an entire city? I get it that you want payback, but how does throwing yourselves on your enemies’ swords get you what you want?’

Leodrakk stood, and for a brief moment looked like he was about to end Grammaticus, but decided against it.

‘It is not so simple as revenge. We want to get back into the war, make a difference, for what we do to have meaning. Before we came here, we had been tracking the Word Bearers of this particular cult for a while. We followed them to a small, backwater world called Viralis but were too late to prevent what they unleashed there.’

Grammaticus frowned. ‘Unleashed?’

‘Daemons, John Grammaticus, a subject about which I suspect you are well-versed.’

‘I have seen the Acuity,’ he admitted.

Leodrakk scowled. ‘I won’t even ask what that is. A gift from your Cabal, no doubt.’

‘It’s no gift, it’s truth and one I wish I could erase from my mind.’

‘Again, not my concern. What does concern me,’ he gestured to Hriak too, ‘us, our mission, is to prevent what happened on Viralis from happening here. Their leader, the Word Bearers cleric, was supposed to die by our hand. We would slip in unnoticed, find him and execute him. Pergellen was our trigger man, the rest of us would ensure rapid egress in the face of reprisal. Our chances of success were good, our chances of survival less so, but at least we would die knowing Traoris was safe.’

‘No world is safe, Salamander,’ Grammaticus countered. ‘No part of the galaxy, however remote, is going to be spared.’

Leodrakk snarled, angry, but more at the situation than Grammaticus. ‘We would spare this world. At least from that.’ He backed down, the threat of violence ebbed. ‘But now we are discovered and being hunted. Shen and Pergellen should have left you in that warehouse.’

Grammaticus nodded. ‘Yes, they should have. But they didn’t, and now you have me and know what I know, so what are you going to do with that?’

‘Nothing,’ said a voice from deeper in the tunnel. It was dark, but even Grammaticus recognised the warrior coming to meet them. He was not alone, either.

‘Numeon.’ Leodrakk went to greet him. They locked wrists. Hriak merely bowed his head to acknowledge the captain. Leodrakk’s good mood soured when he saw who else had come back with Numeon. ‘So few?’ he asked.

‘Their sacrifice will have meaning, brother.’

Of the twenty-three legionaries that had made planetfall on Traoris from the Fire Ark, barely thirteen remained. Shen’ra had come back with Numeon, as well as K’gosi. Pergellen lingered at the back of the group, returning a few minutes after having made sure they were not followed. Hriak was the last of the Ravens now, and he muttered a Kiavahran oath for the fallen Avus. The rest were Salamanders.

Grammaticus beheld a broken force. Fate, oh that capricious mistress, had conspired against them. It had delivered him into their grasp and the fulgurite spear to the Word Bearers. The phrase ‘fugged beyond all reason’ didn’t even begin to describe it.

He also noticed that a key figure was missing, as did Leodrakk.

‘Where is Domadus?’ asked the Salamander.

Numeon sighed, weary. He took off his battle-helm. ‘We lost him during the fight. He and several others went out to meet the Seventeenth to stymie their assault. I didn’t see him fall, but…’ He shook his head.

‘So, what now?’ asked Shen’ra, hobbling to stand beside his brothers.

Grammaticus answered.

‘Let me go. Help me reclaim the spear and get off Traoris. What is there to lose now?’

Numeon ignored him, and went over to Shen’ra. He was badly wounded and struggling.

‘I have seen better days, before you ask,’ said the Techmarine acerbically. He was slumped against the tunnel wall, a trickle of effluence from the cracked ceiling painting a grubby track down his armour. Numeon kneeled to speak with him.

‘You saved us all, you irascible bastard.’

‘Lost the track-mount, though. Anyway…’ he paused to cough, ‘someone had to.’

Numeon laughed, but his humour quickly faded when he saw Shen’ra’s injuries.

The Techmarine’s bionic eye was only partially functional and he carried a limp, but his cracked breastplate hinted at the real damage. Internal injuries, partial biological shut-down.

Two other Salamanders in the returning party were already comatose as their brutalised bodies tried to repair themselves. Prognosis did not appear favourable. Three more were dead, shredded by bolt-rounds, impaled by blades. Not one killing wound, but several small ones amounting to the same. Attritional deaths. Their brothers had carried them, those that were washed down with them into the tunnels, just as they had before.

Grammaticus was surprised at the level of humanity they showed to their dead, and wondered if it was a common Nocturnean trait.

‘So, what now?’ he asked. ‘Are we to hide out in these tunnels until they find us?’

Numeon finished muttering some words of encouragement to the Techmarine and rose to his feet.

‘We move on. Find another way to achieve our mission.’

Leodrakk approached, noticing Numeon touching the sigil of Vulkan he had carried ever since they had fled Isstvan.

‘What do you think it’s for?’ he asked.

Numeon glanced down at it. Fashioned into a simple blacksmith’s hammer, it looked unremarkable.

‘I think it’s a symbol,’ he said. ‘When I see it, I believe in our primarch, that he is still alive. Beyond that, I don’t know.’

‘I hope you’re right, brother.’

Pergellen, returning from scouting out the tunnel ahead, interrupted them.

‘The way on is clear,’ he put in. ‘This tract ends in an outflow. It’s towards the edge of the city and should give us a good vantage point to plan our next move.’

Numeon nodded. ‘Make sure there are no surprises.’

Taking K’gosi with him, the scout headed back off into the darkness.

‘I hate to echo the human,’ said Leodrakk when Pergellen had gone, ‘but what is our next move?’

Numeon regarded Grammaticus.

‘They’re after him now. The attack on the manufactorum is proof of that. We might be able to use that. To use him.’

And just like that, fate twisted again and Grammaticus bemoaned that he had ever been ‘saved’ by the Salamanders.

The outflow ended in a broad sink, a few metres deep. It was raining heavily overhead, causing the dirty sewer run-off in the manmade basin to flow over its rockcrete lip in a rushing cataract that crashed down in an ever-deepening pool below.

At one side of the sink there was a wooden jetty. The bodies of three men laid face down on it. Their attire suggested they were sump-catchers. They had been stabbed to death, and the crude sigil daubed in blood on the jetty suggested it was cult-related. Above them hung a lattice of fishing lines, dead sump rats strung along them by their tiny feet. There were a couple of long pikes, too, and a crumpled-up net stuffed into an empty oil drum. A tarpaulin provided ineffective protection against the elements, covering two thirds of the jetty and suspended on guide poles like a crude tent.

‘Don’t want to slip in there, human,’ muttered Leodrakk as he escorted Grammaticus over a wooden walkway that creaked with the legionary’s every step.

Grammaticus looked down into the viscous, grimy soup slowly coagulating in the sink. Foulness practically radiated from it, the water an ugly pale yellow. Carcasses bobbed up and down in it, disturbed by the effluvia running out from the pipe and cascading over the basin edge.

It reminded him of the drainage basin on the outskirts of Anatol Hive when he had been just a child. As he looked down into the sink’s murky depths he tried not to picture the corpse-white face of the boy, and found that he had to look away. Instead, he thought about the eldar who had flected him in the infirmary. He had offered him a way out, a choice, a truth. Albeit one that had yet to be revealed to him in full. It went against his mission – it might also be a pack of lies, a test by the Cabal to see if he could be trusted. Tired wasn’t the word for how he felt now. He was ragged, just like the warriors who were escorting him. Not only that, he was a traitor to his race. His entire fugging race! That was something not many could claim, not that he was proud of it. He felt grubby, and not just from the sewer pipe. He wanted to believe what he had seen in the infirmary, he needed to. But what if it wasn’t real? What if Slau Dha, Gahet and all those other bastards were manipulating him still? All he had was his mission, and even that sickened him.

Thoroughly miserable, Grammaticus winced as a droplet from above splashed his eye.

Numeon lifted up his dripping gauntlet for retinal analysis.

‘High acid content,’ he said. ‘Better give him something to keep off the worst of it.’

‘How about we go somewhere other than a fugging sewer,’ suggested Grammaticus, ‘perhaps indoors and not surrounded by shit and piss?’

‘Here.’ K’gosi handed him his cloak. It was drake hide, virtually impervious to fire and more than adequate protection against acid-rain.

Grammaticus took it, grudgingly.

‘Why not give me one of theirs?’ he asked, gesturing to the dead Salamanders being carried out onto the jetty.

‘Not mine to give,’ said K’gosi.

‘They’re not going to need them.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ the Pyroclast replied and went to help secure the outer perimeter.

Pergellen was standing at the edge of the basin, a couple of metres away from the gushing cataract.

‘It’s sheer, over eighty metres straight down,’ he told Numeon, who had just joined him. ‘Though the water makes it look shorter than that.’

The dirty torrent from the sewer pipe was coming down so hard that it frothed and foamed below, rising and bubbling in a small but violent tumult. The spray kicked up all the way to the top of the outflow, but Pergellen’s gaze had moved skywards, to a high column which comprised part of an aqueduct that flanked the torrent.

‘Looks like a good vantage point,’ he said.

A walkway led from the jetty, along the side of the outflow pipes, all the way to the aqueduct, and had enough room for men to traverse in file. Beyond the aqueduct, the rest of Ranos was laid open. Numeon could see that since making planetfall they had moved east, towards the edge of the city.

His eyes narrowed.

‘Is that…?’ he asked.

‘The space port? Yes, it is,’ said Pergellen.

Numeon looked back over his shoulder to where Grammaticus was huddled up and shivering in K’gosi’s cloak.

‘This is no place to make a stand, brother.’

‘Agreed,’ said Pergellen. ‘What do you have in mind?’

Numeon watched the lines of dead sump-rats swaying with the foetid breeze.

‘Bait,’ he said.

Narek’s gladius slid from the Salamander’s neck with a wet slurrch. The legionary was dead before he had cleaned the blade and was moving on to the next. Bodies from both sides littered the street. Of the three squads he had taken to eliminate the loyalists, only a handful remained. It had been bloody, and harder fought than he had expected. The sniper had escaped. Again. This stuck in Narek’s craw, and irritated. Approaching the edge of the pit where the manufactorum had collapsed, he thought of the ones who had escaped. An underground river flowed beneath this part of the city, connected to its drainage system. He had no map of those tunnels, no knowledge of their existence or where the outflow would deposit anyone caught in the current, so he let it go.

The loyalists were running out of places to hide. Even if it took him to the edge of the city and the lightning-blasted wastes beyond it, he would track them down. He had sworn, so it would be done. Or he would die in the attempt. Honour about one’s duty, he felt, should still mean something.

‘Stop,’ he said, his boot pressed down on the chest of another half-dead enemy, but Narek was looking at Vogel, who was straddling a Salamander’s chest and was about to begin cutting flesh with his ritual knife.

‘What?’ asked the Word Bearer, head snapping round to regard the huntsman.

‘None of that.’ Narek left the other dying legionary where he was and walked over to Vogel.

‘I honour the Pantheon,’ Vogel hissed, evidently displeased.

‘You dishonour the deed, your kill,’ Narek replied, holding his gladius casually in his off-hand. ‘Mutilate the human chaff, by all means, but these were Legion warriors, once our brothers-in-arms. That should still mean something.’

Vogel went to rise, but Narek put the tip of his gladius to his throat and he stopped in a half-crouch.

‘You overstep your bounds,’ hissed Vogel.

‘If I do, it’ll mean this blade goes through your neck.’

Vogel didn’t look like he wanted to back down just yet.

‘Dagon agrees with me,’ said Narek.

Vogel followed the huntsman’s gaze to the other sniper, who had his rifle trained and ready. The belligerent Word Bearer raised his hands in a placatory gesture and Narek let him step away. When he was certain Vogel was content just to curse him and not retaliate, Narek looked down on the stricken Salamander his comrade had been about to defile.

‘Thank… you…’ the warrior muttered, close to death.

‘It wasn’t for you, legionary,’ Narek uttered, and plunged the gladius into his heart.

The sound of a turbine engine getting louder and closer made Narek turn. He saw the Stormbird that belonged to Elias, and wondered what had happened to bring him here.

‘Gather,’ he voxed to the others. ‘The Dark Apostle is here.’

Elias was wounded. He had also been paid a visit by Erebus himself. As he stood before the Dark Apostle in the lee of the landed Stormbird, it suddenly made sense to Narek why his master had come. He had been ordered to.

‘Another failure?’ asked Elias, surveying the carnage.

‘Not entirely,’ the huntsman replied. He had removed his battle-helm in the Dark Apostle’s presence and held it in the crook of his arm.

They were alone, in so far as the rest of the legionaries were standing guard or rounding up still-living prisoners. Narek wished dearly he’d had the time to give all of them clean deaths. Irritating Vogel was one thing; he wouldn’t defy the Dark Apostle.

‘Did you kill all of them, and apprehend the human?’

‘Not yet.’

‘A failure then.’

Narek briefly bowed his head. ‘One I shall rectify.’

‘No, Narek. Your chance has passed for this glory. Erebus himself comes and has asked me to eliminate our enemies and recapture the human, John Grammaticus.’

‘He asked you, did he?’

‘Yes,’ hissed Elias with more than a hint of anger. ‘I am his trusted ally in this.’

‘Of course, master,’ Narek responded coolly. His eyes strayed to the fulgurite spear scabbarded at Elias’s waist.

It still gave off a faint glow, and seemed to make the Dark Apostle uncomfortable to wear it. Narek realised that the spear had somehow burned Elias’s arm to all but a scorched mess.

‘You are wondering if we were right to worship the Emperor as a god,’ Elias said to him, when he noticed Narek looking at the sheathed spear.

‘I am.’

‘We were, brother. But there are other gods, Narek, who would give us favour.’

‘I see no boon in it,’ he admitted.

Elias laughed. ‘I could have you executed for that, for your lack of belief.’

‘I believe, master. That is the problem – I just do not like where that belief is taking us.’

‘You will come to like it, huntsman. You will embrace it, as we all will. For it is the desire of Lorgar and the Pantheon that we do so. Now,’ he added, growing bored of his sermon. ‘Where is the man, where is John Grammaticus?’

‘He is almost certainly still with the broken Legion survivors. Their trail won’t be hard to track.’

Elias dismissed the idea with a desultory wave of his hand.

‘It’s of no consequence. I can find him through different means.’ He eyed one of the legionary prisoners, one yet to be given a clean death, and pulled out his ritual knife.

Domadus was alive, but somehow pinned. Since the battle had ended, they had been raking through the casualties, looking for survivors. He dimly recalled being dragged, and half-heard guttural laughter from one of his captors. Part of his spinal column had been severed. He was paralysed from the waist down. He also had several potentially fatal internal injuries, and was too weak to fight back.

His bionic eye no longer functioned, so he was left blinded in it. His organic one opened, and the view this received was of the ground. At the edge of his reduced vision he thought he saw the open hand of a legionary lying on his back. The gauntlet was emerald-green, the fingers unmoving. A bolter lay a few centimetres away from it grip.

‘This one,’ he heard a voice say. He sounded cultured, almost urbane.

Firm, armoured fingers seized the Iron Hand’s chin and lifted it up so that Domadus could see his oppressors.

Word Bearers. One, standing behind the other, had scripture painting his cheekbones in gold. His black hair was short with a sharp widow’s peak. One of his arms was badly burned, and he held it protectively to his body. This was the cleric, it had to be. The other one who was holding Domadus’s chin was a veteran, definitely a soldier in the most pugnacious sense of the word. He was flat-nosed, but thin of face, and carried a slight limp.

Through dulled senses, Domadus became aware that his wrists were bound with razor-wire and he was attached to the side of a Word Bearers gunship. His breastplate had been removed, as well as his mesh under-armour, exposing the skin beneath.

‘There is no other way?’ asked the soldier.

The cleric drew forth a jagged ritual knife and Domadus steeled himself for what he knew was coming next.

‘None,’ answered the cleric, who traced a long nailed gauntlet across the flesh of the Iron Hand’s cheek, before taking up a chant.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Enter the labyrinth

‘Go forwards, ever forwards and always down. Never left. Never right.’

– from the dramatic play, Thesion and the Minatar

Ferrus was already watching me when I rose again from death. I think he was smirking, though he always smirked now with that permanent rictus grin of his.

I clenched my fists and fought down the urge to strike the apparition.

‘Amuses you, does it, brother?’ I spat. ‘To see me like this? Am I weak then? Not as weak as you. Idiot! Fulgrim played you like a twisted harp.’

I paused, and heard my own heavy breathing, the anger growing within. The abyss, red and black, throbbing with hate, pulsed at the edge of my sight.

‘No answer?’ I challenged. ‘Hard to chide without a tongue, brother!’

I stood up, unshackled for once, and advanced on the wordless spectre. If I could have, I believe that I would have wrapped my hands around his throat and choked him as I had almost done to Corax in my mind.

I sagged, gasping, fighting down the thunderous beating of my heart. Feverish sweat lathered my skin, which glistened in the flickering torchlight. Another dank chamber, another black-walled cell. Curze had many of them aboard his ship, it seemed.

‘Throne of Terra…’ I gasped, collapsing to one knee, my head bowed so I could breathe. ‘Father…’

I remembered the words, such a distant memory now. He had spoken them to me on Ibsen. After my Legion and I had destroyed the world, turned it into a place of death, I renamed it Caldera. It was to be another adopted world, like Nocturne, and with it the Salamanders would be reforged. That dream ended with the end of the Great Crusade and the beginning of the war.

It pains me, but I will have to leave you all when you need me the most. I’ll try to watch over you when I can.

‘I need you now, father,’ I said to the dark. ‘More than ever.’

Ferrus clicking his skeletal jaw made me look up. His hollow gaze met my own and he nodded to the shadows ahead of us where a vast, ornate gateway had begun to appear.

It was taller than the bastion leg of an Imperator Titan and twice as wide. I could not fathom why I hadn’t noticed it before.

‘Another illusion?’ I asked, calling out to the shadows I knew were listening.

The immense gate appeared to be fashioned of bronze, though I could tell by looking at it that the metal was an alloy. I saw the vague blueish tint of osmium, traces of silvery-white palladium and iridium. It was dense, and incredibly strong. The bronze was merely an aesthetic veneer, designed to make it look archaic. A blend of intricate intaglio and detailed embossing wrought upon the gate described a raft of imagery. It was a battle scene, which appeared to represent a conflict of some elder age. Warriors wielded swords and were clad in hauberks of chain, and leather jerkins. Catapults and ballistae flung crude missiles into the air. Fires raged.

But as I looked closer, I began to see the familiar, and realised what my Iron brother had done.

Three armies fought desperately in a narrow gorge, their enemies arrayed on either side, loosing arrows and charging down at them with swords and spears. On a spur of rock, a warlord carrying a serpent banner held the head of a defeated enemy aloft in triumph.

‘It’s Isstvan V, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said Curze, suddenly standing alongside me, where I realised he had been all along. ‘And it is not an illusion, Vulkan. Our brother laboured long over this piece. I think it would offend him to know you thought you had conjured it in your mind.’ He almost sounded defeated.

‘What’s wrong, Konrad? You sound tired.’

He sighed, full of regret.

‘We near the end,’ he said, and gestured to the gate. ‘This is the entrance to the Iron Labyrinth. I had Perturabo make it for me. At its heart, a prize.’

Curze opened his hand and within it was projected a rotating hololith of my hammer, Dawnbringer. Surrounding it and hanging from chains were my sons. The projection was weak and grainy, but I managed to recognise Nemetor from earlier. I was ashamed to admit that the other I couldn’t identify, but I could see that both were severely injured.

Curze closed his fist, crushing the image of my stricken sons.

‘I’ve bled them thoroughly, brother. They have only days left to live.’

I saw the blackness crowding at the edge of my vision again, and heard the throbbing of my heart in my skull. I felt the heat of the abyss on my face, saw it bathe my skin in visceral red.

With sheer effort of will, I relaxed my gritted teeth.

Curze was watching me.

‘What do you see, Vulkan?’ he asked. ‘What do you see when you stray into the darkness? I would have you tell me.’ He almost sounded desperate, pleading.

‘Nothing,’ I lied. ‘There is nothing. You were gone for a while this time, weren’t you?’

Curze didn’t answer, but his eyes were penetrating.

‘I remember some of it. I remember what you tried to get me to do,’ I told him. ‘Did I disappoint you, brother, by rising above your petty game? Is it lonely in the shadows? Are you in need of some company?’

‘Shut up,’ he muttered.

‘It must burn you to know I beat your moral test, I resisted the urge to kill Corvus. I don’t claim to be noble, but I know I am every-thing you are not.’

‘Liar…’ he hissed.

‘Even though you have me at your mercy, you still cannot manage to drag me down. You can’t even kill me.’

Curze looked like he was about to lash out, but reined his anger in and became disturbingly calm.

‘You’re not special,’ he said. ‘You were just convenient.’ He smiled thinly, and walked around behind me so that I couldn’t see him. ‘I have enjoyed our game, so much so that when it’s over I will go after another of my brothers. And those I cannot kill, I shall break.’

I turned to confront him, to warn him off, but Curze was already gone. He had melted away into the darkness.

The gate yawned open, silently beckoning.

‘I will break them, Vulkan,’ Curze’s disembodied voice declared. ‘Just as I am breaking you, piece by fragile piece. And if you’re wondering if there are any monsters in the labyrinth, I can tell you yes, but only one.’

With Curze gone, I had little choice but to enter the Iron Labyrinth.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Faith

Hiding at the edge of the tunnel outflow, Dagon gave the signal to advance.

Vogel went in first, knife drawn as he closed on his prey.

The earlier battle had hit the loyalists hard and there were fewer warriors than he had expected. Pity, it would mean fewer souls to offer up to the Pantheon. Perhaps he would offer up Narek’s soul too if he got in Vogel’s way again.

There were four of them, all Salamanders, sitting together with their cloaks wrapped protectively around their bodies. One, a Techmarine judging by his armour and trappings, was talking to the others. They must be discussing tactics. Two more were laid out under a tarpaulin, and squatting next to them, also huddled in drake hide, was the human the Word Bearers were looking for.

Heavy acid-rain was fouling the auspex, but the blademaster didn’t need his scanners to tell him the four legionaries with their backs to the tunnel were soon to be dead men.

Foolish to leave the human so lightly guarded, but then Vogel knew that the loyalists had taken a hammering at the manufactorum. He doubted there were many more left. He smiled, showing two rows of pointed teeth he had filed down himself, and remembered how the Dark Apostle’s warpcraft had revealed their enemies to him. The tunnels could have led to any one of fifty or more outflows. Vogel was certain that the loyalists would not be expecting an attack so soon.

Unsheathing a second blade, he crept quietly into the open, his footfalls masked by the rain. His fellow assassins were right behind him, but Vogel didn’t need them. He was going to kill all of these weaklings by himself.

Numeon clung to the side of the cliff, beneath the cascading overflow. Glancing to the right, he saw Leodrakk with his gauntleted fingers dug into the manmade rock face. On the left was Daka’rai, also clinging on. Three of their brothers were hiding on the opposite side of the gushing falls, obscured by the water. K’gosi and three more were submerged beneath the sink itself.

Numeon was blind to whatever was happening above. All he could hear was the roar of the water as it battered against his armour. Even through his helmet respirator, the air was foul and dank.

Soon… he told himself.

It was all up to Shen’ra now. All Numeon and the others had to do was honour his sacrifice.

Vogel had a hunter’s stealth but a maniac’s urgency. The latter tended to undermine the former, which was why Narek had only wanted him in his squad when he needed killers and could trust less to subterfuge. Had he been allowed to do this with Dagon and possibly Melach, Narek would have gone about it differently. Something about the scene before him, the quiet comradely conversation, the huddled figure of the stock-still human, gave him pause. He could have given voice to it, he could have suggested caution but instead he let Dagon give the all-clear to attack. After that, Vogel had rushed out to be first.

Narek was content to let him and followed on behind with Dagon, Melach and Saarsk.

Elias was amongst the vanguard too, the rest of the Word Bearers waiting in the tunnel if needed. Narek kept the Dark Apostle behind him, irritated that Elias had insisted on joining the kill-squad. Fear of Erebus and a loss of status amongst the XVII was a compelling motivator, it seemed.

Vogel had almost reached the Techmarine when Narek received a horrible premonition. His concerns, abstract at first, became reality and his warning could not then remain unspoken.

‘Their eyes…’ he hissed urgently over the vox to Dagon.

‘What of them?’

‘Look!’

The three Salamanders sitting and listening to the Techmarine had dead retinal lenses. Their eyes, normally burning, should have cast a faint light through them.

It meant the eyes were not the only things that were dead, and that in turn meant–

Narek stood up and shouted, ‘Vogel! No!’

Too late, the bladesman plunged his dagger into the Techmarine’s back. It was a killing stroke, punched right through the legionary’s primary heart. Vogel wrenched out the blade. It was covered in blood. He was about to slay another when the dull thud of an object hitting the wooden deck drew his eyes downwards.

Blinking red, an incendiary rolled from the Techmarine’s open gauntlet. There was a smile etched on Shen’ra’s lifeless face as he released the dead man’s trigger.

The explosion immolated Vogel, and threw the others off their feet. Fire swept across the jetty, igniting a chain of grenades dug into and around the tunnel entrance. They cooked off in seconds, releasing a secondary explosion and effectively sealing the outflow behind a tonne of debris.

Smashed back towards the entrance and then away from it as the second blast hit, Narek was on the ground, stunned but alive. He’d dragged Elias down with him as he sought to keep the Dark Apostle from harm. Hate him he might, but he still had his duty to perform. Peering through smoke and fire, the huntsman saw four legionaries emerging from the sink with bolters raised. He threw his knife, piercing the neck of one before the Salamander had a chance to fire.

Dagon had his rifle up, preparing to execute a second ambusher, when a shot whined out from a distance and struck right through the side of his head. The sniper was dead before he hit the jetty.

Bolt-rounds from the submerged legionaries ripped Melach apart, the Word Bearer with his pistol only half drawn.

Prone, almost underneath Narek, Elias fired off a burst and clipped one of the emerging legionaries, who had now drawn blades and were charging through the water. Narek suspected they were low on – or even out of – ammunition, as a concentrated fusillade would have ended the fight quickly. He wondered what the loyalists might be saving their rounds for.

Six more hauled themselves over the edge of the outflow basin. One advanced ahead of the rest. He was a Salamander, a centurion.

A quick headcount made the odds fairly even, but of the many in the tunnel only a few had got out before the blast hit and sealed in the rest. The loyalists also had a plan and the advantage of surprise.

Elias was on his feet. He fired off a snap shot that took the Salamander officer in the shoulder. He staggered but kept on coming, swinging a hefty-looking glaive.

Narek had other concerns as the two from the sink drove at him. He parried one thrust with his rapidly drawn gladius. A second attack he trapped with his forearm and then dragged the legionary in, crushing his vox-grille with a savage head-butt.

Saarsk had engaged some of the Salamanders who had clambered up over the edge of the sink. He stabbed one and shot another before the sniper ventilated his chest, and the others dragged the Word Bearer down to finish him.

He saw Elias barrelled over as the Salamander officer hurtled into him. The two grappling warriors fell hard against the jetty, which cracked under their weight. A second later and the wooden jetty split, dumping everyone on it down into the filth. It doused the fire still crackling against Narek’s armour, and he used the sudden shift in terrain to put a pistol burst point-blank into one of his opponents. Grunting, the Salamander rolled over and sank into the water.

An elbow strike in the second legionary’s throat dented his gorget and partially choked him, freeing Narek of immediate enemies. The fall had split Elias and the Salamander officer apart. They were close to the edge of the sink and a long drop into the reservoir of filth below. Ignoring the other legionaries, who had started to regroup after the Word Bearers’ fast counter-attack, Narek went straight for Elias.

‘What are you doing?’ yelled the Dark Apostle.

They were outgunned, with a sniper rifle trained on them at distance. Everyone else in the kill-squad was dead or soon to be, and all their reinforcements were trapped inside the tunnel without any excavation gear.

‘Saving our lives,’ snapped Narek as he took Elias and himself over the edge of the sink and down towards the foaming tumult below.

Numeon rushed to the edge of the sink and almost jumped.

Leodrakk stopped him, hauling the captain back by his shoulder guard.

‘We’ve lost enough already,’ he said, but leaned over and sighted down his bolter.

‘Save your rounds,’ Numeon told him, embittered. ‘They’re gone.’

Putting aside his anger, Leodrakk relented and lowered the bolter. ‘We almost had him. That bastard.’

‘He’ll want revenge for this. We’ll see him again.’

‘Did you see his arm?’ asked Leodrakk. ‘He was wounded. Recently.’

‘But not by us.’

‘Not one of his own?’

‘No,’ Numeon said, pensive, ‘something else.’

After a few seconds of watching the tide of filth still plunging from the outflow and not seeing either Word Bearer snared by the current, they stepped away from the edge.

K’gosi was alive. His breastplate was bloodstained where a Word Bearer had plunged a blade into it, but he was otherwise unharmed. He had long since depleted his reserves of promethium and flexed his left gauntlet irritably. The right he held against Shen’ra’s chest.

‘We will remember your sacrifice, brother,’ he muttered softly, kneeling next to the Techmarine whom he had rolled onto his back in repose. The splinter of jetty Shen’ra rested on was about all there was left of it; the others were still up to their armoured shins in sewage.

The Techmarine was not the only casualty. Daka’rai was also dead, on his back in the filth with a knife jutting from his neck. Ukra’bar had taken a bolt-round point blank and would not rise again. The others all carried minor injuries, and none that would amount to the wounding inflicted by their brothers’ deaths.

All present bowed their heads, before Leodrakk spoke up.

‘We cannot even burn them.’

‘No, we cannot.’ Numeon went over to the prone form of the dead human, one of the sump-catchers, and retrieved K’gosi’s cloak to give back to him. ‘So we must honour them a different way.’

In his left hand he held up the fulgurite spear. During their fight, he had wrested it from the Dark Apostle’s scabbard.

Despair turned to hope at the sight of this mundane object, though none who saw it could explain why. It crackled with power, an inner golden glow that spoke of the Emperor’s grace and his near-divinity. Stringent steps and sanctions had been taken to refute the idea of the Emperor as a god, but his power had always suggested otherwise, despite the desire to move from superstition to enlightenment. But the past months had begun to challenge that paradigm. For the universe was not the sole province of mortals, be they human or alien – it was the realm of gods, too, and most of them were malign. The Word Bearers believed in them, even courted their foot soldiers for dark favours. They had faith, but what they believed in was horrible.

As he held the spearhead aloft, Numeon knew that he had faith too: faith in the Emperor and his design for the galaxy and humanity, and faith that his primarch was still alive. The power in the fulgurite seemed to ignite that belief; it ignited it in all of them.

He lightly traced his fingers over the sigil at his waist.

‘Vulkan lives,’ he uttered simply.

Every legionary standing before him replied. First K’gosi and Ikrad.

‘Vulkan lives.’

Then G’orrn and B’tarro.

‘Vulkan lives.’

And Hur’vak and Kronor.

‘Vulkan lives.’

With every new voice, the chorus became louder, until only one remained.

Numeon looked his Pyre brother in the eye, and saw the hurt and pain he held there from when Skatar’var had been lost on Isstvan. If any had cause to doubt, it would be Leodrakk. The memory of that day and their flight to the drop-ships left a canker of regret in Numeon’s mouth, but he kept his expression neutral as he regarded Leodrakk.

His gaze moving from Numeon to the spear to the sigil and then back again, Leodrakk nodded.

‘Vulkan lives.’

Together they turned their affirmation into a battle cry, shouting at the sky in defiance and as one.

‘Vulkan lives!’

They would hold to this belief, and use it to give their cause much-needed hope.

For the first time since they had run from Isstvan, beaten and bloody, Numeon knew what he had to do. Going back to stand at the edge of the sink, he signalled to Pergellen, with whom he knew Hriak and John Grammaticus were also waiting.

It was time to talk to the human again.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Human failings

Kharaatan, during the Great Crusade

Night had fallen over Khartor City for the last time. Through a combined effort of Imperial Army, both infantry and armoured, Titans from the Legio Ignis and two Space Marine Legions, the world of Kharaatan was at last officially deemed compliant. With the warriors’ work now done, the Imperial Administration with its army of logisticians, codifiers, servitors, engineers, manufactors, taxonomers and scriveners could begin the long task of recolonising One-Five-Four Six and repatriating it in the name of the Emperor and the Imperium.

Its old name of Kharaatan, together with the names of all its cities and other important geographical locations, would change. For now simple designations would suffice, such as the signifier it had been given when the war of compliance had been authorised by the War Council. In time, new appellations would be chosen in order to help colonists better adapt and think of the world as their own, as a loyal Imperial world with loyal Imperial citizens.

Kharaatan and all its associated trappings represented rebellion and discord. By changing its names, their power was revoked and supplanted it with another’s.

Part of this transformation began with the logging and transportation of the entire population of Kharaatan. These men, women and children, be they rebels or innocents, would never see their home again. Some would go to the penal colonies, others would be sent to worlds in need of indentured workers, some would be executed. But in the end, the cultural footprint of the Kharaatan people would disappear forever.

Logistician Murbo thought on none of this as he conducted final checks before the transporters’ departure. After what had seemed like days rather than hours of painstaking cataloguing and questioning, the Departmento Munitorum, assisted by Administratum clerks in battalion-strength cohorts, had finally rounded up and divided Khartor’s population. This was the last city. It had also been one of the largest. Headache didn’t even begin to describe the wretched pounding that was alive in Murbo’s skull, so his temper was short as well as his diligence.

As he rattled by the first transport, he didn’t notice the smell. He had a gaggle of servitors and a lexmechanic in tow, but they had long since been divested of the burden of olfactory sensation, so didn’t raise any question either.

It was dark, and a cold wind was coming in across the desert. Murbo wanted to be back in his lodgings aboard ship, warm and with something warming in his belly too. He’d been saving a bottle for just this occasion.

There were over fifty transports to check, log and verify before he was done, then he had to confirm passenger designation with the pilot and input said data onto his slate, which he now had in his hand. Administratum protocol was to make visual checks also, to ensure that no one was missed. In the chaotic scramble after a successful compliance that began on a war-footing, it was not uncommon for entire swathes of population to be forgotten about.

The first tranche of ex-Khar-tans, the prisoners bound for the penal colonies, had already gone. Murbo’s job was to despatch those people who were destined to become Imperial citizens on brave new worlds. He wasn’t sure who he pitied more, but his sympathy didn’t last. Rebellion reaped its own harsh rewards when it was against the Imperium.

He panned the weak lumen-lamp around the hold, saw the dead-eyed inhabitants contemplating their new lives, and approximated a head count. All seemed fine at first, but when he got to the second transport and was about to move on to the third, he paused.

‘Did they seem a little quiet to you?’ he asked the lexmechanic.

The hunched clerk seemed perplexed by the question. ‘I suspect they are contemplating the folly of rising up against the Imperium.’

No, thought Murbo, that wasn’t it.

There was nothing that Murbo wanted more in that moment than to be done with his business and be off to his quarters for the flight up to One-Five-Four Six’s atmosphere, but the ex-Khar-tans tended to be more vocal.

Then there was the smell, which, buoyed on the desert breeze, had begun to seem more noisome.

He increased the intensity of the lamp’s glow and went back to the first transport.

‘Oh Throne…’ he gasped, shining the light into the hold again.

Frantically, Murbo ran to the next transport and did the same again. Then he went to the third, the fourth, the fifth. By the time he reached the twelfth, he was violently sick.

Still doubled over, Murbo waved off the lexmechanic who went to help him.

‘Don’t look in there,’ he warned, then asked, ‘Who’s still planetside?’

Again, the hunched little man looked confused in his drab robes.

‘Besides us?’

‘Military,’ said Murbo, wiping down his chin.

The lexmechanic checked his slate.

‘According to the Munitorum’s log, all military assets have left the surface…’ he paused, holding up a withered-looking hand as he checked further, ‘but there are still two Legion transports on the ground.’

‘Hail them,’ Murbo commanded. ‘Do it now.’

Vulkan was alone standing in the broad expanse of the Nightrunner’s cargo hold. Ordinarily it would be used for the transportation of weapons, ration packs and the myriad materiel required for war. This night it accommodated the dead. Caskets lined part of the hold’s east quarter, but the numbers were mercifully light, thanks to the swift and bloodless resolution of the Khartor siege. How many lives had been used to pay for that mercy… tortured, painful endings to lives… Vulkan knew all too well.

The bloodshed had not concluded with the massacre of Khar-tann City either. The riot during the settling of the Khartor citizenry had resulted in many deaths. And though he suspected his brother’s Night Lords had been partly responsible for that, he could not absolve himself of all blame.

Seriph lay before him within her casket. It was plain, unadorned, a simple metallic tube with a cryo-engine built in to retard putrefaction and ensure that the deceased reached their place of final rest unspoiled. The medicaes had cleaned up her wounds, but the bloodstain on her robes remained. Were it not for that and the grim pallor of her skin, then Vulkan might have believed she was merely sleeping.

He wanted to tell her that he was sorry she was dead, that he wished he had heeded her during the burning of Khar-tann and acceded to her request for an interview. His story should be told, he had decided, and Seriph would be the one to do it. But not any more. A corpse could tell no stories.

He bowed his head by way of mute apology.

‘Why this one?’ a voice asked softly from the shadows.

Vulkan didn’t turn, but he raised his head.

‘What are you still doing here?’ he asked, suddenly stern.

‘I came looking for you, brother,’ said Curze, coming to stand alongside Vulkan.

‘You have found me.’

‘I sense a little choler in you.’ Curze almost sounded wounded by it. ‘Aren’t you pleased to see me?’

Now Vulkan looked at him. His eyes were brimming with undisguised vitriol.

‘Say what it is you came to say and leave me.’

Curze sniffed, as if amused by it all.

‘You didn’t answer my question. Of all the mortals who died to make this world compliant for our Imperium, why does this one matter so much?’

Vulkan turned his gaze forwards again.

‘I preserve life. I am a protector of humanity.’

‘Of course you are, brother. But how you threw yourself in harm’s way for her. It was… inspiring.’ Curze smiled, then the smile became a grin, and unable to maintain the pretence, he began to laugh. ‘No, I’m sorry.’ He stopped laughing, grew serious. ‘I am baffled by it. Yours is a bleeding heart, Vulkan. I know how you care for these weaklings, but what made this one so special that you would mourn her passing so?’

Vulkan turned and was about to answer when the vox-bead in his ear crackled. Neither primarch was wearing his battle-helm, but they were still connected to the battle group.

As one primarch’s eyes widened, the other’s narrowed, and Vulkan knew that Curze was hearing the self-same message.

Vulkan reached out for his brother, seizing him by his gorget and dragging him close. Curze smiled and did not resist.

‘Did you do this?’ Vulkan asked. ‘Did you do this?’ he bellowed when Curze didn’t answer straight away.

The smile thinned and became the dark line of Curze’s pale lips.

‘Yes,’ he hissed, cold eyes staring.

Vulkan let him go, thrusting him back from his sight as he turned away.

‘You killed… all of them.’

Curze feigned confusion. ‘They were our enemies, brother. They took up arms against us, tried to kill us.’

Vulkan faced him again, enraged, almost pleading, abhorred at what Curze had done.

‘Not all, Konrad. You murdered the innocent, the weak. How does that serve anything but a sadistic desire for bloodshed?’

Curze seemed genuinely to muse on that. He frowned. ‘I’m not sure it does, brother. But how is that any different to what you did to that xenos? She was only a child, no threat to you. The rebels of Kharaatan were afforded a quick death. At least I didn’t burn them alive.’

Vulkan had no answer. He had killed the child in anger, out of grief for Seriph and retribution for the damage the rampaging xenos had caused. Perhaps it was also because he hated them, the eldar, for their raiding and the pain they had inflicted on Nocturne.

Curze saw his brother’s doubt.

‘See,’ he said quietly, coming in close to whisper. ‘Our humours are similar enough, are they not, brother?’

Vulkan roared and seized the other primarch, throwing him across the hold.

Curze slid, his armour shrieking as it scored the metal deck beneath. He was already on his feet when Vulkan came at him, and succeeded in blocking a wild punch aimed at his face. He jabbed, catching Vulkan in the chest and jarring his ribs even through his armour. Vulkan grunted, pained, but grabbed Curze’s head and thrust it down into his rising knee.

Curze rocked back, bloody spittle expelled from his mouth. Vulkan tackled him around the waist, giving his brother no time to recover, and brought him down on his back. A savage punch turned Curze’s head and cut open his cheek. He was laughing through blood-rimed teeth. Vulkan hit him again, shuddering his jaw. Curze only laughed louder, but choked a little when his windpipe was being crushed. Vulkan clamped his hands, his iron-hard blacksmiter’s hands, around his brother’s throat.

‘I knew you were no different,’ Curze hissed, still trying to laugh. ‘A killer. We’re all killers, Vulkan.’

Vulkan released him. He sat back, still straddling Curze, and gasped for air, for sanity. He would have killed him if he hadn’t stopped. He would have murdered his brother.

A little unsteady still, Vulkan rose to his feet and stepped across Curze’s supine body.

‘Stay away from me,’ he warned, out of breath, and strode from the hold to where his transport was waiting.

Curze stayed down, but turned his head to watch Vulkan go, knowing it was far from over between them.

I knew I was lost. I suspected it the moment I stepped through the Iron Labyrinth’s gates. This was not a challenge I could overcome, not something I could unravel. Here was a place seemingly infinite and of Firenzian complexity, wrought by a mind equal to my own.

No, that wasn’t entirely truthful. My mind was compromised, and so the featureless corridors of brass and iron that stretched before me were beyond my intellect to navigate.

Standing at the hundredth crossroad, each avenue I had chosen on the ninety-nine before it taking me deeper into the labyrinth and yet, at the same time, farther from my goal, I wondered what Curze had promised my brother in return for this gift.

Perhaps Perturabo hated me as much as he did the rest of us, and he had simply decided that hurting one of his brothers was as good as hurting any? Maybe he resented the fact that I had survived his glorious barrage on Isstvan V, and refused to yield to his lines of armour? Whatever the reason, he had crafted this place with one purpose in mind; that whoever entered it would never leave. It suited Perturabo’s mindset, I think, to imagine me wandering these halls forever, although he could not have known about my immortality. I believed that Curze needed more immediate closure, however. Patience was not his virtue, nor restraint. In the hammer he had provided me with hope. I suspected that he meant to drive me further into madness with that hope. He did not realise that he had actually provided a realistic means of escaping his dungeon.

Deciding that it mattered little if I couldn’t find the heart of the labyrinth, I took the left fork and wandered on.

Unlike my previous trials at my brother’s tender claws, there were no traps, no enemies, no obstacles of any kind. I reasoned the labyrinth itself was the trap, the ultimate snare in fact, fashioned by an arch-trapsmith. Once again, I felt the pulse of the abyss nearby, the black and the red, its savage teeth closing around me. It called to a feral part of my psyche, the monster Curze had spoken of.

I shook the sensation off. Somewhere in this accursed place were my sons. I had to find them, and hoped that I would not come across them in the many bodies I had seen so far. Most of the remains were skeletal, though some yet retained their withered flesh. They were Curze’s rats, the poor wretches who had tried to conquer the labyrinth before me. All of them had died still clinging to hope, desperate and out of their minds.

I think that was what Curze wanted for me, to be emaciated, brought low and desperate, a plaything to mock and punish when his own loathsome presence became too much for him to bear.

Ferrus was with me still. He didn’t speak any more, he just followed like my shadow. I could hear his armoured footsteps dogging my tread, slow and cumbersome.

‘I think we are getting closer, brother,’ I said to the spectre lurking a few metres away.

His teeth clacked together in what I took to be mocking laughter.

‘Ye of little faith,’ I muttered.

I wandered like this for days, possibly even weeks. I did not sleep, nor did I rest and I couldn’t eat. Vigour left me and I began to waste and atrophy. Soon I would not be so different from Ferrus, no more than an angry shadow doomed to walk these halls forever.

And then I heard the talons.

It began as the light tapping of metal on metal, a sharp tip rapped against the walls, echoing through the labyrinth towards me. I stopped and listened, sensing a change in Curze’s game, a desire to see it ended. The tapping grew louder and transformed into the scraping of claws. I was no longer alone with my slow, creeping madness.

‘Curze,’ I called out, challenging.

Only the scraping metal answered. I thought it might be coming closer. I began to move, trying to locate the source of the sound, walking at first, then breaking into a run.

‘Vulkan…’ hissed the air in my brother’s goading voice.

I ran after it, all the while the scraping and the tapping clawing its way into my skull, setting my teeth on edge.

I rounded a corner, chasing my instincts, but found only another corridor as gloomy and unremarkable as all the others.

‘Vulkan…’

It came from behind me and I whirled around as something dark and fast slipped by me. I winced, clutching my side. Taking my hand away I saw blood and the shallow cut my brother had delivered.

‘Come out!’ I bawled, fist clenched and a feral hunch to my shoulders. I barely recognised my own voice, it had grown so animalistic.

Only the scraping answered.

I chased it, a bloodhound on the hunt, but could find no trace of Curze. The line between predator and prey was blurring: at times I gave pursuit; at others, my brother. I reached another junction, another crossroads and tried to get my bearings, but the throbbing in my skull wouldn’t allow it.

‘Vulkan…’ The voice returned, taunting me.

I roared, thundering my fist into the nearest wall. It barely made a dent. I roared again, arching back my neck, calling ferally into the darkness. The monster within was unleashed and it craved blood.

Curze cut me again, unseen in the dark, and drew a line of glittering rubies across my bicep. It drove me on, fuelled my rage. A third cut opened in my chest, the blood flowing in red tears across my pectoral muscle. A fourth slashed my thigh. I almost caught him that time, but it was like grasping smoke.

‘Vulkan…’ he whispered, ever scraping, ever goading.

I was bleeding from at least a dozen wounds, my vitae running down my legs and pooling between the gaps in my toes so that I left bloody footprints in my wake. It was only when I looked down at the path I was about to take that I stopped and saw the mark of my passage, the smeared but unmistakable impression of my feet.

I sagged, defeated, nothing to do with my anger but turn it inwards. Closing my eyes, I saw the abyss. I was perched on the very edge, staring down.

A sudden lance of pain in my side drew me back snarling.

‘Don’t worry,’ Curze hissed, claws pinching my shoulder as he thrust his knife into my right side, ‘this won’t kill you.’

I spun around, spitting fury, ready to wrench my brother’s head from his shoulders, but Curze was gone, and I was left grasping at air.

Laughter trailed in his wake, together with the by-now ubiquitous scraping of his talons.

A red film laid over my vision, the filter of my wrath. I was about to go after him, sensing subconsciously that this was what he had planned all along, when I stopped.

Barring my path, I saw him. He was standing right in front of me, as clear and real as my own hand before my face.

Verace, the remembrancer.

‘I have seen you before,’ I whispered, holding my hand out towards him as if to gauge how real or spectral the unassuming man was.

Verace nodded. ‘On Ibsen, now Caldera,’ he said.

‘No, not there.’ I frowned, trying to remember, but my thoughts were muddled with anger. ‘Here…’

‘Where?’ asked Verace.

He was barely a few metres away when I stopped moving towards him.

‘Here,’ I repeated, my memory clearing as he stepped towards me instead. ‘You were with them, the prisoners Curze had me murder.’

He looked at me quizzically. ‘Did you murder them, Vulkan?’

‘I couldn’t save them. You were at the banquet, too. I remember your face.’

‘What else do you remember?’

Verace was scarcely a metre away. I knelt down so we were almost eye to eye. It was the Salamanders’ way.

‘I am a primarch.’ I felt calmer in his presence as the fractured pieces of my mind started to coalesce. ‘I am Vulkan.’

‘Yes, you are. Can you remember what I said to you once?’

‘On Ibsen?’

‘No, elsewhere. On Nocturne.’

Tears were welling in my eyes, as I fervently hoped this was not just another apparition, a cruel trick to send me further into madness.

‘You said,’ I began, my voice choking with emotion, ‘you would watch over us when you could.’

‘Close your eyes, Vulkan.’

I did, and lowered my head for him to put his hand upon it.

‘Be at peace, my son.’

I expected revelation, a flash of light, something. But all that followed was silence. Opening my eyes, I saw that Verace was gone. For a moment I wondered if he had been real, but I felt some strength returning to my limbs and fresh resolve filling me as I stood. The monster within was at bay, firmly shackled. For now at least, my mind was my own again. For how long, I didn’t know. Whatever peace I had been given would not endure in this place. I needed to act.

Curze was broken; I think I knew it back on Kharaatan. He had always been that way, without hope, anger turned within and without. I couldn’t imagine what it must be like to live with that, but then I thought of all the suffering he had caused, the lives he had taken needlessly to satisfy his sadistic appetites. I remembered Nemetor, and all the others he had tortured and killed all in the name of nothing greater than boredom.

My pity was short-lived, my resolve stiffening by the second.

‘You were right,’ I called out to the shadows where I knew my brother was listening. ‘I do think I am better than you. Only a weakling and a coward fights as you do, Konrad. Our father was right to ignore your mewling and discard you. I suspect it sickened him. Only you know true terror, isn’t that right, brother?’ I scowled. ‘So weak, so pathetic. Nostramo didn’t make you the worthless wretch you are, brother. You were languishing in the gutter with the rest of those deviants the moment our father erred in creating you.’ I laughed self-indulgently. ‘It was inevitable that one of us would be flawed, so rotten with human failing that he cannot bear his own presence or the presence of others. You can’t help it, can you? To measure yourself against each of us. How many times have you found yourself wanting after such observation? When was it you realised that blaming your upbringing and your brothers no longer rang true? When did you turn the mirror and see the worthless parody you’ve become?’

No answer came from the darkness, but I could feel my brother’s rising anger as palpably as the iron floor beneath my feet.

‘No one fears you, Konrad. A different name won’t change who you really are. I’ll let you in on a secret… We pity you. All of us. We tolerate you, because you are our brother. But none of us are afraid of you. For what is there to fear but a petulant child raging at the dark?’

I expected him to come at me, claws bared, but instead I heard a great engine turning beneath me, under the labyrinth itself. With the grinding of heavy gears, a large portion of the wall retracted into the floor. Then another and another. In seconds, a path was laid before me and at the end of it another gate, etched in the same manner as the Iron Labyrinth’s entrance.

I knew I could not have found my way out alone. Once the fog of my feral rage had been lifted, I realised that there was only one way to reach the prize. Curze would have to show me. My brothers and I were made differently from the adopted sons of our Legions. In the process of creating progeny, our father had distilled a portion of his essence and will into all of us. In the Legiones Astartes he fashioned an army of warriors, bred for a single purpose, to unite Terra and then the galaxy. In my brothers and I, he desired generals but also something else; he wanted equals, he wanted sons. Into us he poured his matchless intelligence and peerless ability in bio-engineering. We became more than human; every trait, every chromosome was enhanced and brought to its genetic apex. Strength, speed, martial acumen, tactical ability, initiative, endurance, all of it was magnified by the Emperor’s miraculous science. But like a lens directed at an old painting, it was impossible to enhance one detail without enhancing all the others at the same time. We were more than human, greater than Space Marines, but while our assets were magnified, so too were our flaws.

It didn’t matter at first, not while the Crusade roared on brightly, a comet bringing light to the benighted heavens. Rivalry soon became jealousy, envy; confidence grew into arrogance; wrath turned into homicidal mania. All of us were flawed, because to be human, even enhanced as we were, is to be flawed. A perfect state cannot be rendered from an imperfect design.

Curze was more flawed than most of us. His shortcomings were obvious, his all too human weakness evident in his every word and action. Revenge was in his blood. It clawed at him, a nihilistic desire to turn upon others the hurt that was inflicted upon him. He hated himself and so reflected that hate outwards. But to have the mirror turned back by another, to have one of his hated siblings show to him the self-loathing creature that he already knew he was… that could not go unreckoned. My gaoler had revealed much to me of his inner self during my incarceration. I wondered, in those final days, who in fact was trapped with whom. I had preyed on Curze’s weakness and my brother had shown me the way out. He wanted to be released as much as I did.

As I started walking down the path towards it, the gate began to open. Within I saw the heart of the labyrinth and in the centre of the chamber, my hammer, Dawnbringer. Around it, I saw as I drew closer to the yawning gate, were my sons.

Here then, was where we would end it. Curze and I. One would be free, the other lost forever to damnation.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

No more running

Elias was lying on his back. He was also alone. Momentary concern turned into anger when he realised that it wasn’t only the huntsman he was missing. The fulgurite was gone. Through filth-smeared retinal lenses, he looked up at the roaring cataracts of sewage pouring from the many outflows. Somewhere up there was his enemy. They had the spear. That bastard Salamander, the centurion. He had taken it during the fight before Narek had tackled them both over the edge.

‘Narek.’

After a moment, a breathless-sounding huntsman replied over the vox. He was running.

‘Our arrangement is concluded,’ he said.

‘I am lying down in a pool of filth, Narek. How is that a satisfactory conclusion?’

‘You have always lain with filth, Dark Apostle. A life for a life, yours for mine. I now have mine back. Our alliance is null and void. I told you that by turning a blind eye our debt was settled. I’ve decided to conclude my mission alone. My business is with them now. Be glad I let you live,’ he added, before the link was swallowed by static.

Elias didn’t bother activating the warp-flask; he suspected Narek had destroyed it. The huntsman wasn’t coming back, at least not to him.

A cursory scan informed Elias his armour functions were as normal. Some minor damage had been incurred during the fall, but it was negligible. He got up, struggling with only one hand and one arm, the burned limb cradled close to his chest. It hurt like hell, but he used it to fuel his anger.

Narek’s abandonment of his duty would not go unpunished. If he saw him again, Elias would kill the huntsman. Amaresh was supposed to have done it during the attack on the manufactorum, but fate had turned that plan awry. The pleasure of Narek’s demise would have to wait. Regaining the spear was paramount. If the loyalists had it and the human then there was but one move left to them.

‘Jadrekk,’ Elias growled down the vox, knowing that this lapdog would answer its master. Close by he could see the Ranos space port and knew there were docked shuttles capable of launch. Most of the Word Bearers’ ships had returned to the station and Elias had instructed a small garrison to guard it.

Jadrekk answered as predicted.

‘Lock on to my signal and bring all of our forces to the Ranos space port,’ Elias ordered. ‘Tell Radek to expect visitors and prepare a welcome party, and by welcome party I mean kill-squad.’

Jadrekk confirmed it would be done and Elias cut the link.

Erebus would be here soon. Elias was determined that both the spear and the human would be in his possession before then. Over to the north, he could see the tempest boiling over the sacrificial pit. Lightning trembled the sky, splitting the night in half. Once Grammaticus was cut by the spear, one of those jags would open and the Neverborn would spill forth. Elias would be rewarded for his faith and devotion. Trudging through the muck he heard that promise, whispering in sibilant non sequitur. He would be recognised by the Pantheon and ascend. It was his destiny.

‘No more running,’ Elias muttered, his gaze moving to the dark horizon of the south and the shadow of the space port, ‘only dying.’

CHAPTER THIRTY

Our final hours

Isstvan V

The blast struck with atomic force, or at least it felt that way to the Salamanders within it. They had been following Vulkan up the hill, hard on his heels as he smashed into the disciplined Iron Warriors ranks. He had hit the armour quickly, much more quickly than Numeon had believed possible.

Wrath drove him, that and a sense of injustice. The ignoble actions of his brother primarchs had wounded Vulkan to the core, far deeper and more debilitating than any blade. Vaunted warriors all, the Pyre Guard could scarcely keep up. It was snowing overhead, a squall of white ash descending upon them in their ignited fury. It was thick and strangely peaceful, but there would be no peace, not any more, not now the galaxy was at war. Horus had seen to that.

Battle companies followed in the wake of their lords, captains roaring the attack as thousands of green-armoured warriors chased up the slope to kill the sons of Perturabo. It was relentless, brutal. Withering crossfire from both the north and south faces of the Urgall Depression cut down hundreds in the first few seconds of deceit. The XVIII Legion were shedding warriors like a snake sheds scales. But still they drove on, determined not to back down. Tenacity was a Salamander’s greatest virtue – that refusal to give in. Upon the plains of Isstvan, against all of those guns, it almost ended the Legion.

It was at the crest of the first ridge, a jagged lip of stone studded with tanks, that Numeon first saw the arc of fire. It trailed, long and blazing, into the darkling sky. The tongue of flame climbed and upon reaching the apex of its parabola bent back on itself into the shape of a horseshoe. Rockets screaming, it came down in the midst of the charging Salamanders and broke them apart.

A savage crater was gored into the Urgall hills, like the bite of some gargantuan beast resurrected from old myth and birthed in nucleonic fire. It threw warriors skywards as if they were no more than empty suits of armour, bereft of bone and flesh. As a bell jar shatters when dropped onto rockcrete from a great height, so too did the Legion smash apart. Tanks following after their lord primarch were flung barrel-rolling across the black sand with their hulls on fire. Those vehicles in the mouth of the blast were simply ripped apart; tracks and hatches, chunks of abused metal torn to exploded shrapnel. Legionaries spared death in the initial blast were eviscerated in the frag storm. Super-heavies crumpled like tin boxes crushed by a hammer. Crewmen boiled alive, legionaries cooked down to ash in that furnace. It went deep, right into the beating heart of the Salamanders ranks. Only by virtue of the fact that they were so far ahead were the Pyre Guard spared the worst.

With immense kinetic fury, it threw them apart and smothered their armoured forms in a firestorm. An electro-magnetic pulse wiped out the vox, a threnody of static reigning in place of certain contact. Tactical organisation became untenable. In a single devastating strike, the Lord of Iron had crippled the XVIII Legion, severed its head and sent its body into convulsive spasm.

Retreat was the only viable strategy remaining. Droves fell back to the dropsite, trying to climb aboard ships that were surging desperately into the sky to outreach the terrible storm of betrayal below. It was not a rout, though for any force other than the Legiones Astartes it would have been, faced with such violence. Many were cut down as the traitors threaded the air with enough flak to wither an armada.

Groaning, feeling the extent of every one of his many injuries, and ignoring the urgent cascade of damage reports scrolling down the left side of his one still-functional retinal lens, Numeon staggered to his feet. A piece of armour, one he knew well and had seen before, lay within his grasp. He took the sigil once worn by Vulkan and tucked it into his belt. Leodrakk was with him, but he couldn’t see Vulkan or the rest of the Pyre Guard. Through a belt of grimy fog he thought he saw Ganne dragging Varrun by his metal collar – the veteran was on his back, legs shredded but still firing his bolter – but he was too far away to be sure and there was too much death between them to make regrouping an option.

Smoke blanketed the ridge and the ash-fall had intensified. Heat haze from the still-burning fire blurred his vision. He saw the crater – he’d been thrown back from its epicentre – and the hundreds of twisted bodies within. They were incinerated, fused into their armour. Some were still dying. He saw an Apothecary – he couldn’t tell who – crawling across the earth with no legs as he tried to perform his duty. No gene-seed would be harvested this day. No one who stayed on Isstvan in the emerald-green of the XVIII would live.

Numeon had to reach a ship, he had to save himself and Leodrakk. As he tried to raise the others and his primarch through the mire of static, he vaguely recalled having been lifted off his feet and punched sideways by the backwash of heat from the explosion. They were far from the crest of the ridge now. They must have slipped into a narrow defile that had carried them back down and shielded their bodies from the fire. Numeon assumed that he had blacked out. There were fragments, pieces that he didn’t possess in his eidetic memory of what happened after the missile strike. He remembered Leodrakk calling out his brother’s name. But Skatar’var hadn’t answered. None of the Pyre Guard were answering.

‘Ska!’ Leodrakk roared, half delirious with pain and grief. ‘Brother!’

He was clinging to Skatar’var’s bloody gauntlet. Mercifully, there was no hand or forearm inside it. The glove must have been wrenched off in the blast.

Numeon seized Leodrakk by the wrist.

‘He’s gone. He’s gone. We’re leaving, Leo,’ he said. ‘We’re leaving now. Come on!’

The Salamanders were not the only Legion to be punished by Perturabo’s ordnance. Iron Warriors, those bearing the brunt of Vulkan’s wrath and that of his inner-circle warriors, had also been swept up in the explosion. One, his battered senses returning, went to intervene against Leodrakk and Numeon, but the Pyre captain cut him down with his glaive before he could open fire on them.

A warrior, one of K’gosi’s Pyroclasts, clawed at Numeon’s leg. By the time he looked down to help him the warrior was dead, burned from the inside out. A wisp of smoke trailed from his silent screaming mouth, and Numeon turned away again.

‘We have to regroup, rally…’ Leodrakk was saying.

‘There is nothing to rally to, brother.’

‘Is he…’ Leodrakk gripped Numeon by the shoulder, his eyes pleading. ‘Is he…’

Numeon broke his gaze, and looked down to where the guns of the Iron Warriors were scattering the remnants of his once-proud Legion.

‘I don’t know,’ he murmured.

Half blind, they staggered on shoulder to shoulder as the bombs continued to fall, not knowing where to turn or what the fate of Vulkan was. Smoke was spoiling the air, rich with the tang of blood, choking and black. Leodrakk’s vox-grille respirator was damaged and he was struggling to breathe. The spear of shrapnel impaling one of his lungs and still jutting from his chest also complicated matters.

The vox in Numeon’s ear crackled. He was so surprised by its sudden function that he almost lost his footing. It was an XVIII Legion channel.

‘This is Pyre Captain Numeon. We are effecting a full-scale retreat. I repeat, all fall back to the dropsite and secure passage off-world.’

He wanted to go back, return to find Vulkan, but in the carnage of the depression that was impossible. Pragmatism, not emotion, had to rule Numeon’s heart at that moment. His primarch had forged him that way, through his teaching and his example; he wasn’t about to dishonour that now.

‘Pyre brother…’

Numeon recognised the voice on the other end of the vox-link immediately. He glanced at Leodrakk, but the warrior was making his way down the ridge towards the dropsite and hadn’t noticed Numeon was in communication with someone. It was Skatar’var.

‘Is Leodrakk with you?’

‘I have him. Where are you?’ Numeon asked.

‘Can’t tell. I can hear screaming. I’ve lost my weapon, brother.’

A terrible thought struck Numeon as he paused to end a stricken Iron Warrior with half his chest blown out, struggling to rise.

‘What can you see, brother?’ he asked, ramming the glaive down and twisting the haft to make sure of the kill.

‘It’s dark, brother.’

Skatar’var was blind. Numeon cast around, but couldn’t see him. There was no way of telling where he was or if he was close enough to help. Scraps from other companies were storming back down the ridge, the Salamanders laying down covering fire as they retreated back to the dropsite. Numeon waved them on as he continued trying to find his Pyre brother.

‘Skatar’var, send out a beacon. We will come for you.’

‘No, captain. I’m finished. Get Leodrakk out, save my brother.’

‘We might be able to reach you.’ Numeon was scouring the battlefield for any sign, but he couldn’t find him.

Death hung in the air like the noisome smoke, palling overhead from the many fires. Somewhere in the haze, Commander Krysan crawled from the burning cupola of his battle tank. He was burning too. Salamanders were born in fire, and now Krysan would die in it. The fuel canisters cooked off and exploded just as Krysan fell from the turret, rolling, burning down the side of the hull and no longer in sight. Like their commander, his once-proud armoured company was no more than a wrecker’s yard of flame-scorched metal carcasses.

‘Are you injured, brother?’ Numeon asked, increasingly desperate. ‘Can you stand?’

‘The dead are upon me, Artellus. Their bodies crush my own.’

Looming from the oil-black fog was an Iron Warrior who was missing his helm and part of his right arm. He raised a bolter to fire but Numeon’s lunge cut short his attack and his life, as he disembowelled the traitor.

‘I need more than that, Ska. The dead are everywhere.’

It was like looking out onto a corpse sea.

‘It’s over for me. Get Leodrakk out.’

‘Ska, you must–’

‘No, Artellus. Let me go. Get free of this hell and avenge me!’

It was no use. The slope was thronged with retreating warriors now, and skirmishes between the survivors of both sides were breaking out.

‘Someone will come, get you to a ship,’ said Numeon, but the words sounded hollow even to him.

‘If they do, I hope we meet again.’

The vox-link went dead and Numeon couldn’t raise it again.

Deeper into the valley, smoke was rolling in thick and pooling at the nadir of the basin where the drop-ships were launching in beleaguered flocks. Two, eager to get airborne, collided with one another and both went down in flames. Another achieved loft and was clawing for the upper atmosphere when it was stitched by cannon fire and broke apart, its two burning halves sent earthwards.

Even coming down off the ridge relatively unscathed, escape was far from certain.

Finally reaching the dropsite with Leodrakk, Numeon found visibility was almost zero. Like tar turned into air, the blackness was virtually absolute. Auto-senses were of limited use, but Numeon managed to get as far as a ship. Leodrakk was retching in the vile smoke, so thick it would have killed a lesser man. He clung to Numeon’s left shoulder and let the Pyre captain guide him.

But Numeon was struggling, too. The drop-ship was close enough to touch but the filth besieging them made it impossible to gauge the location of the entrance ramp or if it was even open. Through the rough hull, Numeon felt the tremor from the vessel’s engines. They would need to get aboard now or they would have to find another ship.

Hell rained all around them – there would be no other ship. This was it; escape or die.

If it was to be the latter, Numeon avowed he would go down fighting. He would have done so already were it not for Leodrakk.

Out of the darkness, a hand reached for them, and together they stumbled onto the deck of a crowded Stormbird. It was black within the lander; smoke was also filling the hold and the internal lighting was out. Numeon slumped and rolled on his back, his eye burning like someone had thrust a knife into it and twisted the blade. He was more badly wounded that he had at first realised, having taken several hits during the descent as he shielded his Pyre brother from harm. Leodrakk was on his knees, coughing up the wretched smoke from his lungs.

The ramp to the drop-ship was closing. Engine shudder from rapid ignition was rocking the hold as the vessel fought for loft. Then they were airborne, thrusters cranked to full burn to reach escape velocity. The ramp sealed, the blackness became absolute.

Turning onto his side, Numeon saw a single red band of light glowing in the darkness.

‘Be still, brother,’ a calm and serious voice said.

‘Apothecary?’

‘No,’ the voice replied. ‘I am a Morlock of the Iron Hands. Pergellen. Be still…’

Then unconsciousness took him and he was lost to it.

Numeon opened his eyes and touched one of his fingers to the wound that had nearly blinded him. It still hurt – the memory of it and what it reminded him of more than the actual pain.

The trek from the aqueduct, after they had met up with Pergellen, Hriak and the human, was a cheerless one. Shen’ra had been a long-standing comrade and, despite his irascible nature, had forged strong allies. Both Iron Hand and Raven Guard had bonded with him in their own way. It was hard to hear of his death, even though they all knew what his sacrifice meant. Daka’rai too would not see another dawn, nor Ukra’bar, and grief for them was worsened by the knowledge that the Salamanders had both been able warriors and that their small company had dwindled still further.

When Numeon had told Grammaticus of their decision to finally aid him, the human had greeted the news with a grim resolve, as if he knew this would happen or perhaps resented what would have to come next.

‘What made you change your mind?’ he had asked.

‘Hope, faith… this.’ Numeon had presented Grammaticus with the spear, but only shown it to him. ‘It stays with me until we can get you off-world,’ he had said, sheathing it in his scabbard. ‘And where will you go?’

‘I don’t know yet. Those instructions won’t be given until I’m safely off Traoris.’

The conversation had ended there, as Numeon had gone to consult with Pergellen on how they would approach an assault on a heavily guarded space port.

Using the Fire Ark was immediately discounted. Since the commencement of the bizarre storm that kept Ranos smothered in darkness and filled the sky with variegated lightning, there had been no communication with the ship. For all they knew, it was already destroyed. Several amongst the surviving legionaries had suggested as much until Numeon had silenced them.

He had lied to Grammaticus. It wasn’t hope that drove them, nor was it faith. It was defiance and a refusal to give in when the possibility of achieving something of meaning still existed, even if that thing were merely vengeance. With his last words, Skatar’var had sworn him to that promise and Numeon meant to keep it. They all did.

Away from the heart of the urban sprawl, the city thinned out and became less of a warren. Tall stacks gave way to smaller, blister-like habs and outpost stations. Here were the stormwatchers, the men and women charged with the dangerous duty of watching the lightning fields and the ash wastes that kept each of the eight cities apart. Even across the grey deserts surrounding Ranos, the lightning had changed. It struck more fiercely, with greater frequency, carving scorched-black rifts in the earth as if nature itself were being wounded by the Word Bearers’ ritual.

The space port squatted on a flat plateau, raised a few hundred metres above the cityscape itself. From the outflow and the aqueduct in the valley beneath, the legionaries and their human cargo had headed towards the port, hoping to find a route off the planet for Grammaticus. They had skirted the edge of the plateau, neglecting the roads, for they were well watched. They had come low, through the tributaries spat out from the sewers, and found themselves arriving close to the space port’s borders and looking up at its iron-grey towers and desolate landing apron. Like the gnarled creatures of childhood myth, Numeon and his shattered company crouched beneath a large, partially collapsed bridge, the manmade ditch it spanned dry and dead.

On the bridge and beyond it, the strip of Ranos roadway was dead to all forms of traffic. A civilian half-track and a couple of heavier freight loaders cut forbidding skeletons with their chassis burned out and black. Smoke had long ceased rising from their metal carcasses. Here, at the space port, the Word Bearers’ wrath had fallen first and fallen hardest. No vessel could be allowed to escape and raise alarm. The XVII Legion had massacred everyone and everything, including vehicles.

Numeon was hidden by shadows and the ignorance of his enemies as he surveyed through his scope. On a slab beside him were his weapons, the rest of his ammunition and the sigil.

He heard Leodrakk approach and saw him pick up the hammer icon that had once belonged to their primarch and would, perhaps, again.

‘Do you believe it?’ Numeon asked, putting the scope down.

Around him, dispersed along the underside of the bridge and concealed by its overhang, the last of his shattered company made ready for their final hours. All remaining weapons and ammunition had been collected and redistributed to ensure every legionary could fight to his maximum efficacy. At one time it would have been Domadus’s task, but the Iron Hand was gone and so K’gosi had taken on his mantle as quartermaster. They had lost Shen’ra too and many others who should have seen a better end. Numeon owned that, all of it. He would carry that to his pyre.

‘That Vulkan lives?’ Numeon clarified.

‘I said the words, did I not?’ said Leodrakk, handing back the sigil. ‘Still trying to fathom its mysteries, Artellus?’

Numeon glanced at the hammer, at the gemstone fashioned into the cross section. ‘Ever since I took it from the battlefield. But I am at a loss, I’m afraid. Much of Vulkan’s craft is beyond my understanding. It is a device of some kind, not merely ornamental. I had hoped it might yield a message or some piece of knowledge to guide us…’ He shook his head, ‘I don’t know. I always just saw it as a symbol, something to give us hope in our darkest hour.’

‘And this is it then, our darkest hour?’

‘It might prove to be, but you didn’t answer my question. Do you believe that Vulkan lives? Saying it is not believing it.’

Leodrakk’s gaze strayed to where John Grammaticus was hunched down and muttering to himself, arms wrapped around his knees, head bowed as he tried to stay warm. Hriak was nearby, ostensibly keeping an eye on the human. He had shielded him psychically from the cleric’s warpcraft, thrown the soul-flare of Grammaticus’s essence outwards like a ventriloquist throws his voice, drawing the Word Bearers into the trap at the outflow. It hadn’t been a pleasant experience for the human, but the Librarian noticed that little and cared even less.

‘I see something in the spear that kindles hope that has only been the barest embers for so long,’ Leodrakk admitted, gesturing to the fulgurite sitting snugly in Numeon’s scabbard. ‘I have resisted because to hope for one is to hope for another.’

‘Ska,’ Numeon correctly assumed.

‘He could yet live.’

‘As may all of our Pyre brothers, but I have my doubts.’

‘We know he did not die in the blast,’ Leodrakk tried, but couldn’t keep the bite from his tone.

Only later, when their drop-ship was aloft and had broken through the traitors’ pickets surrounding Isstvan, did Numeon tell Leodrakk that Skatar’var had contacted him. He knew Leodrakk would have wanted to go back, that he wouldn’t heed his brother’s wishes as Numeon had. He hadn’t raged or struck out at the Pyre captain as Numeon supposed was his right. He had simply darkened as a flame does when slowly starved of oxygen.

‘I forgave you that moment on the ship when you told me,’ Leodrakk said.

‘Your forgiveness is irrelevant, Leo. I either saved our lives or went back for Skatar’var and signed all our death warrants. I made the pragmatic decision, the only one I could in the circumstances.’

Leodrakk looked away, out past the bridge and towards the space port. Even from this distance, the patrols were visible.

‘Why tell me this now, brother?’ asked Numeon.

‘Because I wanted you to know there wasn’t any bad blood between us for this. I would have wanted to go back, and I know all three of us would have died. It doesn’t make it any easier, though. There will always be a part of me that wonders if we could have found him, if he had survived and we passed him by, only metres away.’

‘I have had the self-same doubts regarding Vulkan, but I stand by my decision and know if presented with it all over again that I would not waver from the course I have already taken. History cannot be unwritten and scribed anew. It is done, and all we can hope for is that we perform our duty until death, irrespective of the destiny we crave for ourselves.’

Pergellen interrupted on the vox.

‘Speak, brother,’ said Numeon, reacting to the Iron Hand’s comm request as he activated the bead embedded in his ear.

‘I have eyes on our former cousins.’

‘How many?’

‘More than you or I should like.’

‘Then these are our final hours.’

‘So it would seem, brother,’ the Iron Hand replied. There was no regret, no sorrow in his voice. It served no purpose. There was but one duty left to perform now.

Numeon thanked the scout and cut the link.

‘Get them ready,’ he said.

Leodrakk was turning to carry out the order when Numeon clutched his Pyre brother’s arm. ‘I know, Artellus,’ Leodrakk told him, clapping the Pyre captain on the shoulder. ‘For Shen, for Ska, for all of them.’

Numeon nodded, and let him go.

‘It’s actually quite stunning when you look at it from this distance,’ Numeon said once Leodrakk had gone. He was watching the lightning flashes over the ash wastes.

‘The word that springs to my mind is deadly,’ Grammaticus replied. He was on his feet and standing next to the Pyre captain.

‘Most beautiful things in nature are, John Grammaticus.’

‘I didn’t have you pegged as philosophical, captain.’

‘When you’ve seen the fury of the earth up close, watched mountains spit fire and the sky redden to the hue of embers, reflecting its hot breath against the ash clouds overhead, you learn to appreciate the beauty in it. Otherwise, what’s left but tragedy?’

‘It’s all about the earth,’ Grammaticus muttered.

Numeon looked sidelong at him. ‘What?’

‘Nothing. You are doing the right thing.’

‘I don’t need you to tell me that.’ The Salamander turned to regard Grammaticus. Towering over the human, his face was unreadable. ‘Betray me, and I’ll find a way to kill you. Failing that, I’ll take you back to Nocturne and show you those fire mountains I mentioned.’

‘I get the impression I won’t see their beauty like you do, Salamander.’

Numeon’s eyes seemed to burn cold. ‘No, you won’t.’

Behind him, the human became aware of another’s presence. Numeon nodded to him.

‘Hriak, all is ready?’

‘Everything is in place, the plan is formed,’ he rasped.

Grammaticus raised an eyebrow, ‘What plan?’

Numeon smiled. He could see that it unnerved the human.

‘I’m afraid you’re not going to like it.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Dawnbringer

I named it Dawnbringer for a very specific reason.

Names are important for weapons, they attribute meaning and substance to what might otherwise be merely tools for war. Curze never paid much attention to that. His concerns are less sentimental, bloodier. To my benighted brother, a spar of sharpened metal is as good as the master craftsman’s finest blade if it kills the same. This was his oversight, this was why I had fashioned the hammer as I had. Dawnbringer was different. It would literally bring the light.

And now it was before me at the heart of Perturabo’s labyrinth, but the hammer was not what my eye was drawn to first.

Both of them were dead. I knew it before I crossed the threshold but I still grieved for them upon sight of their bloodless bodies.

‘Were they dead before I even entered this place?’ I asked.

To my surprise, Curze answered.

‘Before you came aboard my ship.’

His voice was disembodied, but it came from somewhere in the heart chamber.

Nemetor, of course. It would have to be him. He was the last of my sons I ever set eyes upon. Curze knew that would breed a special blend of pain for me. The other one brought me a different kind of grief, for he was part of a brotherhood I had long considered my council.

‘Skatar’var…’ I whispered the name as I raised my hand to touch his skeletal body, but fell just short of making contact.

Averting my gaze from my dead sons, I resisted the urge to cut them down from where they hung like meat and instead focused on Dawnbringer.

The hammer was exactly as I remembered. It looked innocuous enough resting on an iron plinth, though I can humbly say it is the finest weapon I have ever crafted. It shone in a place that was drab and ugly by comparison.

The heart of the Iron Labyrinth was an octagonal chamber, supported by eight thick columns. The dark metal seemed to drink the light, absorb it like obsidian into its facets. But it was merely iron, the walls, the ceiling, the floor. It was heavy and dense with little in the way of ornamentation… or so I at first believed.

As I lingered, I started to discern shapes wrought into the metal. They were faces, screaming, locked forever in moments of pure agony. Beneath each of the arches to which the columns abutted hung a grotesque and malformed statue. They were monstrous things, ripped from a madman’s fever dream and trapped in this iron form. No two were alike. Some had horns, others wings or bestial hooves, feathers, talons, a hooked beak, a swollen maw. They were wretched and repellent, and I could not imagine what had compelled my brother to sculpt them.

If this was a heart, it was a blackened, cancerous organ whose slow beat was as the chime of death.

Seeing no other recourse, I walked up to the plinth and reached for the hammer. Some kind of energy field impeded me, giving out an actinic flash of light as I touched it and making me recoil.

‘You didn’t think I’d just let you take it, did you?’ Curze’s voice rang out, everywhere and nowhere as it was before.

I backed away from the plinth, the gate by which I had entered the heart closing behind me as I warily eyed the shadows. I had no intention of leaving. There was no escape that way. The end of this torment was in here with my brother. With the entrance now sealed, darkness reigned fully. There were no lumen orbs, braziers nor lanterns of any kind. I touched the energy field again, prompting a flare of light briefly to encase the hammer before dying again like a candle flame. The flash gave me little to see with, though I turned as I thought I saw one of the statues start to move.

‘These fear tactics might work on mortals but I am a primarch, Konrad,’ I declared, grateful to my father for gifting me these last moments of lucidity. I would need them to fight my brother now. ‘One worthy of the name.’

‘You think me unworthy, do you, Vulkan?’

His voice came from behind me, but I knew it to be a trick and resisted the temptation to face it.

‘It doesn’t matter what I think, Konrad. Nor what the rest of us think. You behold your reflection, brother. Is that not what you see?’

‘You won’t goad me, Vulkan. We’ve come too far, you and I, for that.’

‘Did you think there would be no mirrors in the darkness, nothing to reflect your worthless self? Is that why you cower there, Konrad?’

I began to turn, sensing my brother’s closeness, if not his actual presence. He was gifted, despite my taunts suggesting the contrary, not so unlike Corvus, though his methodology was far removed from that of the Ravenlord.

‘Do you seek me, Vulkan? Do you wish to have your chance again, like you did at Kharaatan?’

‘Why would I want that? You are beneath me, Konrad. In every way. You always have been. The Lord of Fear has no land, no subjects but the corpses he makes. You have nothing, you are nothing.’

‘I am Night Haunter!’

And at last Curze gave in to his self-hatred, his pathological denial, and revealed himself to me.

One of the statues hanging down from an archway, a chiropteran creature I mistook to be a carven gargoyle, slowly unfurled its wings and dropped to the ground. It was him, and he brandished a long serrated blade.

‘We are both such savage weapons, Vulkan,’ he told me. ‘Let me show you.’

Curze lunged, laughing. ‘Never gets old,’ he said, hacking into my body again and carving a deep wound.

I cried out but kept my senses long enough to hammer a punch into his neck. Even his armour was no protection against my blacksmiter’s fists. I had bent metal, grasped burning coals. I was as inviolable as the hard onyx of my skin and I let my brother feel every ounce of that strength.

He staggered, slashing wildly and catching me just above the left eye as I advanced. A jab aimed for his exposed throat missed and fractured Curze’s right cheek instead. In return, he skewered my left leg, ripping the blade and some flesh out before I could trap it. Now I stumbled and Curze wove round my clumsy right hook to bring his sword down onto my clavicle. I threw up my forearm just in time and felt the weapon’s teeth bite bone. Then I charged in with my shoulder, trying to ignore the agony igniting down my arm. I heard him grunt as my body connected, smashing into his torso.

Curze tried to laugh it off, but his fractured cheek was paining him and I’d just punched most of the air from his lungs.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Ferrus watching the uneven duel. He was no longer the cadaverous ghoul I had made him. The Gorgon had become as he was, as I wanted to remember him. No longer berating me, I sensed in him a willing urge for me to triumph instead.

‘Let me tell you a secret, brother,’ I said, breathless.

We were a few handspans apart, battered but regrouping for another round. Amused, Curze bade me continue.

‘Of all of us, father made me the strongest. Physically, I have no equal amongst my siblings. In the sparring cages I used to hold back… especially against you, Konrad.’

All the mirth drained away from Curze’s already pallid face.

‘I am Night Haunter,’ he hissed.

‘What was your boon, Konrad?’ I asked, backing up as he advanced with sword held low.

‘I am the death that haunts the darkness,’ he said, angling the blade so it would cut across my stomach and spill my viscera.

‘Always the weakest, Konrad. I was afraid, I admit that. But it was from the fear of breaking you. I don’t need to hold back, though, any more,’ I said, smiling in the face of my brother’s rising hatred. ‘Now I can show you how much better than you I am.’

Possessed by a sudden rage, Curze threw down the blade and came at me with his bare hands. I knew it was coming and had shifted my stance just slightly so I was ready for it. I let him land the first blow. It was vicious and tore a hunk of flesh off my cheek. He reached for my throat, talons poised to rip it out, teeth bared in a savage snarl… before I clamped my fist around his forearm, falling back and using his momentum to carry him up and over me.

In the forge, the hammer swing is everything. Shaping metal, bending it to my will, it is the blacksmiter’s art. By its nature, metal is unyielding. It breaks stone, sunders flesh. Strength is not enough. It takes skill, and timing. Judgement of when the hammer has reached its apex, when the strike is purest, that is what I knew. It was ingrained in me by my Nocturnean father, N’bel.

I used his lessons in that moment, I lifted my brother like the smiter lifts the fuller and brought him down upon the iron plinth, my anvil. A sharp crack and a light surge that painted the chamber in blueish monochrome preceded the collapse of the energy shield. Curze broke it with his back, his body. As he rebounded hard off the iron floor, the energy coursed over him, setting fire to nerve endings and burning hair and scalp. He rolled with the last of his momentum, smoke exuding from the plates of his armour.

I stooped and picked up the fallen hammer. It felt good to have Dawnbringer in my grasp again and I ran my thumb along the activation stud I had put on the grip.

‘You should not have led me here, Konrad,’ I told him. My brother was still curled up and shaking with the energy spikes from the shield. At first I thought he was sobbing, his shame and self-loathing having reduced my poor brother to melancholy again, but I was wrong.

Curze was laughing once more.

‘I know, Vulkan,’ he said, having recovered some of his composure. ‘Your beacon won’t work. This chamber is teleport-shielded. Nothing goes in or out except through that gate behind you.’ Still trembling with the aftershocks of absorbing the energy shield, Curze managed to stand. ‘Did you think you had broken me, brother? Did you believe you had tricked me into letting you escape?’ He grinned. ‘Hope is cruel, isn’t it? Yours was false, Vulkan.’

Before I could prevent it, he twisted something on his vambrace, activating some system slaved to his armour.

Hearing the churn of gears, I braced myself. I expected another death trap, a long plunge into a still deeper dungeon. Instead, I saw the floor retreat beneath my feet, leaving a sturdy mesh that supported our weight and that I could see through.

There was another chamber below the heart of the labyrinth, but it was nothing more than a dank cell. No, not a cell, a tomb. Weak lumen strips flickered in this hidden undercroft, and their combined light and shadow revealed hundreds of bodies. Humans and legionaries, prisoners of the Prince of the Crows, languished in the gloom. They were dead, but before they had died they had been tortured and brutalised.

‘This is my true work of art,’ Curze revealed, gesturing to the slain as a painter would his finished canvas, ‘and you, Vulkan, the immortal king presiding over the anguished dead, are my crowning piece.’

‘You’re a monster,’ I breathed, eyes wide with the horror of it.

‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ he hissed.

Meeting his madman’s gaze, I decided to oblige him.

‘You’re right,’ I conceded, holding up Dawnbringer so he could see it. ‘I fashioned it as a teleporter, a means to escape even a prison such as this. I counted on you leading me here, on you needing to face me one last time. It seems I was fooled into thinking you hadn’t planned for this.’ I lowered the weapon and let the weight of its head pull the haft down until my hand was wrapped around the very end of the grip. ‘But you’re forgetting one thing…’

Curze leaned in, as if eager to hear my words. He believed that he had me, that I would never escape his trap.

He was wrong.

‘What’s that, brother?’

‘It’s also a hammer.’

The blow caught him across the chin, a savage upswing that took Curze off his feet and put him on the ground again with the sheer force of the impact. He got to one knee before I hit him again, this time across his left shoulder blade where I split his pauldron in half. I jabbed into his stomach before swinging a second blow that put him on his feet.

Curze almost fell again when I drove into him, pressing the hammer’s haft against his throat and pushing him back until he slammed up against the wall. His gorget had broken apart and was hanging loose, so I kept the haft across his trachea and pushed against it, one hand on the pommel and the other on the hammer head, and slowly began to crush bone.

Blood and saliva flecked Curze’s armour, spat from his still grinning mouth.

‘Yes…’ he choked at me. ‘Yes…’

So wretched, I wanted to kill him, to end his suffering and take some measure of vengeance for all the suffering he had caused me and my sons.

‘Come on…’ Curze’s eyes were pleading, and I realised he wanted this. Ever since Kharaatan, he had wanted this. Not every chink of weakness I had seen in this place was feigned. Curze truly did loathe himself, so much so that he wanted it to end. If I killed him he would have everything he wanted, death and a means of bringing me down to his despicable level.

‘I am damned, Vulkan…’ he gasped. ‘End it now!’

The abyss was pulsing at the edge of thought, black and red, the monster crawling up from its depths to claim me. So many dead, I could almost hear the corpses willing me to do it, to avenge them.

And then I saw Ferrus, his proud and noble face looking down upon me, the beloved older brother.

‘Do it…’ Curze was urging. ‘I will only kill again, take another for my amusement. Corax, Dorn, Guilliman… Perhaps I’ll bait the Lion when we reach Thramas. You can’t risk letting me live.’

I released him, and he fell clutching at his throat, choking the air back into his lungs. From beneath the lank strands of his hair, he glared at me, eyes filled with murderous intent. I had scorned him; worst of all I had let him live when I had every reason not to, and proved that he was alone in his depravity.

‘You can’t escape,’ he spat. ‘I’ll never let you go.’

I looked down at him, pitying. ‘You’re wrong about that too. No craft you possess can hold me here now, Konrad.’ I brandished the hammer, held it aloft like itwas my standard. ‘Your dampeners are useless. I could have left as soon as I took the hammer from your cage, but I chose to stay behind. I wanted to hurt you, but most of all I wanted to know I could spare you. We are alike, Konrad, but not like that. Never like that. But if I see you again, I will kill you.’ I spoke these last words through clenched teeth, my sanity hanging by the barest thread as the grace Verace had given me finally faded. Or perhaps it was my own resolve that had preserved my mind, one last herculean effort to stave off madness? I would never know.

Pressing the stud upon Dawnbringer’s haft, I closed my eyes and let the flare of teleportation take me.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Lightning fields

K’gosi was dead. The last burst had punched straight through his plastron and taken most of his upper torso with it.

‘Brother…’ Leodrakk snarled, firing back through the darkness and accumulated gun smoke. ‘Vulkan lives!’ he shouted, trying to be heard above the roar of automatic weapons. The remnants of his company were pinned. Blistering fire exploded overhead, showering the hunkered warriors with sparks and shrapnel from their slowly disintegrating cover.

A sub-entrance had got them this far, past the first patrols and through the outer gate. The space port was based on three concentric rings, each one diminishing towards the centre where the main landing apron resided. All the ships from the outskirts of the facility had been scuppered, leaving only those in the core.

Unfortunately, this area had proven to be the most heavily guarded, and the sub-entrance a lure to draw the shattered company inwards. A few hundred metres away, three shuttles as well as the Word Bearers’ own vessels stood ready for take-off.

Despite his defiance, Leodrakk knew they would never reach them. According to his retinal display, only six legionaries were still standing. The rest were down, or dead.

Firing off a snap-shot, he bellowed into the vox, ‘Ikrad, move your men up. The rest of you, covering fire!’

Three Salamanders advanced, inching along a corridor section overlooked by gantries that led onto the landing apron. G’orrn went down before he reached the next scrap of cover, a buttressed alcove with scarcely enough room for Ikrad and B’tarro.

Even with auto-senses it was hard to tell how many they were facing. Between bursts Leodrakk tried to count the power-armoured silhouettes jamming up the end of the corridor, but every time he did more were added to the horde.

The Word Bearers were holding and showed no signs of allowing the Salamanders to break through. Leodrakk emerged from cover for a second look. A shell whined near his head, the sound of it glancing off his helmet amplified by his auto-senses. Warning sigils cascaded across his failing retinal display. A close call, but his head was still attached. For now.

Ikrad’s voice crackled over the vox, ‘I can’t see the cleric.’

‘I can’t see much of anything,’ snapped Hur’vak.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Leodrakk replied. ‘Keep their attention focused on us. Hold them here.’

‘That may prove problematic, brother,’ said Kronor, gesturing behind them to where a second force of Word Bearers could be heard moving into position.

Beneath his faceplate, Leodrakk smiled. His ammo count was low. He suspected that his brothers’ were the same. Bolter fire was raining in from the end of the corridor now, accented by the occasional flash of a volkite. It chipped at the iron buttresses and the columns where the Salamanders were taking cover. Soon it would stitch them from either side and that would be an end to it.

Muttering an oath for Skatar’var, Leodrakk addressed what was left of his men.

‘How do Salamanders meet their enemies?’ he asked.

‘Eye-to-eye,’ came the response in unison.

‘And tooth-to-tooth,’ Leodrakk concluded, drawing his blade. He roared, and rose up. The others shouted after him, determined to die with their weapons in their hands and their wounds to the front. It was a glorious but short-lived charge.

‘Vulkan lives!’

Jags of lightning were dancing hard and fast across the desert. Buried under Numeon’s drake cloak, Grammaticus eyed them warily.

‘You’ll kill us all out here,’ he said, voice muffled through his rebreather. It was the one from the dig site, the only part of his original equipment he still carried, if not the persona they had formerly belonged to. As well as the lightning, which cracked the sky in a circulatory system of veins and arcing tributaries, ash storms raked the wastelands. The grit and mineral flecks were as abrasive as glass, and deadly when whipped up close to hurricane speeds. No barrier to an armoured legionary, they could prove fatal to a mortal.

Hriak warded off the worst of it with a psychic kine-shield he had thrown up and was taking painstaking effort to maintain in front of them. It was taxing the Librarian, and he hadn’t spoken since the three of them had entered the lightning fields.

‘Out here is what’s keeping us alive, John Grammaticus,’ Numeon replied.

Like Hriak, his armour was taking a battering out in the storm. Already, much of its green paintwork had been abraded by the gritty ash winds. Since planetfall the storms had worsened. Their initial march to the city proper was much less treacherous. There was but one small mercy – they had, as of yet, avoided the lightning. A bolt struck nearby, throwing up a gout of crystallised sand.

‘All evidence to the contrary,’ said Grammaticus, seeing the dark scar left in the wake of the lightning. ‘I think I would have preferred to be with our comrades at the space port.’

‘No you wouldn’t,’ said Numeon darkly, and that was an end to it. ‘The ship isn’t far. And besides,’ he added, glancing away to the dunes rising far off on their right, ‘we aren’t unprotected.’

Pergellen knew it grated at Numeon to leave the others behind. In the end, it was Leodrakk who had volunteered to lead the rest of the company into the space port so that the Pyre captain and Raven Guard could reach an alternate means of escape. Assaulting the space port had never been viable. It was dismissed before being mooted, but their enemy didn’t know that. Intent on killing the interlopers who had interfered with their plans, the Word Bearers had concentrated their entire force on the team attacking the space port. No one would see the three lonely travellers insanely braving the lightning fields. At least, that was the theory. Pergellen would have stayed with the diversion group, too, were it not for the fact that further insurance in getting the human off-planet was deemed prudent. His scope would watch them and track the ash wastes for errant legionaries who had scented the ruse and decided to come hunting.

He was lying flat, the scouring ash wind raking his power generator and shoulders as he propped his rifle beneath his chin. His eye had not left the scope since he had found his position on the dune. It was a good vantage, high enough to allow for decent coverage but low so that he didn’t stick out. It was solid too, a ridge of bedrock sitting under all that ash.

He first tracked Hriak, then Numeon, and finally Grammaticus, allowing the crosshairs of his targeter to settle on the human’s hooded head. Then he moved the scope back across the wastes to see if they were being followed.

So far, so good…

By his reckoning, the landing site wasn’t far, and once there they would find the gunship they had secreted upon planetfall. The other operational vessel didn’t matter now. It was far from their reach, but Pergellen had plotted a return route to it in case an emergency exfiltration was still possible.

A brief blizzard of ash squalled across him, muddying the lens of the Iron Hand’s scope. He maintained position, but as he peered through the now occluded scope he thought he caught sight of three large humanoid shapes moving against the storm. Visibility was already poor, but it was made worse by the dirty lens. Pergellen considered raising the alarm but decided against it in case vox-traffic was being monitored in any way. He doubted it was Leodrakk or any of his men, but had to be sure if he was going to make a kill. Lifting his body up onto his elbows, he went to clear the lens when he heard the faintest crunch of displaced sand behind him.

‘Stand and turn, I won’t shoot you in the back,’ ordered a gruff voice. It was the first time he had heard it, but Pergellen knew instinctively who it belonged to. With that information in mind, he relaxed the grip on the bolt pistol strapped to his hip.

‘Honour?’ queried Pergellen, rising. ‘I understood that the Seventeenth had long abandoned such scruples.’

‘I serve my own code. Now turn.’

Pergellen did so and saw a warrior armoured in red and black. His trappings were battered and stained. He remembered him from the ambush site, the attack on the manufactorum and the skirmish at the outflow. Seemed the Word Bearer remembered him too.

‘You are the scout,’ he said, nodding.

Pergellen wondered if he’d done it out of respect.

‘And you the huntsman.’

The warrior nodded again.

‘Barthusa Narek.’

‘Verud Pergellen.’

‘Your skill is impressive, Pergellen,’ Narek admitted.

‘I don’t think we’re here to compare notes, though, are we?’

‘Correct. I would have preferred to match myself against you rifle to rifle, but there is no time for that now.’ He sounded almost regretful. ‘Instead, we are left with bolt pistol or blade.’

Upon first sight of him, Pergellen had logged and gauged the threat of each of the huntsman’s weapons. They seemed to consist mainly of blades, but he also had a bolt pistol and the sniper rifle currently aimed at the Iron Hand’s heart.

‘Are you agreeable to these terms?’ Narek asked.

‘Why are you doing this?’

‘I assume you’re not asking about the acts of my Legion, or my fealty to that Legion. If what I think you’re asking is why did I not just execute you where you lay and why now am I allowing you a chance to kill me, the answer is simple. I need to know… who is the better?’ Crouching down, his eyes never leaving Pergellen for a second, he unhooked the rifle’s strap from over his shoulder and set it down on the ridge in front of him. Then he stood. ‘Now we are even, so I shall repeat, bolt pistol or blade?’

The ash wind was howling and the grit lashing around the two legionaries facing one another across the dune. Pergellen estimated there was little more than four metres between them. He had to end it quickly. Enemies were converging on Numeon and the others. If nothing else, he had to issue a warning, but not before he dealt with this. He made up his mind.

‘A fair offer,’ said Pergellen. ‘Blades?’

‘Very well.’

Each legionary grabbed for his pistol, knowing that the other would do the same. A single shot rang out. Narek was faster.

Numeon looked over to the ridge, tracking the report of a pistol heard even above the storm. A lightning bolt cracked the earth in front of him and sent the Pyre captain crashing down onto his back, armour drooling smoke.

In the same instant he turned and saw the warriors behind them. He counted three, and they were moving swiftly through the churning ash. They flickered, like a mirage shimmer, first distant, then closer, and closer still. It was warp-craft.

‘Hriak!’ he bellowed, slow to rise. On the far ridge, the one where Pergellen was meant to be keeping watch, he saw a slumped shadow and another, this one standing, disappearing into the storm as it backed away.

‘Prepare yourself,’ the Librarian hissed at Grammaticus. Then he was running, but not to Numeon’s aid. He passed the Pyre captain without a second glance, having sensed the psyker in their midst. ‘It’s the cleric,’ he shouted. ‘I’m sorry, Artellus, he must have followed my psychic spoor into the wastes.’

Numeon was back on his feet and rushing over to Grammaticus, who was struggling through the storm. Without the kine-shield he was being battered, and only the drake hide was keeping him alive.

‘Where is your fugging ship?’ he snapped, irritated, from inside the cloak.

‘Close.’

‘You hid a ship out here?’ asked Grammaticus.

‘Not I – my brother Ravens,’ said Numeon. ‘It was undetectable.’ He turned his attention to Hriak, who had begun to describe arcane patterns in the air before him. ‘Brother?’ Numeon called out. He blink-clicked a proximity icon that had recently flashed up on the part of his retinal display that was still working, and gestured into the storm.

Looking in the direction that Numeon had pointed, Grammaticus noticed a bulky silhouette looming through the ash-haze.

Hidden in plain sight, using the storm as cover, thought Gramma-ticus. How like the XIX.

‘Go, get him out,’ said Hriak. ‘I’ll deal with this. The raven’s feast has been long overdue for me. Victorus aut Mortis.’

Numeon turned back to the human. ‘Are you all right, are you–’

Grammaticus aimed his fist at him. Something sparkled on the ring he wore.

‘Better than you, I’m afraid.’

The las-beam stabbed into Numeon’s retinal lens, burning out his eye and searing his face beneath. He cried out, clutching his eye, the trauma of it putting him on his knees. The bolt had struck him, and split part of his armour. It wasn’t clotting properly, Numeon’s enhanced physiology undone by something in the storm, something the cleric had incepted. It made the eye burn all the more painfully.

Half blind, he snatched for the human, meaning to crush him this time.

Grammaticus had hit him with a potent charge. Whilst the legionaries were plotting their assault on the space port and this cunning feint to get him to another ship, he had been altering the tech in his ring. The blast had exhausted it. The digital weapon was done and wouldn’t charge again, but it pierced the legionary’s defences and put him down long enough to scurry from the warrior’s grasp.

He snatched the fulgurite from Numeon’s scabbard, deftly avoiding the Salamander’s grab.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Grammaticus, his voice growing more distant the farther away he ran, ‘but you were in my way.’

Running hard against the storm, he reached the ship. The gentle throb of turbine engines was obvious up close. Now he was alongside the ship, he could see it more clearly. He looked back for any sign of his captors.

Lightning crackled in the distance that was not caused by the storm. It illuminated three figures, armoured in legionary battle-plate. One other, the Raven, opposed them. Numeon was still down but rising.

He could pilot this vessel without the Salamander’s help, but Grammaticus knew he didn’t have long to get aboard and get away. Moving around to the rear access ramp, he paused.

There was something dripping through the rear access hatch, as if someone had released a valve and filled the hold with water. It was dark, murky and reeked of stagnation. There was something wrong about this place, this city. Grammaticus had felt it ever since he had made planetfall with Varteh and the others. He had no weapon – the ring was useless, and so he could only rely upon his own wits. At that precise moment they seemed more than a little fragile.

Hammering the hatch release icon, Grammaticus braced himself for what was within. He had wanted to leap up and onto the gunship’s still descending ramp, to rush to the cockpit and quit Traoris for good, but the figure standing before him was blocking his path.

Trapped for so long in the drainage basin, all those years… The water had not been kind. Grammaticus couldn’t remember his name, but the thing glaring at him through the strands of lank hair hanging down over its sunken face knew Grammaticus.

Instinctively, he backed away, his ankle throbbing where the five tiny weals still showed on his flesh.

‘You aren’t…’ he began, but how could he be sure? All the things he had seen, all the deeds he had done…

The drowned boy advanced towards Grammaticus, his gait shuffling and unsteady, leaving a trail of drain water behind him.

A childhood trauma, one from his first life; why did this horror eclipse all the others?

Grammaticus recoiled and found unyielding war-plate preventing further retreat. He turned to face his attacker, knowing the game had ended at last.

‘You’re headed the wrong way if you want to escape,’ said Numeon, one eye ablaze through his retinal lens.

Glancing back, Grammaticus saw that the drowned boy was gone. But the delay had cost him dearly.

‘Is this when you kill me?’ he asked, still a little shaken but shoring up his composure with each passing second.

‘I should have killed you when I saw you. Tell me this. Is what you said true, does Vulkan still live?’

‘As far as I know–’ Grammaticus’s answer was cut by the report of a bolt pistol.

In front of him, Numeon convulsed as the shell struck him in the torso and punched the Salamander off his feet.

‘You have proven remarkably elusive, John Grammaticus,’ said a cultured, yet terrifying voice. The dull click of a bolt pistol being primed to fire again froze Grammaticus in place. He turned, having made it halfway up the ramp, and saw the Word Bearers cleric drawing down on him. ‘But then you are quite remarkable, aren’t you?’

‘So I’m told,’ he said, fulgurite still in hand.

‘Give the spear to me,’ the Dark Apostle ordered. ‘Throw it onto the ground.’

Numeon was still down and not looking like he was going to get up. Grammaticus obeyed.

‘What now?’

‘Now you will come with me and I shall show you the true meaning of the warp.’

‘I’ll pass if that’s all the same to you.’

‘I didn’t say you had a choice, mortal.’ Elias wagged the pistol’s muzzle, gesturing for Grammaticus to step down from the ramp and out of the gunship’s waiting hold.

He hesitated. ‘I’ll be shredded out there.’

Elias briefly looked at the athame dagger sheathed at his belt.

‘You won’t be out here long enough for that. The shredding comes later, though.’

Grammaticus was taking his first steps back down the ramp, trying desperately to think of a way out of this, when a charge trembled the air. It wasn’t from the lightning field, it was nothing to do with the storm at all. Elias felt it, too, and began to turn.

Something was coming.

Numeon was dying. He didn’t need the failing biometric data relayed by his armour to tell him that. Red warning icons were flashing across his vision, a sputtering, static-crazed feed that did more to impede his senses than enhance them.

He discharged the locking clamps on his helmet and tore it off.

The Word Bearer, the cleric they had been seeking, who had undoubtably killed Hriak, paid him no heed. As he gazed into the storm, Numeon detected a change in the air. He felt heat, and imagined the trembling of atoms as the veil of reality was parting and being rewritten.

He reached out, ostensibly for a weapon, perhaps his pistol, as the glaive was now too far to grasp, but found himself clutching the sigil.

Vulkan’s sigil.

For his legionaries it had become an enigmatic symbol of hope, but for the primarch it held no such mystery. He had crafted it, imbued it with technologies beyond even his Legiones Astartes sons.

It was a beacon, a light to bring a stricken ship to shore or a lost traveller home.

For a few brief seconds the storm abated to a murmur, the last jag of lightning seemingly frozen in place and becoming a tear in reality that exuded light.

Gazing into that light, Numeon saw a figure limned in godlike power.

‘Vulkan lives…’ he breathed, emotion and blood both swelling up into his throat to choke him.

Elias holstered his pistol, realising it would have little effect on whatever was about to emerge into reality. He was reaching for his athame, intent on flight, when he recognised the figure that appeared before him.

‘My master,’ he murmured and fell to one knee, bowing his head before Erebus.

Erebus ignored him. Instead he regarded John Grammaticus, who was still standing on the ramp of the gunship, transfixed by what he had just witnessed.

The traveller was hooded. His dark robes swathed a power-armoured frame. There was no face beneath the cowl, only a silver mask fashioned to resemble one. In one hand Erebus held a ritual knife which he secreted back beneath his robes; the other was bionic, yet to be re-fleshed, and reached to retrieve the fulgurite.

‘Rise,’ he said to Elias, though he was looking at Grammaticus. His voice sounded old, but bitter and filled with the resonance of true power.

‘You have arrived at an auspicious moment–’ Elias began, before Erebus lashed out with the fulgurite and slit the other Dark Apostle’s throat.

‘Indeed I have,’ he said, allowing the blood fountaining from Elias’s ruptured arteries to paint the front of his robes.

Dying, unable to staunch the wound from a god-weapon, Elias was reduced to clawing at his former master. He managed to grasp the silver mask and tear it from his master’s face before Erebus seized his flailing hands and threw him back.

Grammaticus recoiled as Erebus faced him. Something akin to a daemon regarded him, one with a hideous flayed skull, blood-red and patched by scar tissue that wasn’t healing as ordinary flesh and skin. It was darker, incarnadine, and shimmered with an unearthly lustre. Several small horns protruded from his pate, little nubs of sharpened bone.

At Erebus’s feet, Elias was gasping like a fish without water. He was dying. His desperation seemed to draw Erebus’s attention, and Grammaticus was glad those hellish eyes were no longer focused on him.

Crouched down, Erebus addressed his former disciple.

‘You are as stupid as you are short-sighted, Valdrekk.’ He showed him the fulgurite, still glowing slightly, clenched in Erebus’s bionic hand. ‘This does not win wars, mere chunks of wood and metal cannot do that. It was never the weapon you were looking for. The primarchs, the god-born, are the weapons. Sharpen our own, blunt our enemy’s.’

Erebus leaned down and clamped his flesh hand over Elias’s gaping mouth. The struggle was brief and uneventful.

‘He goes to the Neverborn as a reward for trying to betray me.’

It took Grammaticus a couple of seconds to realise that Erebus was talking to him. He looked down and saw the fulgurite brandished towards him.

‘Take it,’ Erebus said. ‘No one will stop you.’ Now he looked up and there was terrible knowledge in his eyes. ‘Go to your task, John Grammaticus.’

Warily, Grammaticus took the spear. He then walked back up the ramp and pressed the icon to close it. When he looked back, both Erebus and Elias were gone.

Although he was no legionary, he could fly the ship. His abilities as a pilot were exemplary and there weren’t many vessels, human or xenos, that he couldn’t fly. Heading across the troop hold, Grammaticus opened the door that would allow him access to the cockpit. It was large, built to accommodate a legionary, but he managed well enough. It took him a few minutes but he got the ship’s systems online for atmospheric flight, and the engine turbines were already warmed up.

Through the glacis plate he noticed the sky over Ranos was changing. There were shapes in the storm clouds now, looming large and too distinct to be merely shadows. Erebus had done more than end the life of a rival when he had killed Elias. Grammaticus wasn’t about to stick around and find out what that was.

Engine ignition sent tremors through the ship as Grammaticus boosted forwards and then started to gain loft. A quick check of the sensor array revealed a path through the scattering of vessels in orbit. None of them were suitable; he’d need to find another space port and gain passage aboard a cruiser, preferably non-military.

It would be guarded, he knew that. But if he got there before Polux, he’d have a much better chance of slipping through their security nets.

Dark sky gave way to desolate, black void as the gunship streaked through the upper atmosphere and beyond.

A reflection in the glacis made Grammaticus start at first, the memory of the drowned boy still all too fresh, but he masked his sudden panic well. The eldar regarded him sternly.

‘You were successful, John Grammaticus?’ asked Slau Dha.

‘Yes, the fulgurite is in my possession.’

‘And you know what you must do?’

‘You still doubt my conviction?’

‘Just answer the question.’

Grammaticus sighed, deep and world-weary. ‘Yes, I know what must be done. Although killing a primarch won’t be easy.’

‘This has ever been your mission.’

‘I know, but even so…’

‘His grace is bound to the earth. Separated from it, he will be weak and can be slain like any of the others.’

‘Why him? Why not the Lion or that bastard Curze? Why does it have to be him?’

‘Because he is important and because he must not live to become the keeper of the gate. Do this and your pact with the Cabal is ended.’

‘I somehow doubt that.’

‘It doesn’t matter what you believe, mon-keigh. All that matters is what you do next.’

‘Don’t worry, I know my mission and will carry it out as ordered.’

‘When you reach Macragge,’ said the autarch, threatening even though he was only flecting, ‘find him. He has been there some time already.’

‘Shouldn’t be too difficult.’

‘It will be harder than you think. He is not himself any more. You’ll need help.’

‘Another primarch, yes, I know. I suspect few will be lining up to be his executioner, however.’

‘You would be surprised.’

‘Your kind are full of them.’

Slau Dha ignored the slight, deeming it beneath his concern.

‘And then,’ he asked instead, ‘when the fulgurite is delivered?’

A sudden star flare forced Grammaticus to dim the glacis, effectively ending the flect, but he answered anyway.

‘Then, Vulkan dies.’

Falling from grace…

Burning. Endlessly burning.

I awoke to heat and the stench of my own scorched flesh. My body was wreathed in flame. I didn’t need to look to know it, my every nerve ending screamed it.

Falling.

I thought I had succumbed to another of my brother’s death traps, some pit or chasm of fire.

But I had descended for too long and too weightlessly for it to be that.

I opened my eyes and in the few seconds I had before their vitreous humours boiled and then evaporated in their sockets, I saw a vast orb below me through the blazing heat haze.

It was a grey – almost pallid world – wreathed with white cloud. I was far above it, breaching its upper atmosphere without a ship or even the protection of my armour.

Skin burned away. Flesh too, then muscle.

My head wrenched back, my mouth agape in a silent scream as I experienced agony on a scale without measure.

Stars and nebulae flashed before me but I had not the facility to see them.

As my brain rebelled against what my body was telling it, I witnessed my own destruction through my mind’s eye.

Vulkan, his body an inferno…

…skin shrivelling like parchment, his meat-fat spitting…

…his flesh sloughing away and disintegrating.

Vulkan, rendered down to blackened bone.

His withered skeleton breaches the upper atmosphere until finally…

Vulkan dies.

~ DRAMATIS PERSONAE ~

On Macragge

Roboute Guilliman, Primarch of the XIII Legion ‘Ultramarines’, Lord of the Five Hundred Worlds, now known as ‘the Avenging Son’

Drakus Gorod, Fief commander of the Invictus bodyguard

Maglios, Lieutenant, Invictus bodyguard

Valentus Dolor, Tetrarch of Ultramar (Occluda), Primarch’s Champion

Casmir, Captain, equerry to the tetrarch

Titus Prayto, Master of the Presiding Centuria, XIII Legion Librarius

Phratus Auguston, Chapter Master, Ultramarines First Chapter

Verus Caspean, Chapter Master, Second Chapter

Niax Nessus, Chapter Master, Third Chapter

Terbis, Captain

Thales, Captain

Menius, Sergeant, Ultramarines 34th Company

Zyrol, Sergeant, posted to Helion orbital plate

Leaneena, Deck officer, Helion orbital

Forsche, Consul of the senate

Tarasha Euten, August Chamberlain Principal

Vodun Badorum, Captain of the Praecental Guard, household division

Percel, Praecental Guard

Clenart, Praecental Guard

On Sotha

Barabas Dantioch, Warsmith of the Iron Warriors

Arkus, Sergeant, Ultramarines 199th Aegida Company

Oberdeii, Scout, Aegida Company

From the storm

Eeron Kleve, (rank deferred in mourning), X Legion ‘Iron Hands’

Sardon Karaashison, X Legion ‘Iron Hands’

Timur Gantulga, V Legion ‘White Scars’

Verano Ebb, Captain, Silence Squad, XIX Legion ‘Raven Guard’

Zytos, XVIII Legion ‘Salamanders’

Alexis Polux, Captain, 405th Company, VII Legion ‘Imperial Fists’

Faffnr Bludbroder, Watch-pack master, VI Legion ‘Space Wolves’

Malmur Longreach, Space Wolves watch-pack

Shockeye Ffyn, Space Wolves watch-pack

Kuro Jjordrovk, Space Wolves watch-pack

Gudson Alfreyer, Space Wolves watch-pack

Mads Loreson, Space Wolves watch-pack

Salick, ‘The Braided’, Space Wolves watch-pack

Biter Herek, Space Wolves watch-pack

Nido Knifeson, Space Wolves watch-pack

Bo Soren, ‘The Axe’, Space Wolves watch-pack

Aeonid Thiel, Sergeant, Ultramarines 135th Company

Narek, Former Vigilator, XVII Legion ‘Word Bearers’

Barbos Kha, Unburdened

Ulkas Tul, Unburdened

Lion El’Jonson, Primarch of the First Legion ‘Dark Angels’

Holguin, Voted lieutenant, Deathwing

Farith Redloss, Voted lieutenant, Dreadwing

Stenius, Captain and master of the Invincible Reason

Lady Theralyn Fiana, Navigator, House Ne’iocene

John Grammaticus, Perpetual

Damon Prytanis, Perpetual

Ushpetkhar, Neverborn

Sanguinius, Primarch of the IX Legion ‘Blood Angels’

Diverse other lords, potentates and commanders,
as the actions unfold

‘No man will ever be forgotten so long as he has children.’

– Konor, consular records

‘A capacity for the theoretical is admirable, but a stomach for the practical is priceless.’

– Roboute Guilliman, private writings

‘An ambition to save humanity is almost always a disguise for the desire to rule it.’

– attributed to the Panpacific tyrant Narthan Dume,
in the era of the Unification of Terra [M30]

1
First, the
Apparitions

‘Horatio says ‘tis but our fantasy,
And will not let belief take hold of him
Touching this dreaded sight, twice seen of us:
Therefore I have entreated him along
With us to watch the minutes of this night;
That if again this apparition come,
He may approve our eyes and speak to it.’

– from Amulet, Prince Demark (attributed to the
dramaturge Shakespire), circa M2

That phantoms should haunt Macragge, after all the horrors that had been recently visited upon the planet and the five hundred worlds it held in fealty, came as no surprise to anyone.

The population of Ultramar’s Five Hundred World dominion had suffered the atrocity of Calth, the gross treachery of Lorgar, the widespread bloodshed that followed in consequence, and the pan-galactic devastation of the so-named ‘Ruinstorm’. Every single one of those billions of souls was in a state of existential shock. The monumental events had left psychological scars, ghost wounds that lingered in the minds of men: combat traumas, griefs and private losses, physical injuries, bitternesses, grudges, stress disorders, warp-fuelled nightmares, and other, less-classifiable after-effects. Calth, the ignition point, barely more than two years past, had haunted the citizens of Ultramar with such phantoms ever since.

No, when the latest apparitions came, the only surprise was that they should be so very real.

Over ten successive nights, phantoms stalked the high towers and wall-walks of Macragge City, under the shadow of the Fortress, beneath a night sky that had been a permanent, star-less russet, like blood-soaked black cloth, since the coming of the Ruinstorm two years before.

No stars shone, none that looked healthy or matched any charts, at least. Even the brightest of the capital world’s four moons was seldom visible through the inky, cosmological swirl of the enduring warp storm. The corpse of the Word Bearers immense warship the Furious Abyss could sometimes be seen in the western skies as the orbital breakers went about their work, but this was merely a sad relic of past bloodshed. During the day, when sunlight fell upon Macragge, it fell only as a tarnished golden haze, as if through battlefield smoke.

It fell upon a haunted city: Macragge City, Magna Macragge Civitas, the greatest city in the Imperial East, a city so mighty that it shared the name of the world it stood on, for the city was the world and the world was the city. Filling the vast lowland plains, from the Hera’s Crown peaks in the north to the sea in the south, it was a testament to the power of Imperial mankind, and to one man in particular.

The apparitions appeared only after nightfall. Footsteps were heard in empty corridors where no one walked; voices mumbled from inside block-cut walls or the roots of staircases; sometimes the sound of hasty, running feet rushed down deserted colonnades; once, an odd and mournful laugh was heard echoing through an odeon hall; most often came the aching melody of a bowed string instrument, playing in some cavernous place of eternal echoes.

These manifestations were heard by household guardsmen on night patrol, by cooks and servants, by attachés hurrying to late conferences, by cleaners and servitors, by senators coming to the Residency. They were heard everywhere, from the high Castrum of the Palaeopolis, where the Residency, High Senate and praecental barracks shared the castellated summit with the monolithic immensity of the Fortress of Hera, right down across the demes of the city to the lowliest insulae and worker-habs on the southern coast, from the labouring zones of the eastern wards, and even from the squalid slums beyond the Servian Wall in the west.

It is likely they had been occurring for several nights before they were first reported. Junior staffers and servants had become timid and superstitious in this new age of darkness, and were individually reluctant to speak up and tell their superiors what they thought they had heard in some lonely room or deserted wing.

The Lord of Macragge, the Avenging Son, had issued strict orders that all phenomena were to be reported, however.

‘We can’t trust the physical integrity of our universe, anymore,’ he told Euten. ‘Its laws no longer operate the way we think they operate. Everything that might once have been dismissed as a trick of the mind or a figment of the imagination must be taken seriously and investigated. The warp is reaching into us, mam, and we do not yet recognise half of the faces it wears. I will not be taken by surprise again. I will not be infiltrated.’

As I was at Calth. Those were the unspoken words at the end of the sentence. The Avenging Son could seldom bring himself to speak the name of that dear planet. Phantoms of his own haunted him.

Euten impressed the lord’s directive upon the staff of the Residency, and the public officers of the Civitas; but ironically it was she who, the very next night, heard a bowed instrument playing in a side chamber of the counting house where there was no player, no instrument, no bow, nor even the space or conditions to produce the echo that had accompanied the tune.

Stories accumulated for several nights after the chamberlain’s report. Spirits were abroad in Magna Macragge Civitas. Their range was wide, but the focus seemed to be the Residency, and the barracks and parklands adjacent to it. Vodun Badorum, captain of the praecental household guard, mobilised sweep parties to watch for occurrences, and record or even challenge them, and he also consulted with agents of the Astra Telepathica and the Mechanicum for advice and counsel.

The Lord of Macragge studied the reports as they came in, and sought the wisdom of his high officers and senior advisors, looking for explanations that could be grounded in science, or at least those parts of human science that lay adjacent to the unknowable laws of the warp.

He also summoned Titus Prayto, a supervising centurion of the XIII Legion’s newly reinstated Librarius. After Calth, and the hellish losses inflicted on the XIII by psychic warfare and warpcraft, the Lord of Macragge had effectively repealed the Edict of Nikaea, which had stringently outlawed the use of psykers within the Legiones Astartes. The Edict had been the will of the Emperor, and had been enforced as such. However, the Lord of Macragge felt it had deprived his Legion of its most effective weapon at Calth.

The repeal was his decision to make, and he made it with confidence. There were no brother primarchs to consult, no council to convene, no father to turn to. The Lord of Macragge, like the City of Macragge, stood alone in the night, besieged by storms that made communication impossible. The Lord of Macragge, Roboute Guilliman, was his own authority more than ever.

He overthrew the Edict, for the duration of the emergency at least, for the good of Ultramar. This exercise of authority was the action of a lord who believed that he wielded the power of the Emperor himself. Until now, only Malcador the Sigillite had been entrusted with such influence, and he had been the Imperial Regent.

And ‘regent’ was a word used aloud even less often, and with less ease, than was the word ‘Calth’.

Titus Prayto, a hooded giant in cobalt-blue Mark IV armour, came to the Residency directly from the Sacristy of the Librarius, which had been unlocked for use within the Fortress.

His lord awaited in a high chamber overlooking the city. The Avenging Son was working diligently at an antique cogitator. Nearby, his great granite desk was piled with papers and slates. The last rays of smoked gold sunlight shone through the tall, narrow windows. Night was encroaching.

Prayto lowered his psychic hood, unclasped his helm, and stood, respectfully bareheaded, helm tucked under his left arm, the clasps and seal-straps dangling.

‘Apparitions walk, Titus,’ Guilliman said, without looking up.

‘They do, my lord,’ Prayto said, and nodded.

‘Every night,’ Guilliman went on, ‘more footsteps. More muttering. And this music. The music is a recurring manifestation. A bowed instrument, or instruments.’

‘A psaltery, we think, my lord.’

Guilliman looked up at Prayto with piqued interest.

‘A psaltery?’

‘From the pitch and tone. A particular high and sharp resonance, though there may be more than one instrument. Some are deeper toned, though the note quality is the same. Perhaps meso or bass psalteries, which have larger sound-boxes.’

‘All this from verbal accounts?’ asked Guilliman.

‘No, my lord. Last evening a high-grade servitor in the pantry of the west dining room made a vox recording.’

Guilliman stood.

‘I had not been told. Do you have it?’

Prayto nodded and activated a vox-module clamped to his belt to play back the audio clip.

A few seconds of haunting, plaintive music played: thin, high, long notes that had an ethereal quality.

The clip ended.

‘Shall I play it again, my lord?’ asked Prayto.

Guilliman shook his head. His mind was such that one hearing was sufficient for him to process all particulars.

‘Assuredly a psaltery,’ he mused. ‘The melody was in the pitch of D, though I do not recognise the tune. So… it can be recorded.’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘This reassures me somewhat. A psychic intrusion, or some assault of the warp upon our imaginations would not leave a sonic fingerprint.’

‘No, my lord,’ replied Prayto. ‘We seem to be hearing physical sounds, transmitted to us somehow. It would explain why, between us, the Librarius and the Astra Telepathica have detected no trace of psychic activity whatsoever.’

Guilliman nodded. He was wearing the dark, heavy robes of a senator or consul, though cut to a different scale of being.

‘Be seated,’ he told Prayto, with a sidelong gesture.

Titus Prayto hesitated for a moment while he selected an appropriate place to sit down. The Lord’s Chamber was part of a suite of rooms in the upper level of the Residency, which, Prayto knew, had been the private accommodation of Konor, the primarch’s adoptive father. Lord Guilliman had changed very little of the decor. The walls were still hung with paintings of people and events that bore significance to the local history of Macragge, but had precious little to do with the greater, galactic narrative of the Imperium.

The main change that Lord Guilliman had made in the decades he had occupied the Residency was to have most of the human-scaled furniture removed and replaced with objects built for a primarch’s dimensions: the desk, four chairs, a footstool, and a day bed. There were other items proportioned for the physicality of a Legiones Astartes battle-brother, and Prayto sat upon such a chair. The room, therefore, contained three magnitudes of furniture to provide for the Lord of Macragge and any of the advisors and subjects who might attend him. Positioned correctly, with one of the lord’s massive chairs in the foreground, a Legion-scaled item of furniture in the middle ground, and a chair for human build furthest away, it was possible to play amusing and impossible tricks upon the mind, as the apparent recession of the furniture suggested a distance in the room that the walls and ceiling denied. Reverse the positions and the room appeared to have no depth at all.

‘The echo,’ said Guilliman, returning to the ancient, brass-fitted cogitator on his oversized desk. Like the chamber, the cogitator was an inheritance from his stepfather, Konor. In the old days of Ultramar, before contact with the crusade fleets of Terra brought new technologies, Konor had effectively run the fiefdom from this room with that cold-gestalt instrument from the Golden Age of Technology.

‘The echo is part of the sound,’ Guilliman said. ‘This has been mentioned by several witnesses about several apparitions. The quality of the echo is not an acoustic product of the environment.’

‘No, lord,’ Prayto agreed. ‘The west dining room’s pantry would not produce an echo like that. I had it tested by the adepts of the Mechanicum.’

‘You did?’ asked Guilliman. ‘Why?’

‘Because I knew you would have ordered such a test if I had not.’

A brief, appreciative smile crossed the Avenging Son’s mouth.

‘We will solve this puzzle, Titus,’ Guilliman said.

‘We will, my lord. Assuredly.’

‘Bring all new data directly to me, day or night.’

‘I will, my lord.’

Prayto rose to his feet, sensing that his audience was ended. Guilliman noticed that the Librarian had been regarding, with some interest, books and data-slates piled on a side table.

‘You read, Titus?’ the Avenging Son asked.

‘Of course, my lord.’

Guilliman demurred with a slight shake of his hand.

‘You misunderstand. Of course you can read. But I don’t mean data, or tactical updates, or informational material. Do you read fiction? Drama? Poetry? History?’

Prayto maintained a solemn face, though he was amused. There were times when Lord Guilliman of Ultramar seemed to know everything about everything, in astonishing detail, yet he could also be childlike in his naivety and not understand very basic things about the people and the culture surrounding him.

‘I do, my lord,’ said Prayto. ‘As I believe someone in this very room said, in the address to mark the recommencement of the Librarius programme, our minds are our primary weapons, so it pays to exercise them well.’

Guilliman laughed and nodded.

‘I did say that,’ he agreed.

‘I read extensively to that end,’ said Prayto. ‘I find the notions and wisdoms contained in literature and poetry push my mind to places that pure technical reading does not. I enjoy the epic cycles of Tashkara, and the philosophies of Zimbahn and Poul Padraig Grossman.’

Guilliman signalled his approval with a tip of his head.

‘All Unification Era, of course,’ he said. ‘You should explore the classics.’

He crossed to the side table and took up a data-slate. He handed it to Prayto.

‘You’ll enjoy this,’ he said.

‘Thank you, my lord.’

Prayto studied the title.

‘Amulet, Prince Demark?’

‘It’s drama, Titus. Ancient stuff, from M2 or earlier. One of the few extant works by Shakespire.’

‘Why this, my lord?’

Guilliman shrugged.

‘My father had me read it as a child. I was reminded of it by current events, so I had it fetched from the Residency biblios. In the ancient kingdom of Demark, ghosts walk upon the palace battlements, and are premonitions of great societal change in the court of that realm.’

Prayto shook the slate approvingly.

‘I will enjoy it,’ he said.

Guilliman nodded, and turned back to his cold-gestalt machine. The audience was over.

Dit-dit-dit-deeeeet!

The cogitator had an odd, synthesised alert chime. It was an antique device. Every twenty-five seconds, it burbled its little noise, trying to alert the Avenging Son to the new information it had acquired.

Guilliman ignored the chime. He did not need to be told. He had already noticed the matter that the cogitator was trying to bring to his attention.

A star. A new star. It was the first star that had been visible in Macragge’s night sky for over two years.

Guilliman sat, staring through the chamber windows at the star, which glimmered alone in the otherwise bloody, swirling night sky. He had scribbled down its position on a note slate: eastern limits, low on the horizon, rising between the peaks of Calut and Andromache. He had spotted it with his naked eyes fifteen minutes ago, a good three minutes before the cogitator had begun its persistent burbling.

Konor – great Konor, Battle King – had run Macragge, world and city alike, from this room, and with this cogitator. At night, when the mechanisms of bureaucracy had shut down, he had sat here alone, monitoring data-traffic and news-flows. He had sat at his teak desk, looking out of the deep windows, observing his realm. In the daytime, Konor had ruled Macragge from the senate floor. At night, this chamber had been the focus of his authority.

Guilliman remembered that. He remembered his stepfather’s intensity, even in repose. As a youth, Guilliman had come to the Residency and watched Konor sitting by the cogitator after hours, reading from the day’s reports and slates, reviewing briefings for the next day, looking up every time the data-engine chimed.

Dit-dit-dit-deeeeet!

Until Guilliman came to Macragge, capital world of Ultramar’s Five Hundred, Konor had been the epitome of statesman, politician and warlord. No one, not even Guilliman, could have imagined how Konor’s adopted son would come to eclipse him.

Roboute Guilliman, a genetically enhanced post-human, one of only eighteen in the galaxy, had fallen to Macragge out of the skies at the whim of fates beyond mortal ken. His blood father, it later transpired, was the nameless Emperor of Terra. Like all of the eighteen sons, all of the primarchs, Guilliman had been stolen from his father’s genetic nursery and cast out across space. No one really knew how this action had been accomplished, or by what, or for what reason. When pressed on the subject – and he could seldom be pressed on any subject – Guilliman’s blood father had attested that the abduction and scattering of the eighteen primarch offspring had been an action of the Ruinous Powers of the warp, an event designed to thwart the schemes of mankind.

Guilliman did not place much faith in this. It smacked of foolishness to suggest that his blood father should be so naive as to be gulled by Chaos so. To have his genetically engineered heirs stolen and scattered in some bizarre diaspora?

Nonsense.

Guilliman believed that a great deal more deliberate purpose had been at the heart of it. He knew his gene-father. The man – and man was far too slight a word – possessed a mind that had conceived a universal plan, a plan that would take thousands or even millions of years to orchestrate and accomplish. The Emperor was the architect of a species. The primarchs were central to that ambition. The Emperor would not have lost them or permitted them to be stolen. Guilliman believed that his father had arranged or allowed the dispersal.

Eighteen perfect genetically engineered heirs were not enough. They had to be tested and tempered. Scattering them across the tides of space and time to see who would survive and who would succeed, that was the project of a true luminary.

Guilliman had fallen on Macragge, and had been raised as a son by the first man of that world to be a ruler, a statesman and a warlord. By his twelfth year, it was apparent from his inhuman stature and abilities that Roboute Guilliman was not simply a man. He was a demigod. He had been tested by circumstances, and he had not been found wanting.

Dit-dit-dit-deeeeet!

Twelve years old, coming into the chamber at night, seeing Konor in his chair, the cogitator chiming, the windows undraped. Twelve years old, already as tall as his stepfather, and already more physically powerful; another year or two and he would have to have furniture, armour and weapons made especially for him.

Dit-dit-dit-deeeeet!

Konor believed in contingency. Any plan, no matter how flawless, needed a back-up. Guilliman believed his blood father thought this too. Contingency was something Konor and Guilliman’s blood father agreed on. Their advice would have been the same. Do not believe in perfection, because it can be taken away. Always have a fall-back you can live with. Always know how victory can be achieved in a different way. Always have the practical to compensate for any theoretical.

The Imperium of Man was the most perfect vision of unity imaginable. The Emperor and his heirs spent more than two centuries making it a possibility. If it failed… If it failed, was one to simply despair? Did a man collapse and rail at the universe for compromising his plan?

Or did he regroup and turn to his contingency?

Did he demonstrate to fate that there is always another way?

Horus Lupercal – another of the eighteen primarchs, but, in Guilliman’s opinion, far from the best – had been selected as the heir among heirs and, in a miserably short space of time, had been found wanting. He had risen in revolt, twisting some other primarchs against their gene-father too.

The first Guilliman had known of this sacrilege was when Lorgar’s bastards had turned upon the Five Hundred Worlds at Calth and, in darkest treachery, had shattered that planet.

Shameless. Atrocious.

Two years had passed, and there was not a second of them when Guilliman had not thought of Lorgar’s treachery and – by extension – Horus’s.

Guilliman would be avenged.

It would be a simple revenge, ultimately, the kind of revenge Konor had taught him at the cutting edge of a gladius.

Dit-dit-dit-deeeeet!

There was a new star in heaven tonight. One hundred days ago, Guilliman had set the old cold-gestalt cogitator to alert him to any stellar changes.

Guilliman had known what to expect if it worked. If. Tonight, he had seen the new star immediately. He had been sitting in his chair, beside the cogitator, facing the windows, the way his stepfather had passed the long nights.

The star.

A light.

A beacon.

Hope.

Dit-dit-dit-deeeeet!

Guilliman leaned over and pressed the cancel button to kill the persisting chime.

There was a knock at the chamber door.

‘Enter.’

It was Euten.

‘My lord–’ the old woman began.

‘I’ve already seen it, mam,’ said Guilliman.

Euten looked puzzled.

‘The… apparition?’ she asked.

Guilliman stood.

‘Begin again,’ he said.

Badorum, commander of the praecental household, had gathered a squad of men from the night watch in the hallway leading to the hydroponics gallery. By human standards, they were all large, powerful men, though they seemed like children beside the primarch.

Badorum was a seasoned officer in late middle age. Like his soldiers, he wore steel, silver and grey, with a short cape of cobalt-blue. His strap-hung plasma weapon was chromed and immaculate.

Euten the chamberlain, a tall, fragile stick-figure in a long white gown, led the way, clomping with her staff. Guilliman followed, impatient to arrive, but respectful enough to walk at the old woman’s best pace. The approach was dark, as if the lights had been switched off or had failed. The only luminosity came from the lanterns and visor lights of the householders, and the faint green glow of the gallery beyond the door.

Guilliman could already hear it: a psaltery, a bass psaltery, peeling its long, sad, pure notes into the night air. The echo was pronounced. The hydroponics gallery was a large space, but Guilliman was sure it could not have produced quite that kind of echo. The sound seemed to come from the heart of the world, as if it was rising out of some tectonically riven abyss.

‘What have you seen?’ asked Guilliman, ignoring the rattle of bowed salutes that Badorum and the night watch offered him.

‘I was only just summoned, lord,’ said Badorum. ‘Clenart? You were here.’

The soldier stepped forward and removed his helm respectfully.

‘We were patrolling, my lord, and approaching this gallery when we first heard the noise. Music, just as now.’

‘Clenart, look at me,’ Guilliman said.

The soldier raised his eyes to meet the Avenging Son’s gaze. He had to tilt his head back a long way. ‘You saw something?’

‘Yes, my lord, indeed so,’ the man replied. ‘A great figure in black. Made of blackness, as it seemed. It stepped out of the shadows and was solid. It was wrapped in iron, my lord.’

‘In iron?’

‘In metal. It was armoured, even the face. Not a visor, a mask.’

‘How big?’ asked Euten.

‘As big…’ the soldier began. He paused. ‘As big as him, my lady.’

He gestured down the hallway. Titus Prayto had just come into view, escorted by four Ultramarines battle-brothers.

As large as a Space Marine of the Legiones Astartes. A giant, then.

‘Another sighting, my lord?’ Prayto asked.

‘Can you scan the area?’ asked Guilliman.

‘I have done so, but I will again,’ Prayto replied. ‘There is no psychic trace here. The passive monitors would have triggered long before I arrived.’

‘But you hear the music, Titus?’

‘I do, my lord.’

Guilliman reached out his hand. Prayto, without hesitation, drew his boltgun and slapped it into his primarch’s waiting palm. Guilliman checked its readiness quickly and turned towards the gallery door. The weapon was a little too small for his hand. It looked like a pistol.

‘My lord,’ Badorum began. ‘Should we not go in before you and–’

‘As you were, commander,’ said Prayto. He did not need to read his master’s mind to be sure of the determination of his intent.

Guilliman entered the green twilight of the hydroponics gallery. Inside, it was warm and humid. The lights were on some night-cycle pattern. He could hear the gurgle of the water feeding the tanks, and the soft drip of the sluices. There was a pungent scent of grass and leaf mulch.

The phantom music was louder inside, and its echo more profound and inexplicable.

Prayto followed Guilliman. He had drawn his combat sword. Badorum followed him, his plasma gun braced at his shoulder in a sweeping aim.

‘I don’t–’ Badorum began.

The shadows parted in front of them and a figure loomed where no figure had been. It seemed to grow out of the darkness as if it had come on stage through some invisible curtain.

‘In the name of Terra,’ Guilliman breathed.

The figure was no apparition. It was real and solid. More particularly, he recognised it: the iron mask, the unmaintained Mark III plate, the insignia of the IV Legion Astartes. Guilliman knew too well the shuffling, crippled gait that spoke of chronic and unhealing illness. It was worse than when last he had observed it.

‘Warsmith Dantioch,’ he said.

‘My honoured lord,’ Barabas Dantioch of the Iron Warriors replied.

‘How can you be here, Dantioch? No ships have arrived in weeks! How can you be here without us knowing of your arrival?’

Guilliman paused suddenly. Dantioch’s greeting had been accompanied by a distinct echo.

‘When last I heard,’ said Guilliman, ‘you were half a segmentum away, in the Eastern Fringes, on Sotha.’

‘Yes, my Lord Guilliman,’ replied Dantioch, ‘and I still am.’

2
Pharos

‘And the decree was, “let light be”
And so it was, and it was good.’

– Proscribed ‘Creation Myth’, proto-Catheric
teachings [pre-Unification]

Dantioch, warsmith of the Iron Warriors, stood in the cold chamber high on the summit of Mount Pharos, and held Guilliman’s gaze.

It was extraordinary. There was no lag or delay. The image and sound of Ultramar’s lord was an entirely realised presence. It was as though they were sharing the room, except that no echo accompanied Guilliman’s voice, and no fume of breath came from his lips, suggesting that the room he actually occupied was smaller and warmer.

‘Forgive me, my lord,’ said Dantioch. He reached out an ironclad hand and pressed his fingertips against Guilliman’s sternum. There was a slight resistance as Dantioch’s fingers slipped into Guilliman’s form, causing a slight, spreading ripple of light to shimmer his image for a moment.

Dantioch withdrew his hand.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You seemed so real.’

‘You are on Sotha?’ Guilliman asked. ‘We are communicating at this distance?’

Dantioch nodded.

‘I am in a chamber known as Primary Location Alpha, near the top of the Pharos structure. We test-started the system three weeks ago, local, and the system has been running for two weeks. Since then I have been attempting to establish communication.’

Guilliman shook his head, marvelling.

‘We saw your light for the first time tonight,’ he said.

‘Roughly when alignment was properly established,’ Dantioch noted, ‘which in turn allowed this conversation to take place.’

‘You are like a star. A new star.’

‘I would appreciate any data you can process back to us via this link,’ Dantioch said. ‘To understand in more detail how we are received will allow us to fine-tune the connection.’

‘This is technology of a level we can scarcely dream of, warsmith,’ said Guilliman.

‘We did not dream of it,’ replied Dantioch. ‘It was dreamed of by beings who came and went long before us. Yet you suspected its worth, imagined its potential, and trusted me to unlock its secrets. This vision, both literal and metaphorical, is due to you, my lord.’

Sotha was a far-flung world close to the edge of the galaxy’s Eastern Fringe. It lay farther out than Graia or Thandros, almost at the limits of both the fiefdom of the Five Hundred Worlds and the span of all Imperial territory.

Not far beyond it, in warpcraft terms, lay the rim of the Ultima Segmentum and the edge of the human galaxy. Past that vast thinning-out of stars and systems lay nothing but the black, heatless void of the intergalactic gulf.

Sotha was a jewel of a world, one of the few Terra-comparable ecosystems discovered so far out in the galactic east. It possessed living oceans and densely forested, mountainous landmasses. There were lower-level animal-forms, avians and insects. Curiously, there were no higher forms, nor any obvious trace of attempted xenos visitation or colonisation. Guilliman and the expedition fleets of Ultramar had always considered the world a particular curiosity: if there was one geo-type almost guaranteed to have been settled during the outward expansion of the Great Age of Technology, it was the rare and precious Terra-comparable planets. For Sotha to have been overlooked or missed by the Great Expansionists seemed unlikely, but there was no evidence that any human presence had reached Sotha, not even a colony that had been established and then died out.

Then the surveyors learned the truth about Mount Pharos, the tallest of all the peaks in the planet’s majestic mountain ranges.

Plans for full colonisation were put on hold. A small agri-colony was approved instead, to be based on Sotha in support of a survey mission of archaeologists and xenoculturists assigned to Mount Pharos.

A dedicated company of Ultramarines, the 199th, was assigned to Sotha as permanent protection, and the world was given the classification ‘restricted’.

All that had happened one hundred and twenty-seven years earlier.

Dantioch had been out on the promontory at sunset when the Ultramarines of the protection company came to tell him that signs of contact were finally becoming apparent.

It was about time. The ancient systems of the Pharos, vast quantum-pulse engines of almost inscrutable function, had been running for two weeks. Dantioch had begun to fear that he and the men he worked with had entirely misconceived the purpose and use of the artefacts.

It was late afternoon, the particular moment when the light above the forests and distant sea outside began to skew away, filling the apertures of the summit behind the promontory with a phantom luminescence.

It was the best time to appreciate the sheer magnificence of the structure.

‘There is a sign at last?’ he asked.

One of the Ultramarines, a sergeant called Arkus, nodded. He was accompanied by two young men of the company’s Scout section. The Ultramarines 199th had made the best of their residency on Sotha by taking pride in their specialist duty. They had adopted the name Aegida, or ‘shield’, Company while operating from the Legion orbital. They had also taken up a symbol as their company icon. Both the Scouts wore it on their pauldrons.

‘There are signs, sir,’ said Arkus. ‘Noises in the… the acoustic chambers.’

‘At last,’ Dantioch said. He limped across the rocky promontory to follow them inside the mountain, every step an effort for his massive, iron-framed physique. He no longer cared to disguise the attenuated gasps of pain that movement forced out of him. He had been genetically fabricated to withstand superhuman tolerances, and by the damned Emperor, he was withstanding them.

At the threshold of one of the vast apertures which opened like a giant eye socket in the mountainside, Dantioch turned back to look at the evening sky. Beyond the high cloud, he could detect the malicious disturbance of the Ruinstorm. It was easier to see at night, usually, but even in daylight hours the traumatic warp-spasms and ripples shimmering through space were visible.

The trigger point for the Ruinstorm had been the attack on Calth twenty-eight months earlier. Its hideous effects had rapidly spread right across the segmentum, and had engulfed the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar.

No one knew how far the storm effects went. Some said they had possessed the entire galaxy. What was certainly true was that they had rendered the Five Hundred Worlds unnavigable except for the most high-risk enterprises. Trade and communication had collapsed. Ultramar, as a single and admirable area of governance, was ruined. Furthermore, all interstellar transit between the Eastern Fringe and the core segmenta, and beloved Terra, was impossible. The galaxy was, in effect, cut in two.

Lord Barabas Dantioch, warsmith of the IV Legion Iron Warriors, was technically a traitor. He was a traitor to the Throne and Terra, because his Legion had crossed the line and sided with the renegade Warmaster, Horus. Simultaneously, he was a traitor to his own Legion, because he had forsworn the Iron Warriors and decided to stand with the loyalists. He stood alone, besieged by the conflicting loyalties of the new, riven Imperium.

Being besieged suited all Iron Warriors, of course, no matter their inclination. No Legion matched them for their artistry in fortification, except perhaps for the VII Legion, the Imperial Fists. The comparative technical excellences of the IV and the VII would be put to the ultimate test, Dantioch was sure, before the Civil War ended. In fact, given that the morality of the Imperium had already been turned upside down by Horus’s revolt, it would seem a waste of the opportunity if the ancient rivalry was not tested by war.

For his excellence in siegecraft, and his staunch loyalty to the Emperor, Barabas Dantioch had been recruited by the Lords of Ultramar to help them construct and defend the greatest contingency plan – and perhaps the second greatest heresy – the Imperium had ever known.

Dantioch had accepted the challenge. He had supposed he would be employed in fortifying the physical defences of Macragge and other key worlds of Ultramar. That was his forte.

Then the Avenging Son had revealed to him the long-sequestered mysteries of Sotha, and Dantioch had realised that the survival of a pocket empire like Ultramar lay less in fortifying its physical defences and far, far more in strengthening its function and operation.

He agreed absolutely with Roboute Guilliman. Sotha offered a way in which they might overcome the Ruinstorm rather than batten down against its wrath.

Dantioch had spent the last nine months working to that end, unlocking Sotha’s mysteries and activating the planet’s deep-time secrets.

The day’s ebbing light shone into the aperture and the great coiled chamber. The interior spaces of the Pharos, each one of them cut from the mountain’s living rock by processes that no one had been able to explain, reminded Dantioch of the inner spaces of a great conch shell. They were polished, smooth, and curved. There were no straight lines or hard edges. Vast, organically curved chambers led one into another, sometimes connected by smaller, flask-chambers or rounded coils of hallway that felt like tubes or blood vessels. Everything was a polished, gleaming black: a surface treatment of the exposed rock that was durable and resistant to scratching or cutting. It was like a black mirror, yet it gave back very little reflection – just the merest shadow – and held very little light, except for when, at the end of each day, the sunset flooded through the mountain-top apertures, and a curious golden light dripped and drained down through the Pharos chambers, deep into the mountain, like liquid fire running off the polished black walls.

The early surveyors had found the Pharos, men working in the fleets sent out by Guilliman to expand the realm of Macragge, and reconnect with ancient fief-holdings that had been part of the realm before the Age of Strife. This had always been Konor’s dream. Konor had ruled Ultramar from Macragge, but his Ultramar was but a shadow, a fraction of the culture that Ultramar had been before the Long Night. Konor had been determined to rebuild the mythical Five Hundred Worlds, and, after his death, Guilliman had set out to achieve his father’s ambition. It was while he was rebuilding the Five Hundred Worlds, and making them the greatest empire in the galactic east, that the crusading fleets of Terra had reached Macragge, and Guilliman had finally met his blood father, and learned of his true inheritance.

That the Pharos was an immense structure of xenos origin had been obvious. That was why Sotha had been restricted and placed under guard while it was thoroughly investigated. Guilliman, so forward thinking in other ways, had a natural mistrust of technologies not built by man, especially those that could not be easily reverse-engineered. The Pharos of Sotha was potentially many things, with many possible functions, and Guilliman was cautious of them all. The survey mission was established on the planet, a planet that otherwise would have been rapidly colonised, and a community of settlers founded to support the scientists.

This amused Dantioch. The settlers were simple agricultural workers charged with food production and livestock management. They lived simple, pastoral lives on the lower slopes of the mountain. Forest growth on the slopes was rapid and vital. It had taken several years to clear the entrance apertures just to gain access. Every summer, the farm workers came up from the arable fields in the valley below, bringing their scythes and harvesting hooks, and worked to clear away the year’s grass and brush growth where it had begun to choke and invade the gleaming black halls again.

This simple, rural tradition, dating back over a hundred years, had given rise to the protection company’s choice of icon.

The people of the farming community did not hold the Pharos in any particular awe. It was simply part of their world. They often used its obsidian apertures as caves to shelter them and their herds from storms. They had also, long ago, discovered the extraordinary acoustic qualities of the linked chambers and halls, and had taken to playing their pipes and horns and psalteries in the deep caves, creating music of unparalleled beauty and mystery.

From the first moment that he arrived to inspect the Pharos, Dantioch had understood that the interlinking chambers had not been intended as occupation spaces, at least not for any creatures of humanoid dimensions. There were often places of near impossible access between chambers: deep, polished drops; smooth sheer curves; untenable slopes. There were no stairs, no measured walkways. In one particular instance, a vast tri-lobed chamber, shaped almost like a stomach, plunged away into a polished tube seven hundred metres deep, which opened in the ceiling of another vast, semi-spherical hall a hundred metres high.

A long, slow process of construction had been undertaken over the years, establishing self-levelling, pre-fabricated walkways of STC design to provide platforms, ladders, stairs and bridges that would allow humans to traverse and explore the almost endless interior of the Pharos.

Dantioch and his Ultramarines escort descended on just such a walkway. The Imperial equipment, solid and steady, locked into place over the rolling, polished curves of the Pharos’s chambers, seemed crude by comparison: treated, unpainted metal, cold-pressed from a standard template, stamped with the Imperial aquila, echoing to their footsteps with leaden clatters. When they walked upon the polished black, they made only the softest tapping sounds. The walkways, stairs and platforms were also dwarfed by the gloomy chambers they threaded through, and seemed frail by comparison to the sheened black curves and cliffs.

Arkus and his Scouts patiently led the crippled warsmith to the abyssal plain of Primary Location Alpha. Twice on the journey they passed farmworkers eating supper and playing their instruments. Oberdeii, one of the Scouts, and the youngest of the entire company, shooed them away. The Pharos had been officially out of bounds ever since Dantioch had brought the quantum-pulse engines, deep in the mountain’s core, online. They could all hear, or at least feel, the infrasonic throb of the vast and ancient devices.

Dantioch had stood in Primary Location Alpha, and nodded to his escort to withdraw. He had been fairly confident that he understood the function of the Pharos even from the data he had studied before his arrival on Sotha. Guilliman had deduced it too. Primary Location Alpha was, he was sure, the centre of the entire mechanism. Dantioch found himself referring to it in his notes as the ‘tuning stage’ or the ‘sounding board’. It was a vast cave of polished black, with a domed ceiling and an almost flat floor.

Ghosts walked here, images of things light years away, drawn into the Pharos by its quantum processes. They were often fleeting, but always real. It had taken Dantioch two weeks and immense astronomical calculations to tune the Pharos as he wanted it.

As he walked onto the tuning floor, Dantioch saw Guilliman appear before him, as if in the flesh.

He had finally tuned the xenos device to far distant Macragge.

‘It is as you speculated, my lord,’ Dantioch said. ‘The Pharos is part of an ancient interstellar navigation system. It is both a beacon and a route-finder. And, as we just saw, it also permits instantaneous communication across unimaginable distances.’

‘You say I speculated, Dantioch,’ said Guilliman’s image, ‘but I never had the slightest clue what manner of technology it was.’

‘It is not fully understood by me either, lord,’ replied the warsmith. ‘It certainly involves a principle of quantum entanglement. But I believe that, unlike our warp technology that uses the immaterium to by-pass realspace, this quantum function once allowed for site-to-site teleportation, perhaps through a network of gateways. I also believe its fundamental function lies not with psychic energy, but with empathic power. It is an empathic system, adjusted to the needs of the user, not the will. I will provide fuller findings later.’

‘But it is a navigational beacon?’ asked Guilliman.

‘In many ways.’

‘You said it was part of a network?’

Dantioch nodded.

‘I believe other stations like the Pharos must exist, or once existed, on other worlds throughout the galaxy.’

Guilliman paused.

‘So it is not one, single beacon, like the Astronomican?’

‘No, lord. In two ways. I believe the Pharos and other stations like it once used to create a network of navigational pathways between stars, as opposed to a single, range-finding point the way the Astronomican does. Or did.’

‘Go on.’

‘It is more like a lantern than a beacon, lord. You tune it. You point it, and illuminate a site or location for the benefit of range-finding. Now I have tuned to Macragge, I can, I believe, light up Macragge as a bright spot that will be visible throughout realspace and the warp, despite the Ruinstorm.’

‘Just as I see Sotha as a new star in the sky?’

‘Yes, my lord.’

Guilliman looked at him.

‘I am loath to use xenos technology, but the light of the Astronomican is lost to us because of the Ruinstorm. To hold Ultramar together, to rebuild the Five Hundred Worlds, we must restore communication and travel links. We must navigate and reposition. We must pierce and banish this age of darkness. This is the first step towards our survival. This is how we fight back and overthrow Horus and his daemon allies. Dantioch, I applaud you and thank you for the peerless work you have done, and the labours you are yet to undertake.’

‘My lord.’

Dantioch, with difficulty, bowed.

‘Warsmith?’

‘Yes, my lord?’

‘Illuminate Macragge.’

3
From the Heart
of the Storm

‘Hjold! The sea is set against us, for
it is the sea, and the darkness is set about us,
for it is the darkness, but
we will row on, brothers, backs breaking into each stroke,
we will row on because no other
life or comfort awaits us.
Fja vo! Survive! The sea and the dark are our context!
We will, before eternity, out-row all storms.’

– from The Seafarer (Fenrisian Eddas)

The hull had been screaming for months. Screaming like a newborn thrown to the night-packs.

Their ship was called the Waning Crescent; zeta-class, a courier ship. It was not the proud warship or longwarp they might have hoped for, but they were a small company of Wolves, and Leman Russ had no resources to waste.

Faffnr Bludbroder had felt his heart swell with pride when Russ had given him the duty. It was a duty that had been handed to the VI Legion by the Sigillite. However, Faffnr had felt his heart sag when he realised it was not going to be some great, sharp-edged expedition of battleships and barges, but ten wolf-brothers on a lowly ship to distant Ultramar.

Faffnr had quickened his edge anyway, accepted the fold of parchment upon which his duty was laid out, and bowed to the primarch of the VI Legion.

‘Ojor hjold. I will do this, lord,’ he had said.

They had set out, sworn and dedicated to what was one of the most shocking duties any of the Legiones Astartes might ever undertake.

Three weeks into their voyage, the warp had gone dark, the storm had risen, and the ship had begun to scream. It had been screaming ever since.

Most of the crew, the human crew, had gone mad. The Wolves of Fenris had been forced to kill some, and deprive most of the others of their liberty for their own protection. The Waning Crescent, aside from ten warriors of the VI Legion Space Wolves, was carrying gene-stock grain samples and ceramics. Within a day, the violence of the warp storm had smashed all the ceramics in the holds. The screaming… The screaming was…

It was as if the world were ending. The Bloody Sunset of legend, the end of things, the wolf eating its own tail, the end of the great cycle, to be followed only by the cold moonrise of the afterworld. Faffnr had been forced to tie the whimpering shipmaster to his seat. Bo Soren, known as ‘The Axe’, had stood watch day and night over the Navigator’s socket-pit, blade ready to administer mercy. Malmur Longreach, spear in one hand and bolter in the other, had guarded the defibrillating engines. Shockeye Ffyn, Kuro Jjordrovk, Gudson Allfreyer, Mads Loreson and Salick the Braided had patrolled the empty companionways and echoing corridors of the stricken ship in rotation, watching for manifests.

Biter Herek had watched the fore-station.

Nido Knifeson had watched the stern quarters.

None of them had gone unchallenged.

The broiling warp had squeezed out daemonforms, creatures that had pierced the screaming, and slipped in through the hull plates of the ship. The Wolves had been tasked. They had been forced to draw down, stand their ground, and bloody their blades to drive the warp-things back. Malmur had fought two nights in the spastic engine room. Kuro had lost an arm to a tar-blackened maw that had swung in from nowhere. Biter Herek had split a lunging skull in twain with his axe, and had done it every night, to such an extent that it was almost a ritual. As the ship’s master clock struck four, the raging skull would appear at the fore-station, and Biter would be ready with his axe to greet it, and split it.

They all had stories, pieces of a saga that none of them would ever live long enough to pass on to a skjald for retelling.

It was a voyage of the damned. They believed that each day, marked out by the increasingly unreliable deck-clocks of the battered ship, would be their last.

Then their voyage and their saga ended in the most unexpected way; not in the jaws of the doomwolf, or a drench of blood spilt by an enemy’s blade or teeth.

No, their saga ended in a light, in a beacon.

In hope.

Somehow, during the storm crossing, they had become friends. Eeron Kleve of the X Legion Iron Hands, black in his mourning cloak, and Timur Gantulga of the V Legion White Scars, pale as tundra frost.

Their paths had crossed at Neryx, where Kleve’s forces had been caught in flight after the Isstvan massacre that had taken his beloved primarch. A sixty-day fight through the asteroid belt had finally ended when the Sons of Horus, snapping at Kleve’s throat, were driven off by Gantulga’s strike force.

Word had already begun to spread of the Warmaster’s treachery, and Gantulga’s force had been hunting for targets. His remit had been to seek confirmation of the atrocity and its perpetrator, but Gantulga had found all the confirmation he needed in the sight of eight warships bearing Horus’s mark hounding a battered barge of the X Legion like dogs baiting a wounded bear.

The Sons of Horus had not gone quietly. Knowing their astropathic death screams would swiftly bring more of their kind, the Iron Hands and White Scars had formed up and made a run for Momed, where further Iron Hands were reported to be mustering. Gantulga had transferred to Kleve’s barge to share intelligence data just before the assembled flotilla had entered the warp.

Then the storm had struck and they had been lost. Their crossing had begun.

Gantulga did not count the hours or the days. It was fluid to him.

‘Time is merely the distance between two objects,’ he said.

Kleve had no choice. Settings in his optical implants automatically displayed the track of local time. He would relate the tally to Gantulga, and the White Scar would shrug, as if to note that while the data was practically meaningless, he appreciated the sharing.

When the death of Ferrus Manus had been authenticated, Kleve had decreed that his companies would observe ten years of mourning. But as time was meaningless and fluid within the storm, and merely an arbitrary count in the corner of his vision, Kleve had also declared that the mourning would only begin once they were back in realspace, within the flow of time as it is understood in the physical universe.

It had become his obsession: not deliverance or salvation, not to escape the storm, not even to find the enemy and avenge the fallen of his Legion. He simply wanted to end the crossing and translate again so that he could reset his counter and begin the mourning.

That day, just another period marked for convenience on the shipboard watch, for the bucking, bridling ship travelled through the eternal storm-blackness of the warp, Kleve found Gantulga in an upper wardroom, teaching Chogorian combat slang to some of Kleve’s company and a party of remembrancers. Gantulga believed that there might be strategic benefits from having Iron Hands understand the private patois of the White Scars if they were to fight in close cooperation against a remorseless foe who otherwise knew all Imperial codings. The remembrancers were present to learn, and then act as tutors for those in Kleve’s company prevented from attending because of watch duties. Kleve had requested his remembrancers set aside their original role, a function that had been established to celebrate the glory of the Great Crusade. Since the treachery, there was nothing pure or worthy to remember. The only thing Kleve felt worth commemorating was the broken past before the fall, so the remembrancers had become willing memorialists.

That day, which was just another meaningless mark in Kleve’s stoic timekeeping, and just another non-day to Gantulga, would turn out to be a day to mark after all.

The Iron Hands and the memorialists rose as Kleve entered the wardroom. Gantulga did not. Kleve addressed him directly.

‘There is a light,’ he said. ‘A beacon.’

‘This I have heard,’ said Gantulga.

‘We steer towards it,’ said Kleve. ‘I have instructed the shipmaster so.’

‘Do we know if any of my ships are still with us?’ asked Gantulga.

Kleve shook his head.

‘Is it the light of Terra?’ asked Gantulga, getting to his feet. ‘Is it the Astronomican, light of the Throne?’

Kleve shook his head again.

‘The data is inconclusive. It seems unlikely. Analytically, its pattern is similar, but not the same. However, we are half-blind, and our sensors are hardly reliable.’

‘We should steer towards it,’ Gantulga agreed. He took out his long, slightly hooked sword, and laid it on the table in front of him. He placed his palms flat on the surface beside it, and made a silent oath of blessing to its trustworthiness and sharpness.

‘You draw your sword?’ asked Kleve.

‘I am a hunter,’ replied Gantulga, ‘so I know how hunters operate. The light may be Terra. It may be some other hope. But it may also be a lure. So let us go to this light, but let us do so armed until we know what it contains.’

From the heart of the storm they came, over hours, then days, then weeks: lone ships, wounded vessels, broken flotillas and piecemeal fleets.

They were the lost and the damned, survivors and refugees, men fleeing battles or hunting for them, or simply voyagers seeking shelter from the madness of the Ruinstorm.

And they came to Macragge, the light in the darkness.

Some were ships bringing much needed imports and materials from others of the Five Hundred Worlds. All brought news, or pieces of news. Many were ships of Guilliman’s own Legion, storm-lost on their way back from the Underworld War raging on Calth, or the bitter campaign against the traitor sons that snarled across Ultramar as a whole. Some carried more of the wounded Legions – the Iron Hands and Raven Guard, a handful of Salamanders. The stories they brought were the bitterest of all.

‘The Audience Hall is ready for you, lord,’ said Euten gently.

It was a daily practice: the Lord of Ultramar would personally greet representatives of the ships that the light had brought to Macragge. There was some solace and joy in this, sometimes the reunion of old comrades, or the welcoming of a valuable asset. There was also grief and despair, however, and an ever-increasing tally of stories recounting infamy and loss. Guilliman thought his heart had been hardened by Calth to the point at which it had fused like the heavy-metal core of a star, inured to further pain, for a heart can only take a certain measure of pain before it ceases to feel.

He had been wrong.

He was studying a large-scale hololith display of the systems defences: Macragge and its orbital defences, the disposition of the Ultramar fleet elements and the newly arriving masses of ships, the outer weapons platforms and void stations, the starforts and lunar stations, the barrages and decoy hulks, the swathes of mines, the mid-system watch stations and sentry flotillas guarding the Mandeville point, the prowling patrols, the patient battlecruisers, the automated batteries. With dabs of his fingers, he was making adjustments to certain lines, and re-ordering ship positions.

Euten knew this was merely automatic tinkering, the distracted activity of a mind that barely had to concentrate to supervise such strategic complexity.

She knew, from long experience, that Guilliman’s mind was elsewhere.

‘My lord?’

Guilliman did not look up.

‘Three dead,’ he said softly. ‘Lorgar’s boasts were true. Three.’

‘My lord.’

Guilliman shook his head, eyes still on the display.

‘The stories they bring to me, Euten. That Horus, or any of them, should turn against us, against me, against my father… I cannot begin to process it. My only consolation… My only consolation at all, as I have learned through our bitter fight with Lorgar, is that something has overtaken them, contaminated them. The warp is in their brains. It hardly excuses their actions, but it explains them. They are run mad and are no longer of themselves.’

He looked at the elderly chamberlain. She was upright and slender, supported by her tall staff. Her short hair was as glacial as her gown.

‘It is a hard thing to accept, my lord,’ she said.

‘I thought it would be the hardest,’ Guilliman agreed. ‘But what are brothers turned traitor compared to the death of three loyal sons? The survivors cannot refute it. Ferrus is dead. Corax, Vulkan, loyal all, and dead. Then, from the mouths of others, this news from Prospero. Magnus defying our father so much that they set the damned Wolves upon him? And now we hear from the Phall System, confirmation that Perturabo has indeed betrayed us…’

He rose to his feet.

‘What else? What else, I wonder? Is Terra already burning? Is my father already dead? If half of my brothers have turned to follow Horus’s treachery, then who remains? Three of those who might be counted loyal are already dead. Who else? Where is the Khan? Does Dorn burn along with Terra? Sanguinius and his Legion are said to be lost. The Lion has gone into the dark. Have the traitors hunted down the Wolf King and torn him to shreds? Am I alone now?’

‘My lord, you–’

Guilliman held up his hand.

‘I am just thinking out loud, mam. I will be composed by the time I reach the hall. You know I will.’

She nodded.

‘All I can count upon is what I know as solid fact,’ said Guilliman. ‘Macragge still stands. My Legion still stands. While those two facts remain, there remains an Imperium.’

He pulled a mantle around his broad, armoured shoulders, and fixed the clasp at his throat. He was wearing the ceremonial version of his ferocious, clawed wargear, and carried no weapons. For his daily custom of greeting those coming to his light out of the storm, he carried no personal weapons.

Euten watched her beloved lord fix the mantle. He looked, more than ever, like a monarch. Somehow the very lack of weapons made him seem more powerful.

‘We are all we can count on,’ Guilliman said. ‘The time has long passed coming. We must declare. We cannot afford to lose any more time. We cannot afford to wait to hear if Terra endures or my father yet breathes. For the sake of mankind, as my father would have wished it, the Imperium begins again here. Now.’

He walked towards the chamber door.

‘And I will personally kill any bastard who tries to stop me.’

4
In the Hall of the
Lord of Ultramar

‘Never stand between a predator and its quarry,
Or between a king and his throne.’

– proverb, from Illyrium

‘No one kneels here,’ Guilliman said as he strode into the Audience Hall, but everyone was already bowed. The hall was vast, ornately wrought in silver and gold, the soaring roof supported by a thousand columns with petal capitals. Across the broad floor of black and white mosaic tiles, hundreds of visitors knelt and bowed their heads. Nearly two-thirds of them were Space Marines of the Legions.

‘No one bows here,’ Guilliman said. ‘You are come to Macragge and you are welcome here. Let me greet you.’

Flanked by the imposing Cataphractii Terminators of his Invictus bodyguard, Guilliman approached the nearest group. He raised the leader up, his hands clasping the warrior’s shoulders.

‘Name yourself,’ he said.

‘Verano Ebb, captain, Silence Squad, Raven Guard,’ the man replied.

‘Your loss is my loss, captain,’ said Guilliman.

‘And your hope is my hope,’ Ebb replied. ‘I pledge my force to you, lord. I ask nothing but the opportunity to stand with Ultramar and kill murderers.’

‘And I’d ask nothing else of you. Your place is here, Verano. Welcome.’

Verano nodded a half-bow and gestured to the squads nearby.

‘Sardon Karaashison, Iron Hands, and all of his kinsmen that could be rallied. Beside him, Zytos of the Salamanders and his brothers.’

Guilliman regarded them.

‘Do you pledge as Verano pledges?’ he asked.

Karaashison was a flesh-spare creature in proud black and white plate. He had left his visor in place, undoubtedly because he had little organic face left beneath it. The visor was his face. The lenses of his helm slits glittered red.

‘I am, lord,’ he replied. ‘I will stand with any who stand against Horus.’

Zytos had unclamped the helm of his green armour and stood with it under his left arm. His skin was almost as dark as the black finish of Karaashison’s livery. His eyes shone unnaturally brightly, as brightly as the photo-enhanced lenses of the Iron Hands warrior.

‘We mourn the loss of our brothers the Iron Hands and the Raven Guard,’ he said in a gentle, accented voice, ‘and we are bowed and bloodied. But the Eighteenth Legion Salamanders are not in mourning. We have resolved to remain steadfast, and to trust that our primarch, your brother, has survived. Until we see proof, we will not mourn.’

‘Is this false hope, Zytos?’ Guilliman asked.

‘It is pragmatism, lord.’

‘It might be argued that the pragmatic approach would be to accept the worst and move on. Hope can be a burden.’

‘Hope can be a weapon too,’ said the Salamander. ‘Just because we will not mourn, it does not follow that we will not fight. We will pledge to you, and make war at your side, and our fighting shout will be “Vulkan lives!”. Your word is our command, my lord, until the day our battle cry is proven true.’

Guilliman moved on to the next group, a huddle of battered Imperial Fists led by a hulking giant. The man had been mauled by war, and had refused all except the most basic medical stabilisation. One arm was truncated, and looked as though it had been gnawed off.

‘Alexis Polux,’ he began, ‘captain of the 405th Company and–’

‘I know you, Alexis,’ said Guilliman.

‘I am flattered, my lord. I was not sure you would remember.’

‘I make a point of remembering all the officers my brothers regard as exceptional. I have read your report. The engagement in the Phall System.’

‘It was a bloody matter, lord.’

‘You displayed brilliant strategic thinking. The Iron Warriors had you outnumbered and outgunned.’

Polux made no reply.

‘You escaped in a captured ship? The Contrador?’

‘It was not an escape. It was an exit, lord,’ Polux said. ‘Our primarch had signalled our immediate return to Terra. We do not disobey orders.’

‘Despite the losses you were forced to suffer by disengaging?’

‘I regret the losses,’ Polux said. ‘More than that, I regret not finishing the job. My retribution fleet had him, lord. We were close to killing the bastard.’

There was silence in the hall. Traitor or not, no one was yet used to hearing one of the Emperor’s sons referred to with such disdain.

‘Perturabo is my brother,’ said Guilliman.

‘Apologies, my lord,’ said Polux. ‘I did not mean–’

‘He is also a thrice-damned bastard,’ said Guilliman. ‘Do not guard your words on my account. Alexis, I would have you do two things. First, accept the medical provision we can offer you here, so that you may be restored and renewed. Second, thus restored, stand with me and finish the job you started at Phall.’

Polux hesitated, then nodded.

‘I accept both, my lord,’ he said, ‘but conditionally. I have orders to return to Terra, and I will not disobey them.’

‘There is no route to Terra now,’ said Guilliman. ‘Terra may no longer exist.’

‘You think the Throneworld has fallen?’ asked Polux.

‘I am sure it is the Warmaster’s primary target.’

‘Then all the more reason why we should rally, re-arm, and move en masse to Terra,’ Polux declared.

‘How long were you lost in the storm after Phall, Alexis?’ Guilliman asked. ‘I’m telling you there is no route to Terra. There is only one light in the darkness. We have no choice but to fortify and consolidate here. Besides, I feel I have the authority to countermand your orders.’

‘How so?’ asked Polux.

‘Alexis,’ said Guilliman, ‘I have seniority. Until someone arrives who outranks me, I have command. I intend to use it. We must save the Imperium. Speculation and indecision are not useful traits at this time.’

Polux glared at the Lord of Ultramar. He was one of the few Space Marines who even remotely matched the primarch’s physical scale.

‘What have you done here, lord?’ he asked. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I am securing the Five Hundred Worlds, Alexis,’ Guilliman replied. ‘I am anchoring what remains of the Imperium on Macragge. We have a beacon, some security of transit, and the possibility of proper recomposition. For all intents and purposes, this is the Imperium.’

‘Which makes you what?’ asked Polux. ‘Our Emperor?’

‘I do not presume to inherit anything,’ said Guilliman, recoiling very slightly. ‘Like Zytos, I will wait for proof of life before I take any drastic measures. But if my father is dead and I am the last loyal primarch alive, then yes, I am the Imperium.’

‘If those are the circumstances, I will follow you,’ said Polux, ‘but I caution you that until we know–’

‘You are familiar, I’m sure, ‘said Guilliman, ‘with the Ultramarines’ concepts of theoretical and practical?’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘Everything is theoretical, Alexis. The rest of the Imperium, the security of Terra, the survival of my father. Macragge is the only practical. It’s the only thing we know we have, and at such a time of extremity, it’s the only foundation I know we can depend on.’

Alexis Polux looked as though he had much more to say on the subject. He held Guilliman’s gaze, and nodded.

‘Practical solutions are what matter now,’ he said. ‘Fix me and I will fight at your command. I will fight, at the very least, to learn more of what is practical.’

‘Thank you, Alexis,’ said Guilliman. ‘I welcome whatever expertise you and your brothers can offer in the matter of improved fortification and defence. The Imperial Fists have long been renowned for–’

He stopped. He had become aware of the quiet, steady scrape of a whetstone against a blade.

Nearby, another Iron Hands officer waited with his men and a formation of White Scars for their opportunity to greet the primarch. Guilliman clapped Polux reassuringly on his sound shoulder and moved towards them. They seemed to be the origin of the scraping sound.

‘Eeron Kleve of the Iron Hands,’ said Kleve, bowing. He and his men were shrouded from head to foot in black cloaks. Now they had returned to realspace, their mourning had begun.

‘I am Gantulga,’ said the White Scars leader, with more of a snap of the head than a bow. He had a sword, drawn and gleaming, in his left hand.

‘Welcome both,’ said Guilliman, clasping Kleve’s hands. ‘Accept my offer of shelter from the storm. I hear you were several ships together, Kleve?’

‘A White Scars strike force and my own barge, lord,’ answered Kleve. ‘Most of us made it through the turmoil in formation. Two vessels were lost.’

‘You come to me with blade drawn?’ Guilliman asked the White Scar.

‘Yes, but with my other hand open,’ said Gantulga, offering it to Guilliman. ‘We did not know what was in your light, Lord of Ultramar, so I kept one palm empty and a sword in the other.’

‘What do you think of the light now?’ Guilliman asked.

‘I like it well enough,’ said Gantulga. ‘It is not the trap I feared. But I marked your words to the Imperial Fist. The actions of Horus…’

He said the name like a snake-hiss, as if it burned his mouth and he wanted to spit it out.

‘The actions of Horus are treachery, Lord of Ultramar–’

‘Heresy, I would say,’ said Guilliman. ‘It was treachery at first. To turn against brothers, to kill for personal advancement and power. But we have seen them, seen how their minds and bodies have been corrupted. Their very belief systems have been warped. This is no longer Horus’s treachery. It is his heresy.’

Gantulga nodded. ‘Heresy comes in many forms,’ he said. ‘It can be blatant, like the one which now tears down the stars, but it can be subtle too, accidental. To make example, the building of a new Imperium when the old one is not yet pronounced dead.’

Guilliman’s smile was as bright and sharp as the White Scar’s blade.

‘I am not building my own Imperium, Gantulga. I am preserving what’s left of the original.’

With his free hand, the White Scar stroked his long moustaches thoughtfully.

‘Then I would make sure of your purpose, Lord of Ultramar,’ he said. He sheathed his sword.

‘With that blade drawn,’ said Guilliman, ‘I thought you Scars were preparing impatiently for war.’

They could still hear the scraping of the whetstone. It was coming from behind their group.

‘No, lord,’ said Kleve. ‘That would be the Wolves.’

The men with Kleve and Gantulga stood aside, and the pack of Space Wolves was revealed. They crouched rather than bowed or knelt, hunched and huddled in their armour and pelts upon the black and white paving. One was sharpening his war-axe with long, steady strokes of the honing flat. All of them had removed their helms, but they still wore their tight leatherwork hoods and masks, fright-masks curled in perpetual snarls, worked with figures and spirals. Their eyes shone yellow

‘Fenrys Hjolda,’ said Guilliman. ‘You are far from home.’

Their leader rose out of his squat, unwrapping the fur cloak he had gathered around his forearms, and allowing it to fall loose.

‘Not your home, Jarl Guilliman,’ he said.

‘Let me know you,’ said Guilliman.

‘Faffnr Bludbroder,’ said the Wolf, ‘and my pack.’

‘Ten of you. A squad.’

‘A pack. In fealty to Sesc Company, of the Rout, of the Vlka Fenryka.’

Guilliman glanced at the warrior sharpening the axe. Apart from Faffnr, none of the Wolves had risen or shown any deference.

‘That axe looks sharp enough to me, brother,’ said Guilliman.

‘No axe can ever be too sharp,’ the man replied without looking up.

‘Bo Soren,’ Faffnr growled. ‘Ask forgiveness for your tongue.’

The Wolf looked up at Guilliman. He bared his teeth.

‘I recognise my failing and will be sure to correct it,’ he said.

Faffnr looked at Guilliman. ‘Bo Soren can be insolent,’ he said, unapologetically.

‘Bo Soren is a Space Wolf,’ said Guilliman.

‘You make a good point, jarl,’ said Faffnr.

‘Of all today’s visitors, you intrigue me most.’

‘Are we not welcome to your hall, Jarl Guilliman?’ asked another of the men.

‘Hush your noise, Herek,’ said Faffnr.

Biter Herek let out a low, bubbling growl.

‘You are all welcome to my hall, Faffnr Bludbroder. What intrigues me is that everyone else sought a safe haven. From the flight data of your vessel, I see that Macragge was your intended destination.’

‘It was.’

‘We rode out the storm to get here,’ said Biter Herek.

‘We have a duty here,’ added Bo Soren.

‘A duty?’ echoed Guilliman.

‘Bo Soren has a big mouth,’ growled Faffnr.

‘Necessarily, for he has a great many teeth to fit into it,’ said Guilliman. ‘What is your duty, pack-leader?’

‘Our duty is what our duty has always been – to do what others will not. To do the unthinkable, if the unthinkable must be thought.’

‘Your reputation as the sanction is well known,’ said Guilliman, ‘and perhaps undeserved. We all serve according to our courage.’

‘Wolves serve beyond that. We are the executioner’s sons.’

‘Who have you come to execute, Faffnr Bludbroder?’

Faffnr hesitated. He reached under his pelt and produced a sheaf of parchment.

‘I see no point hiding it,’ he said, holding the document out. ‘Read for yourself, Jarl Guilliman.’

‘No, tell me in your own words.’

Faffnr kept the parchment extended.

‘Look at it at least. See the seal of the Wolf King, and beside it the sigil of Malcador. Know where this instruction comes from, and the authority it contains.’

Guilliman took the document, unfolded it and studied the marks.

‘Authenticate it if you must,’ said Faffnr.

‘I don’t have to. This is real.’

‘You heard the fate that befell Prospero?’ asked the pack-leader.

‘The Wolves were unleashed to issue sanction to Magnus.’

‘Yes. Not so undeserved a reputation after all, eh?’

‘Go on.’

Faffnr paused. In the eye slots of his straked and knotted leather hood, his golden eyes blinked once, twice.

‘If one can fall, more can fall. More have fallen. Half have fallen. It has been decreed that a company of Wolves be sent to the hearth-side of every one of the Emperor’s sons, to watch them.’

‘For what?’ asked Guilliman.

‘For signs of treachery, of heresy.’

‘And if such signs become visible?’

‘Then we are to act.’

‘Act?’ asked Guilliman. ‘You’re saying that you are here to watch me? To shadow me? And if you perceive my actions to be in any way untoward, what? You are authorised to enact sanction?’

‘By the Sigillite, so authorised.’

Guilliman laughed. ‘You would… cut my thread?’

‘If needs be. Primarchs are not invincible. Some already sleep upon the red snow.’

Guilliman raised his hand, indicating that his bodyguard should back down. The Cataphractii had cycled up their weapons at Faffnr’s last response.

‘Faffnr Bludbroder,’ said Guilliman, ‘do you really think that your pack could take me down?’

Faffnr shrugged. ‘Perhaps not. You are Jarl Guilliman and your prowess is the stuff of saga. But we have our duty, and we would try. If you were, say, without your bodyguard and cornered in a room with us–’

‘My dear Faffnr, then you would be cornered in a room with me.’

Faffnr shrugged again.

‘We are the executioner’s sons, Jarl. Even if you took us all, I doubt you’d leave the room whole.’

Guilliman glanced at a nearby adjutant. ‘Find them somewhere to sleep.’

‘Your hearth will do,’ said Faffnr.

‘Then show them to my hearth,’ said Guilliman.

The light of the Pharos, the distant xeno-tech of Sotha, illuminated Macragge as a lone, bright beacon in the encompassing dark, and that day it brought one other visitor to the heart of Ultramar: not a storm-lost ship, or a bedraggled convoy; not a broken battle-barge or a cargoboat of refugees.

Not a vessel at all.

It brought a flash, high in the warp-dappled skies above Macragge Civitas, a flash, and then an object falling like a stone, streaking out a tail of fire as it scored through the atmosphere.

Guilliman left his guests behind, walking back to the door of the Audience Hall with his Invictus guard at his heels and Euten at his side.

Titus Prayto was waiting for him.

‘The Wolves aren’t lying,’ Prayto said.

‘I didn’t think they were,’ said Guilliman.

‘Should I–’ Prayto began.

‘Watch them, Titus? Guard the guard dogs?’

‘I urge caution, my lord,’ said Prayto. ‘The Wolves are mercurial beasts at the best of times, unpredictable and quick to find their temper. It is their asset in battle, but it is not suited to the realm of the court. They are tired and they have endured much. They are living on their nerve-ends. I read this in them.’

‘You don’t need to have the sight to read it,’ muttered Euten, casting a disapproving glance over her shoulder in the direction of the Fenrisian huddle. ‘And they reek like–’

‘Enough, Euten,’ said Guilliman. ‘Faffnr seems an honest man, straightforward. He made no attempt to hide his duty, or the egregious burden of it.’

‘Nonetheless, I urge caution, my lord,’ said Prayto, ‘precisely because of that. He is like an open book. He is determined to perform his duty even though he knows it is a thankless task. He does not want to make an error. He is aware that the best of us have made many errors so far, not seeing the truth behind the traitors’ masks before it is too late, expecting the best because we trust they are our brothers. At Isstvan. At Calth.’

‘I understand, Titus.’

‘No, my lord, you do not. It means that honest Faffnr is too determined not to fail. He will jump at the slightest thing, the merest doubt. He will err on the side of caution, because the alternative failure is too grim to bear. He and his men are a risk to you, because they would rather strike at you in error than allow the slightest possibility of your disloyalty.’

‘I have nothing to hide,’ Guilliman said.

‘Do you not?’ asked Prayto boldly. ‘What about me? What about the Librarius? We have learned that the Wolves were unleashed on Prospero because your brother defied the Edict of Nikaea. You do the same. Faffnr is looking for the slightest sign. The slightest sign. And I am it. I am proof of your heresy, lord. I am evidence of precisely the wretched warpcraft they have been told to hunt for.’

‘Your counsel is noted,’ said Guilliman. He looked back at the Wolves one last time. ‘I think I can handle them. Teach them to come to heel, perhaps. That’s why I want them where I can see them.’

‘You take liberties with your own safety, lord,’ murmured Euten.

‘Not now, Euten–’

‘You are everything, my lord, and you cannot be everything. The only primarch, the only son, the only loyal son we know yet lives.’ Euten began to count the roles off on her fingertips. ‘You are Lord of Ultramar, king of this world, master of the Five Hundred, commander of the Thirteenth Legion Ultramarines, last champion of the Imperium. You are also the Emperor’s proxy, and protector of the Throne. Like the word or not, you will be a regent. You are his surrogate, and possibly his heir. You may indeed, by default, be Emperor already.’

‘Mamzel!’

‘I will have my say, Lord of Macragge!’ the old woman protested. ‘You cannot be all of these things. You are too valuable to risk. Let others command the forces. Let the tetrarchs do that! Let others do the dirty work. Delegate! Formally appoint commanders from the forces you are assembling. As a figurehead alone, you are too important. If fate overcomes you, the Imperium is most surely done.’

Guilliman looked at Prayto.

‘Tell Mamzel Euten what I am thinking, Prayto,’ he said.

‘My lord is thinking that he does not wish to call himself regent. If he is building what amounts to a new Imperium, it would be unseemly to place himself on the throne.’

Euten snorted. ‘Tell my beloved lord that he may yet have to if there is no other heir!’

‘That would make me no more loyal than Horus Lupercal,’ said Guilliman. ‘I will not countenance it.’

He saw that Prayto was looking at him.

‘What, Titus? Something else?’

Prayto hesitated.

‘No, my lord.’

Figures approached through the broad hall doorway. Flanked by Ultramarines in artificer plate, Valentus Dolor approached. Dolor was one of the four tetrarchs of Ultramar, the four princes who ruled the master worlds of the fiefdoms that made up the realm, and whose rank was second only to Guilliman’s. Dolor’s fiefdom was Occluda. He was a giant, and his master-crafted, modified Mark III plate was painted in the Ultramarines livery, reversed – blue for white and white for blue.

‘Valentus,’ said Guilliman, ‘present me with good news and save me from my chamberlain’s relentless nagging.’

Dolor looked down at the slender old woman.

‘My good and distinguished friend Mamzel Euten is very small, lord,’ he said. ‘I do not know how she could ever be very bothersome.’

‘Flies are small!’ Euten snapped. ‘Ticks, they are also small!’

‘Ticks get plucked out and squashed,’ said Guilliman. ‘Flies are swatted. Your point, mam?’

‘I find myself temporarily without one, lord,’ said Euten.

‘I do bring good news, lord,’ said Dolor. ‘I knew you’d want it communicated directly. A ship has put in. The pitiful thing has limped all the way from Calth, carrying the wounded and the weary. A sergeant called Thiel is aboard, and commends himself to your lordship.’

Guilliman smiled.

‘Aeonid Thiel. He made a practical choice to remain committed to the Underworld War – it will be good to see him. Have him go to the Residency so that we can talk in private. It’s been a long time since he was so steadfast by my side at Calth.’

‘I will instruct him so,’ said Dolor with a courteous head bow. ‘Is something wrong, Brother Titus?’

Prayto had suddenly winced, and steadied himself against the wall with one hand. With his other hand he clasped his forehead.

‘Something–’ he began.

There was a supersonic bang that shook the windows of the hall and made someone present cry out. Looking up through the tall panes, Guilliman saw a streak of fire stride down the sky. For a stricken moment, he thought of Calth, of the Campanile, of missiles raining down…

But this looked more like a meteorite, an object plunging through the atmosphere.

Others in the hall had hurried to the windows to see.

‘A bad star!’ one of the Wolves spat. ‘An omen star!

‘A broom star!’ snarled another. ‘Maleficarum!’

The fireball was not large. Guilliman could see that. It fell straight down and disappeared behind the towers of the Civitas. There was no explosion, no sunburst of a warhead.

Dolor was already checking a data-slate.

‘Reports of an impact, my lord, in the labouring habs of the southern suburbs. Site is just north of the Octagon Fortress, in Anomie Deme.’

‘Take charge of this,’ Guilliman told him. ‘Find out what it was. Find out how in the name of the Throne it passed through our orbital screen and detector grid. And someone check there aren’t more of them incoming.’

‘At once, lord,’ said Dolor.

‘Report to me directly when you have anything!’ Guilliman snapped.

He turned to look at the room. All eyes were on him, all the visitors: Wolves, Fists, Hands, Scars, Salamanders.

‘Find them accommodation in the garrison, see to their needs, and begin to assign them duties,’ he said to Prayto. ‘Form them into companies, according to their strengths. Let us make an army.’

He turned to leave.

‘I’ll be in the Residency,’ he said. His bodyguard made to follow him.

‘Stand down,’ he said. ‘I go to speak with an old friend.’

5
He That has
Returned

‘Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil’s foot.’

– unknown song of Terran origin, circa M2

Smoke rose above the rooflines of the southern city district of Anomie in a grey horsetail.

Alarms were still sounding, and city watch divisions had moved in to isolate the area and hold back residents and labourers from the fabricatories who had gone out onto the streets to look.

Dolor’s lifter flew along the broad colonnades and boulevards of Strayko above the moving lines of ground traffic and beneath the sweeping arches and bridge spans. At Larnis Gate, where Strayko Deme became Anomie Deme, the traffic circulation was blocked. A Warhound Titan stood watch on the grassy field by the Illyrian Monument, and another strutted with a muscular, crow-like walk across the upper pavement to take up position behind the fabrication plants along Antimon Square.

Dolor’s pilot keyed the authority code, and the sentry Warhound tracked the lifter with its weapons for a second before acknowledging the tetrarch’s right to proceed.

In the restricted area around the impact site, the streets were empty, except for rescue and emergency teams. A major fire, sparked by the impact, had half-gutted the old Antimon machine works, the smoke from it staining the sky.

‘Not a warhead?’ asked Dolor, looking at the scene.

His equerry, an Ultramarines captain called Casmir, was monitoring the information feed on a battle-grade data-slate.

‘No, tetrarch, not a warhead. Very little metallic registering in the analysis of its down-track.’

‘And it was small, too,’ he added.

‘It set the machine works ablaze.’

‘It probably ruptured something flammable. It went down through the roof at the northern end, and then punched through several storeys. Crews are trying to get to it.’

‘How did it get past the damned grid?’ asked Dolor. ‘In the name of the Throne, this is the most fortified and sky-watched world in the quadrant!’

‘I can’t answer that, tetrarch,’ Casmir replied. ‘The data is incomplete. There is no trace of it prior to the point of atmospheric entry. I’ll keep working on it, but there is no trace of any in-system plot, not even a cloaked one.’

Dolor frowned.

‘So what? Did it just jump out of a ship in orbit?’

Casmir laughed.

‘Nothing jumps out of a ship in orbit, tetrarch. Not if it’s going to fall like that.’

Dolor looked at the pilot.

‘Set us down. Over there.’

The moment the lander had settled, Dolor punched the ramp-hatch key and exited. His immense, armoured boots crunched across a rockcrete quadrangle covered in glass and ceramic fragments from the machine shop’s blown-out windows. Six-legged Mechanicum bulk servitors were firefighting in the steaming ruins of the fabricatory shed’s western end, blasting retardant foam from shoulder-mounts. Two of them scuttled past the tetrarch as he approached. They were heading back to the carrier parked in the street to refill their foam reservoirs.

Figures came to meet Dolor. Some were Ultramarines, others were regular humans from the city watch and district medicae. They all snapped to attention.

‘Who has authority here?’ Dolor asked.

‘We have the zone secured, lord tetrarch,’ said the leading Ultramarine, his boltgun mag-clamped to his chestplate, ‘but Consul Forsche has jurisdiction.’

Forsche stepped forward. He was a solemn, dark-haired man in suit and mantle. He made the sign of the aquila.

‘Tetrarch,’ he said, and nodded.

‘The primarch personally sent me to oversee,’ said Dolor. ‘Report, please.’

‘We’ve controlled the fires and accounted for all personnel,’ said Forsche. ‘Some injuries, but no fatalities. All the damage you see is due to kinetic impact and collateral.’

‘And the object?’

‘We’ve located it by scan. It’s gone down about six floors into the sub-basement, or possibly the sanitation system beneath that.’

‘What is it?’

‘We haven’t cut down to it yet, my lord. A lot of machine shop structure fell into the impact hole after the strike.’

‘I want to see,’ said Dolor.

Forsche nodded and beckoned for him to follow.

Guilliman walked alone along the private hallways of the Residency, avoiding the public spaces. These quiet corridors, lined in marble and pale wood, had often hosted Konor, pacing for no purpose other than to think. How much of a Battle King’s life, Guilliman wondered, was spent in whirring contemplation, compared to the proportion spent in actual battle?

Was that Horus’s failing? Named as Warmaster, did Horus take that title too literally, and allow himself to be enflamed past reason by a choleric humour until he was full of violent urges and thus vulnerable to the poisons of the warp? What was it the Wolves had called it? Maleficarum?

Guilliman had always believed that the true purpose of a warlord, or a Battle King, or a warmaster, was not to wage war but to prevent it. War should not be the natural state of life. It should be resorted to only when all other agencies failed. But when war became the only means, a warmaster or a Battle King had to be capable of prosecuting it to crushing compliance.

In Horus, Guilliman had always felt, there was an ugly propensity to love war for war’s sake. Was that the human flaw that had led to this calamity?

The eyes of past leaders watched him from gilded frames as he passed portraits of consuls and Battle Kings. How had they managed that balance? What personal struggles of conscience had they endured to keep society safe from its enemies yet unsullied by war?

How would he, Roboute Guilliman, fare when that feat of balance became his to master?

He reached the private entrance into the Residency. The huge pairs of outer and inner doors closed automatically behind him, their hisses sealing him in his private realm.

He paused for a moment in the high chamber, and glanced out of great windows at the single new star shining in the troubled, golden sky, and the wisp of smoke rising from the cityscape in the south. He began unclasping his gauntlets while he scanned the datafeed on the old cold-gestalt cogitator.

There was no new information on the impact. He would wait for the tetrarch’s report. Euten had told him to delegate. Dolor was more than competent.

A chime alerted him to the arrival of his visitor. Guilliman put aside the one gauntlet he had unbuckled and keyed the high chamber’s public doors to open.

An Ultramarines sergeant with a red helm entered and saluted. His armour was well-maintained, but worn from months of toil and warfare. Guilliman could barely make out the unit insignia. A blade had left a cut down to bare metal across the red visor. On the right pauldron there was a scouring mark, undoubtedly the trace of a flamer’s touch. Guilliman noticed all such miniscule details in one glance. Even from the Space Marine’s bearing, he could read much. Thiel had always been a confident, almost reckless warrior, but now he seemed subdued and unsure of himself. The unremitting intensity of the Calth war had fused him into a state of constant readiness, a perpetual expectation of threat that even the down-time voyaging back to Macragge had not diminished. Thiel’s hand, subconsciously conditioned, never strayed far from the butt of his clamped weapon, as though he believed he might be ambushed at any second.

It was chastening to see a man so changed, so imprisoned by tension.

‘You’ll keep the armourers busy bringing that plate back to inspection standard,’ Guilliman said, as lightly as he could.

‘I trust my service has been worth every scuff and scratch, lord,’ said the sergeant.

Guilliman smiled. He held out his bared right hand. The warrior hesitated, then took it.

‘Good to see you, Aeonid. Good to see you indeed. Come, bring me news of Calth, and forget this formality for a moment. Unclasp that helm. I’ll send for wine, or amasec, perhaps.’

‘There is no need, my lord.’

‘There’s every need, Sergeant Thiel. I want to spend some time in conversation with a man who has been devotedly practical since I last saw him. There’s too much theoretical here on Macragge.’

‘I have seen plenty of evidence to the contrary, my lord. Macragge was always a defended world, a capital world, but such defences we saw as we came into orbital space…’

‘Security is pre-eminent, Thiel. Now sit and remove that helm, and talk to me.’

Thiel hesitated.

‘With your permission, my lord, I brought battle-brothers I would like you to meet with me.’

‘Indeed?’

‘They served as my squad in the Underworld War these past eight months. I owe every one of them my life. If it’s stories you want, they have plenty to tell, and I would appreciate it very much if you honoured them with a little of your time. They are loyal brothers.’

‘They are with you?’

‘They wait without, in the anteroom, lord.’

‘Bring them in, Thiel.’

At a signal from the sergeant, the other Ultramarines entered: nine battle-brothers, their blue plate as worn and marked as Thiel’s. Unit insignia and marks were virtually illegible on all of them. They all exhibited the same quiet intensity as Thiel, so much that it seemed like timidity, as if they were afraid of entering such a bright, luxurious, peaceful environment, or afraid at least of disgracing it with their worn, imperfect armour. Guilliman sighed quietly. What appeared to be timidity was just hard-wired tension that might never unwind. This was the price the accursed Lorgar had made his Ultramarines pay.

He drank in the details again, each untold story plain to see: an armour plate slightly distorted by a melta’s brushing touch; a missing finger, sutured and sealed; a gladius with the wrong coloured grip that had been taken up as a battlefield replacement and forced to fit the wearer’s scabbard; the pockmarks of a too-close call with Tempest munitions; the slight twitch of a visor from side to side, hunting for hidden killers even here in the Ultramar Residency.

‘Each of us was the remainder of a broken squad,’ said Thiel. ‘Expediency brought us together on Calth.’

‘Let me know you all,’ said Guilliman. ‘Sit. Lose those helms. Tell me your stories, face to face.’

Awkwardly, the Ultramarines began to do as they had been instructed. The situation did not suit them. Two or three seemed unwilling to sit. No one removed his helm. Were they ashamed of their scars? Were they ashamed to show the Mark of Calth?

One had spaced himself back near the main door, a curious placement that was the vestige of squad discipline in chamber-to-chamber fighting. One always covers the exit. Guilliman regretted bringing them in. He should have handled the meeting differently, in one of the squad rooms of the Fortress where they would not have felt so out of place. Guilliman felt a great measure of pity for them: built for war, and then locked into a fierce one, they had become unused to the simple habits of society. They had most probably lived in their armour for the last year, never letting their weapons out of their hands.

They all carried them, bolters and blades, holstered and sheathed. It was odd to see armed men from the warfront in the heart of the Residency. The only weapons openly carried in the private chambers were those of the Cataphractii escort and the palace guard. But Guilliman could hardly ask these weary veterans to check their trusted weapons at a gatehouse. It would be like asking them to surrender something integral, like a hand or an eye. These were the instruments they had depended on for their lives during their tour in Calth’s Underworld War, they were part of them, extensions of themselves, and to deprive them–

A thought occurred.

‘You lost the sword?’ he asked.

‘Lord?’ Thiel replied.

‘The blade that I loaned you at Calth? The one from my collection?’

‘Yes. Yes, sadly that was lost.’

Such a small detail. Just one among the hundreds of details Guilliman had absorbed in the last three minutes. It was so tiny, so insignificant, it ought to be ignored, but the past two years had taught him that nothing was too small to ignore. It was in his nature, the way he was engineered, to study every single fact available and notice any discrepancy. To read the potential of anything, the way a card player reads tells.

‘Why do you keep your face hidden, Aeonid?’ he asked.

‘My lord–’

‘What kind of sword was it? What type of weapon?’

Thiel did not reply.

His right hand went for the boltgun mag-clamped at his hip.

Guilliman turned cold. Through sheer force of will, he negated dismay, surprise, disappointment, even the desire to curse the fact that he had been tricked, or to vent his hurt at how the treachery had been delivered. There was no practical time for any of those things. They were mere luxuries.

He negated them in an instant, because if he used that instant to indulge in any of them, he would be sacrificing his single, nanosecond opportunity to do one far more important thing.

Which was remain alive.

‘Be careful, my lord!’ Consul Forsche called out.

Dolor paused and glanced back, hoping that Forsche would appreciate the full meaning of his withering look. A human urging a fully armoured transhuman giant to be careful?

Dolor clambered down into the well of wreckage that the object had created with its auguring impact. The fires were damped, and more servitors were cutting away at crumbled cross spars and fallen roof supports. Steam and smoke, mingled in equal measures, rolled up out of the cavity.

Forsche began to follow him, hitching up the skirts of his robe so that he could climb down the side of the debris pit.

‘Now you be careful,’ Dolor growled. ‘Stay put. I’ve been in worse, but you’re not dressed for this. Stay put.’

Forsche nodded, and took his place at the lip of the pit. Other members of the recovery crew stood with him, peering down.

Dolor continued to descend. A way below him, he could make out two servitors using las-cutters to slice through a slab of buckled and displaced floor plating.

‘We are close to the object,’ one of them reported to the tetrarch in a reedy, augmetic tone as he came down to them.

Dolor reached their level and jumped the last few metres onto the slumped decking. He looked up, and saw human faces and legionary visors staring down from several floors above.

‘The primarch will reprimand me for allowing you to go down there alone, lord tetrarch,’ Captain Casmir remarked over the vox-link.

‘There isn’t room down here for a lot of us, Casmir,’ Dolor replied. ‘Besides, he gave me a duty, and I will perform it personally. Anything further from the orbital grid?’

‘Nothing yet, my lord. Still processing.’

Dolor looked at the heavy servitors. Braced on their multiple limbs, they were peeling back the section of flooring, using their manipulators to curl the metal plating back like the lid of a food can. As one continued to grip, the other switched back to close cutting work to free twisted bars and connectors. Sparks leapt from shorn and dangling cable work. Fresh smoke swirled up out of the ground as the flooring cap was stripped away.

Dolor moved closer.

‘We cannot guarantee your safety,’ one the servitors told him.

‘Noted,’ Dolor replied.

‘We have detected something below,’ said the other.

‘Let me see,’ Dolor said. He crouched at the lip of the pit they had exposed and peered down. To either side of him, the servitors activated shoulder-mounted banks of work lights. The dark broiling smoke of the pit became a blinding white haze, defeating even his occulobe enhancements.

‘That’s useless,’ Dolor said. ‘Off.’

The servitors obediently shut off the lights. Dolor rose to his feet again.

‘Casmir,’ he voxed, looking back up the deep throat of the pit. ‘My helm, please.’

He’d handed his suit’s helm to the equerry before making his descent.

‘I’ll bring it down directly, lord tetrarch.’

‘Just throw it, Casmir.’

There was a slight pause and then the beautifully crafted war-helm appeared, tumbling down through the air into the pit. Dolor caught it neatly and clamped it in place, then crouched again at the lip of the hole, his transhuman eyesight further augmented by the visor’s powerful light-sensitive optics.

He saw the shape at once, because it was hotter than the surrounding structures. He saw the heat outline of it.

It made no sense. Why would anyone drop the statue of a man from orbit?

Dolor hesitated. He scanned again, and took another reading. He was not looking at super-heated black granite; he was looking at roasted flesh, burned to charcoal. He was looking at a humanoid figure that had been turned into a seared corpse by the heat of re-entry, then smashed into the ground, pulverising every bone.

‘Great Throne…’ he whispered.

It was extraordinary enough that it was a corpse. Then full realisation sank in. There should be nothing left. Given the fall, the heat, the ablation, the impact, anything organic, including bone, should have been utterly vaporised.

There should be nothing left.

He opened his vox-link.

‘I need a full medicae recovery team down here right now!’ he called. ‘And Casmir? Have this area sealed, vermilion-level security!’

6
To the
Death

‘It is easier to forgive an enemy than a brother.’

– proverb of the Five Hundred Worlds

Thiel fired his boltgun. His men began shooting too.

In that first moment, in that first eye blink, time hung in the air, as weightless as a bar of sunlight. Guilliman’s transhuman physiology accelerated from nothing to hyperfast response.

Practical. Read. Move. React. Read everything. No other thoughts. Practical.

He read the storm of bolter-rounds spitting from gun barrels. He read the white-hot muzzle flashes almost frozen mid-belch by the suspension of time as his heightened reactions propelled him to a new state of response. He read the mass-reactive shells in the air, travelling, burning towards him–

Guilliman was already moving, already turning. His right hand was grabbing the edge of a heavy sunderwood chart table, and pulling, overturning it.

Practical. Read everything. So many variables, but so few that will make a difference. Extreme close quarters. Outnumbered and outgunned. Not even the slightest margin for error.

Time seeped like resin. The top of the flipping table, heavy as a drawbridge gate and suddenly rising to meet Thiel like a bulldozer blade, took the first four rounds virtually point-blank. The mass-reactive shells detonated, biting vast wounds out of the dense, aged hardwood, filling the air with splinters and burning fibres. One leg of the table came spinning away.

Guilliman was diving sideways behind the exploding tabletop, full-length in mid-air.

The table completed its overturn and crashed against Thiel and the Ultramarines beside him, forcing them to backstep. All of the other visitors were firing. Six bolt-rounds missed the diving primarch, annihilating a section of the high chamber wall and several portraits hanging upon it. Others hit the spilled table and a chair beside it. Another clipped Guilliman’s left shoulder guard and detonated. His plate protected him from the worst of it, but the heat of the nearest detonation scorched his left cheek and the nape of his neck, and shrapnel peppered the side of his face.

He hit the carpet, rolling, his tumble distorted by the glancing impact.

A weapon discharge alarm started screaming. Why so late? The shooting had begun hours before, days before… No, time was just trickling like syrup.

Concentrate! The odds are too bad, in such a confined space. If the Residency’s bodyguard reacts fast enough–

The Ultramarines who had hung back by the door – of course one of them would cover the exit for such an ambush! – clamped a magnetic device onto the doorframe and twisted it. The public hatches slammed shut. They were locked in together. The primarch and ten would-be killers.

Traitors. Turncoats.

Why?

Guilliman was still rolling. Mass-reactives chewed holes in the carpet, chasing him, filling the air with flock fibres and shreds of matting and underfloor. Mass-reactives punched holes through the furniture he was rolling between, blowing out chair backs and arms. The air was full of cushion stuffing, blizzards of the stuff.

Why? Why Thiel?

Don’t think about that. It’s just a distraction, robbing focus from all that actually matters.

Practicals. Practicals. Read everything. Move. React.

A throne built for a primarch’s stature, punctured twice through the seat back by bolt-rounds, began toppling onto the Lord of Ultramar.

I’m damned if I’ll die on my knees–

Guilliman rolled onto his back, put his weight on his shoulders, met the falling throne with bent legs and kicked out.

The throne left the ground, its direction of movement violently reversed. The flying mass of it felled three of the traitors in its path.

I’ll die on my feet if I have to die. Even the odds.

Time was still as slow as glue. He could see individual bolt-rounds in mid-air, leaving comet trails of fire behind them. He sprang into the face of the nearest killer. He seized the man’s right wrist with his left hand and yanked his aim aside, so that the boltgun barked uselessly at the ceiling. Plaster dust showered like spilled sugar. Guilliman kept his grip tight, twisting the Space Marine around in front of him, turning him into a shield to meet the bolter-rounds crawling through the air towards him. Three rounds hit the man in the lower back, rupturing his plating and blowing out his spine. Guilliman felt the impacts transmitted through the body in his grasp, saw the spinning shards of ceramite armour-plating, fragments of blood and flesh, splashing droplets of blood. He reached down with his oh-so-unarmoured right hand and grabbed the handle of the man’s sheathed gladius.

Then he wrenched sideways with his left hand, flinging the dead man aside like a doll. The motion left the gladius drawn in Guilliman’s bare right hand. Scaled to the primarch, the short sword seemed little more than a large combat knife. The flying corpse, showering blood, loose-limbed and whirling horizontally, hit two of the other killers in the faceplates and knocked them onto their backs.

Guilliman turned, shearing the blade of the stolen gladius through the extended forearm of the next nearest killer. The veteran’s bolter fired once as it fell to the floor, still clamped in the severed fist. Guilliman put his foot in the man’s belly and kicked him away, grabbing the hilt of his adversary’s sheathed power sword with his left hand as he did so.

A captured blade drawn in each hand, he recoiled sharply, turning his face aside, as a mass-reactive shell burned past his cheek like an angry insect. Then he rotated, burying the edge of the power sword in the side of an Ultramarines head. The helmet parted, so did the skull. Guilliman saw grinning teeth in a skinned gumline, and a dislodged eyeball.

Three down, two of them dead.

But Guilliman was upright, and he was a big target. No matter that time had slowed to a glacial pace, he was not the only being in the room with transhuman reactions. His assailants were of the Legiones Astartes, and that made them the most potent warriors in the Imperium.

Guilliman took his first solid hit: a bolt-round to the shoulder. He felt his armour plate crack and compress, felt the sledgehammer slap of it, felt the searing pain of the fragments that had penetrated his body. A second hit, an instant later, lower back, and then a third, right hip. Dizzying pain. Impact. He was fighting for balance. There was blood in his mouth. He saw his own blood glinting as it ran down the scorched cobalt-blue surface of his leg armour.

Another bolter-round caught him in the left side, exploded, and threw him hard into the room’s massive desk, a piece hewn from the granite of the Hera’s Crown mountains. He had to drop the gladius to steady himself. Ornaments, trophies and documents scattered off the desk in all directions. Guilliman managed to roll his body against the edge of the desk so that the next round struck its surface rather than him. The polished stone fractured and crazed like glass. Roaring, Guilliman pushed away from the desk, side-stepped another hurtling round, and swung the power sword at the shooter. He felt the collision impact shiver along the blade. The man left the ground, head back, arms rising, as if he had run throat-first into a tripwire. A small dish of blue metal flew off sideways. The power blade had sheared through the cranium of the warrior’s helm, carving off a slice of it. Blood drizzled from the perfectly circular hole in the helm’s ceramite, the concentric rings of scalp and bone, and then the exposed brain tissue beneath that. He landed hard.

Guilliman wanted to reach for the man’s bolter, but another round took him in the chest and blew him back against the desk. They were coming at him. All those he had knocked down but not finished were on their feet again. He groped for the fallen gladius on the desk, missed it, and found a marble bust of Konor’s father instead. He hurled that.

It struck one of the killers in the faceplate hard enough to turn his head and smash a visor lens. Guilliman’s rummaging hand located the gladius. He hurled that too, like a throwing knife. It impaled the neck of the assassin he had just dazed with the marble bust. The man lurched several drunken steps sideways and collapsed, blood gouting from under his chin.

Guilliman was hit again, left hip. The pain was so fierce he wondered if his pelvis had fractured. Two more shots went past his head to the left, missing him by less than a hand’s breadth.

Gasping with pain, the Avenging Son threw himself backwards over the desk in an evasive roll, trying to get its granite bulk between him and the relentless bolters. Stone chips and fragments whizzed out from every fiery impact. The front and top of the desk quickly began to resemble the cratered surface of a moon. One of the attackers leapt on the desk to fire over the side at the sheltering primarch. Guilliman came up to meet him, and put the power sword through both of the assassin’s knees with a double-handed stroke that felled the man like a sapling. One leg remained standing on the desk’s top, supported by its heavy armour casing.

Guilliman could feel blood leaking inside his buckled, perforated armour. He could feel blood running from the torn tissue of his face and neck. He could hear the palace guard hammering at the high chamber door.

The guard could not open the doors, public or private. If they had no override, then the assassins had brought a system jammer with them. Pre-meditated. Clever. Ingenious, in fact.

Not the actions of bitter, disaffected veterans, nor the behaviour of warp-damaged maniacs.

‘Who are you?’ Guilliman demanded of anyone and no one. His voice sounded small, enclosed by gun smoke, cinched by pain.

More bolt-rounds came his way in answer, flaring out of the fyceline smoke that clogged the air. Guilliman threw himself flat. Bolts kissed the ruined desk and struck the high windows behind him, creating cobweb patterns of cracks in the strengthened glass. Part of the window drapes collapsed. A picture fell off the wall and its frame shattered. A bookcase toppled over, spilling its contents in an avalanche of paper and leather bindings.

How many had he finished? Five, and one other with a hand severed. Was it five? How many of them would it take to finish him?

He glanced around.

The man he had cut off the desk was sprawled beside him on his back, still twitching. Blood had already stopped jetting from the stumps of his thighs, but the carpet around him was dark and soaking. He was reaching up weakly, aiming his boltgun at Guilliman.

Guilliman rolled and impaled the assassin to the floor with the power sword. The man went into juddering spasms and died.

Guilliman wrenched the boltgun out of his dead grip. Like the one Prayto had lent him the night Dantioch manifested, it was like a pistol to him. It only fitted his un-gauntleted hand. That hand was dripping with blood.

He heard the remaining assassins exchanging guttural, coded words as they fanned around the devastated desk through the smoke to finish him. He didn’t understand what they were saying. It wasn’t an Ultramarines battle cant.

It didn’t matter that he didn’t understand.

Practical. Read everything. React.

Their exchange told him plenty. It placed them. Sound and relative angle. He knew, without having to see, that two were coming around the desk to his left, and one to his right.

He went to the left. He came around the desk firing. One kill, solid, a head shot, a red fog. A second, two through the chest.

Something ran into him from behind. His mouth opened wide, a silent howl, as he felt the sharp, cold bite of a gladius blade punching through his back-plate armour and running in under his ribs. It stayed there. It was wedged. Guilliman wheeled and smashed his gauntleted left fist into the face of the swordsman.

The Ultramarine was somersaulted backwards by the force of the blow. He hit the windows face first, upside down. Despite the cobweb cracks, the glass did not break. The man dropped in a heap on the floor beneath them.

Guilliman turned to track the remaining killers. The damned gladius was still stuck through him. He–

At least two shells struck his left shoulder armour behind his ear and detonated. He felt as though his head had snapped off to the right with the shockwave. He felt heat and ferocious pain. He tasted blood and fyceline, his ears ringing, his vision gone.

He fell. He couldn’t get up. He was half propped against the desk or an overturned chair.

He couldn’t see. He fired blind. It was pointless. He fired again.

He felt a blade against his throat.

‘Death to the false Emperor,’ said the voice Guilliman had thought belonged to Aeonid Thiel.

‘Let me die knowing what you are,’ Guilliman whispered.

A laugh.

‘Your killer.’

‘What else? What else are you?’

‘I am Alpharius,’ said Thiel.

Then the hateful rumours from Isstvan, of treacherous masquerade and false colours, were true. The Alpha Legion would employ any means. The deception through which this execution had been accomplished, the impeccable covert approach, it made sense. Guilliman had never had any martial respect for the elusive, cowardly tactics of the youngest Legion, but this had been superlative.

‘One thing you should learn from this moment, servant of the Alpha Legion,’ Guilliman said. ‘When you have to murder a primarch, and you get one at your mercy, do not waste the moment answering his questions when he still has a bolter in his hand.’

Guilliman fired. ‘Thiel’ was thrown away from him by the force of the point-blank shot. The assassin’s blade left a deep scratch across Guilliman’s exposed throat. Blood welled.

He rose to his feet, unsteady. His clouded vision began to return. He saw the last assassin, the one whose hand he had chopped off, crawling across the high chamber floor, struggling to find a boltgun.

‘Enough,’ Guilliman said, and shot him through the back of the head. Then he dropped to his knees and realised how tired he was.

At some point after that, the Invictus guard finally cut through the main doors.

7
Greeted By
Death

‘There is an art to dying, but it is a dying art.’

– Corvus Corax, Primarch of the XIX Legion

‘Does he yet live?’ asked Valentus Dolor.

There was no response. They had all come in haste, rushing to the Residency, and had entered the medicae hall to find the ashen chamberlain outside a sealed, guarded apothecarion chamber.

‘Mamzel, is he alive?’ Dolor pressed.

Euten looked up at him. She had been lost in thought. Her frail face was more pale and translucent than ever, drawn more by pain than age. She had been a beautiful woman in her youth, a noted beauty. Now her beauty was her strength, and an intense inner core of belief in, and devotion to, Roboute Guilliman.

The day’s events had shaken that.

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘My Lord Valentus, he lives. He has been most sorely hurt, and it is only chance that spared his life. One lucky shot–’

‘I think not chance,’ said Phratus Auguston. ‘I rather think the martial prowess of our beloved lord saw him through this infamy. His practical–’

‘Yes,’ said Euten sharply. ‘Yes, why not? Let us believe he is an invulnerable god who can do no wrong. Let us believe that death cannot overtake him, or that there are no limits to his energy and capacity. Let us put our trust in him blindly and expect him to deliver us single-handedly from all this–’

‘My lady,’ said Auguston, ‘I meant no disrespect.’

‘Did you not?’ she asked. ‘Really?’

She eyed Phratus Auguston with barely disguised contempt. In the absence of Marius Gage, who had vanished during the battle for Calth in pursuit of the renegade Kor Phaeron, Auguston had been elected to the post of Master of the First Chapter, and thus First Master of the Ultramarines. He was a bullish, aggressive man, and one of the finest field commanders in the XIII. Euten had not favoured his appointment, though she enjoyed no official influence in such Legion matters. She had advised Guilliman to prefer Verus Caspean, current Master of the Second. Auguston was too focused and aggressive, in her opinion, to suit the broader needs of the role. Caspean was wiser, more compassionate, more nuanced. She urged that Auguston should be kept where he would be most effective – in line command, in the field.

Guilliman had not taken her advice.

Euten took a step towards the massive First Master and tapped the chased gold engraving of his breastplate with the tip of her staff.

‘Understand respect, First Master,’ she said. ‘Is this respectful?’

She tapped again. ‘No, it is not. No, it does not accord with respect. I do not know my place. I am but a chamberlain of the court, and you are the Lord of Lords in Macragge’s Legion. But I am listened to because I am not sparing in my wisdom. Each to his own, Auguston, each to his strength. If you would show our beloved primarch respect, then first do so by accepting his limits. Your vapid praise sounds like false flattery. He is more than human, but he is only more than human. The Invictus guard counted eighty-five spent bolter-rounds or impact holes in that chamber. If any one had struck his unarmoured head, any one, he would be dead and this conversation would be very different.’

‘Lady–’ Auguston rumbled.

‘Where was the error, today, sir?’ she asked, tapping again. ‘Was it the bodyguards, for failing to anticipate? Was it the Residency guards, for not scanning the visitors properly? Wait, was it Badorum and his men, for failing to police the precinct? It must have been, for they are but human and therefore flawed, unlike the transhumans of the Legion! Or perhaps it was Titus Prayto, or others of his office, perhaps even our Lord Librarius Ptolemy, for failing to foresee the event? Or perhaps it was our avenging Lord Guilliman, for being too tired and burdened with duties, for slipping a moment and allowing someone a quick pass through Residency security because he wanted the relief of a conversation with an old friend? Guilliman ordered the would-be killers through, Master Auguston. He ordered them through, and no one thought to question that authority. Do you know what that means? It means he made a mistake. Let us all help him not to make another.’

Dolor glanced sideways at Titus Prayto, but Prayto had already read the instruction before it had been voiced. He stepped forward.

‘No one here disputes your words, mamzel,’ he said, taking Euten gently by the arm. ‘Let me fetch you water and sit with you. You’ve had a long and stressful day.’

Euten glared at Auguston a moment longer, then sagged and nodded. She allowed Prayto to lead her from the waiting chamber.

‘I have no idea what he sees in her and her counsel,’ growled Auguston as the hatch closed. There were thirteen senior Ultramarines in the chamber, the anteroom of the Residency’s medicae hall, all of them at least of the rank company commander or Chapter Master. Some laughed. Verus Caspean did not. Neither did the most senior of them, Tetrarch Dolor.

‘I am glad you are not of the Librarius, Auguston,’ Dolor said.

‘How so, my lord?’ Auguston replied.

‘Because then you would know what I was thinking about that remark,’ said Dolor.

Commander Badorum and five of his guards entered the chamber through the southern hatch. They stopped short when they saw the assembly of Legiones Astartes officers.

‘My lords,’ said Badorum, removing his helm smartly and saluting. ‘I came to find out how he fared.’

‘He lives, commander,’ Dolor said, ‘and will live yet.’

Badorum breathed out and nodded.

‘No thanks to you,’ said Auguston.

‘My lord?’

Auguston bore down on the commander of the household company like a Titan lining up on an unshielded kill.

‘You screwed up,’ he snapped. ‘Where were you? Where were your toy soldiers? Your scans? Your surveillance? How long did it take you to respond?’

‘My lord,’ Badorum stammered. ‘Our scanners were jammed. We had no–’

‘Excuses,’ sniffed Auguston. ‘I have a mind to see you relieved of duties.’

‘I don’t think you can do that,’ said Verus Caspean. ‘Household is a different chain of command to the Legion and–’

‘Close your mouth, Verus,’ Auguston spat over his shoulder. ‘This is wartime. Wartime rules apply.’

‘First Master, the fault was most surely ours,’ said Drakus Gorod, commander of the Invictus guard. His voice surged out through the vox unit of his massive war-helm. His armour was stained with blood, Guilliman’s blood. He had been one of the men who had carried the primarch to the medicae hub as soon as the high chamber doors had been breached.

‘He dismissed you, Gorod,’ Auguston laughed. ‘He said he could do without you.’

‘I make no excuses,’ said Gorod. ‘We should have insisted. We should have vetted the visitor list, no matter who they seemed to be. Also, the assassins were Alpha Legion. Their jamming tech was exceptional. We could not override it’

‘Let us learn from it, then,’ said Auguston.

‘Their tech self-destructed before it could be examined and reverse-engineered,’ said Gorod.

‘Alpha Legion,’ murmured Niax Nessus, Master of the Third. ‘What have we become, the proud Legions? What has this conflict devolved into?’

‘Something we can kill and fight,’ Auguston said.

‘I think we may need to be smarter than that,’ said Caspean.

‘I told you to close your mouth,’ said Auguston. ‘We are one voice here.’

‘Then we should decide what that voice says,’ Caspean replied.

The hatch of the apothecarion whirred open suddenly. A gust of environmentally stabilised air exhaled at them, like the opening of a void-lock. It stank of blood, of counter-septic gels, of graft cultures and sterilising solutions. The chamber revealed before them was gloomy, illuminated only by the low-light displays of life support systems.

Guilliman had come to the door. He glared out at them like a wounded beast looking out of its cave-lair. He was breathing hard, and his torso, neck and one side of his face were wrapped in juvenat wadding and fixing wraps.

‘The walls,’ he wheezed, ‘are not so thick I cannot hear your bickering. This is not how we behave in crisis.’

‘Great lord,’ Auguston began. ‘You must recuperate and–’

‘This is not how we behave in crisis,’ Guilliman repeated.

Dolor stepped forward and dropped to one knee, his head bowed. One by one, the others did the same, transhumans and humans alike. Auguston was the last to kneel.

‘How may we serve you, lord?’ Dolor asked.

‘Stand,’ Guilliman said.

They stood.

‘I will take your private counsel now, tetrarch,’ Guilliman said. ‘I must do something more than just sit in a bed while I heal. First Master Auguston, you will carry out a full security review of the Residency and the city.’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘I’m not looking for blame, Auguston, and I do not expect to hear of any punishment unless a true dereliction of duty can be proved. What I want to know is how they got in so we can prevent it happening again. Give us practical information, to improve our practical. Find out how else people come and go, especially the off-world influx. What needs to be monitored more closely? What procedures do we need to improve? Do any of the Alpha Legion – or any of our other enemies – remain among us?’

Auguston nodded.

‘My lord,’ he said, ‘I will have my staff officers detailed to this audit at once and–’

‘No, Auguston,’ said Guilliman. ‘You do it. Don’t hand it off. Oversee it personally. Consult by all means, but consult wisely. Bring in Polux.’

‘The Imperial Fist?’

‘Correct. The Fists were charged with the defence of Terra. Let us learn from their mouths about the performance of that duty. Am I understood?’

‘Yes, lord,’ replied Auguston, his jawline tight.

‘You think I demean you, somehow, Phratus?’ Guilliman asked. ‘You think I insult you by giving you a job that is beneath you? You are First Master of the Ultramarines, and that Legion knows no greater responsibility than the security of Macragge. I do not know how this task could possibly be beneath you.’

‘Apologies, my lord,’ said Auguston. ‘It is an honour. I will do this, and I will do it scrupulously.’

‘Of course you will,’ Guilliman said, nodding. ‘The rest of you return to your duties. Assist the First Master in any way he requires, and do your utmost to defuse any alarm or anxiety in the Legion, the Army and the public that has arisen because of this incident.’

‘News of the attempt on your life has been restricted to privileged personnel only, my lord,’ said Gorod.

Guilliman sighed.

‘Nevertheless, it will get out, so expect it to and be ready to diminish its negative effect,’ said Guilliman. ‘In fact, I think the news should be made known. If we have enemies on Macragge, they will learn they have failed, and the story will raise the base level of vigilance. Besides, the people of Macragge will be troubled by rumours of an attack on me. I think they would far prefer the fortifying frankness of an account of today’s events, especially if it includes the fact that I am very hard to kill.’

He dismissed them, and turned back into the apothecarion with Dolor. Suddenly, as soon as the hatch shut, Guilliman reached out to the tetrarch for support. Dolor shouldered Guilliman’s weight without a word and guided him back to the bed.

Shrouded medicae personnel, as silent as wraiths, lurking in the shadows, moved forward to reattach nutrient drips and monitors to Guilliman’s chest and limbs. Small servitor units were moving around and beneath the bed, scrubbing away the bloodstains and incinerating dirty dressings.

‘She was right,’ Guilliman murmured as he lay back.

‘Lord?’

‘Euten,’ Guilliman said. ‘She advised against Auguston.’

‘I confess,’ said Dolor, ‘I’ve never liked the man, except when he’s been at my side in a fight. Then he has few equals.’

‘That is precisely why I chose him to succeed Gage,’ said Guilliman. ‘I was angry. Treacherous war had wounded us deeply. I wanted a warrior to lead the Legion to vengeance. But our situation grows ever more complicated, and Phratus is no politician.’

‘None of us are,’ said Dolor.

‘Not true. Not if I have done what I set out to do. I didn’t raise the Legion solely to build an Imperium and fight a crusade. Crusades are finite. Wars end. I raised the Legion to have a successive function in peacetime too – as leaders, as statesmen, as rulers of the Imperium once it was built.’

Dolor said nothing.

‘I always thought of the future, the far future,’ Guilliman said quietly, ‘where there is only peace. What will our kind do then? What, by comparison, of Russ and his Wolves? What purpose will his kind have when there are no more worlds to conquer?’

‘The Warmaster’s treachery has given him a few extra years of bloodshed to justify his purpose,’ said Dolor.

Guilliman nodded.

‘He’s probably almost grateful. No, strike that. It’s too harsh a judgement, even for Russ, even as a joke. But Russ must wonder, mustn’t he, about the peacetime that will someday follow this? What will his purpose be? He believes that his Legion exists to sanction those who become problems to the Imperium. Does he fear that one day that will be him and his kind? That he will face the sanction for being too wild and dangerous for a civilised culture to accept?’

He looked at Dolor.

‘Tell me of other things, Valentus. Let us do practical work here rather than theoretical musing. Report to me. What did you find? What fell from the heavens?’

‘A body,’ said Dolor.

Guilliman’s eyes narrowed.

‘Human?’

‘Transhuman,’ said Dolor. ‘It is remarkable, lord. We have not identified the corpse or its origin, but I have ordered that it be recovered and brought here to the medicae hall for analysis. The entire impact site is currently being scoured for evidentiary data. I have also taken the liberty of restricting the incident at vermilion-level until we know what we’re dealing with. Very few individuals know what has been found, and they are all oathed to secrecy.’

‘I trusted the light of the Pharos might bring many things to Macragge,’ said Guilliman. ‘Lost ships, lost friends, enemies even… I was prepared for the unexpected. But a body, falling from the stars?’

‘If I was a superstitious man, lord,’ said Dolor, ‘I would say it feels uncomfortably like an omen. And if I was a truly superstitious man, I would wonder what else might be coming.’

The warp sent a daemon to kill him.

He felt that he should have been flattered.

The hand-off was made without incident. The assigned stealth-cutter, procured by the Cabal, made no mark whatsoever on the acutely sensitive scanner systems of the Ultramar-humans as it blinked in and blinked out, depositing him by long-range jump onto the Northern Massif under a peak called Andromache.

He woke from the jump, aching and curled in the foetal position, on the glacier. Blood was streaming out of his nose like water from a tap.

‘Thank you so much,’ he whispered out loud, spluttering blood, speaking to inhuman gods and demi-deities who could no longer hear him, and who had never cared for his opinions anyway. The stealth-cutter was long gone, a darting spectre, retreating into the outer void. He wondered if any of the souls in Guilliman’s would-be empire had even tracked it. He doubted it. A ghost return? A slight imaging artefact? Perhaps. Human technology was highly advanced, but it did not begin to match ancient kinebrach levels.

No wonder the humans were losing. No wonder they were losing to themselves.

No wonder he cared. He was human. At least, he had been once, long ago. He worked with the eldar now, though he hated the mother-loving sweet stink of them. He worked with the eldar and the other inhuman breeds of the Cabal that they were in bed with.

In bed out of desperation.

He hated that fact even more. He hated the fact that the human race was the reason why the galaxy was dying. G’Latrro had explained that to him in great depth. He had explained it to him when he had first recruited him from the blood-soaked sands of Iwo Jima. The human race, vibrant, innocent and fecund, was the doorway that the warp was going to use to flood the galaxy. Chaos would win because mankind was the weak link that would allow the warp in.

He was a Perpetual. He had been born that way, a natural Perpetual, but the Cabal had enhanced his abilities. He’d been working for them ever since that recruitment on the beach, old-style bullets zipping and fizzing around his head.

He’d been killing people for them ever since: good men. Sometimes, serving the Cabal seemed counter-intuitive. They were very obliging. They explained why a good man had to die, and why it was not a bad thing. The wetwork they had had him perform… damn. In Memphis, against the Good Man, and then more than a thousand years later in the City of Angels, against the Brother. Then in M19, against Holiard in the Glass Temple of Manunkind, and in M22 against Maser Hassan in the Spire Terrace before his Word of the Law speech.

And then Dume, though no one could persuasively argue against the fact that Dume really had to die, by any standards, even human ones.

Things had evolved, of course they had, because of the quality of the opponent. The constant cosmological chess game with the hyper-brilliant, but wayward, Emperor had placed things in flux. The Cabal could no longer quite contain or predict his actions. The mon-keigh was getting above himself.

So, now the ploy was known as the Horus Gambit, or the Alpharius Position. The purpose was simple: let Chaos win. Let the warp win so hard, so damnably hard, it falls in upon itself and burns its fury out. Let humanity be the sword it falls on.

He did what he had to do. He did what they needed him to do. Downside, on an unfriendly planet, bleeding internally and externally from a covert, fast-jack jump, holding himself together and carrying the flesh-tanked sack his weapons were in.

He was high in the mountains, a week’s walk from Macragge City. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was the daemon that the warp had sent after him.

Three days after his jump, he turned and said to the cold mountain air, ‘Show yourself.’

Laughter echoed back, though it was hardly human. It rippled up the deep trenches of the Andromache foothills.

‘Come on, sir,’ he said. ‘Come on, Mister Daemon. I await with interest.’

There was a long, silent, sucking second, then a voice said, ‘I know who you are. I have your name. I have possession of you.’

He sighed, and dropped his pack and his weapons and opened his arms wide to the mountain air.

‘You have me then. Take me.’

‘Damon,’ answered the voice. ‘An interesting choice of name, given your trade.’

‘What can I tell you, daemon?’ he answered.

Silence.

‘You have my name,’ Damon said. ‘What are you waiting for?’ His hands were still outstretched. He turned in a slow circle, the snow scrunching under his boots.

‘I have your name indeed,’ the voice answered. ‘And true names are true power. I have your name, and you cannot deflect me.’

‘I know that,’ he said.

‘So you know I am going to kill you? You know that is what I have been sent to do?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Good.’

He cleared his throat. The atmosphere on the high plateau was thin.

‘What is my name to you?’ he asked.

‘Damon Prytanis,’ the daemon replied.

‘And knowing my true name gives you power over me?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘You have me, then, child of the warp. You have me soundly. As I die, and as I accept my death, allow me one last boon.’

‘Speak it.’

‘Tell me, so I know the true name of my obliterator.’

A chuckle rippled through unspace.

‘Die forever knowing it,’ the voice said. ‘I am Ushpetkhar.’

‘I resign. Come and get me,’ he said.

The shadow of the void rose and rippled at him. It came at him across the snowfield like a black tsunami.

‘By the way,’ Damon Prytanis said at the very last minute, ‘that is not my true name. Turns out, you have no power over me. But I know you now. I have your true name… Ushpetkhar!’

In his pocket, Damon had been frantically getting the vessel ready. He made the appropriate signs and cast the appropriate runes, just as he had been shown. He threw his magic into the onrushing face of the screaming daemon.

The daemon exited realspace in an explosion of fury and indignation. Damon was thrown to the ground.

When he opened his eyes, he realised he was soaked. He was covered in blood, and so was a vast area of the glacier shelf around him. None of the blood was his.

Slowly, badly broken, he got up. Macragge City was still a while away, a long trek down the mountain.

In this manner, the killer calling himself Damon Prytanis came to Macragge.

8
First Among
Equals

‘A man chooses his friends; fate chooses his brothers.’

– attributed to Ondrin of Saramanth

The ship came out of the darkness, and within its darkness, an endless hunt played out.

It was a human ship, an Imperial ship, a battleship, a flagship, but it was unnaturally propelled through the miasma of the warp by means whose origins and nature would have been deemed heretical to the machinesmiths and forgefathers of mankind.

Behind the battleship, following in its wake, came its fleet. Within those storm-battered hulls, twenty thousand warriors awaited word of a destination, a safe haven.

They were twenty thousand of the greatest warriors in the Imperium. They were the First, and the first among equals.

The ship came out of the darkness, and within its darkness, an endless hunt played out.

The huntsman waited in the darkness, listening to the eerie throb of the unhuman device directing the ship’s engines. The darkness was oily black, as black as the armour he wore.

The quarry was close, but then, the quarry was always close.

The quarry was supposed to be dead, or at the very least a prisoner, but through his innate guile and wickedness, he had evaded capture and was loose in the ship, haunting its dark spaces and inaccessible extremities. Of course, the quarry was technically a prisoner, because the whole ship was his cell. There was no escape from the ship.

It galled the huntsman that the quarry was at liberty at all. The quarry should have been dead for his crimes long since. The huntsman should have made sure of that, blood or no blood. The quarry was not a sentient being deserving of any respect or mercy. The quarry was an insane animal that needed to be put down, a monster that deserved termination. All the while the wretched quarry was loose on the huntsman’s ship, the huntsman’s heart burned with rage.

The huntsman had sent warriors to locate the quarry and kill him, to section the ship, deck by deck, to smoke the monster out of hiding, and end his curse. But the quarry – the creature of darkness, the haunter of the eternal night that glowered in the unlit hold spaces and hull structures that were a feature of any warp-capable ship – had killed the men, and killed the men sent after them, and the men sent after them. The quarry had trapped them, and murdered them, stalked them and tricked them, left their bodies swinging from hold spars as warnings, left their heads in void-locks as messages, left their butchered remains impaled on inter-deck stanchions and pipework as bloody promises.

The huntsman was a noble soul, though to those who met him in battle, he often appeared to be a monster too. Few, if any, knew the true workings of his mind. He kept his own counsel, and walked his own path. He was hard to know.

He was a noble soul, nevertheless.

He refused to send any more men into the darkness to their deaths. He refused to order any more men to do what he was not prepared to do. He had had all but the primary decks evacuated and sealed; then he had put on his armour, the black armour etched with Martian gold, and had become the hunter. Every day for sixteen weeks, he had entered the unregulated spaces of his ship and hunted through the darkness for his quarry.

Every day for sixteen weeks.

The ship came out of the darkness, and within its darkness, an endless hunt played out.

The huntsman could smell the quarry. They had come close many times in the past sixteen weeks. There had been two brief scuffles, from which the quarry had fled when he had realised that the huntsman was hard to ambush. There had been times when the quarry’s brittle whisper of a voice had gusted out of the darkness to taunt the huntsman. There had been messages left in blood. There had been traps and counter-traps, hours of stalking, slow progress through the dark and juddering spaces of the ship, testing every shadow for the one shadow that wasn’t a shadow at all.

The huntsman halted, crouched, balancing his dense but agile form on a cross-spar that ran like a rock bridge over the ravine of an exhaust shaft. A dark green blackness glowed far below. Thermal vents opened and a stream of hot air blew up the shaft like a desert wind. It stirred the huntsman’s long, golden hair. He paused, unclasped it, re-gathered it and tied it again to keep it out of his eyes.

There was a scent on the dry wind. One part in a billion, but the huntsman could smell it.

Old blood. Pain. Adrenaline. Hatred.

The quarry was close. He was hiding below, on one of the sub-level walkways that lined the throat of the exhaust shaft. In sixteen weeks, the huntsman had never got such a precise fix.

The hot air was venting from below, and the huntsman was downwind of the quarry. Doubtless, the quarry couldn’t hear him because of the machine noise echoing up the shaft space.

Silently, the huntsman rose and leapt. He landed twenty metres away on another cross-spar, and ran along it like a tight-rope walker before clambering into the girder-work reinforcing the shaft wall. He descended. Every few metres, he stopped and scanned, hunting with his eyes, his ears, his sense of smell.

Close, so close…

There. The huntsman froze. He could see the quarry. He could see him for the first time. The quarry was hunched on a gantry about thirty metres below the huntsman’s position. He looked like a ragged hawk, roosting on a ledge. The quarry was looking down. For some reason, he was expecting the huntsman to approach from below. For once, his uncanny powers of augury and foresight had failed him. The quarry was waiting, hunched, silent, ready to strike.

The quarry had no idea the huntsman was above him.

The huntsman drew his sword, oil-damp and silent, from his scabbard. He lined up to make the leap – less a leap, in fact, more a pounce. It would be an impact kill. The huntsman’s weight and momentum would crush the quarry into the unyielding gantry, and the sword’s edge would finish it.

It would be quick, which was more than the quarry deserved, but long overdue.

The huntsman flexed his arms, loosened his neck, and made ready for the leap. There was no room for error. The quarry was not a creature to underestimate. The huntsman leaned forward, holding onto a girder with his left hand for support, tensing his legs, ready to–

‘My lord,’ his vox system woke up and crackled.

Below, the quarry looked up, his head snapping upright at the sound. The huntsman saw the quarry’s pale face: surprise, and delight.

‘Close!’ the quarry squealed up at the huntsman. ‘So close, but confounded!’

The quarry started to laugh. He darted off the gantry and dropped away into the shaft, arms spread, tattered cloak fluttering like ragged wings. He dropped into the darkness of the exhaust pit, leaving his scornful laughter in the hot wind behind him.

The huntsman rocked back. He bit down his rage. He activated his vox-link.

‘Speak,’ he said, his voice low and seismic, ‘and for your sake, make the content worthwhile.’

‘My lord,’ said the vox. ‘There is a light.’

‘A light?’ the huntsman growled.

‘A beacon, my lord. We have detected a strong but unknown navigational beacon.’

The huntsman hesitated.

‘Have an assault squad waiting at the agreed exit hatch to meet me,’ he said. ‘I’m coming out. Let’s see this beacon.’

First Master Auguston was waiting for him on a battlement of the Moneta Fortress overlooking the landing fields of the starport. The First Master was accompanied by several of his key subordinates and a number of officers of the city. They had finished delivering their latest reports and were silent. Auguston was gazing up at the light of the Pharos, the new and only star in the turbulent sky.

Auguston’s suit system registered the approach of another, and he turned to regard Alexis Polux as he came along the battlement to join them. Auguston was used to being one of the largest beings in any given place, excepting the Avenging Son. There was something dismaying to him about the Imperial Fists captain’s size.

‘Lord Auguston,’ Polux said, with a respectful bow of his head. ‘My apologies that I was prevented from joining you sooner.’

Auguston acknowledged him.

‘It was suggested to me that you might assist with your expertise, captain. You have three days’ worth of security inspections and protocol reviews to catch up on.’

‘Again, I apologise,’ said Polux. His wargear had been cleaned and mended, and his damaged arm was strapped across his chest in a juvenat sling. ‘The Master of Ultramar ordered me to heal and make ready for the coming war. I have been two days in the grafting suites.’

Auguston glanced at the repairs to Polux’s arm. Instead of a simple augmetic replacement, the Apothecaries had elected to fix a flesh graft grown from seeded organics, vat-cultured. Inside the semi-transparent sleeve of the sling, beneath the layers of nutrient wrap and growth hormone gel, Polux wore a new hand and arm of living flesh which had been bio-typed to his own. It was still growing, still forming, the new bones still knitting. Flooded with oxygenated blood, the hand was almost crimson.

‘Will it take?’ asked Auguston.

‘The prognosis is good,’ said Polux. ‘Another two days and rejection can be ruled out. It should be serviceable within a week.’

Auguston nodded. He gestured for one of his aides.

‘As I said, we’ve been conducting the review for three days. I have had a summary prepared.’

The aide handed Polux a data-slate.

‘How fares the primarch?’ Polux asked.

‘He–’ Auguston began. ‘He fares well, I understand. Given that it has been merely three days, he shows remarkable signs of recovery.’

Polux didn’t do more than quickly scan the data-slate. He turned and looked out over the port fields, then eyed the shadows of ships at high anchor far above, and the cloud-bank shapes of the orbitals.

‘I don’t believe it’s a simple matter of protocol reviews,’ he said.

‘You haven’t even begun to look at the slate–’ Auguston started to say.

‘I can study the close detail later. Believe me, First Master, I have been considering Macragge’s security all the while the Apothecaries worked on my limb. This is a magnificent port facility, but it is not secure.’

‘What?’

Polux looked at Auguston.

‘I said, it is not secure.’

‘Are you trying to anger me, Captain Polux?’ asked Auguston, stepping forward. Polux noticed that most of the aides and juniors escorting him took a step backwards. They did not want to get caught in the First Master’s wrath.

‘No, lord,’ replied Polux calmly. ‘I am trying to help. I took very seriously your great primarch’s request.’

‘Then look before you speak!’ Auguston spat. ‘Since the crime that was Calth we have fortified the system, the planetary approaches, set guards and defences, launched new platforms, and fortified the city, especially the starport areas and–’

‘You have done all of these things,’ Polux agreed. ‘But you have done them all while preserving the original nature of this world and this port. Macragge is a capital world, sir, and this port is its great harbour. Macragge rules an empire of five hundred worlds, sir – the realm of Ultramar. It may even come to rule over the Imperium. It has a port that reflects that role, a port built for trade and commerce, a port built to serve the mercantile needs of peace. Yes, you have fortified it. But it is still not secure. It may withstand an assault, but can it filter out the illegal entry of our enemies? I believe it is reasonable to expect that those killers who meant to take the life of your primarch are not the only intruders currently here on Macragge.’

‘Is this how your kind would protect Terra?’ asked Auguston scornfully. ‘To cast away all of its original purposes and make it nothing more than a razor-wired rampart?’

Polux nodded.

‘I fully expect that my primarch will have encased Terra in armour. I fully expect that the Imperial Palace is no longer a palace but the greatest fortress in the galaxy. This is a war like none we have ever contested, sir. It will make casualties of us all if we do not respect it, or if we are too precious about our possessions.’

‘So what? We stop trying to fortify and preserve what we have, and instead simply rebuild it?’

‘Yes. In times like this, it is not enough to bar or board up a window, my lord. You must brick it shut so that the window no longer exists. The reconstruction work needed on the city, and especially the port, will be costly and time consuming. You must begin work on the construction of a fortified military port. There are remedial actions that can be made while construction is planned and executed.’

‘Such as?’ asked Auguston.

Polux gestured at the ships at anchor overhead.

‘Let nothing, and I mean nothing, come within firing distance of Macragge until it has been inspected. I suggest using some of the outer starforts in mid-system as way stations. Let no ship land, or send landers to the surface, until the identity of both the ship and its occupants have been verified by eye and gene-code.’

‘That will slow all trade and imports to a crawl!’ said one of the city officials.

‘It will,’ Polux agreed, ‘but it will also slow down the ticking of the doomsday clock.’

‘What of our veterans, returning from Calth and the other warzones?’ asked an Ultramarines captain beside Auguston. ‘Must their passage be delayed in this ignominious way too?’

‘I think after what happened in the Residency,’ grumbled Auguston, ‘we know the answer to that. What else, Polux?’

‘That,’ he said, pointing at the orbiting wreck of the Furious Abyss, now clearly visible as it crested the horizon.

‘It’s dead,’ said Auguston, ‘and what’s left of it is being dismantled by reclamation teams. What of it?’

‘It’s a hazard to navigation,’ Polux replied, ‘and furthermore, it is a military threat. Effective sabotage could knock it from orbit, and drop every megatonne of its metal bulk on this city. The enemy is not beyond such tricks, First Master. That corpse-ship must be towed beyond the orbit of the outer moons and dismantled there.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Orbit-to-surface teleporting must be restricted, and all entry to the planet by craft or teleport forbidden, unless it comes through the designated area of this port. I suggest the installation of upgraded void shields to cover the lower orbital tracks and the port area, enough to close it down if necessary. I also suggest a proportion of the orbital sensor systems and auspex modules be re-tasked to cover the surface of the planet.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m talking about a new philosophy of defence, First Master. You have fortified the system, the planet and the city in case of another Calth. You have more than enough ships and battery systems to fend off any openly hostile approach to Macragge. But the incident in the Residency proves that an open assault is not the only way our enemies may come for us. Treachery comes in different scales, sir. A small percentage of your auspex modules could be retrained to cover the entire surface of this world without significant impairment of the early warning or system scanning watch processes. If anyone lands a ship or uses a drop pod or a teleport system outside this restricted port area, you’ll know about it. Do not assume you can keep them out, sir. A planet is a vast area. Assume they will get in, and make sure you see their footprints when they do.’

Auguston pursed his lips. He was annoyed at the way the Imperial Fist had schooled him in basic defence analysis, and made the conclusions look so obvious, but he also knew that including most of Polux’s suggestions in his report would make it look as though he’d done a particularly thorough job.

‘You’re worth listening to, Polux,’ he said grudgingly.

‘I take that as high praise from you, sir.’

Polux looked up at the light of the Pharos.

‘You have hung up a lamp to draw travellers here out of the storm, my lord, and that is right and just, and the only way that a fair and noble civilisation can survive. However, you must scrutinise who and what the light brings to you, and how disguised their real motives are. I would certainly like to know more about your “new Astronomican”. Understanding its function and process may assist me in making good recommendations for Macragge’s protection. I do not even know where it is situated, or what manner of technology allows it to function.’

‘That is classified,’ said one of the aides, ‘but I am sure the primarch will permit you to discuss basics with the warsmith.’

‘Did you say warsmith?’ asked Polux.

The aide nodded.

‘Warsmith Dantioch has led the operation to activate the Pharos,’ said Auguston.

‘An Iron Warrior?’ Polux asked, his voice low.

‘Is that a problem, captain?’

Guilliman walked with a slight limp, though it would mend. His throat and one side of his face looked as though he had been dragged along rockcrete by a Scimitar jetbike.

He had dressed in a loose tunic and robes to cover the extensive bandaging around his torso, and had refused the armoured bodyglove for reasons of mobility and comfort. He told his advisors that he would not be making a similar error again. However, until he was healed enough to wear full war-plate, he accepted the heavy belt slung with a refractor field generator, which he wore under his robes. To it, he had holstered a Maetherian ray-pistol, a formidable piece of archeotech from his personal collection.

Titus Prayto and Drakus Gorod of the Invictus accompanied him wherever he went, the Librarian and the heavy-armoured beast, ready to sense danger and dispense violence.

So escorted, he returned to the Residency for the first time since the attack. He had ordered that nothing be touched or repaired until he had the chance to review the scene. Titus Prayto read very cleanly the psychological intent of this. Guilliman wanted to face his daemons. He wanted to look directly at the circumstances in which he had nearly died. Prayto could sense the underlying tension in the primarch like a tremble in the air. It disquieted him. When the greatest beings in the universe registered stress or tension, it was time for all things living to find cover.

They came up the hallway. The carpet was dappled with dark stains, a trail of blood where Gorod and his men had carried Guilliman out. Ahead of them was the door that the Invictus guard had cut open.

Men waited for them at the doorway: a pack of men.

They looked up, yellow eyes alert, heads cocked, the moment Guilliman and his escort came into view. They had been huddled around the doorway, resting or sharpening their blades. None of them had dared cross the threshold into the primarch’s inner chambers.

Guilliman approached. Faffnr Bludbroder’s wolf pack rose to meet him, not as a challenge, but as an honour guard.

‘This isn’t my hearth,’ Guilliman said, looking at the pack-leader.

‘No, jarl, it’s your door,’ Faffnr agreed. ‘Your door will do, for now.’

Guilliman nodded.

‘We were told not to go in. Told it was your orders,’ Faffnr added.

‘They were my orders,’ Guilliman agreed.

‘Dogs must always wait at the doorpost,’ Gorod rumbled out of the depths of his Terminator plate, ‘until the master lets them in. Good dogs, that is. Good dogs stay at the edge of the firelight, waiting for scraps, until they are allowed near the hearth.’

Faffnr turned his head slowly and stared into the Cataphractii’s gargoyle visor. His eyes were unblinking. One of his men leaned forward and whispered something into the pack-leader’s ear. A half-smile crinkled Faffnr’s lips, exposing one fang.

‘No, Bo Soren,’ he said. ‘I can’t let you do that. Though it would be funny to watch.’

Faffnr glanced up at Guilliman.

‘You’d let your warrior speak to me like that, jarl?’ he asked.

‘It’s exactly what you were thinking,’ said Titus Prayto.

Faffnr looked at Prayto. He sniffed, and then chuckled and nodded.

‘It was, maleficarum, it was. True enough. We have a low opinion of ourselves, I suppose, but a high opinion of our loyalty and obedience.’

‘What about your obedience, Jarl Guilliman?’ Faffnr asked sidelong of the Avenging Son, his stare fixed rigidly on the Librarian’s face.

‘Is it questioned, Wolf?’ asked Guilliman. ‘Because I use the Librarius in defiance of the Edict? The Edict was made before this war was begun. It is obsolete. We need the Librarius if we’re going to survive. Does that make me disobedient?’

Faffnr let out a deep, wet growl, like a jungle beast. His eyes stayed on Prayto’s face.

‘He thinks it might make you courageous and decisive in your obedience,’ Prayto told Guilliman, holding Faffnr’s stare, ‘to pursue your loyalty through decisive, unilateral and perhaps unpopular choices. He thinks that’s why you are a great leader.’

Guilliman nodded.

‘Tell him the rest while you’re in there, maleficarum,’ said Faffnr.

‘He thinks he will, nevertheless, keep a very close watch on you, lord,’ said Prayto.

‘A day without a clumsy threat from you is not complete, is it, Faffnr?’ asked Guilliman. ‘Really? Again with this? Me, alone in a room against a squad of ten? In case you’ve missed recent events, I’ve already done that.’

Faffnr Bludbroder shrugged.

‘They were Alpha Legion. Not Wolves.’

‘I did it unarmed.’

Faffnr broke his gaze from Prayto and looked at Guilliman. ‘I never said it wasn’t well done,’ he replied.

Prayto smiled.

‘Will you let my pack guard your hall, jarl?’ asked Faffnr. ‘We’ve come a long way to protect the Emperor’s peace.’

‘I think that responsibility is fully covered,’ rumbled Gorod, his words grinding out of the helm-vox, one by one, like heavy calibre rounds from a chain-fed weapon.

‘Not well enough, looks like,’ replied Faffnr.

‘Not even nearly well enough,’ added Bo Soren.

‘You may cross my threshold, Wolves,’ Guilliman said. ‘You may approach the fireside. I’ll permit it. But do not obstruct Gorod or his men. Can you be obedient in that respect?’

Faffnr nodded. His men broke and stood aside.

Guilliman entered the room where he had nearly met his end.

The furniture was shattered. The great desk was scarred and gouged like a meteor. There were holes in the walls, the floor, the ceiling. Pictures had fallen from their suspensions and broken. One portrait of Konor still hung, but the entire area of the face and shoulders was shot away. Hanging canvas shreds and fibres stilled in the gentle air-circulation.

All the corpses had been removed, but the carpets were still dyed with the lifeblood of the Legiones Astartes, and the walls were speckled with yet more blood that had dried and looked like black paint or spatters of tar. Parts of the wall and chunks of heavy furniture were peppered with pieces of exploded plate armour, shards of ceramite flung out from exploding wounds to embed like shrapnel. The main windows were crazed with spider-web patterns. One series of cracks looked like a coiled snake: a multi-headed coiled snake.

Guilliman drew a breath. He knew he was in a slightly heightened state. He was reading symbols and portents into things that had no significance.

He closed his eyes. For a millisecond, the noise and fury of the moment came back, filling his head, every last moment relived in flaring, vivid–

He opened his eyes again.

‘My lord?’ asked Prayto.

‘I’m all right,’ Guilliman said. He looked around, and moved forward, each step crunching scattered glass chips into the carpet. Konor’s cold-gestalt cogitator, and the stand that had housed it, was a smashed wreck on the floor. A falling body had crushed it.

Guilliman stared at the debris for a moment. The living history of Macragge, the rise of Ultramar, the fortunes of the Five Hundred Worlds, had all been witnessed and monitored by that ancient device. It was strange. The loss seemed to carry more emotional weight than had been provoked by the sight of his stepfather’s disfigured portrait. Guilliman felt unexpected levels of sentiment rising within him.

‘I will need–’ he began. His voice cracked slightly.

‘A replacement device,’ Prayto finished quickly. ‘I will speak to the adepts of the Mechanicum at once about furnishing you with a new cogitator system, a cognis-signum application device that will enhance data processing.’

Guilliman nodded.

‘I feel…’ he began to say to Prayto. He stopped. Gorod was waiting behind them at the door, the Wolves in the doorway behind him. Guilliman walked to the windows on the far side of the room and stood with his back to the doorway, staring out. Prayto went with him.

‘You feel pain and sadness,’ said Prayto, ‘and you do not want the others to overhear this.’

Guilliman nodded again.

‘It is a delayed reaction, lord,’ said Prayto.

‘To an attack? I’ve lived through wars, Prayto – I’ve fought daemons, and my own brothers. I’ve taken worse wounds than this.’

‘That was not my meaning, lord.’

‘Then what? To the loss of an old cogitator?’

‘I think that was just the trigger, my lord. It was an heirloom. It had personal meaning to you.’

‘Then what, I say? A delayed reaction to what?’

‘To Horus,’ said Prayto.

Guilliman sighed deeply.

‘Make sure they come no closer,’ he said to Prayto.

Prayto nodded, letting the unspoken thought finish in his mind.

Because I do not want those Wolves to see me with a tear in my damned eyes.

Euten found him alone in the room. Prayto had gone to meet with the Mechanicum, and Guilliman had sent Gorod and the Wolves out so he could have time for reflection. He heard her greet Gorod and grumble at the feral wolf pack as she came through the outer door.

He had raised one of the larger seats onto its feet. The back was shot out of it, so the shredded leather padding looked like ruptured blubber. He had placed it in front of the cobwebbed windows, and was sitting, leaning forward, elbows on his knees.

‘Do you bring me the day’s agenda, mam?’ he asked, without looking at her.

‘I do not,’ she replied. ‘I have dealt with most matters. You need time to think.’

‘I never stop thinking, mam.’

‘Then you need time to focus, my lord. The hour has come to commit.’

He glanced at her, though he still sat forward.

‘I have already committed. You know this. Macragge, and the Five Hundred Worlds… They are the Imperium. Imperium Secundus. The contingency that we never even dreamed might be necessary is now a practical.’

She nodded.

‘You continue to evade my meaning,’ she said. ‘What I mean is, I think it’s time you admitted it to more than just me and your closest confidences. It has been your private theoretical – now you must declare Imperium Secundus formally and publically. You have to have strength in your conviction, and not shrink from the more unedifying aspects of it. If you do not have faith in it, then neither will a single soul in the Five Hundred Worlds.’

He opened his mouth to answer, but said nothing.

‘What is it? What makes you hesitate?’ Euten asked. ‘Is it a fear that you are usurping every bit as much as Horus? Or is it–’

‘Grief,’ he said quietly. ‘Grief that my father, and Terra, and the grand dream of the Imperium are lost, and the only way for our civilisation to survive is to consolidate here. It is a burden I never looked for, mam, and it is made heavier by sorrow.’

He looked out through the crazed glass and surveyed the towers and stacks of Macragge Civitas, golden in the sickly warp-light.

‘You think I should make a formal declaration because I look weak, don’t you?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she said, nodding. She adjusted her grip on her staff to ease her stance and rest her back. ‘The morale of Ultramar has never been lower. Calth, the Ruinstorm, the war against the sons of Lorgar and Angron – these things have battered us, but the assault on you… My lord, it has shown us that even the most precious thing we have left is not safe.’

Euten glanced around at the cold devastation of the chamber. Her eyes lingered on the smashed cogitator and a broken bust of Konor.

‘Just an hour before… before this happened,’ she said, gesturing at the room with her slender left hand, ‘I lectured you about how vulnerable you are. I am sorry if my tone was hectoring. I am not sorry that my words were true. This is all we have left of the Imperium, and you are the last precious prince. You cannot be all the things you once were. You are too valuable to be risked. You are too important to be diluted with a surfeit of roles.’

‘This isn’t a conversation about declaring Secundus, is it?’ he asked.

‘There is no point declaring Secundus if Secundus has an empty throne. You must declare yourself.’

‘What?’ he asked, a mocking laugh behind the words. ‘Emperor Guilliman?’

‘Regent at least, my lord. Don’t look at me like that. I know how you hate the word.’

He stood up.

‘Euten, I cannot. I cannot command and rule. I cannot administer this empire and be its figurehead.’

‘I told you, you must delegate,’ she said. ‘No one else can possibly be head of state. No one else can possibly be regent. You are the last primarch, my lord. The last loyal son. The only loyal son. Become what you must become. Invest yourself as the rallying point of Imperium Secundus. Be Imperial, and reveal your renewed strength, your resolve, your mettle and the glory, like a phoenix rising from these ashes. Leave the everyday mechanics of Imperial business to others.’

‘That is my point,’ he replied. ‘I trust no one else to oversee those mechanics. I have done it for so long. I… trust no one else… Not even you, dear lady.’

‘Because I am not capable?’ She sniffed, though she was mocking.

His reply was typically honest.

‘Because you are old, Lady Euten. You are human and old. I do not know how much longer life will let you stand at my side. I cannot rely on you being here, and I do not trust anyone else.’

‘A good answer,’ she said. ‘But, you know… I have known you since you were a child, Roboute. I know when you are being careful with the truth. This is such a time. For all your logic, none of the things you have said are the real reason you will not declare yourself Imperial Regent.’

‘Is that so?’ he asked.

‘You know it is.’

He sighed.

‘Then let me say it once. I cannot build an empire and put myself on the throne, even if I am the only candidate. It smacks of hubris, of arrogance, of overweening pride and foul ambition.’

‘It smacks of Horus Lupercal,’ she said.

‘Oh, indeed. It will diminish me in the eyes of those who yet respect me, and it will simply confirm the doubts of all those who do not. “Look at Guilliman,” they will say, “taking advantage of this crisis and naming himself king. Look at his unseemly eagerness. Look how fast he jumped in to take unwholesome advantage of the situation!”’

‘I am glad to hear you admit your misgivings at last,’ she said. ‘But it is the only practical action to take. You always taught me that practical trumps theoretical.’

‘But in this matter, the theoretical stinks,’ he said. ‘I have been holding out hope that one other brother might still come to me. Rogal, stars, but I would hand the throne selflessly to him! Sanguinius, in an instant! These are worthy heirs! These are noble brothers!’

‘And if they were willing, it would validate Secundus,’ she nodded. ‘Their sanction would reinforce your choices.’

‘Any loyal son,’ murmured Guilliman. ‘Right now, I would take any loyal son.’

‘Even Russ?’ she asked.

Guilliman laughed.

‘He’s a barbarian,’ he said, ‘but he is still a king. And he is loyal in ways that shame us all. Yes, even Russ. Perhaps we need a truly fierce monarch to see us through this new strife.’

‘And you, as his conscience, would keep his crown clean,’ she said.

‘Of course,’ he said. He sighed deeply again, and looked around. ‘Have the Residency staff clear this room. Strip it. Make it new. I’m hungry. I think I’ll feast with the Wolves tonight.’

He looked at her.

‘Rest easy, mam,’ he said, ‘by morning I will have made my decision. If I am going to declare as regent, you will know it soon, and we can prepare for the announcement.’

‘There is no one else fit, my lord,’ said Euten.

‘There is no one else at all,’ he replied. ‘So I suppose it will have to be me.’

The scorched corpse that had fallen on the southern deme of Magna Macragge Civitas had been taken to a private, secure suite in the lower levels of the Residency’s medicae hall. The exits to the area were guarded and locked, and only authorised personnel were allowed in and out, or even to know the nature of what the lab suite contained.

Valentus Dolor, Tetrarch of Occluda, arrived unescorted, and strode down the long, echoing hallway to a series of iris valve hatches. Ultramarines guards bowed to him and let him pass. The hatches scraped as they dilated, one by one.

Captain Casmir was waiting for him in a stark laboratory chamber of zinc and galvanised steel. The place was lit by greenish lights, and smelled industrial. A massive iron casket lay on a raised plinth in the main area of the room. There were heavy armourglass viewing ports built into the sides and top of the casket, so that the body, suspended in embalming solutions, could be examined. Instrument locks in the sides of the casket also allowed for surgical tools to be inserted so that tissue samples could be taken. All that could be seen through the ports was a thin, scummy murk. Several medicae technicians were working around the casket.

‘Do we have an identity?’ Dolor asked his equerry.

‘No, lord,’ replied Casmir. ‘But we have answered one question.’

He offered Dolor the data-slate he had been holding. Dolor took it and read.

‘Careful analysis of orbital watch records has finally revealed how our dead stranger arrived,’ said Casmir. ‘You see the brief spike there? A teleport flare in the upper atmosphere. Non-standard teleportation pattern.’

‘So he materialised in the upper atmosphere, out of nowhere?’

‘And then fell,’ Captain Casmir said, ‘all the way to the surface, burning like a meteor as he cut through the atmosphere.’

‘Do we know anything about the origin point of the teleportation?’

‘The flare pattern is being examined, but I doubt it, my lord.’

Dolor handed the slate back and took a few steps towards the casket.

‘The more we learn, the more of a mystery he becomes. I–’

He stopped short. Some monitor alarms had started to buzz. A few amber telltales lit up along the console beside the plinth. The medicae technicians reacted in surprise and backed away for a second.

‘What is it?’ asked Dolor. ‘What’s happening?’

‘I don’t know, lord tetrarch,’ said one of the technicians.

‘It makes no sense,’ said another.

‘It must be a system malfunction,’ said a third.

A new alarm started to sound.

Dolor stepped closer to the casket, his hand on the hilt of his sword. He peered in at one of the murky portals.

‘Someone explain to me what’s going on,’ he snarled.

There was a sudden, very violent bang. Even Dolor jerked back.

The sound had been made by an impact from inside the casket. Something had struck one of the glass portals very hard.

Dolor looked. He blinked. Pressed against the inside of the armourglass – bloody, raw and peeling with blackened, burned meat – were the palm and fingertips of a large human hand.

‘Open the damned casket!’ Dolor ordered, drawing his sword. ‘In the name of the Five Hundred Worlds, whatever’s in there isn’t dead at all!’

The ship came out of the darkness, and within its darkness, an endless hunt paused for a moment, for the first moment in sixteen weeks.

Deep in the almost lightless void of the ship reactor’s vast heat sink, the quarry paused, a nocturnal ghost, condemned to be absolutely alone for the rest of his life.

He crouched on a rusting stanchion above the smoking furnaces of the ship’s engines, and wrapped his arms around his body. His cloak was tattered and black. What little light was coming off the smouldering embers of the drive chambers beneath him caught along the razored lines of his claws.

He felt the bump, the ripple, the heave of transition. He heard the arrhythmic flutter of the engines as they dimensionally corrected. He felt his guts twist and his sinuses pinch. It made him whimper.

The ship had made a translation into realspace.

The quarry tilted his head back and began to laugh. He peeled back cracked lips to expose teeth that, had there been any light, would have showed as blackened and rotting. His laughter, as sharp and shattered as a calving glacier, fell away and echoed down the sink.

The rules had just been rewritten. In realspace, the ship was no longer a finite prison. He was no longer the quarry.

The rules had just changed, and people were going to die. A lot of them. All of them.

At long last.

The ship came out of the darkness.

‘Translation complete,’ Captain Stenius called from the high, railed platform of the bridge. ‘Realspace positioning achieved.’

Below him, on the main fore-station deck, the bridge crew, plugged into their various consoles, chattered back and forth, sharing and updating the surge of realspace data as fast as their automatics would allow.

Stenius turned to look at the ship’s lord. The low light of the flagship’s bridge hazed off Stenius’s smoked-silver augmetic eyes. The captain’s face, immobilised by nerve damage, hadn’t registered an expression for decades.

The ship’s lord, the huntsman, knew, however, that there was a smile of relief locked away in that unmoving flesh. He sat on his titanic, engraved throne, a shadow at the back of the flagship’s vast bridge space, a monarch with no realm.

He raised his head, acknowledging Stenius, and looked at the main display. The light was astonishing: a beacon of some sort, a world thoroughly illuminated. His ship, miraculously, with all of its fleet in sequence behind it, was ploughing into a stellar system lit up by the greatest intergalactic lighthouse that he had ever seen.

The system was armed and defended. Already, challenges were coming in on all channels. He could read starforts heating up weapon banks on the strategium display, interplanetary bands of defence, mine-belts, gun-stations powering batteries, and interceptor fleets turning hard in response to the pulse of their abrupt arrival.

Of course they would. Of course they would react so urgently. What the huntsman was bringing with him was one of the greatest war-fleets in the Imperium; perhaps the greatest.

‘This isn’t the Terran Solar System,’ he said.

‘Not even slightly, my lord,’ replied Stenius. ‘It’s not even the Solar Segmentum.’

‘Answer me, now. Where is this?’ asked the huntsman. His voice was barely audible.

Lady Theralyn Fiana of House Ne’iocene, the flagship’s Navigator, stepped off the elevator platform from the navigation pit and approached the huntsman’s throne. The nephilla had much damaged her. Her withered form was supported on either side by her brothers Ardel Aneis and Khafan.

‘You are correct, lord,’ she said, in the whisper that was all she could manage. ‘This is not Terra, and that is not the light of the Astronomican. I cannot yet account for the presence or nature of the beacon, but it has drawn us out of the storm. It has done it in ways that–’

‘What do you say to me, lady?’ asked the huntsman.

Fiana shook her head.

‘I cannot explain, my lord,’ she whispered. ‘There is something at work here, some technology I cannot explain. Not psychic. Empathic. It is as though the light showed itself to us because it knew what we wanted. It knew where we wanted to be.’

‘Expand on this,’ the huntsman said.

‘Despite the storm, my lord,’ the Navigator whispered, ‘despite the turmoil of the warp, we have arrived precisely where it wanted us to be. This is Macragge. This is the heart system of Ultramar.’

The huntsman rose. He stared at the planet ahead of them.

‘By my father’s dead gods…’ he breathed.

‘Orders, my lord?’ asked Captain Stenius. ‘We are bombarded with challenges – vox, pict-feed, psychic and sub-vox. We have been target-locked by sixteen of the starforts and platform systems, and two of the three nearest intercept fleets are moving in to acquire firing solutions. They will start shooting very soon.’

He shrugged.

‘Of course, my lord,’ Stenius added in a more hushed tone, ‘our shields are raised. We can cut right through them. We can burn and splinter Macragge if you so wish. An order is all I require.’

The huntsman held out his left hand. ‘Vox,’ he said.

Servitors, gilded and cherubic, flew a master-vox horn into his grasp and braced it for him.

‘To my brother, Lord Guilliman,’ the huntsman said, ‘on all channels. I bid you welcome from afar. I wish to alight at Macragge and parlay with you. It is I, Roboute. It is the Lion. Respond.’

9
Traitor to
Mankind

‘Those who affect masks, and steal their way through shadows, and take the names of others as their own, are more deadly than any blooded warriors.’

– Gallan, On Espiel

‘The Lion?’ asked Warsmith Dantioch softly. ‘The Lion himself? Is it true?’

A degree of trial and error had allowed them to permanently stabilise the vision of Primary Location Alpha in the Chapel of Memorial, adjacent to the newly founded Library of Ptolemy in the Fortress. The chapel, now an oddly lustrous place thanks to the permanence of the Pharos link, was the site for all audiences with far-away Sotha.

‘The Lion himself, sir,’ Titus Prayto replied. ‘His fleet translated in-system just a few hours ago.’

‘So the Lion emerges,’ murmured Dantioch. ‘He comes to support Lord Guilliman, I trust?’

‘It would appear so, though he brings with him a fleet force of Dark Angels that might have split the planet in two,’ Prayto said.

It was a curious experience to be at once standing in a candle-lit chapel and looking into a gleaming, abyssal cave of the tuning floor.

‘So, he is our salvation,’ Dantioch said.

‘He is our hope,’ Prayto corrected. ‘It appears he has twenty thousand Dark Angels with him. That number could turn any tide.’

Prayto paused.

‘I sense unease in you, Titus. You greet me with today’s momentous news of the Lion’s arrival, but there is another reason for this conversation.’

‘You “sense”?’ Prayto replied with a quizzical smile.

‘Now, now, sir, I am no psyker,’ replied the warsmith. A heavy, high-backed seat had been set on the tuning floor so that Dantioch did not have to stand throughout the audiences. Some of his tactical conversations with Guilliman lasted for hours. The warsmith eased his position a little and succumbed to a rasping cough. ‘The quantum tuning of the Pharos device is empathic, and the more I use it, the more I am aware I can read demeanor. What do you hesitate from saying?’

‘Alexis Polux of the Imperial Fists has requested an audience with you, sir.’

Dantoich stiffened slightly as the hulking Imperial Fist stepped into the communication field beside Prayto and became visible. Polux had removed his helm. He gazed directly at Dantioch’s masked face.

‘Captain,’ said Dantioch.

‘Warsmith,’ Polux replied.

‘I have been advised of your actions in the Phall System, sir,’ said Dantioch. ‘I am used to the sons of loyal Legions regarding me with suspicion, but I imagine you have more cause to distrust me than most.’

‘I reserve judgement,’ replied Polux.

‘This means of communication,’ Dantioch said, ‘as I was reminding the Librarian, enhances empathic vibrations. You hate me. I can feel it.’

‘I have not quite done killing Iron Warriors, sir,’ Polux replied.

‘I am quite sure the Iron Warriors have not done killing Imperial Fists, either,’ Dantioch said, ‘but I stand apart from their actions. Do not judge me by–’

‘Sir,’ said Polux, ‘Primarch Guilliman has asked me to assist in the provision of security and fortification for Macragge and its system. I have made it my business to personally inspect all potential flaws and weaknesses.’

‘You feel that I am a weakness?’ asked Dantioch.

‘Your Legion has turned,’ said Polux, ‘yet you are here, charged no less with the control of a device at once vital to Ultramar’s survival and yet technologically still a mystery. That is a dangerous combination. The navigational viability of the Five Hundred Worlds is entrusted to a man who might be an enemy. How better to undermine the fortress of Ultramar than to get inside, and gain a position of trust and vast responsibility? I would know if this is your siegecraft, purposed to bring Lord Guilliman’s domain down.’

‘You are direct at least,’ said Dantioch, ‘but if you learn to read the tuning field’s vibrations, you will see my true intent well enough. Besides, if I had been seeking to undermine Ultramar, captain, it would have fallen already.’

‘You seek to distance yourself from your traitor-kin,’ said Polux. He pointed at Dantioch with his crimson, grafted hand. ‘That mask is not helping.’

Dantioch’s iron mask was fashioned to resemble the emblem of the IV Legion.

‘The mask hides nothing, Polux,’ said Dantioch, ‘and it does not come off. Rather than reminding you of my association and origin, it should remind you how far some will go to remain loyal. This tells you something about mettle, sir. This mask shows you that some men will wear a badge of shame forever, so that no one forgets the bonds they have broken in order to remain true.’

Dantioch slowly rose to his feet.

‘The Imperial Fists and the Iron Warriors, Polux,’ he said, sadly. ‘Let us not debate, let us simply agree that of all the Legiones Astartes, they are the greatest in warcraft, the finest exponents of fortification, either of building defences or of overwhelming them. Together, sir, with our talents and vast experience pooled, we can make Macragge impregnable.’

He coughed again, looked to his side and took up a data-slate from the heavy arm of his seat. His gauntleted hand shook slightly at the effort.

‘Now that the Pharos is operational,’ he said, ‘I have been giving time to the consideration of defence in the Macragge system. Speculation, really. Some suggestions. A number of integrated schemes that might work well.’ He looked at Polux. ‘This might be the way to prove my loyalty to you, captain.’

‘How?’

‘We talk,’ said Dantioch. ‘Every day, if necessary. I share every plan and idea I have with you. Every secret of my warcraft, including concepts the Iron Warriors have regarded as private lore since their foundation. I will betray my traitor-kin, captain. I will tell you all of my secrets, until you see through this mask and believe that only a truly loyal warrior could give up so much.’

Guilliman finished reading the report, and then looked at Euten.

‘Why didn’t you wake me?’ he asked.

‘You needed rest. Besides your injuries, you spent too long drinking that foul brew with the heathens last night.’

‘Mjod is… an interesting concoction,’ Guilliman agreed. ‘As for the Wolves, I like their honesty. I like much less battle-brothers who hide their intentions and make guile a weapon.’

‘Battle-brothers in general?’ Euten asked. ‘Or one in particular?’

‘I am thinking of one brother especially,’ said Guilliman.

He rose from his day bed.

‘Is it really the Lion?’ he asked.

‘In such strength,’ she replied, ‘that he could have been a serious threat, had he not come peacefully.’

‘Of all of them… Why did it have to be him who found a way through the storm?’ Guilliman whispered.

Euten pretended she had not heard. She waited patiently.

‘I admire him,’ Guilliman said, more audibly, looking at his stoic chamberlain. ‘Throne, who wouldn’t? It’s impossible not to admire him. But there is always a shadow on him. He dwells in secrets, he plays his cards too close, and he walks by himself when he pleases. There is… too much of the wild forest in him. He should be as noble as any of my beloved brothers, but we have never been close, and there is too much about him that is sly. This will be an interesting reunion. I wonder what agenda brings him all the way to Ultramar.’

‘It could be nothing more sinister than shelter from the warp,’ replied Euten. ‘You’ll find out. The Lion is coming. I suggest you put on full plate and welcome him in a manner that befits his eminence. Any loyal son, you said. Well, one has come to you out of the storm.’

In the opinion of most rational observers, the Primarch of the First Legion Dark Angels was the most potent and potentially dangerous individual to visit Macragge since its illumination.

There was another strong candidate for that title, however, though his arrival was rather more clandestine.

Sometimes, he used the name John.

The immigration halls of the Helion orbital plate were vast, but now they were overcrowded and had begun to smell. Helion was the outermost grav-adjusted hard anchorage circling Macragge, and the largest and oldest of all the capital world’s orbital plates. Battleships, bulk carriers, barges and gross tenders clung to the edges of it like piglets to a sow’s teats.

Macragge, a gleaming grey marble whorled with white cloud, rolled slowly beneath the floating island.

John had been trying to find a way off the Helion plate since he’d arrived there six days before.

‘This is cruel! Cruel, I tell you!’ sobbed Maderen, holding her hungry baby against her neck. She was twenty-one, Terran standard. Her baby – John forgot the name of the poor thing, but knew he could fetch it out of her mind in a moment if he had to – had been born aboard the filthy refugee ship from Calth. The newborn’s father, an Army regular in one of the Numinus regiments, had died back on Calth, and had never seen his son. He had never even known he was going to have a son.

Maderen was marked, a sunburn blush on the right side of her pretty face. The child was marked too, John noticed. An extra toenail on the underside of the second toe, left foot. The Mark of Calth, legacies of a biome corrupted by toxins, munition dust, heavy metals and solar radiation.

‘Cruel,’ she whispered, subsiding.

‘I know it is,’ John said, soothing her. He could smell the stale odours of his own body, and the reek of the hall around them. There was crying and wailing everywhere, echoed by the orbital’s unforgiving acoustics.

‘What is Guilliman thinking?’ asked old Habbard. He coughed, shaking his head. ‘I thought he was a kind king, a noble man. But he keeps us penned like animals.’

‘I thought he was a warrior,’ grumbled the sulking youth, Tulik. ‘Some warrior. He let Calth get scoured to ashes.’

‘Come on, hush, all of you,’ John said. ‘We’ve all been through hard times. Our beloved primarch… and let’s be respectful, shall we, old man?’

John looked at Habbard, who shrugged and nodded in apologetic agreement.

‘Our noble primarch,’ John went on, putting his hand on old Habbard’s shoulder to reassure him, ‘he’s been through a hard time too. He’s hounded here. Enemies at his door. I’m sure he’s doing his best to look after us all.’

‘This is his best?’ Maderen asked.

‘I was talking to the guards, last shift,’ John said.

‘Guards, now? Guards, is it? Why would they have to guard us, poor damned victims in all this?’ Habbard asked.

‘Shhhh, now, old fella,’ said John.

He dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, and edged up the persuasion in his psyk.

‘Enemies at the door,’ he told them, the wide-eyed circle of desperate refugees crowded into the corner of the gloomy hall. ‘The guards are as much for our benefit as anything. These are bad times, we all know that. Bad, dark times. God knows, an age of darkness. Security’s tight. It’s got to be. They want to let us down to the welcome camps in the city, but they have to hold us here while they check us out. Check identities. Confirm our status as metics.’

‘Metics?’ Tulik asked.

‘Resident aliens,’ John said. ‘It’ll be a temporary classification until we are assigned full citizenship. Anyway, they’re using the orbitals as way stations, to process us as we come in. That’s what the guards told me last shift, okay?’

Some of them smiled because they were reassured. Some of them smiled at the comfort of his odd vocabulary, the ‘okay’ thing. Some of them smiled because he had managed a subtle adjustment of their amygdalae.

‘Please,’ said Maderen, ‘can’t you talk to them again, Oll?’

‘Okay,’ he said.

He trudged up the grilled staircase to the main landing deck. He heard moans and complaints from below as the ghostly blue light of the ultraviolet sterilising lamps came on. Every few hours, the lamps bathed the holding halls in a radiance that made everyone feel nauseous. The ultraviolet wash was meant to keep them clean of lice and bacteria.

He fought to hold back the misery of the thirty thousand refugees in the deck pens below. The weight of it could easily unbalance a mind as sensitive as his.

Yet coming up was harder still. On the main deck, he was obliged to contend with the constant pain of the Thallax guards. The towering Mechanicum meat-borgs watched over the entire yard area, brutal and spare, glowering like butcher-birds, striding around on piston-limbs.

John wasn’t sure what was harder to handle, the empathy or the knowledge. He hated the psykana backwash of the Thallaxii. He could smell their pain. He could feel and see that behind every polished, blank faceplate was a human skull, with its spinal column still attached, screaming in agony, neurally threaded to the unforgiving steel frame that it wore.

He also knew why the orbital was being guarded by a Thallax-heavy retinue, however, and that fact was difficult to deal with. He could read the order sequence plainly in their howling, fizzling brains.

The plate had been staffed by Mechanicum automata with a skeleton staff of Ultramarines supervisors in case it had to be sacrificed at short notice. Helion could be auto-destructed with a minimum loss of Legiones Astartes.

‘Return below!’ the nearest of the Thallaxii commanded, pistoning towards him, pneumatics puffing, weapons cycling.

‘I want to talk to the officer in charge,’ John said.

‘Identify yourself,’ the automaton said.

‘You know me, Khee-Eight Verto. We talked just a while ago,’ he said.

‘Accessing records,’ the machine replied, hesitating.

‘What’s the problem here?’ asked the bay supervisor, approaching them. The supervisor was an Ultramarines sergeant. John hot-read him in a flash. Ambitious.

‘Sir, I was just asking about waiting times and conditions,’ John said.

The Ultramarine looked down at him. Helm off, the warrior was oddly out of proportion, a too-small head on a too-big body.

‘What’s your name?’ asked the Ultramarine.

‘Oll Persson,’ said John. He’d been wearing his old friend’s identity ever since he’d joined the refugee ship during a stop-over at Occluda. Oll was an easy role to play. He’d been a farmer on Calth after all, and his name would be on the population lists. It was easier to play an old friend. There were fewer cover details to remember.

‘You’ve come from Calth?’ asked the Ultramarines sergeant. Zyrol, John read. His name was Zyrol.

‘Yes, sir,’ John lied.

‘What were you back there?’

‘A farmer, sir.’

The Ultramarine nodded, compassionate. ‘These are tough times, Oll,’ he said.

‘They are,’ John agreed.

He felt a sudden, unexpected twinge of guilt. He thought of the real Oll Persson, his very real friend. He thought of the task he’d set for Oll, the danger he’d put him in. He thought about all the things at stake. Right now, Oll was cutting his way across–

No.

John regained control, regained clarity. He couldn’t afford to think that way. Worry and fear made him vulnerable.

‘There are a lot of women and children below,’ John said, gesturing towards the holding decks. ‘God knows, they could use proper help and not confinement here.’

‘‘‘God?’’’ asked the sergeant.

‘Apologies, sir – a slip of the tongue. Old habits die hard.’

‘You’re what? Catheric?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Play the role. Play the role. ‘Renounced, of course.’

‘So, what are you, a spokesman?’ asked the Ultramarine.

‘I guess. We’ve been here a while, sir. Days. Before that, ten months on a carrier from the ruins of Calth. We thought–’

‘I know it’s bad, Oll,’ said the sergeant. John read the legionary’s ambition more closely, and saw it for what it really was – a kind of nobility. Sergeant Zyrol wanted honour. He wanted promotion. He wanted the transverse broom-crest of a centurion. To earn that, he knew he had to be just like his primarch: open and honest, compassionate, caring, serious, truthful, firm, effective. This was not an act. This was his belief model. It was in his gene-code.

‘Women and kids down there,’ John said. ‘Waiting… It’s getting hard for them, do you see? To be at the doorstep of sanctuary and yet denied.’

‘New protocols, Oll,’ replied the sergeant, with a shake of his head. ‘First Master Auguston brought them in. We are obliged to hold, question and search them. Trust me, we hate to do it. You people deserve all the support Macragge can give you.’

Auguston. The name flamed up in the sergeant’s mind. These new security measures weren’t Ultramarines protocols, in John’s estimation. XIII Legion security was all about guns on walls. This was Iron Warriors style countermeasures… Long-term planning, arm’s-length caution. No, given the way the cards had fallen, not IV Legion. No, more like…VII tactics. Imperial Fists. John probed harder, caught a quick memory flash of Zyrol watching his superior Auguston taking the credit for a security scheme orchestrated by someone called Polux.

Auguston. Arsehole. Note to memory. Adjust, a new strategy. Zyrol was not going to bend, nor was he going to bad-mouth his arsehole superior, but he was noble. He wanted to be like Guilliman. He wanted to stand for honour and duty.

‘What’s that, sir, over there?’ John asked, pointing across the vast hangar space of the orbital deck.

Zyrol sighed. ‘The dead,’ he replied.

About half a kilometre away, across the rockcrete and adamantium cargo floor of the orbital’s western dock, sarcophagus capsules were being unloaded via suspensor webs into the open maw of a cargo lander.

‘The dead?’ John echoed. He was pushing a gentle mental finger into the sergeant’s frontal lobe dopamine system.

‘We’re repatriating the fallen of the Thirteenth to the Memorial Gardens for interment.’

‘You…’ John paused for effect. He amped his emotions so that tears would well. ‘You prioritise the dead over the living?’ he asked.

‘It’s not like that, Oll,’ the sergeant protested, suddenly guilt-stricken.

John shook his head and walked away. It was all right. He’d already secured from Zyrol’s surface thoughts the name of the officer in charge of landing schedules.

John shed the Oll Persson guise as easily as one might take off a coat. He adjusted, and became Teo Lusulk, a fleet Intelligence officer assigned to the orbital. He gained access to a prep room, and acquired a clean flightsuit and a carrybag to stash his possessions in. He was particularly careful with one item. It was heavy, but not much bigger than a short sword. John had wrapped it in silk cloth, and he further bundled it inside his dirty clothes.

As he changed garments and cleaned himself up, John allowed the Mark of Calth that he had psyko-somatically applied to his left cheek and forehead to begin fading.

He walked into the busy control ring levels of the orbital’s western watch tower. The great arched windows were open to permit a view across the grey cityscape of the titanic plate, the shoals of ships beyond, glinting in hard light and sharp shadows, and then the bright and vast sweep of sunlit Macragge, painfully lit against the throbbing darkness of the void. Operational code magenta, he decided. If the day’s status was higher than scarlet, the window ports would have been automatically blast shuttered.

Passing as someone you were not was all about confidence: the confidence of body language and mind-state. John simply walked through the bustle of fleet staffers and servitors, passing Thallaxii sentries and Ultramarines security without even glancing at them. He was stopped, once, at the hatchway into a strategium.

‘Papers and ident,’ the Ultramarine said, his voice a glottal drawl emanating from his vox-grille.

‘Of course, sorry,’ John replied. He made a show of searching his flightsuit pockets. At the same time, he planted a thought-seed in the Ultramarine’s head.

‘Apologies, Lusulk,’ the Space Marine said, waving him through. ‘Didn’t recognise you, friend.’

The strategium was humming with dataflow. Tactical officers, intelligencers and Mechanicum adepts worked around the glowing hololithic display tables. John picked up a data-slate and pretended to consult it as he moved closer.

He read dispositions. Near orbit and high anchorage were both packed tight as a drum. So many ships. Close to a third of the Ultramar warfleet by the looks of it, and another big fleet had recently taken up station in Macragge’s polar range.

Were those Dark Angels ships? First Legion? Holy hell. Holy shitting hell.

John looked closer, reading the fine detail. There was a stand-off. It was subtle, but none of the Dark Angels vessels were out of gunsweep from either the Ultramarines warfleet or the principal weapon orbitals. Shit, what did Guilliman think his brother-Legion was going to do?

Of course. Of course. The answer was ‘almost anything’. The galaxy had been turned upside down. No one trusted anybody.

What else? What the hell was that navigation beacon? Since when did Macragge have an Astronomican?

Except it wasn’t an Astronomican. John could feel it. He could feel the light of it pulsing in his brain and heart and spine and balls. It was xeno-tech. Guilliman was using some kind of xeno-tech to pierce the warp storm and make the Five Hundred Worlds navigable. Holy, holy hell. The galaxy had turned upside down. Even sane men were resorting to desperate measures.

The xeno-tech was ugly. It was an ugly light – an old light, like a lamp lit aeons earlier. John didn’t like it. It reminded him of something, something that had lurked deep in the Acuity he had shared with his alien puppet masters in the Cabal; a species memory, a memory of old time, of pre-humanity. It was tech that had taken others across the gulf of stars long before man, long before the eldar, even.

The feeling made him shiver. It made him fear for his own kind, for mankind, even though he had been a traitor to his kind for longer than he cared to remember.

He was an agent of the Cabal. He wondered for how much longer. John Grammaticus had a conscience, despite all evidence to the contrary. How much longer before he would finally be forced to acknowledge what his conscience was telling him and pay it some heed? How much longer before he let it guide his actions?

The galaxy had turned upside down. What else had to happen before he finally told his alien masters to go screw themselves?

His alien masters would kill him, of course. Permanently, this time.

John crossed to the next hololithic display table, a downsweep view of Macragge.

He bumped into a good-looking female officer, who was turning away from the table.

‘Sorry,’ he said, picking up the data-slate she’d dropped. She smiled.

As he handed it back to her, he got a decent hot read as his mind brushed hers. Her name was Leaneena, which was nice but not important. More significantly, he took her console access codes out of her head, like plucking individual whisker bones out of the cooked flesh of a good piece of fish.

John got to the table, and keyed the code into the fascia panel. He had data access. He started to work, carefully and methodically, trying not to make it look like he was gorging on information. He pulled up meteorological views, disposition spreads and data-slides. He dragged as much of it as he could over to his borrowed data-slate, his hand moving through the motion-conductive light-cloud. Some of the data was rebuffed and wouldn’t copy to his device, because his clearance wasn’t high enough. He copied what he could and memorised what he couldn’t.

It was extremely demanding, keeping up a psyk disguise in such a crowded and vigilant environment. John reckoned he could do it for thirty minutes, tops, before his control started to fray. This was his one shot at learning how the ground lay.

He looked at Macragge. According to the Cabal, his target was down there somewhere, somehow.

John had been many things for them: procurer, suborner, spy, panderer, recruiter, persuader, provocateur, iconoclast, thief.

He’d never been an assassin before.

He rotated the table view and rolled the three-dimensional globe of Macragge around on its axis, flicking aside the meteorological overlays and air traffic schemes. He wanted security data.

He got it. He’d been hoping for a teleport entry, but that was clearly out of the question. Some supremely clever bastard had retrained a modest proportion of the orbital auspex systems to watch the surface. Clever. Oh, very clever. Any teleport burst would be seen and logged. The same applied to unauthorised drop pods or landers. That was definitely Imperial Fists thinking. You can’t keep everyone out. What you can do is know if they have got in.

What else? Well, authorised planetfall was restricted to the primary starport, and the primary damn starport looked wide open, but it wasn’t because starship-quality void fields had been set up to close down the lower orbital tracks and the entire port area at a second’s notice. So, zero chance of stealing a lander and then pleading code ignorance on the final approach. They’d just slam him out of the air.

John Grammaticus sighed. Sweat was starting to bead on his forehead.

It looked as if he was going to have to go with a crazy improvisation that had crossed his mind earlier.

Teo Lusulk became an Army officer called Edaris Cluet, who was attached to the repatriation process. As Helion plate was overtaken by the terminator and night fell, Cluet boarded a bulk transport and stood, solemn and dignified in his mourning uniform, alongside other officers of his stripe, beside a row of sarcophagi. A fanfare sounded.

Lifting on hot blue burners, the transport rose and moved out of the orbital bay.

10
A Pride Comes
to Ultramar

‘Enter every city as though you are its first-born master.’

– Fulgrim, Primarch of the III Legion

The six great war horns of the ancient Battle Kings sounded across the storm-lit Civitas, screeching out long, rasping blasts in unison. The horns, hollowed from the tusks of an extinct beast, had once been wheeled into battle on giant cart-engines in the vanguards of the armies that Konor and his forebears had taken to war. Now, they were placed in the minarets of fortified towers around Martial Square and the great wall of the Fortress.

As their hoarse bellows died away, like the fading roars of a monstrous bull or glacial pachyderm receding into myth, the sharper fanfare of the XIII began – silver trumpets and carnyx, eight hundred of each, swelling with bright, triumphal joy.

In full, magisterial wargear, like a golden and azure demigod, Guilliman stood on the platform of the colossal Propylae Titanicus, the ‘Titan’s Gate’, that formed the northern entrance of Martial Square. It was a pylon gate, large enough for even the largest engines of the Collegia Titanica to pass beneath without stooping, a fact that had been demonstrated twice that morning. Titan’s Gate had been draped with the colours of the XIII Legion for the occasion, flanked on either side by the drop banners of the Titan Legions, various Army regiments, along with the standards of the V, VI, VII, X, XVIII and XIX Legiones Astartes.

Guilliman breathed in, ignoring the dull wound-ache in his back and the cramp of his healing lungs. From his vantage overlooking the nine hundred-hectare square, paved in polished azurite and marble from the quarries of Calut, he could see the Avenue of Heroes, the central axis of the Civitas. Its pavements only one-thousandth part engraved with the names of the fallen, led due north to the massive glacis of the Aegis Wall that surrounded the Castrum. Above that majestic, cliff-like rampart rose the implacable towers and halls of the Fortress of Hera, dwarfing the Residency, the Agiselus Barracks and the High Senate, each one a vast building in its own right, but which clustered like small children in the skirts of the Legion Fortress. The Fortress and its surrounding structures on the high Castrum were collectively known as the Palaeopolis, or ‘Old City’. Behind that vista, stabbing into the sky, climbed the distant mountains, the points of Hera’s Crown, usually ghost blue at that time of year, but now a submarine green thanks to the storm-light.

To the east of the square lay the imposing domes of the new Senate House and the Diribitorium, the municipal buildings that dominated Circe Deme, a district of habitas and industry, which ran east across the valley to the Porta Medes, and the fine farming country beyond where many consuls kept their estates. Circe and its neighbouring demes were collectively known as the Neapolis, the New City.

To the west lay the river Laponis, shining like smoked glass in the daylight, which wound between the vast black ziggurat castle of the Mechanicum and the vertiginous Red Basilica of the Astra Telepathica. No birds ever flew in that part of the sky. This was a fact that Guilliman had noted from the moment the basilica was first raised and inhabited.

To the south-west of Martial Square lay the geographic centre of Magna Macragge Civitas, the point at which the north-south running cardo of the Via Laponis crossed the east-west running Via Decumanus Maximus. The spot was marked, at a circular intersection guarded by herms and blackwork statues, by the Milion, a milestone marker from which all measurements in the Civitas and, technically, the entire realm of Ultramar, were measured. It was from the top of that milestone, his hands red with traitor blood, that Guilliman had made his first rallying speech during Gallan’s revolt, the uprising that had left his beloved stepfather dead.

Due south of where he stood, the Grand Colonnade led straight and true from the south end of the square all the way down to the starport fields and the coast. The airspace had been cleared. Guilliman could smell the sea, and even glimpse the distant glitter of its racing waves.

It was nearly time.

The intensity of the trumpet fanfare shivered the air, but he knew it would soon be drowned out by the roar of braking jets and landing thrusters.

Guilliman felt a kind of gladness. The arrival of his warlord brother threw up many questions and troubles, but it at least marked a state change in the affairs of Ultramar. Whatever else it might be, this was a turning point.

It was also an excuse to take pride in the glory of Macragge and the XIII. It had been a long time since his Legion had assembled in full and formal regalia for the sheer magnificence of it. Nothing since Calth, not even the hard-fought victories and bloody feats of retribution, had caused them to celebrate.

The arrival of the Lion called for nothing less. The galaxy contained only eighteen primarchs. The conjunction of even two of them was a singular moment when the balance of the cosmos was temporarily and specifically weighted, especially when those two were, perhaps, the most feted and respected war leaders of all.

This was a day to be marked, so that all of Macragge – all of Ultramar! – knew it. This was a moment. The lord of the Dark Angels deserved such respect, and by the high towers of Terra, Guilliman knew his warriors deserved to feel pride too.

Guilliman was accompanied on the platform by Gorod and the Invictus guard, by Auguston and fifteen officers of the XIII’s senior ranks, by ninety-four senior Army and fleet commanders, by high officers of the senate and the Mechanicum, and by twenty centurion-ranked warriors of the Legiones Astartes, representing an officer cadre for the other Legions that had come to Macragge. Of high officers of the XIII present on Macragge that day, only Valentus Dolor was noticeable by his absence.

The first fanfare of the trumpets had ended. As the second volleying blast began, the clean, silver notes of the horns lofting like a flock of bright eagles into the summer sky, the war horns of the Collegia Titanica began to boom in harmony. Forty war-engines, representing all eight of the Titan Legions pacted with Guilliman, the engine-forces of the forge worlds Tigrus and Accatran, stood on station around Martial Square, or flanked the Grand Colonnade to the starport gates. The assembly included nine Warlords and two Imperator engines, the Ijax Ijastus and the Death Casts Its Own Long Shadow, which had taken up positions on either side of the platform, and stood like vertical cities, bristling with guns.

The air did more than shiver. It threatened to split.

Guilliman allowed himself a smile. He glanced to his side, and saw Euten grimacing and covering her ears.

He beheld the scene again. This was his empire. It was magnificent. He would never use the phrase ‘his empire‘ out loud, of course, but it was. He had founded it and fought for it, and he knew that, one day, he would die for it too. Below him, the polished marble paving slabs of Martial Square gleamed in the storm-light and the eerie luminosity of the Pharos, the single star in the sky. Around the vast square lay the Magna Macragge Civitas, one of the greatest cities of the Imperium. It wasn’t the city that mattered – it was what the city bred. It was what the city could produce.

Guilliman had assembled an honour guard of nine thousand Ultramarines around the edges of the square. They stood in perfectly mediated blocks behind their respective company standards, their polished wargear glittering in the daylight. Between each company formation was assembled either a mechanised armour formation or an Army battalion, the soldiers kneeling in obeisance beneath their fluttering vexils held aloft by their bannermen. Guilliman was offering his brother an honour guard of almost forty-seven thousand fighting souls, not to mention the million or more civilians crowded into the adjacent streets and thoroughfares for a glimpse of the Lion-lord and his famous warriors. Euten had told Guilliman that street hawkers and vendors were doing a brisk trade in cheap icons and tin badges displaying the iconography of the First Legion.

‘So my people think he will save them when I cannot?’ Guilliman had asked as he strapped on his ceremonial plate in the Residency’s fitting chamber.

Euten had blown a raspberry.

‘They celebrate the moment, you foolish boy,’ she replied. ‘They welcome his arrival. He is noble and he is loyal.’

Guilliman had nodded.

‘Are you jealous of him?’ Euten had asked.

‘No!’

‘You are. You are. Because he is the Lord of the First, the first born. I never thought I would see such jealousy in you, my dear lord. It does not become you, but it is also rather sweet.’

Guilliman had growled something indecipherable, and then demanded that his armourers adjust the servo fit of his pauldrons.

‘Of course,’ Euten had added, thoughtfully. ‘He is Lord of the First, and thus the first of your equals, but he was not the first found.’

‘What, woman?’

‘Horus was the first lost son to be found. Look how well that ended, my lord.’

Guilliman had looked at her and laughed. He couldn’t stop himself. It had felt good.

‘First is not always best,’ Euten had said, also laughing, ‘my eighth-found Lord of the Thirteenth Legion. Look who has an empire.’

Still smiling, Guilliman had looked at her.

‘Be careful what you say,’ he had told her. ‘Whatever I have, my beloved brother Horus almost has an empire.’

‘The point is,’ she had replied, ‘the people of Macragge know that two primarchs are, logically, better than one.’

The trumpets screamed, lifting him from the memory. An aide stepped to Guilliman’s side, and presented him with a gene-reader data-slate.

‘Your authority to open airspace, my lord?’ the aide bowed.

‘Given,’ Guilliman said. He took the slate and kissed the screen. Such ultimate authorities required a direct gene-sample, and it was often too cumbersome for a fully plated warrior to remove a power fist or gauntlet to affect a dermal read. A kiss had become the expedient and understood custom. Guilliman knew that some, like First Master Phratus Auguston, preferred to spit on slates rather than kiss them. It had the same effect, but it lacked humility.

The deep systems of the Civitas accepted and interpreted his genetic order. Overhead, the starport airspace opened and the void shields slid aside. Ships descended from the shadow of a fleet lying out in the atmospheric murk.

First, Stormbirds, painted void-black, the leading edges of their wings flecked in dark, dark green, the colour of ancient forests. Behind them, in formation, landing ships, Thunderhawks and Thunderhawk bulkers, and troop landers.

They were not just in formation. They descended in perfect, perfect, aerial synchronicity. The ships came down like formation dancers, in a precisely integrated and orchestrated ballet.

He’s showing off, Guilliman thought. He smiled. I would too, if the situation was reversed.

The ships began to land, four by four, in perfect sequence, along the top of the colonnade where it met Martial Square. The timing of their touchdowns was almost embarrassingly precise. Four, then four, then four, each group together. Their downdraft obliterated the trumpet fanfare and even the constant howl of the Titan war-engines.

Drop hatches and ramps opened and released with similarly pin-sharp timing. Formations of Dark Angels strode down the ramps onto the colonnade and entered the square. They stepped as one, each beat perfect, each warrior gleaming and uniform. As the marching companies entered the square, they began to spread into wide, double-ranks from their ten-by-ten blocks. The spread was seamless. Squads widened and melted into and through each other, forming a perfect double-wall, all still marching in step, never missing a beat. The drill discipline was the most impressive Guilliman had ever seen.

He’s showing off, he thought again.

Not missing a beat, the Dark Angels formation rotated its edges to form a horseshoe with the open end facing the platform of Titan’s Gate. Two thousand warriors deployed in sublimely orchestrated marching order. Then they began their weapons drill, all marching on the spot as they tossed, spun and rotated their bolters, or threw swords and standards aloft and back again in precise returns. Beat, beat, beat, beat, beat.

Guilliman noticed details of particular weapons carried by the Dark Angels – beam and projectile weapons of various kinds that even he did not immediately recognise. The First Legion had arsenals containing devices unknown to all the other Legions. The Dark Angels had been the first created, and their history predated all other institutions of the Legiones Astartes. They were, in many regards, the prototype. It was said that during the latter years of the Unification War and the first years of the Great Crusade, before the other Legions had been constructed, the Dark Angels had known and done things that no other Legion was privy to. They had built their strengths and identity in that era, in isolation.

That identity had needed to be complete. When there was only one Legion, that Legion had been obliged to contain all specialisms. Guilliman knew that the six hosts or ‘wings’ of the Dark Angels represented specialisms of every school, at subtle variance to the standard order of the Principia Bellicosa.

Guilliman had also heard tell of secret orders and mysterious hierarchies within the ranks of the Dark Angels; hierarchies of knowledge, trust and authority invisible to outsiders. It explained some of their curious insignia, which sometimes bore no relation to rank or company structure.

Like their lord, the warriors of the First Legion were coded, shrouded and ciphered. They kept secrets well, perhaps too well. This was a legacy, Guilliman believed, of the formative days when they were alone and had no other Legion to rely on.

Without any sign of a signal, the Dark Angels suddenly stopped their drill and froze, as one singular form. Perfect. Perfect.

He’s really showing off, Guilliman thought.

His helm-vox beeped. Guilliman looked at the mantle display. The ident-tag read Dolor.

‘I’m busy,‘ he said.

‘Of course you are, lord,’ Dolor replied over the link. ‘I would not trouble you if it wasn’t important. I need to show you something.’

‘Again, dear friend, this is not the time.’

‘Agreed. Come to me as soon as you can. But do not pact anything with your noble brother that you can’t undo… until you have seen what I have to show you.’

‘You unsettle me, Valentus.’

‘Greet your brother. Commit to nothing. I have a practical here that you need to appreciate.’

The link cut.

‘Everything all right?’ Euten asked him.

Guilliman nodded.

‘They’re very, very good at that marching drill thing, aren’t they?’ Euten said, gesturing at the square below. The Dark Angels ranks had begun moving again. They had peeled meticulously into tempered, marching cohorts that crossed diagonally through other cohorts to create perfect new shapes: diamonds, squares, triangles, curved lines, a six-pointed star. Point leaders were turning and marching back into their packs, inverting the march order. It was annoyingly impressive.

‘I imagine they must get plenty of time to practise,’ Guilliman replied.

Euten looked at him and covered her mouth with her hand.

‘That’s the most acid thing I’ve ever heard you say, Roboute,’ she declared.

He grinned at her.

‘Brace yourself, mam. My big brother’s come to stay. The acid is only just starting to flow.’

Down below, on the polished marble stage of the Martial Square, the Dark Angels finally finished their display. Polished bolters clamped to their chests, they formed a V-shaped fan of squads leading back to the ramp of the lead Stormbird.

The Lion emerged.

Despite himself, Guilliman felt his heart skip and his lungs pump. The Lion. The Lion. There were brothers that he could look down on, and was happy to, and there were brothers that he could admire. Rogal, Magnus and Sanguinius, and, damn him, even Russ. He could admire them for what they were. But there were only two brothers that he had ever actually looked up to, only two brothers that he had ever actually admired.

There were only two brothers that he felt shadowed by when they were present.

Lion El’Jonson and Horus Lupercal.

The Lion emerged from his lander stony-faced, bareheaded, his long golden hair trailing in the wind. So beautiful, so deadly, so empty, so unreadable. He carried his war-helm under his left arm, and marched with the same perfect discipline that his men displayed. To each side of him came his voted lieutenants, in identical step. Beloved Corswain was commanding the First Legion elements on the other side of the Ruinstorm, so the Lion was braced by Holguin and Farith Redloss. Holguin carried an executioner’s long sword upright before him in his two hands, the tip of the six-foot blade rounded over like a butter knife. His pauldron was marked with the crossed swords of the Deathwing. Redloss carried a massive war-axe, haftwise across his chest. His pauldron bore the skull-in-hourglass of the Dreadwing. All three wore black artificer armour worked with red Martian gold.

They approached along the echelon, entering the square.

Guilliman sighed.

‘Bastard. Always showing off,’ he murmured.

He looked at his aides, nodded, and began to walk down the steps to meet his brother. The Wolves followed him. Guilliman stopped and looked back up the steps.

‘Really? Right now, of all times?’ Guilliman asked Faffnr.

‘My watch-pack walks where you walk, jarl,’ said Faffnr.

‘Even my own Cataphractii aren’t following me at this moment, Wolf.’

‘We could, lord,’ Gorod growled from the platform. ‘Indeed, we could also hose the unwanted off the steps in an unbelievable storm of shot, if you so desired.’

‘Enough,’ Guilliman said. He looked at Faffnr and the Wolves. ‘You see how I spare your lives?’

‘No one spares our lives, jarl,’ Faffnr replied. ‘They’re not for sparing. Never have been.’

‘With… respect,’ Biter Herek whispered to his pack-leader.

Faffnr nodded. ‘Obviously, obviously. Like Biter here says. Goes without saying. With respect.’

Guilliman hesitated, painfully aware that he was halfway down a staircase, in front of a million and a half people, pausing to converse with a band of barbarians while his noble brother waited below.

‘I appeal to your honesty, Faffnr Bludbroder,’ he said. ‘This moment isn’t about me, is it? It’s about you, and the Angels, and the feud.’

Faffnr paused.

‘It is,’ he replied, nodding. His men, hunched and ugly, nodded too.

Guilliman sighed. ‘Let’s do it then. But do not embarrass me or I’ll gut you all myself.’

He turned and resumed his walk down the steps from the platform. He was aware of the Wolves closing in behind him as a ragged and unseemly bodyguard.

‘By the void,’ Guilliman hissed at them. ‘You know you’re making me look like an idiot! Like a heathen king of Illyrium!’

‘Sorry and all that, jarl. Honour demands it,’ Faffnr replied, a hot-breath whisper at Guilliman’s shoulder.

‘You’re a pain in the arse, you know that?’ Guilliman said.

‘Indisputably,’ Faffnr returned.

Guilliman walked down to meet the Lion. The Lion walked up to meet him.

It was a long wait. The distance between the landing site and the gate was over a kilometre. The two primarchs made slow progress towards one another.

When they were at last face to face, there was a moment of silence. All the grand fanfares had died away. Even the crowd noise had ebbed.

The Lion looked at Guilliman. The Avenging Son looked at the Lion. The Lion’s black armour was richly engraved and inlaid with red gold. The chestplate and pauldrons displayed all the interconnected icons and symbols of his Legion, the complex heraldry of the Dark Angels hierarchies, visible and invisible. All the secret hosts, thrones and powers of the First Legion’s secret structure were represented there, united by the central insignia, the six-pointed hexagrammaton. He wore the pelt of a forest beast across his right shoulder, and the golden badge of a shrouded urn at his throat.

‘Brother,’ said the Lion.

‘Brother,’ Guilliman replied.

‘Well met.’

‘Not before time,’ said Guilliman.

‘You do me a great honour with this show of force,’ the Lion said, gently indicating the square around them.

‘And you do me an honour with this display of drill,’ Guilliman said.

The Lion smiled, nodding, appreciative.

He handed his war-helm back to Holguin.

‘Has it really been so long, Roboute?’ he asked and abruptly embraced Guilliman in a clash of armour.

‘No, no,’ Guilliman replied, swallowing hard. His war-helm had been knocked out of his grip with the abruptness of the Lion’s embrace, and was rolling on the marble paving behind him. ‘It’s good to see you,’ he said, forcing control of his voice.

The Lion broke the embrace and nodded. He bowed, picked up Guilliman’s fallen helm and rose again, handing it back to him.

‘Good to see you too, brother,’ he said. ‘And good to see your extraordinary light. You must tell me all about that.’

‘I will. But, there is another, more immediate matter,’ Guilliman said, hoping his composure had remained intact. ‘Of… protocol,’ he added.

‘The Wolves?’ replied the Lion.

‘Just so,’ said Guilliman.

The Lion nodded and turned away from Guilliman. He looked down at Faffnr Bludbroder.

‘Name yourself, Wolf. Let’s get this done.’

‘I am Faffnr, dear lord.’

‘Are you of Sesc? I recognise the markings.’

‘I am, lord.’

‘Let’s take the smack, Faffnr. Will it come from you?’

Faffnr Bludbroder straightened to his full height. The feud between the Angels and the Wolves had existed since Dulan. It was a ritual for them to field champions every time they met.

‘Yes, lord,’ Faffnr said. ‘I crave you advance your champion.’

Both Holguin and Redloss stepped forward.

‘I’ll be my own champion,’ the Lion whispered. There was a hint of a smile on his lips.

‘No,’ said Faffnr.

‘So, the Wolves of the Rout are cowards, I take it?’

‘No,’ snarled Faffnr.

‘Then take your strike, Wolf,’ said the Lion, ‘and make it count.’

Faffnr sighed and swung his axe at the Lion. Guilliman flinched as the blade cut the air beside him. It was a sensationally good strike. Faffnr had betrayed no cues, no hint of muscle tension, no focus of powered plate. The blow had just come. Guilliman wondered if it would have taken him by surprise. He was forced to admit that it might have.

The Lion caught Faffnr’s swing with one hand, blocking the haft with the blade edge millimetres from his face. Faffnr grunted involuntarily as his strength was met and fundamentally matched by superior power.

Then the Lion delivered his return blow. It came with his left hand, not enough to maim or kill, almost pulled, but fast, faster than Faffnr’s superb swing.

It knocked the pack-leader onto his knees and left the Lion holding Faffnr’s axe.

Faffnr Bludbroder rose to his feet again.

‘Satisfied?’ asked the Lion, tossing the axe back to him.

‘Honour is satisfied, lord,’ Faffnr assented, catching it. He nodded and backed off, waving to his pack to do the same. Holguin and Redloss both grinned with unbearable insouciance.

‘Then tell Bo Soren to guard his manners, Faffnr,’ Guilliman said over his shoulder without looking back.

‘I will, Jarl,’ Faffnr returned. Guilliman heard a hard slap and a muffled curse.

He looked at the Lion. He’d never realised before that the Lion was very slightly taller than him.

‘Shall we, brother?’ he asked.

‘The famous Fortress of Hera?’ asked the Lion. ‘I would be disappointed not to see it.’

It was late afternoon.

At the Occident Gate in the mighty Servian Wall, at the very western edge of Magna Macragge Civitas, the gate-guards were processing incomers. There was a steady tide, tricksters and black-marts flowing in to the evening markets of Laponis Deme from the slums of the Illyrian Enclave behind the high wall, or agrics flocking to the city granaries with sweating payloads of grain from the chora on bulk-servitor wagons.

‘Name?’ asked the gate officer, a senior ranked man in the praecental division. The man looked important and he bloody knew it too.

‘Damon,’ replied Damon Prytanis, huddled on the back gate of a servitor freight car in his smelly black fur coat. ‘What’s going on?’

‘What do you mean what’s going on?’

‘In the city? All that airshow? The damned horns?’

‘The First Legion has come to us,’ the officer replied proudly.

‘The First Legion, eh? The Lion’s mob? Big news.’

‘It is,’ the officer agreed.

‘Big news,’ Damon repeated, nodding. His heart sank. Too many serious players for comfort.

‘Ident,’ the officer reminded him.

Damon shrugged and nodded and held out his open, empty hand. It generally worked. The gesture was so automatic, guards usually saw what they wanted to see.

‘Good, all right,’ the officer said, waving him on.

Damon passed through the deep, cold shade of the Occident Gate on the back of the jolting servitor car and entered the western edge of the city. This was his target city, his bloody destiny, probably. It was not promising. Down at this skunk-end of the low-qual deme it was still gross, cheap-built habitas, tinker-marts and slum runs, and would be for many kilometres before a traveller could reach the handsome domi and wide estates of Xanthi Deme in the low, rolling country west of the river.

Damon dropped off the back of the trundling bulk-car and started walking down the busy highway, skirting Illyrian caravans and grain cargoes.

He suddenly had a bad feeling. He liked to call it his first sense because, according to his blessed mother, he had not been born with any.

‘Hey!’ a voice called out from behind him. ‘Hey, you! Fur coat man!’

Damon cursed. The gate officer had only been temporarily convinced. Damon took a look back, and saw a squad of praecentals moving from the gatehouse in his direction. They were picking up pace and shoving slower-moving pedestrians out of their path. Most of the locals shrank back. The praecentals looked like over-groomed show-guards, but they were tough, well-trained, and they carried serious authority.

They were also well-armed. Damon saw plasma weapons and intimidating blades.

‘Halt!’ one of them shouted. When Damon didn’t, the officer started barking at the pedestrian traffic.

‘Out of the way! Give us a clear shot!’

A clear shot? Encouraging. Welcoming. Reassuring. Times were worse, and tensions far hotter, than he had anticipated, and he had anticipated a fair bit.

It was a moment to switch out, to revert to the skills he’d honed hunting and being hunted over an unimaginably long period. The hindbrain temptation was huge. There were only a handful of humans in the galaxy possessed of equal to or greater experiential skill than Damon Prytanis. He’d met two of them, and one of those was his current target. The other was a surly, uncooperative rogue.

Yet another of his kind was the Emperor of Man. Damon had never met the fellow, and didn’t much want to. He sounded like a total dunkhole.

Smiling, he reverted.

Damon ducked to his left very sharply, racing down an alley into the warren of stenopoi, the maze of narrow streets in this most densely packed quarter of Laponis Deme. He collided with no one and knocked over nothing. People just got out of his way or, if they froze, he went around them. He made two more turns, another left and then a hard right, following a dank, high-walled lane under the arches of a major aqueduct. Washing had been strung out to dry on lines below the arch and between the walls, and he could smell cook-pots and pipe smoke.

The guards were fit, and close behind him, moving fast and with determination, despite the encumbrance of their armour and wargear.

He saw the hazy grey shapes of the giant granaries ahead of him, and thought for a moment that he might reach them and hide. But the praecentals were efficient. A second squad had appeared, crossing a chain-dropped canal bridge ahead of him to work back through the stenopoi and pin him between them and his pursuers.

He realised he was going to have to get wet. It disappointed him to have to contemplate blood-business so early on, but it also partly pleased him. He’d been in the mountains for too long, and he was cold and hungry and fit to hurt someone. He’d been sent to Macragge to perform a mission he didn’t want to perform, and challenge a man he didn’t think needed to be challenged.

Damon Prytanis was in an ugly mood, and by cornering him, the praecentals had offered him a chance to vent that frustration.

He carried four weapons. They had come with him in a sack of living flesh in order to survive, as metallic items, the extremity of the fast-jack teleport. The sack had been bred for purpose in a Khu’Nib replicator vat. Once he had cut it open and killed it to get at his weapons and kit, after his painful arrival, its meat had fed him for six days.

Four weapons: a matched brace of Zhul’kund murehk – elegant, long-snouted, knob-gripped sling pistols, the best kind. Eldar shuriken weapons were Damon’s favoured firearms, for what they lacked in range and accuracy they more than made up for in rate of fire and penetrative effect. This pair had come from Slau Dha’s personal battle-casket, an uncharacteristic gesture of generosity that had been made, Damon was sure, to emphasise the importance of the mission. One was called (in High Idharaen) Guh’hru, which meant ‘Bleed-to-death’, and the other was called (in the demotic and corrupted slang of the Crone Worlds) Meh’menitay, which meant ‘Death Looks in Your Eyes and Finds You Entirely Wanting’. He kept them holstered under his fur jacket, in a makeshift double-shoulder rig he’d made from the indigestible skin of the flesh-sack.

The third weapon was a short-pattern chainsword, not much longer than a gladius, which dated from the interminable wars of the pre-Unification Era of Terra, and which had been designed as a secondary, close-protection weapon for the retinues of a Panpacific nobleman called Kendra Huul. The sword came from Damon’s private collection, and he knew its provenance well, because he’d been the retinue member it had been carried by, and he had given it its name: Huul’s Doom. He wore it across his spine, once again under his heavy fur jacket.

The fourth weapon was a small red-glass bottle that lay in the right-hand pocket of his fur coat, jumbled in among the other odds and ends of his trade.

Damon side-stepped into a range of shadows, darted under the eaves of an old stable block, and pulled himself back against a stone partition wall to wait.

Six men coming from behind, six more from up ahead, Praecentals all. All of them were packing plasma weapons, and wielding quality blades if it got nasty-close, blades they knew how to handle. They were armoured in the head, torso, shoulders, groin and legs. Guilliman did not stint on the materiel budget for his householders, so that armour was plasteel at the very least, probably with a ceramite underveil.

Nothing a murehk couldn’t puncture, but he’d need to let them get very close to ensure hard, wet kills.

He reached under his coat and drew his pistols, Guh’hru in his right hand and Meh’menitay in his left. He held them up, muzzles aimed at the storm-streaked sky. With his thumbs, he stroked the studs that activated the almost silent gravitic accelerators and brought them cycling up to power. The wraithbone grips began to feel warm.

The sound of racing footfalls had ceased. Damon listened and heard, over the gurgle of the nearby canal and the distant street sounds, a terse, hushed back and forth: vox chirps, a search pattern inter-signalling as it spread out.

Come for me then, he willed them.

The first two appeared to his left very suddenly, turning around the end of the stable block with their plasma weapons aimed.

Snap. He was already moving. They had the drop, but he beat them to it. His guns came down, side-by-side, as he moved and fired.

He squeezed each trigger with the lightest of touches, a pulse technique that the eldar called the Ilyad’than, or ‘feather-finger’. Shuriken technology was amazing. The gravitic accelerators shoved shots out of the weapons at abnormal velocities, and ammunition was a solid core block of plasti-crystal that the gun sliced off and hurled one monomolecular disc at a time. It was so efficient a system that a single over-generous squeeze of the trigger could unleash hundreds of razor-rounds in a second or two.

The Ilyad’than technique allowed the shooter to fire off crisp bursts of five or six discs at a time, preserving the solid ammunition core and avoiding messy overkill.

Damon was well-practised. Guh’hru spat four monomolecular discs through the armoured chest of one guard, and Meh’menitay did the same to the other. Dark slits, suddenly welling blood in extravagant quantity, appeared in their chest plating as they fell backwards. One dropped onto the path, the other toppled over a rail into the dirty canal.

Damon swung around as a third praecental appeared around the opposite end of the stable block behind him. Turning, he fired Guh’hru straight-armed, and put two discs into the man’s face, which ruptured messily inside the frame of his helmet. The man dropped to his knees, then flopped onto his front, kicking a squish of blood up out of his head on impact.

No pausing now. Voices were raised. The men had heard the distinctive shriek of sling guns, a sound no being who had faced the eldar ever forgot. Damon ran towards his first kills. The corpse in the water was face down and slowly sinking into the green, algae-thickened murk, supported by the air caught in his cape. The man on the path was on his back, his eyes as wide as full moons, blood leaking out of him in astonishing quantities, turning the earth pathway into terracotta putty.

Damon knelt and made an adjustment to the man’s weapon. Then he started to run back the way he had come.

‘Here he is! Help me!’ he yelled over his shoulder as he ran.

Damon threw himself sideways into the far end of the stable block, putting a heavy wall between him and the canal.

He heard other praecentals approaching, heard their outraged curses as they saw the kills.

Then one of them said, ‘Wait, wait! What’s that sound?’

A plasma weapon’s powercell on overload, you numbwit, Damon thought.

It went off like a bomb, blowing out the far end of the stable block where it overhung the canal. Damon emerged into the smoke, finished off the one man that the blast hadn’t killed with a swift headshot, and counted the other bodies. It was a jigsaw. He had to make sense of the bloody, half-cooked chunks. Four. Two more still close, then. And more squads would be on their way.

How many more would he risk? How many more would it take to slake his frustration?

He looked down at the canal. The water was very still, suddenly.

‘Oh, come on…’ he began.

Gahet looked up at him, an impossible reflection. The telepathic consult was like a hot wire through his brain.

+You waste time and expose your presence unnecessarily, Damon.+

‘I’m blowing off steam,’ Damon growled back, hurting.

+Fulfill the duty you must perform for us.+

‘All right, just stop–’

+Find him and secure the prize. Make him perform his assigned task, or, if he will not do it, perform it for him.+

‘All right, damn you!’ Damon winced.

He turned away from the canal. The two praecentals were rushing him along the towpath. One fired, scorching the air beside Damon with plasma heat, a very near miss.

Damon pulled up his guns, firing both.

+What are you doing?+

‘Finishing things,’ Damon replied.

He could hear the other squads moving in. Wet. It was going to get bloody wet.

‘I’ll do your job, Gahet,’ he said, with no respect at all, ‘once I’m done here.’

11
Communion

‘Let us start with the truth, and move on to more interesting matters.’

– attributed to Malcador the Sigillite

Two Legions slowly marched, side by side, along the Avenue of Heroes, towards the Castrum and the Fortress, like a half-black, half-blue river. On the right-hand side of the column marched the Ultramarines; on the left, the Dark Angels. Behind the main column came the remnants of the other Legions, and then the Army units and the Titan engines. Crowds cheered and waved from both sides of the vast route.

‘The last time this many banners were carried aloft must have been on Ullanor,’ the Lion said.

‘I think so,’ Guilliman agreed.

They were walking side by side at the head of the procession, half-shaded by the Legion standards being carried at their heels. Holguin and Redloss escorted the Lion, and Gorod and his lieutenant, Maglios, flanked the Avenging Son.

‘It is a glorious feeling,’ the Lion said, ‘and one we deserve. Your warriors, after the ordeal of Nuceria and the many battles of Lorgar’s “shadow crusade” – mine after Thramas and the fury of the warp.’

‘You will tell me, I hope, about the Thramas Crusade in detail,’ Guilliman said.

‘I will.’

‘You fought against Konrad? Against the Eighth Legion?’

‘Traitors all, sad be the day. I have prisoners aboard the flagship, including his First Captain, Sevatar.’

Guilliman glanced sideways at his expressionless brother.

‘Have you interrogated him? Have you rooted out the cause of this treason?’

‘Have you?’ asked the Lion. ‘In your wars against Angron and Lorgar, have you identified their argument?’

‘It is the warp,’ replied Guilliman. ‘It is an infection, a pollution of the soul. On Nuceria, the horrors I saw heaped upon Angron by one he considered a comrade… Our brothers, even the Lupercal, have not turned against us. They have been turned.’

‘I think so too,’ the Lion replied. ‘It is a hard thought to hold. I cannot imagine having cause to turn against our father and Terra, but I can at least conceive of the possibility of a cogent argument for dissent. This treason… it spreads like a plague. It is contagious.’

‘It is. Which is why, I imagine, you came to me.’

The Lion glanced sideways at Guilliman.

‘Roboute. Such a question.’

‘Your ships were not lost, brother. They were heading for Macragge when the storm struck. I have read the flight-logs. Did you fear I’d turned with Horus and become a threat to our father? Have you come to sanction me, like Russ’s wolf pack?’

The Lion laughed.

‘My dear Roboute, I did not think for a moment that you had turned. I thought you’d done much, much worse.’ He looked at Guilliman. ‘I think we both know you have.’

He glanced at the Castrum ahead, the towering bulk of the Fortress of Hera.

‘That is quite a place,’ he said. ‘I am impressed. I expect a proper tour and inspection.’

The Memorial Gardens lay to the east of the Avenue of Heroes. John Grammaticus watched the glittering column move by, banners aloft, heading up the titanic street to the Porta Hera, a cyclopean gateway in the Castrum wall that he could see from six kilometres away.

It was a display of force, John had to admit. The Legions were good at that. They were good at killing too, and the vanguard, the Army and the Titan engines… a god-slaying force. John was especially impressed by the retinues of the so called ‘Shattered Legions’. They suggested a human resolve that John knew the Cabal doubted. They stood together, despite their losses. They fought on.

We always have, he thought. Watch us for just a moment, though a moment to you might be ten thousand years to us, and you’ll see. We are not children. We have morals and souls.

The Memorial Gardens were far too civilised. Walls of inscribed stone flanked oblong pools of pale water lilies and beds of rushes and vein flowers. The Ultramarines dignified their dead. They engraved their names upon the flagstones of the Avenue of Heroes, and again here in the gardens, and also on the black marble walls of the Chapel of Memorial in the Great Fortress.

It was the gardens where the dead were actually interred, in pre-built catacombs that lay beneath the beds and pools.

John had a vision of the day when, after endless centuries of war, there would be no room left on the flagstones of the avenue to fit more names, and the catacombs would be full, and the walls of the chapel would be covered. Where would they commemorate all their dead then?

He blinked back the thought.

The funerary shuttles had been cleared to land on the raised stone decks of the garden compound. Eight of them, wings hinged up like butterflies, sat side by side on the landing terrace. Their cargoes of sarcophagi would be unloaded later. Because of the parade, there weren’t enough Legion personnel available to conduct the rites and deliver the dead in respectful silence to their resting places.

John was content enough, however. As Edaris Cluet, an officer of repatriation, the funerary flights had got him to the surface of Macragge and deep inside the great Civitas. The Ultramarines solemn respect for their fallen had allowed him to circumvent almost all of Macragge’s complex layers of planetary security.

Most of the other crews from the repatriation flights had gone to the edge of the landing terrace to watch the procession pass along the Avenue. A few were running systems checks on the landers, which were parked on the deck with their canopies up and their loading ramps down.

Time to slip away. Time to step out of Edaris Cluet and find a new person to hide in.

John picked up his pack, slung it across his shoulder and walked quietly away through the lawns and bowers. The jet-black mourning uniform was sober and smart, and, because it was austere and lacked any rank pins except the golden ultima-and-omega of the Funeral Watch, it suggested he was of a higher rank than he actually was. In a city of uniforms, he could pass for almost anyone and not be called on it, except by those with the most expert and detailed knowledge of Legion liveries.

All eyes were on other, grander things. Unchallenged and unobserved, he walked up the northern pathway of the gardens, passing under box-hedge arches cut for transhuman statures, and along flagged walks shaded by stately yew and sorona trees.

The planners had built the gardens to be appropriately noble and quietly sorrowful. The grey-leaved canopy turned even the day’s bold light into a kind of dusk. The flagstones, the commemoration walls, and the entrances to the crypts were all of Saramanthian bluestone. The water lying in the long, oblong, black-reeded pools was as dark as veils. The silver shivers of ghost carp moved under the silent mirrors of the water. The lilies drifting on the surface of the pools were grey, like tear-stained handkerchiefs.

Mirrors…

A breeze hissed through the trees around him. John tensed. Ripples radiated across the surfaces of the pools. He was aware of the distant bombast of trumpets, war horns and cheering in the distance, but it felt as though the volume had suddenly been turned down.

John’s eyeballs prickled. His mouth dried. A pulse began to tap in his temple.

‘Please don’t do this now,’ he said, quietly but firmly. The Cabal was trying to summon him. They were trying to establish a psychic communion, most likely using one of the pools nearby as a flecting surface.

They were trying to keep track of him. They would want to be sure he was staying true to the task they had given him.

He swallowed hard. The breeze hissed again, rustling grey leaves. The heavy object in his carrybag trembled slightly, as if sensitive to the immaterial stirrings around him.

+Please.+

This time he spoke with his mind, not his mouth.

+Please, I’m tired. I’ve only just got here and I’m at my wits’ end. Let me get safe and rest. Come to me later when I can take the burden of a communion. Please.+

The breeze stirred. Who would it be? Gahet, he of the Old Kind, most probably, but John suspected the unsympathetic persistence of Slau Dha, the eldar autarch.

+Please.+

He turned and resumed walking, but his skin was still prickling. The faraway sounds of the parade had become so muffled that John felt as though he was underwater.

He glanced at the pool next to him, involuntarily. The surface had frozen, like dark glass, scrying glass. Below the surface, silvered fish had stilled, suspended, tail-fins mid-stroke.

A shadow fell across the flecting surface, and it wasn’t his. He flinched as he saw the dark, rising crest of an eldar war-helm, the impossibly tall, attenuated figure, a scarecrow-god, the dimensions of its slim, long-boned form running the whole length of the pool.

‘I said not now!’ John spat.

He turned, tearing his eyes away from the shadow and striding down the flagstoned path away from the pool. There was a buzzing in his hindbrain. The leaves hissed.

‘Leave me alone!’ he growled over his shoulder. ‘Leave me alone!’

He left the gardens and entered the oddly quiet streets. Everyone in the deme was lining the Avenue of Heroes. His head stung from the attempted communion, and his hands were shaking.

They had to be careful. The Cabal had to be more careful than that. From his reviews, in the guise of Teo Lusulk, of Civitas security, John knew that the XIII had reinstated their Librarius on a world-wide protocol. There was also a formidable contingent of the Astra Telepathica on the planet. Psykana techniques would be interlacing the defences. A raw conduit like the one Slau Dha had attempted to forge in the gardens might well be detected.

Detection by the Librarius would make his work very much more problematic, and would probably end his life. This life, anyway. He was tired of dying.

Shaking, he saw a fairly grand tavern on the corner of the next emptied street. Lights burned inside. It was an up-scale place for senatorial officers and the political echelons of the Civitas. The whole neighbourhood adjoining the Memorial Gardens was elegant and well-to-do.

He went inside. The place was a grand salon of gilded ormulu and chandeliers, with rows of tables under the high, frescoed ceiling and in booths along each wall. It was empty, aside from a few waiting staff and servitor units, and they saw to him quickly.

John took a table in one of the booths, the nearest he could find, and sank back into its comparative privacy. The seats were high backed and upholstered in leather, and the booth was formed from panels of coloured glass that rose from the tops of the seat backs to form partitions. At the back of the booth, the wall above the seats was a large crystal mirror in which John could watch the foot traffic coming in and out of the tavern without drawing attention to himself.

His hands were still shaking. One of the aproned serving staff brought him a jug of water and a beaker, and the large amasec he’d ordered as he’d walked in.

‘Will you dine, sir?’ the servant asked.

Food was an excellent idea. John had been poorly nourished the last few weeks as it was, and a decent hit of carbs and protein would help smooth out the after-sting of Slau Dha’s approach.

‘Bread,’ he said. ‘Salt butter. Something gamey or some chops.’

‘We have a haunch of coilhorn deer.’

‘That will do. Some root vegetables.’

The servant nodded.

‘Are you not watching the parade, sir?’ the servant asked.

‘Are you not?’ John snapped.

The man shrugged.

‘I’m working, sir,’ he said.

John nodded, and tried to warm up a smile.

‘Me too,’ he said. ‘Besides, when you’ve seen one Space Marine march past you, you’ve seen them all, haven’t you?’

The servant laughed as if this was a reasonably funny observation, and went off to take the order to the kitchen. John poured a beaker of water. His damned hands were still trembling, but food would help take the edge off.

So would the spirits. He raised the amasec. He needed to use two hands just to keep it steady.

A sip. Warmth. Better. Better.

He put the heavy glass down, felt the tension slip out of his wrists.

There was a mark on the white tablecloth between his hands. A dot. A second dot appeared beside it.

Spots of blood.

His nose, his damned nose was bleeding!

He shook out his napkin and wiped his face. He hoped no one had seen. He could move the water jug to cover the bloodspots. That damned Slau Dha had done a real number on him.

John took another sip of amasec, relishing the way that its burn counteracted his nerves, and checked the mirror at the back of the booth again, half-expecting to see centurions of the Librarius bursting across the tavern threshold.

Mirror. Oh, stupid! Oh so stupid! His anxiety had made him clumsy! Mirrors and glass and reflective giltwork all around him!

Hotwire pain jabbed in his head through the base of his skull.

‘No! No!’ he gasped.

A little dribble of blood came out of his right nostril, ran down his mouth and chin, and dappled the white linen. No hiding that.

‘Please!’

The mirror above the booth-back frosted as though the room temperature had dropped forty degrees. John refused to look at it even though a force, a physical pull, was trying to tilt his face up by the chin to stare.

‘No! Not now! Leave me alone!’

He forced himself to look down. He stared at his drink instead, the oily surface of the amasec, which was rippling because the hand clasping the heavy glass was trembling so hard. He looked at the constellation of dark blood-spots on the table cloth, marks that all the careful arrangement of beakers and jug could not hide.

In the freshest of them, where the glossy blood had yet to soak into the linen, he saw reflections forming: a crested helm. John moaned. The amasec in his glass stopped rippling and froze. The glass frosted cold under his fingers. The crested helm reflection appeared in the amasec too.

John groaned aloud, and closed his eyes.

‘Slau Dha, you f–’ he gasped.

‘Not Slau Dha.’

There was silence. No sound at all except John’s stumbling breath. The voice had not been that of the cruel autarch, steel sharp and cold-edged.

It had been as dark and dense as ebony.

John opened his eyes.

The entire tavern had suspended. The candle flames, frozen, radiated a cool blue light, and that light sparkled off the chandeliers, the sconces, the ormulu, the mirrors, the stacked shelves of clean glasses for wine and amasec. Daylight falling into the grand salon through the tavern’s handsome windows was stained blue too, as if by very diluted ink. John could see serving staff across the room, poses locked mid-gesture, mouths open in mid-exchange.

Silver shoals of ghost carp hung, stilled, in the blue air above the tables.

The eldar stood at his table. His lean frame in its form-fitting armour, combined with his crested helm and flowing robes, made him seem extravagantly tall and thin, like a gaunt spectre of death, or a skeletal giant.

‘Not Slau Dha,’ John murmured, surprised by the sound of his own voice. ‘You, again.’

‘Again,’ the eldar replied from behind the beautifully terrifying visage of his helm.

John’s latest mission for the Cabal had begun on a world called Traoris. He was sent there to acquire a weapon, and then to use it to–

To betray his species more than he had ever betrayed it before.

John had struggled with his conscience for a long time, but this had brought him to the brink. The acquisition of the weapon that lay wrapped up in his carrybag had been miserable, and the prospect of what he was supposed to do with it more miserable still.

The one ray of hope had been an intercession that had taken place during the Traoris mission: a psykana communion visit from the very same eldar who manifested before him.

John had not been told the being’s name, though he had suspicions, but he had been offered consolation, an alternative to following the Cabal’s plans.

Not all eldar were of the same mind, it appeared. The Cabal wanted to sacrifice mankind to snuff the power of Chaos out. This nameless eldar lord opposed that thinking. He saw mankind not as a firebreak but as a true ally against the rise of the Archenemy. It seemed, and this notion troubled John more gravely than he cared to admit, that the eldar were at war with themselves over what to do about the human civil war.

‘You promised me hope,’ John said.

‘I did.’

‘On Traoris, you promised me hope. An alternative.’

‘I did,’ the towering figure replied.

‘But there was nothing,’ John complained. ‘You offered to place information in my mind, information that would make me understand things in new ways. You offered me a conduit for the transfer of new thoughts.’

‘I did.’

John sneered. ‘There was only one thing true about it. You said the conduit would hurt, and it did. I learned nothing else, no new perspectives, no alternative thinking. I don’t know what you did to me, or why, but I was just being used again, wasn’t I?’

‘You learned a great deal, John Grammaticus, you just don’t know you did yet.’

John laughed. He laughed a dirty, mocking laugh and shook his head. He looked up at the impossible silver fish frozen mid-stroke in the blue air, and the servants locked in an eternal conversation.

‘You know what, nameless lord?’ he said. ‘I am sick to death of you xenos-breeds and your enigmatic little un-meanings. Say what you say, plainly. Say something true. Or get the hell out of my head.’

He snatched up the amasec to take another sip, but the solid reflection of the eldar still lay across the liquid, so he set it aside, untouched.

‘Think, John Grammaticus,’ said the eldar quietly. ‘Think, and you will recognise that you know much more than you knew you knew. Through the conduit, I placed data and ideas in your head, but they were too dangerous to be left in your surface thoughts. All the while you were on Traoris, or making your way here, there were any number of chances you might be read… by the notions of the warp, by your enemies, by the Dark Apostles, by your slave-masters the Cabal. They would each have killed you for thinking such thoughts, so I ensured they would not surface until the time was right.’

‘When will that be?’

‘When you are come to Macragge, in the realm of Ultramar.’

‘I’m here. I don’t know anything different.’

‘Don’t you? Think.’

‘Come on…’

The eldar reached up and unclasped his war-helm. He set its sculptural form on the linen cloth beside the spots of John’s blood. His pale face, tinged blue in the psyk-light, was similarly sculptural, taut and high-boned. His long dark hair was bound up tight to fit beneath his helm, and there was a rune inscribed upon his forehead. There was nothing human about the intelligence in his dark eyes.

Slowly, and with a dignity that seemed almost comical, he sat on the bench of the booth across from John. He was too tall and slender to fit the human space well. The long bones of his arms and legs just too long. Folding himself into the seat made him seem gangly, like an adolescent.

Once seated, he spread his hands on the cloth, palms down. The fingers were as alarmingly long and slender as his limbs. Even sitting, he was taller than John.

‘Think what you know,’ the eldar said in his ebony voice. ‘Do you have the spear?’

‘Yes,’ John answered, realising he had shot an incriminating glance at the carrybag on the seat beside him. Not that the eldar would have been under any illusion that the weapon was anywhere else.

‘And you know what to do with it?’

‘I know who I’m supposed to see killed with it, if that’s what you mean.’

‘What else might you do?’ asked the eldar.

‘I don’t know,’ said John. ‘Sit here forever and talk riddles?’

‘Who am I?’ asked the eldar.

‘I don’t know. You never said,’ John replied. ‘I have no way… you–’

He hesitated, swallowed hard, wished the damn reflection wasn’t in his drink so he could gulp it down.

‘Eldrad Ulthran, Farseer of Ulthwé Craftworld,’ he said in a very small voice.

‘Indeed. See, then, what you know?’

‘How did I know that?’

‘The conduit put it in your head on Traoris so that you would know it now. It is one of many ideas the conduit put in your head.’

‘Is this the truth?’ John asked.

‘What else might it be?’ Eldrad replied. His spider-leg fingers gestured to the rune-marks on his armour, his crested helm and his brow. ‘Are you a scholar of the path-signs and world-symbols of the eldar lexicon? Do you recognise the marks of Ulthwé?’

‘No,’ said John.

‘But you know them well enough now.’

‘What else do I know?’ asked John. He thought for a second and then held up his hand to mute any response. ‘Wait, if we’re dealing with truths, farseer, tell me this. Why have you come to me? Why have you made such ridiculous efforts to commune with me? If you passed ideas into my mind months ago on Traoris that would be secure until the very act of coming to Ultramar unpacked them, so I could know then… what the hell? What else have you got to tell me? This communion has placed us both in huge danger of being detected.’

‘It is a risk worth taking, when set against other risks, though I agree this conversation makes your position here more precarious by the second. The Ultramarines Librarius is already aware of a psykana event. Fortunately, in eight minutes’, time, this communion will be eclipsed by another, more powerful psykana event in the city, followed by a considerable crisis. Both will divert attention from you.’

‘If we haven’t got much time, speak fast. What do I need to know?’

‘Almost everything you know already. Now you are here on Macragge, the ideas will unlock. The “unpacking” process, as you referred to it, may take a day or more, and ideas may come in strange orders, but do not be frustrated. It will give you all that you need.’

Eldrad leaned forward.

‘I am here to warn you. That was my imperative. Since our communion on Traoris, I have foreseen new things, new dangers. It has been worth the effort forging this link just to make you aware of them.’

‘What dangers?’ asked John.

‘Two things,’ replied the Farseer. ‘The Cabal may be beginning to suspect that your resolve is not all that it might be. They may make an effort to reinforce your commitment.’

‘I’ve been expecting that. But thanks for the tip. What else?’

‘It may be connected to the first thing. Someone is hunting you, John Grammaticus.’

‘I see. Are they here, or–’

‘They are here, or will be soon.’

‘Good to know.’

Eldrad nodded.

‘My departure is overdue,’ he said. ‘Yours too, John Grammaticus. Use the fade of this communion to slip away. Do not stay. Find a safe place and unpack your mind. Choose your path. We are bound together, human, in the target of your mission, and in the matter of Earth.’

‘You said that before. You don’t just mean “earth” as in soil, do you? You mean it literally but not just literally. You’re using the old meaning too, aren’t you? The old name for Terra?’

There was no answer. Eldrad Ulthran was no longer there. John looked around. Time was still frozen. The silver fish still swam in the air. The servants‘ conversation was still paused.

The light was still blue.

But it would not remain so for long. John felt a prickle in his ears and a warmth in his spine. He could hear sounds returning, as though from far away. Ten, fifteen seconds and the aura would be gone.

He looked at the table, at his blood spots on the cloth. The reflections had vanished at least.

He picked up the amasec, sank it in one gulp, then snatched up his carrybag and left the tavern just before the blue light fled and noisy reality resumed.

A little under eight minutes later, and just nine streets away from the tavern in Ceres Deme, physical reality failed briefly, and a mouth into the warp yawned open.

Members of the Librarius of the XIII Legion, in concert with adepts of the Astra Telepathica, were monitoring the psychic landscape of the Civitas, and had already detected the farseer’s communion with John in the tavern, though they had not identified it. A rapid response squad of Librarius officers and Cataphractii Terminators had been sent to the tavern location in armoured Land Speeders and heavy skimmers.

The warp-tear occurred in a scriptorium in the Via Edirne, south of the Memorial Gardens and east of the Avenue of Heroes. The moment it took place, psychic wards in the Red Basilica and the Sacristy of the Librarius pealed out their warnings. Two attuned adepts in the Basilica suffered debilitating strokes.

The fast-response force was immediately and urgently diverted to the Via Edirne.

The scriptorium had been closed and locked for the afternoon so that the scribes and rubricators who worked there repairing and transcribing old books could attend the parade.

In the gloomy, unlit chambers, lined with shelves of manuscripts, filled with lecterns, and stinking of cochineal and mixing oils, papers began to rustle. Books and bound manuscripts on the shelves and desks began to shiver and rattle, or fell onto the floor, or spilled open as if a strong breeze were rifling their pages, or an invisible scholar was speed-reading them. Locked cases of more valuable books began to quiver, the chains and padlocks rattling, as though the rebellious tomes wanted to break out and fly free, flapping their pages like wings.

More than anything, it appeared as though the density of words held in that one place was what had drawn the warp’s wild attention and anchored it there.

Reality split.

It sheared open like a fruit torn in two by hungry hands, shreds of pulp and pith stringing across the breach.

It cut like a silk curtain.

It opened like a mouth, like a wound.

Light welled, like unstaunched blood.

The skin of reality sliced open along a jagged diagonal scar, torn by the tip of a ritual athame wielded on the far side.

The blade-cut peeled back corporeal reality on either side like excised flesh. A foul breeze exhaled into the scriptorium, billowing loose leaves further into the air, until the chamber was a blizzard of fluttering pages.

A figure stepped through the slice. He was huge, and armoured in full plate. In his fist, glowing and dripping with immaterial aetherplasm, was the ritual athame.

A second figure stepped through after the first, sword raised. Like the first, he was clad in the dark red and ritually inscribed armour of the XVII Legion Word Bearers. Like the first, he wore no helm, for no helm could ever contain the twisted horns and scalp spikes that adorned their skulls. Their eyes were slits the colour of hot night.

They were once-proud warriors of the Legiones Astartes who had willingly allowed daemon-things to spawn and grown inside them parasitically. They were Unburdened.

Their names had become Ulkas Tul and Barbos Kha, dull inhuman echoes of the names they had been baptised with. They were members of the Dark Apostle Erebus’s retinue, and had learned their evil craft directly from him.

They were vile things, their plate covered with scraps of parchment, all of which bore the insane scriptures of a now-mad creature who had once been the most insanely loyal of the Emperor’s sons: Lorgar.

A third figure stepped through behind them. He was a Word Bearer too, but he was helmed, and his armour was grey, scraped back to the metal, and bore no inscription other than the Legion’s crest. The warrior’s plate resembled the colour of the scheme worn before the war, before the Fall.

The third warrior lacked the Neverborn traits that invested his companions. A massive Legion-issue sniper rifle was slung in a case over his back. He carried his bolt pistol, drawn and ready in his hand.

He was not ready, however. He shuddered as he stepped through the reality-slice, and then dropped to his knees with a crash, shaking the wooden floor of the scriptorium. Pages swirled around him, covered with words. Some had started to singe and burn.

With his free hand, Barthusa Narek tore off his helm. Beneath it, his eyes were masked by a tied blindfold. He had insisted on that. He had seen nothing of the crossing, but he had felt it well enough.

It was not a sensation that he ever wished to repeat. He had no idea how his brothers had ever embraced it, except for the fact that they were insane.

He began to pull off his blindfold, but the trauma he had experienced finally swept him away. He pitched forward onto his hands, and threw up. Stinking black bile squirted out of his mouth and plastered the floorboards between his hands. Burning scads of paper fell around him like snow as he heaved, prostrate and humiliated.

With a shudder, the slice in the world behind him sealed again, and the sickly light faded. The swirling, burning papers began to cease their turmoil and scatter back on the floor as the wind died.

‘This is the place, Narek,’ said Barbos Kha, the Neverborn-blessed with the athame. Kha wiped the blade clean on his tongue, and kissed it. ‘As close as we can get.’

‘M-Macragge?’ asked Narek, still on his hands and knees, spitting out toxic bile to clear his throat. He shuddered and gagged again. More bile jetted out of his anguished, gaping mouth.

‘Macragge,’ agreed the horned thing with the knife. ‘Sanctuary City of our sworn foe. As the divinations said, this is the place.’

‘I th-thank you for your trouble, brothers,’ said Narek, trying to steady himself and rise. ‘I could not have reached this place otherwise.’

‘Then do what you must, Narek,’ hissed Ulkas Tul, the other horned thing. ‘Whatever your great mission is, whatever your hunt – it will be your last.’

‘I know,’ said Narek. Slowly, trembling, he got to his feet. His gut felt hollow. There was a disgusting taste on his palate. He held his bolt pistol in trembling hands that were splashed with flecks of tar-black vomit.

‘You are pathetic,’ announced Barbos Kha, turning away. Kha’s bat-tongue flicked the air, tasting it, like an insect. There was a particularly unpleasant growth of hair and tumour on the back of his powerful, corded neck where it rose above the gorget seal of his armour.

‘We could kill here,’ he purred to Ulkas Tul.

Ulkas Tul smiled back. It was not a smile anything human ever wanted to look at.

‘No,’ Narek said, spitting to clean out his mouth. ‘No, you should go. You got me here, and I am thankful for it. But coming here is suicide. To enter the fortress city of our enemies–’

‘We are aware of the dangers,’ Barbos Kha said. He began to play with the athame.

‘But we can cut our way out anytime we like, unlike you, Narek. Now we’re here, we can have sport.’

‘May Lorgar watch over you,’ Ulkas Tul told Narek. ‘Barbos Kha is right. There is sport to be had here. We are in the belly of the beast. Kha and I will do as we please. We will take many lives before we leave. Maybe Guilliman’s.’

‘My brothers,’ Narek said, ‘if you go on a spree, you will ruin my mission. I need to disappear. I need to work and hunt. You will spoil this for me if you go killing.’

Barbos Kha kept toying with the athame that had cut open the warp for them.

‘Look at you, Narek,’ he said, ‘so impoverished. Our transit alone left you gasping and sick.’

‘You have mocked us, burdened one,’ Ulkas Tul said. ‘You have scorned our conjunction with the warp, refusing to take it into yourself. Yet you were quite happy to make use of our magic to get you here.’

‘You are right, brother,’ said Narek nodding. ‘I have dishonoured you and the glory you serve. Forgive me.’

‘Not good enough,’ said Kha. There was something horribly insectile about the way his mouthparts moved independently. ‘You used us to get here. You used my knife.’

‘You used my divination to find your target,’ Ulkas added.

‘We only brought you because of where you wanted to go,’ Kha gurgled, saliva welling out of his maw and dripping onto the floor. ‘Magna Macragge Civitas, home of our enemies. We will kill now, and then depart. That is the price we claim for your transfer.’

‘Yes, I dishonoured you,’ Narek said. ‘I am not worthy of the magic you wield. But you must go now. Now.’

‘Is he threatening us?’ Ulkas asked Kha.

‘No, no, not at all!’ Narek told the daemonic twins. The smell of them was quite awful. Flies were humming around them, flies born out of nothing.

Narek turned his head aside, spat out another fat gob of black phlegm, and looked back at his travelling companions. He tried to smile a reassuring smile at what remained of two men who had once been his sworn comrades. It had taken every ounce of his guile to persuade the pair to assist him at Traoris starport, and every scrap of his stamina to tolerate their presence ever since. His weakness was not false, for the warp-transit had harrowed him, but he was overplaying it to keep them pliant.

‘Then you presume to give us orders?’ asked Ulkas.

‘I presume only the Word,’ said Narek.

He paused and wiped his mouth with the palm of his left hand.

‘I believe in the Word of our primarch,’ Narek continued simply, ‘and I believe that Word makes us loyal to the Emperor. We are of the Word, and thus we are of the Emperor. It was ever thus. I despise the steps my Legion-kin have taken to embrace the Outer Dark. Too many steps, too far. You, Kha, and you, Ulkas. You have polluted yourselves and our Legion. Yet I thank you. I thank you for bringing me here. You have done a great service to the loyal Seventeenth.’

They both glared at him, confused.

‘What are you saying, Narek?’ Kha asked.

‘I’m saying receive my thanks,’ Narek replied, and put four bolts from his pistol through Barbos Kha’s skull.

Fragments of horn, bloody meat and brain tissue spattered out in an explosive burst that was driven from within by an eerie flicker of fracturing warp-light.

Barbos Kha toppled backwards. Narek was fast, but not as fast as he had been in his glory days, thanks to the augmenting bionics that had repaired his leg.

Ulkas Tul came at him howling, swinging his blade. The light of dead stars blazed in his lidless eyes, and his lips had peeled back to reveal a screaming maw filled with serrated, blackened tusks.

Narek tried to shoot, but the blade ripped the pistol out of his hand. Too slow. The cross-strike came back and the sword scratched a deep gouge in his ceramite chestplate, almost splitting him entirely, as surely as Kha’s athame had split time and space.

Narek smashed the blade aside with his forearm, and backed away. Ulkas would not be denied. The Unburdened swung again, another potential kill-strike. Narek threw himself backwards, ducked further slashing cuts that would have severed his armoured torso cleanly, and then bypassed Ulkas’s guard and landed a ferocious punch in the beast’s snout.

Teeth broke. Bits of them went flying. The Unburdened monster lurched backwards, crashing into two script lecterns and shattering them. Still toppling, he caught himself against a heavy shelf to stop his fall, but Narek was not going to let up. Ulkas’s guard was down, his sword flailing. Narek came in and delivered two more punches into the side of Ulkas’s skull with his gauntleted fist, crushing his ear, cracking his brain pan.

Raging, Ulkas smashed back at Narek, catching him a glancing blow that removed the two smallest fingers of Narek’s left hand with the edge of his sword. Narek rolled away from the pain and the jetting blood, and delivered a huge, angry, power-amplified punch with his right fist, which sent Ulkas flying the length of the scriptorium chamber.

He hit the far wall, demolishing shelves, crushing books. Another blizzard of pages filled the air.

Ulkas fell on his hands and knees, found his blood-stained sword, and got up again. He saw Narek across the chamber and came at him, charging, his sword drawn back for a two-handed strike.

Narek had already dropped the case from his rifle and pulled it to his cheek, aiming. He felt the kill-notches against his skin.

He had time for one shot. He had pre-loaded a specialist bolt-round for penetration and range, a custom-built core and propellant shell manufactured by his company armourer. Overkill, at this distance.

Narek didn’t care. He enjoyed the explosive red murk Ulkas’s head produced as it burst off his neck.

Ulkas kept coming.

Narek remained calm. Time had almost frozen for him. A sniper’s greatest strength was steadiness and patience, even when the world around him was moving at high velocity.

The sniper rifles of the Legions were all massive weapons, and Narek’s gun, the infamous Brontos-pattern, was a particularly huge and unwieldy brute. It was long and heavy and cumbersome, and gauged for bolt-rounds, an almost impossible trade-off between muzzle velocity and round impact. The bolt shells had to be tailor-made to compensate for range with an added propellant stage.

The Brontos had an automatic bolt return, a fixed sequenced powered cycle that chambered each round from the short-packed magazine.

It also had a manual racking handle for faster returns.

Narek calmly racked the bolt handle and fired again as the headless thing bore down on him. The first shot had been overkill, but the second…

Ulkas’s torso disintegrated in a crimson blitz of meat, sheared electro-fibre bundles and armour shards. His ruined body collapsed at Narek’s feet.

Narek rose out of his firing crouch and lowered the smoking bolt rifle from his shoulder. His transhuman biology had already stopped the blood flow leaking from the stumps of his missing fingers.

Something twitched nearby. Kha’s corpse was still quivering. Narek slotted back the bolt of his rifle and put a final shot through Kha’s chest into the floor. Kha’s corpse jolted like someone slammed by cardiac paddles as the round went clean through him.

Silence.

Paper crackled as it burned and settled.

The chamber reeked of toxic blood.

Narek shook himself. ‘Wake up,’ he muttered. ‘This is done but there is so much still to do.’

The enemy would be closing in, without a doubt. He had to move, and lose himself. The Ultramarines wouldn’t take him. He wouldn’t allow it, not this early. Not like this.

He had work to do, the holiest work that any legionary had ever undertaken.

He had to deliver his Legion from evil.

Narek bagged his rifle and exited the scriptorium. Outside, in a dank insulae, he cowered, hearing landspeeders approaching and gun-teams deploying.

He took out the piece of parchment that Ulkas had given him before their departure, and looked at the words written upon it.

Grammaticus: the divined location of Grammaticus.

Narek closed his eyes and let his mind dwell on his target.

John Grammaticus, human, Perpetual, and pawn of the xenos-breeds. He and John had played regicide against one another on Traoris.

This new playing board, this Magna Macragge Civitas, would see the endgame.

Narek of the Word fled into the darkening streets.

12
Brothers

‘The Salamander is a sufficiently convincing example that
everything which burns is not consumed,
as the souls in hell are not.’

– ‘Saint’ Augustine

Tetrarch Dolor came to attention as Guilliman strode into the Residency’s medicae hall. The primarch was still wearing his ceremonial war-plate, and seemed too big and regal for the sub-level confines.

‘My lord,’ said Dolor. ‘Your brother has arrived, I gather?’

‘He awaits upstairs,’ Guilliman replied. ‘There is conversation to be had.’

‘How does he seem?’

Guilliman’s solemn face permitted a slight smile at the subtlety of the question.

‘Like himself, Valentus. Like the Lion. He is suspicious, and I fear he has already, in his mind, decided to oppose the future we are trying to secure. I have yet to explain myself and my decisions to him. He has yet to show me that he accepts or even understands what I am about.’

Dolor nodded.

‘He is waiting,’ Guilliman added, dryly, ‘and I have excused myself and come to you, because you asked me to do so, and I know you would not waste my time or divert me unless it was critical.’

Dolor nodded his head again, more a bow of appreciation.

‘It is, my lord,’ he replied. ‘You need to see this. I believe you may be shocked. In truth, I cannot count whether it is reason to rejoice or mourn. Also, I would have spared you this concern when you are occupied with your noble brother, but… you need to know this. You need to be in possession of this information before you take any further steps.’

Guilliman studied his friend’s face, but transhuman features were notoriously hard to read for microexpressions.

‘Then just show me,’ Guilliman said.

Dolor ushered his lord through the doorway into the guarded areas of the secure suite. Status bars on the wall plates displayed the fact that the area was held at vermilion level security. The long line of guarded iris valves opened and closed behind them as they walked.

‘This concerns the object that fell from the sky, doesn’t it?’ Guilliman asked as they walked.

‘Yes, lord.’

‘The transhuman corpse?’

Dolor did not reply directly.

‘You’ve established an origin?’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘An identity?’

‘Yes, lord.’

Guilliman glanced at him sharply.

‘Something else?’ he asked.

‘Something else indeed, my lord,’ said Dolor.

They reached the gloomy inner chamber where the iron casket lay. Captain Casmir and Titus Prayto were waiting for them. They bowed to the primarch and fell into step as Dolor led his lord through the laboratory chambers and into the isolation block beyond. The area was reserved for hazardous material and viral quarantine work. It was a long row of brightly lit cells, stark and white, each with a hermetically sealed armourglass wall facing into a common corridor. The corridor was lined with Ultramarines guards, and high-ranking medicae personnel worked at cogitation and cellular-sampling arrays that had been set up in the walkway facing one of the cells. Power cables snaked from the consoles across the grilled deck in fat rubber loops.

‘Surely the mortal laboratory would have been a better venue for dissection,’ Guilliman began.

‘I authorised the transfer of the patient,’ Dolor replied simply.

Guilliman stopped in his tracks so abruptly that Captain Casmir almost bumped into him.

‘You said patient,’ Guilliman said quietly.

‘My lord, I did,’ said Dolor. ‘By the stars of Ultramar, my lord, he is alive.’

‘How?’ asked Guilliman. He asked it first of Dolor, a mix of anger and incomprehension crossing his face.

‘How? How?’ he repeated, turning to look at Casmir, Prayto and the suddenly tense medicae personnel.

‘He… healed, my lord,’ said Prayto.

‘Healed?’ Guilliman snapped. ‘He fell out of the damn sky! From orbit! He burned to a crisp and dove deep into the Civitas like a meteor! You don’t heal from that!’

‘And yet–’ Dolor began.

‘May the old gods come and strike you all down as either liars or incompetents!’ Guilliman yelled. ‘Whatever else, you said, Dolor, you told me he was dead! Organic residue. A corpse. A cremated corpse!’

‘I did not lie,’ Dolor said calmly. ‘He was utterly dead… Utterly. All life sign was extinct, all brain function. There was no viable organic tissue on his charred bones whatsoever. Your best physicians and analysts confirmed this, and so did all the instrumentation of the medicae hall.’

He paused.

‘He was dead, lord. And then… he was not. Life returned where life was not and could not be. He healed.’

‘You do not heal from death!’ Guilliman roared.

‘It appears you do, my lord,’ said Prayto quietly, ‘if you are one of the sons of mankind’s Emperor.’

Silence. Guilliman turned to look at Prayto.

Titus Prayto held his master’s stare and nodded confirmation.

Guilliman turned away and strode towards the occupied cell. Guards and personnel darted out of his path. He reached the thick armourglass wall, stopped a few centimetres from it, and stared inside.

The cell was a bare white space. A single male figure occupied the left-hand corner away from the glass. He was sitting on the floor, his back against the walls, his forearms resting on his raised knees. He was naked. He stared ahead, towards some distant spot that was not in the room.

He was a massive form, heavily muscled. The fire of his long fall had shrivelled his corpse but his stature, so much greater than human, was obvious now that he was restored to life. He possessed a primarch’s build, a being scaled to fit only the largest chairs in Guilliman’s Residency.

There were no marks on his body, no hair. By whatever means he was healing, it was still happening. Every part of his skin was raw and bloody as some miraculous process brought living tissue out of burned residue.

‘I don’t…’ Guilliman began, his breath making a fog on the surface of the glass wall. ‘Who is he?’

‘It is Vulkan,’ said Dolor.

Guilliman gasped in pain and recognition. ‘You are sure?’

‘I’m certain,’ said Titus Prayto.

Guilliman raised both hands, and placed the palms against the armourglass on either side of his face, peering in. He paid no heed to the fact that both were jacketed in full ceremonial plate and massive, ornate lightning claws.

‘Let me in there,’ Guilliman said, staring at his brother.

‘No, my lord,’ Dolor replied.

‘Let me in there, damn you! My dear brother is returned to me! Twice! Once from the death that I thought had befallen him on the traitor’s field, and once from the death that delivered him here! Let me in!’

Guilliman slammed his clawed and armoured fists against the unbreakable wall in frustration. The sound shook the cell.

Vulkan looked up, brought out of his reverie. Eyes as blood-red as the healing flesh of his body fixed upon Guilliman. They fixed upon the massive, clawed figure standing at the glass.

‘He sees me,’ Guilliman said. ‘Let me in there!’

‘My lord–’ Dolor began.

Vulkan lunged. With an anguished scream of rage and horror, he leapt up and threw himself across the cell at Guilliman. The attack was so sudden and so violent that Guilliman started back from the protective armourglass in surprise.

Howling words that meant nothing and sounds that meant every pain in the galaxy, Vulkan hammered his fists against the glass, until it was slippery with blood and tissue-fluid from his healing, still-forming flesh. His teeth were brilliant white enamel chips in his screaming mouth.

His eyes were glaring circles of blood.

‘Don’t! Brother, stop!’ Guilliman cried out in alarm. ‘Brother, it is me! It is Roboute. Calm yourself!’

‘He does not hear you, my lord,’ said Dolor miserably. ‘He does not hear any of us.’

‘The Salamanders who have come to your hall were right, my lord,’ said Titus Prayto. ‘Vulkan lives. But whatever he has endured, it has driven him mad. Your brother, my lord, is quite insane.’

That three of the Emperor’s sons were present on the same world at the same precise moment was a truly auspicious conjunction, whatever the circumstances.

For different reasons, none of them knew that the true number of primarchs who had converged that day on Macragge was, in fact, four.

Deep in the pitch-black, unregulated spaces of the First Legion’s flagship, the Invincible Reason, the quarry exhaled slowly.

It was time. Time.

Visions flickered through his head like a broken, mis-cued pict-feed. Visions had always flickered through his head, since his earliest childhood – visions of the future, of the possible, of the probable. Of the next, and the next after that.

It was the visions that had driven him mad.

Just now, though, the visions were coming to him more cleanly. They were bearable, tolerable. They were not the prescient nightmares of a galaxy in flames and a doomed future. They were not the hellish sights of a corpse-universe that came to him too often and caused him to devolve past the point where life – his or any other – retained any value.

The quarry breathed carefully. The visions firing behind his blood-rimmed eyes were calm and trustworthy. The ship had translated into realspace after weeks of travail through the storms of the warp, and suddenly he had clarity.

He knew who he was: a lord of the dark. A master of the lightless. A night haunter.

No, the Night Haunter: Konrad Curze. Konrad Curze.

‘Konrad Curze,’ he whispered to himself, speaking his name like a benediction. A benediction, or a death sentence.

He knew who he was and he knew his purpose. At that moment, in the bleak and bloody years of Horus’s revolt, Konrad Curze understood his purpose the most cleanly and most perfectly of all the Emperor’s eighteen sons.

The pitiless void had shown it to him. The endless night, his friend and tormentor, had shown it to him. His dreams had shown it to him.

Terror, pain, iconoclasm. All would pay. All of them, every soul, every one. They would all scream with him.

The mighty Invincible Reason creaked and groaned around him as its titanic superstructure, a billion tonnes of alloy, settled and unstressed from the tensions of warp-transit. Curze knew where they were. He had envisioned it, so he knew that it was almost assuredly true. They occupied high orbit above the grey-sheened glory of Macragge.

Macragge. Ultramar. The thought of the self-righteous Guilliman made Curze want to piss acid. His blood-brother the Lion was his blood-enemy, as the Thramas fight had proven, but Guilliman…

Toad. Reptile. Fool. As bad as Dorn, as bad as Vulkan. So blindly indoctrinated into the belief that the future would be a noble, golden age. So insufferably honourable. So eager to please their father. So eager to cry, ‘Look at me! I have built an empire just for you! Just like yours!’

Jump up and down all you like, little child. Boast all you want.

They were all going to pay. They were all going to understand the truth, the truth that only Curze saw. He would bring them down once more in fire and fear, until they were as broken as him. Perhaps, if he provoked them far enough, one of them might even kill him. Curze was waiting for his end. He welcomed it. If he could force one of his oh-so-noble brothers to deliver it, and thus reduce themselves to his level, it would serve a sweet, delinquent purpose.

Guilliman. Proximity and fortune had raised him up the list of priorities. Guilliman was an icon to topple and break. Guilliman, and his world along with him.

Curze closed his eyes. Visions played. He saw the streets of Macragge Civitas carpeted with bodies. He saw the towers and spires ablaze. He saw blood. He saw–

The red visions struck him with the force of arterial spray. He composed himself. It was too soon to devolve. He had work to do. He had to retain some focus. Anger was only useful when it was forged as a weapon. The same was true for terror. He knew both intimately.

It was time, time to leave the ship. Now they were back in realspace, the Invincible Reason was open and unbarred.

First he had to break out of the ship. Then he had to break into Macragge. Guilliman was a toadying cur, but he was no amateur. His defences would be sound.

The Night Haunter was not put off for a moment.

Visions flowed through his head like a river, the surface shot with reflections.

Curze mostly trusted them, for they were almost always true. Only occasionally, when fate shivered its spine, did a vision prove to be a false promise. He usually knew when they were lies. He certainly knew when they were questionable. He was always aware that he was playing a chance. With each vision, he had to decide if it would prove true or false, trustworthy or untrustworthy. He decided whether to act on a vision or not, and he calmly accepted when those decisions were wrong.

The current stream of visions seemed particularly dependable. Curze decided to follow their hints.

One in particular kept coming to him: a vision of rust, of a hard-void seal, of a sign. Cargo Load Hatch 99/2.

He smiled.

Sixteen minutes later, Curze exited the flagship’s hull by shearing through the second cargo hatch of the ninety-ninth deck. The ninety-ninth was one of the unmediated spaces in which he had been sealed and hunted by his brother.

The shredded hatch blew out into the nearspace glow, cascading bright fragments of debris after it. Curze saw the world below, lit by the rising star. He saw the hard edges all shadows possessed in the contrast of the void. This was a stern, geometric night to haunt.

He saw the orbital plates circling below the standing fleet like artificial continents.

He had long since lost his helm. He simply held his breath as he flew out of the ship, and bounded, weightless, along the skin of the hull. The sheer cold of the hard vacuum was bracing.

Curze squatted beside Hatch 22/3, waiting for it to open. Prescience had shown this to him too. Hatch 22/3 was where the repair crews would emerge if a cargo hatch blew on the ninety-ninth.

It took them eighteen seconds. The hatch opened and light shafted out. The Night Haunter tilted back, so as not to be seen immediately.

It was not a repair crew, however. It was an assault squad of Dark Angels, warriors wearing the marks of the Stormwing, braced with boarding shields.

Curze shrugged. Sometimes the reflections were unreliable. The Lion, it seemed, had anticipated that Curze would try to break out. He had set his men on alert. Full marks, brother. Full marks.

He would kill them anyway.

Curze paused for a second to see if Hatch 22/3 reconciled in any way with the recurring visions he had had of his death. Was this it? Was his last moment rushing up at him?

No. His mind simmered, confident. His death lay somewhere and somewhen else.

The first Dark Angel pulled himself clear into the weightless space, one hand on his shield straps, the other on the hatchway rail.

Curze lunged at him hard and fast, the way a shark slams into a swimmer. A crunch, a single wound trauma that nothing could survive.

The Night Haunter’s claws took away both the gorget and the throat of the Dark Angel as he came clear of the hatch. Vast beads of blood bobbled away into the vacuum.

The man fell away, limp, trailing balloons of blood, his head held on by a twist of metal and a shred of gristle.

As the first victim went by, Curze took his shield from him and slammed it into the face of the warrior emerging from the hatch behind him.

The impact was hard. Things broke – a skull, primarily – beneath all of it. The blood oozed out of the crushed faceplate in oily, weightless bubbles.

The blow knocked the man back. Curze reached in and scooped him out through the hatch so he could get at his next kill. The dying Dark Angel was propelled away from the hull so hard that his twitching form quickly overtook the drifting, rotating corpse of the first victim, and dropped towards the bright, grey planet below. It began to glow blue and then burn like a shooting star.

Curze went in through the open hatch. He re-entered the ship feet first. He was moving so fast, shadows barely stuck to him. His heels met the shield of the Dark Angel advancing behind the first two, and kicked the warrior back down the gullet of the hatch’s void-lock. The man dropped heavily.

Landing on a foot and one knee in the gate beside the Dark Angel, Curze slew him before he could rise again by slamming down the edge of the captured boarding shield and crushing his throat.

Now there was confusion. Now there was reaction. Possibilities flew fast. Curze obeyed the visions. He responded, reacting to things that had not yet occurred.

Two Dark Angels came at him, firing. Bolter-rounds burned silently across the narrow space of the gate. Curze could hear, through vox-chatter or his visions, the outrage and profanity they were screaming, because of his attack and the murder of their brothers.

They wanted him dead.

Their wish would be entirely denied.

Curze tilted, and stopped the shoal of bolter-rounds with the captured shield. One, two, three and four, five and six, he swatted them aside. He felt the impact of their detonations transmitted up his arm. Flickering reflections had told him where each blazing shell would be before it had even been fired.

Curze went for the poor bastards. He removed a head with the long claws of his right hand. He eviscerated a torso with the long claws of his left.

Conflicting arterial geysers hosed the ceiling and wall.

Another Angel, a veteran of the Deathwing, rushed at Curze. Curze impaled him upon the claws of his left hand. Blood squirted in a torrent as the poor fool bled out around the adamantium hooks rammed through his torso.

The killing was only just starting.

The visions told him that a great many more Dark Angels were closing in on his location.

That meant that a great many more lives were about to end.

‘I seldom come to this chamber,’ Guilliman said, ‘but when I do, it reassures me.’

The Lion followed him into the room. Guilliman’s Cataphractii bodyguard held the broad doors open for him.

‘You give me a tour of the most magnificent fortress stronghold beyond Terra itself,’ The Lion said, ‘and believe me, I am impressed, Roboute. But you decide that this tour should include a chamber you seldom visit?’

He stopped, and looked around.

‘I see,’ he said, nodding. His lieutenants stood in the doorway behind him. He nodded to them, dismissing them.

‘Leave us,’ Guilliman said to Gorod. The warriors of the bodyguard turned, and closed the doors.

The two primarchs were alone for the first time.

‘The Fortress of Hera is a true achievement, brother,’ the Lion said quietly. ‘It is more than I could have believed. It exceeds my imaginings.’

He smiled and glanced at Guilliman.

‘That was not a slight, Roboute. I have never doubted your abilities. But I stand in awe of your achievements. The Fortress. Macragge. The Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar. All of it.’

Guilliman pursed his lips. ‘I do what I was bred to do, brother,’ he said. ‘What we were bred to do.’

‘Ah, that,’ the Lion murmured, as if contemplating things that Guilliman could not possibly know.

‘The Fortress is robust,’ Guilliman went on, a little stiffly. ‘It serves me and it serves my Legion. It is fit for purpose.’

‘It is entirely and magnificently practical,’ the Lion replied. ‘Truly, a wonder. I have no doubt it will endure for a thousand years or more. But you were always practical, Roboute. You, Rogal too. Men of the head. Led by your brains, by your processed data, not your emotions. That’s why the two of you have the best and most efficient Legions in human space.’

The Lion tapped his brow with one long index finger.

‘You think, and you apply that thought, and you don’t let emotions cloud you. Not like Vulkan, or dear Ferrus, or Jaghatai.’

‘Or Russ,’ Guilliman added.

‘Heavens, no!’ the Lion laughed.

‘Terra help me, Russ.’

‘So, this,’ the Lion said, gesturing to the long table. ‘This surprises me. A work of emotion, not logic.’

The light of the late afternoon, discoloured by the storm, flooded the chamber through high windows. A long table, carved from stone, dominated the length of the room. Around it were twenty-one chairs, all built for the scale of a primarch. Each one was cut from the same mountain granite as the table.

The chair backs were draped with banners. The great seat, at the head of the long table was draped with the pennant of Terra. Two of the other pennants were plain and made of bleached, un-dyed cloth. The other eighteen were the banners of the Legiones Astartes.

‘You did this?’ The Lion asked.

‘Are you mocking it?’ asked Guilliman.

The Lion shook his head.

‘It moves me. You still believe in a day when all of us, all of us, can sit at a table with our father, as equals, and talk of the matters of empire.’

‘All of us,’ Guilliman nodded.

‘You made this room in anticipation of that?’

‘Yes, many years ago. Does that make me sentimental?’ asked Guilliman.

‘No, brother,’ said the Lion. ‘It shows you possess a soul.’

He set his hands on the back of one of the chairs bearing an un-dyed banner and leaned.

‘Two will never come,’ he said.

‘Yet their absence must be marked,’ replied Guilliman. ‘Places must be left for them. That is simply honour.’

The Lion straightened up, and slowly pointed, in turn, at the banners of Horus, Magnus, Perturabo, Mortarion, Curze, Angron, Alpharius, Lorgar and Fulgrim.

‘Others will never take their seats, unless as conquerors,’ he said.

‘I know,’ said Guilliman. ‘Yet their places must be kept. I believe in the Imperium… In the continuity of the Imperium.’

‘That it will endure?’

‘That it must endure. That we must make it endure.’

‘Without a doubt,’ replied the Lion, ‘but this is a universe of uncertainty. We know the names of many of our traitor enemies, but not all.’

‘No?’

‘I am certain there is more treachery to be revealed.’ The Lion looked at the draped banner of the Fifth Legion.

‘The White Scars?’ asked Guilliman. ‘You suspect them too?’

‘The Khan is a mercurial figure. Who of us can say we know him or trust him? His nature is rebellious, and he keeps himself much apart from us. Only one brother stands close to him, and that is Lupercal. The Khan always had great affinity with Horus Lupercal.’

‘And on this basis…’

‘Tell me your theoretical simulations have not suggested this?’

Guilliman was silent.

‘And don’t pretend you haven’t run multiple theatrical simulations on all of us, Roboute,’ the Lion sneered.

‘I won’t,’ replied Guilliman. ‘You are quite correct. The projections concerning the Khan were troubling. But neither of us have heard a single whisper that he has turned too.’

‘We have not,’ The Lion agreed. ‘But until I arrived here out of the warp storm, I had not seen confirmation of Magnus’s treachery either. That was data you could impart to me, data that you had only just come upon. We knew they had ignored the Edict, and that Russ’s hounds had been unslipped to chastise Magnus, but neither of us knew the grim outcome – the fate of Prospero, the full disgrace of the Fifteenth. This is a universe of uncertainties. What else do we not know?’

Guilliman paused. Then he turned to look the Lion in the eye.

‘You have made it plain that I am one of your uncertainties,’ he said.

‘Brother–’

‘You mistrust me, and my motives,’ said Guilliman. ‘You have told me so, clearly. You suspect me of a treason at least as great as Horus’s, if not deeper.’

The Lion sat in the seat marked with his Legion’s banner, and placed his armoured hands flat upon the table in front of him.

‘Imperium Secundus,’ The Lion said, staring down at his mailed hands. ‘You do not deny it. You are establishing a second Imperium on the corpse of the first.’

‘No,’ replied Guilliman.

‘No?’

‘No. I am trying to keep the flame alive. This is not about empire-building, or thrusting for the main prize. I have an empire already! Ultramar! Five Hundred Worlds! Brother, I do this only so that we may persist. Terra may have fallen, and our father may already be dead. Whatever the facts, the Ruinstorm prevents us from knowing the truth. I am not taking this moment to move to my advantage, and I am not using the crisis as an opportunity to usurp. I am not Lupercal.’

The Lion looked up and held Guilliman’s stare.

‘I am simply keeping the flame alive,’ said Guilliman. ‘If we need another capital world, another figurehead, then let us have one, if it keeps our father’s vision of the Imperium alive. If Terra burns, then Macragge lives. The Imperium endures. Do you know the real difference between me and Horus Lupercal, brother?’

‘Tell me.’

‘I don’t want to be Emperor,’ Guilliman said.

The Lion didn’t reply.

‘Help me do this, brother,’ said Guilliman. ‘Help me keep what is left together. Help me preserve the human intent. Don’t make argument with me and misinterpret my motives.’

‘I want to trust you, Roboute,’ the Lion replied, ‘but I have always been wary of your ambition.’

Guilliman sighed and shook his head.

‘I cannot be more open with you. It is ironic. With respect, my dear brother, you come here full of doubts about me, yet you have always been one of the most opaque amongst us. You are a man of secrets, Lion, or at least of silent privacy. No one knows your mind or fully appreciates your intent, not even our father. Yet you doubt me?’

A tiny tremor of irritation crossed the Lion’s noble face.

‘Hard words,’ he said.

‘But true,’ Guilliman replied, ‘and perhaps I should have spoken them before now, long before. I do not doubt your loyalty or your prowess, but you and your Dark Angels are secretive beings, my brother, and Caliban is a world of mystery. I am wounded that you come to me with distrust when no one knows you well enough to know your heart.’

‘You have never spoken this way before,’ said the Lion.

‘There has never been a time before,’ replied Guilliman. ‘The universe has never closed in so tightly around us to squeeze the words out. I will be plain. I have never had the courage before. I have always been too in awe of the noble Lord of the First.’

‘The Master of the Five Hundred Worlds in awe of me?’ laughed the Lion.

‘You know it. You know we all were. When Horus was named Warmaster, he did not much care that he had succeeded above me, or Rogal, or Ferrus. What he truly savoured was being chosen over you.’

Guilliman felt a curious wash of relief at having spoken so candidly. He saw, though he wondered if it was his imagination, that the Lion seemed uncomfortable when confronted by such openness.

‘Your Imperium, then,’ said the Lion, ‘this Imperium Secundus, this great scheme of survival… How do you intend to proceed? Do you intend to declare yourself regent?’

‘I do not,’ Guilliman replied. ‘I will not found an empire and then crown myself. Such arrogance would confirm every doubt and suspicion lurking in the minds of men like you. I need a figurehead for the public to rally around while I fight to keep the mechanisms of Imperium turning over and protected.’

‘But…’ the Lion began. He looked pointedly at the great central seat, draped with its Terran standard. ‘Who then? Surely it must be blood?’

‘Agreed,’ said Guilliman. ‘It must be a primarch.’

‘My dear Roboute,’ said the Lion. ‘There are only two of us here. What exactly are you proposing?’

13
Falling Angels

‘The strength of your enemy is also his weakness.’

– Martial Stratagems, 123rd Maxim

‘I am, I confess, uneasy with the suggestion,’ said Titus Prayto.

‘I understand,’ Guilliman nodded. ‘Then you refuse?’

‘I do not refuse orders, my lord,’ Prayto responded quickly.

‘It is not that kind of order. It is a request that you could choose to deny.’

Prayto looked at his commander. They were alone in the Residency, out of earshot of even Gorod and the Terminator bodyguard, and out of mindshot of any psyker.

‘I would neither deny a request, my lord,’ said Prayto.

‘But I put you in a difficult position?’

Prayto nodded.

‘I am not sure I want to spy on the mind of a primarch.’

‘I’m sure you’re in my mind all the time, Titus,’ smiled Guilliman.

‘No, lord. Surface thoughts only, and only then when they are too bright for me to screen them out. I never pry unless invited.’

‘Then perhaps I should not presume, and explain my thinking to you in words,’ said Guilliman.

He sat down, and stared out of the repaired window ports at the distant glimmer of the new star.

‘We stand at the brink. Imperium Secundus needs a figurehead to unite it. I had postponed that choice, for it had to be a primarch, and I was the only primarch present. It was unseemly–’

‘No one would have refuted you, lord,’ said Prayto.

‘It would have been unseemly,’ Guilliman insisted. ‘I prayed for a loyal brother to be delivered through the storm. When all hope seemed extinguished, I resigned myself to taking the regency with all the humility I could gather. Then the Lion appeared.’

‘You would declare him your regent?’

‘Of course… but…’

‘You don’t trust him?’

‘Yes, I do. No matter how closely he plays his secrets. The problem is, I don’t believe he trusts me. If I am going to let him in, Titus, if I am going to declare him into a position of power that I cannot undo, I have to be sure of his agenda. Once he has been ratified as regent, we cannot unseat him if we are disappointed by the character he reveals.’

‘Not without insurrection,’ said Prayto.

‘Which we will avoid, for reasons of toxic irony if nothing else. I need to know his mind, Titus.’

‘I see, my lord. We are essentially vetting the new Master of Mankind.’

Prayto rubbed the bridge of his nose thoughtfully.

‘It is difficult,’ he said. ‘It is as with the Wolves, only on a greater scale. Like the Wolves, the noble Lion undoubtedly understands the authority of the Edict of Nikaea. The Librarius of the Ultramarines is already evidence that you are prepared to overrule the word of the Emperor. If I am caught probing his mind…’

‘Will you be caught?’

‘I will endeavour not to be. At the Feast of Hosts tonight, I will use the background rush of many minds in company to get close. Understand, I do not know his capabilities, and he is famously closed. Also–’

‘Yes?’

‘There has been odd activity this afternoon. At least two incidents were detected by the Astra Telepathica during the parade. We are still processing their findings, but it is possible that one or more powerful minds are at liberty in the precinct of the city.’

Guilliman nodded.

‘Keep me appraised. Titus, if you can tell me that the Lion trusts me sufficiently, I will declare him. He is the only choice… unless you can tell me that poor Vulkan is no longer insane?’

‘I cannot, lord.’

‘I do not care which, Titus,’ said Guilliman. ‘Search the mind of one primarch or heal the mind of the other. Whichever is easiest. Whichever serves us best.’

The surface. That was the next goal.

Curze dropped feet first, a flutter of crow-shadows, and landed at the bottom of a deep extraction vent overlooking one of the Invincible Reason’s eight massive dispersal decks.

Below him, like seeds ready to be sown, hundreds of drop pods were loaded in their cradles over the chutes to the void hatches.

He could commandeer one and drop–

No. A vision came, and it was firm. An undeniable reflection. Guilliman’s city was protected from aerial and orbital assault by field screens and vast automated batteries. In his mind’s eye, Curze saw a single drop pod falling. Its descent was rapid, but not rapid enough. Detection systems awoke. Auspex trembled. Fire control systems calculated intercept. A spear of green energy from the surface struck the diving pod and converted it into an expanding cloud of fire and fluttering debris.

Another vision, slipping in and overlapping the first, showed him that a similar fate awaited any ship or lander that attempted planetfall without the correct code signal. But the codes wouldn’t resolve in his mind. He imagined that they were being randomly generated on a minute by minute basis.

A third vision showed him the pointlessness of trying for the teleport assemblies. The Lion had ensured that they were all deactivated to prevent exactly that kind of escape route.

The Lord of Night bared his teeth and whined. How could one man get to the surface? How could one man–

Another vision. Curze smiled. One man could not.

They were still hunting for him on the upper decks of the flagship. Curze had wearied of the killing, and had slipped away, leaving false trails and brutal traps to delay and occupy his would-be captors. No one suspected that he could have reached the dispersal decks in the ship’s belly so quickly.

Curze slid out of the vent base, and slunk along the side of the vast deck, using the shadows of the great stanchions and kinetic brace-beams. He was moving parallel to the lines of drop pods in their cradle framework. He studied them carefully, checking their status, though this only confirmed what the visions had shown to him.

He was far from alone on the dispersal deck.

Launch control was a large operations room overlooking the bay. Alongside the servitor station personnel, there were twelve drop officers on duty. From the moment Curze let himself into the room, none of them lived for more than thirty seconds. They took the launch permission codes with them as they died, but that didn’t matter.

Codes were for minions and menials. The Lord of the First could launch his drop pod blizzards with a simple gene-sample override.

Curze picked up a data-slate that had fallen onto the deck beside the headless body of the launch station’s commander. He wiped the blood off it with the tattered hem of his cloak. ‘Full assault drop’ was already pre-selected and waiting.

Curze stuck out his dark tongue and slowly, almost lasciviously, licked the cold screen of the data-slate.

From a shared genetic root-source, one brother’s gene-sample was as good as another’s.

The slate pinged.

Genecode accepted.

Launch authorised.

Assault swarm launch in thirty seconds.

Twenty-nine.

Twenty-eight.

The Lion raised his goblet. ‘To the Lord of Macragge, for your welcome,’ he said.

‘To the Lord of the First, for your faith,’ Guilliman replied, ‘and to the Imperium, for its endurance.’

They drank, and around them, along the dressed tables of the great dining hall, their men echoed the toasts and drank.

There were a thousand guests present at the long tables – the highest ranking Ultramarines had gathered and were seated with the Dark Angels counterparts of their specialisms, along with senior consuls, delegates from the Army, the Astra Telepathica, the various fleets, the Mechanicum and the Collegia Titanica, and representatives of all the other Legions that had come to Macragge.

As soon as the toasts were given, music began, and tides of servitors flooded out of the kitchen doorways to serve the first of many courses.

Guilliman and the Lion took their places across from each other at the principal table. Glow-globes drifted in the vaults of the hall’s high roof, and the tables were lined with fluttering candelabras, which combined to fill the hall with a golden light – a luminosity that reminded many present of the numinous aura of the Emperor.

Three seats away from Guilliman, Titus Prayto watched the Lion and waited for his opportunity.

He closed his eyes for a second, screening out the background noise. He was uncomfortable. There was a terrible tension that–

Prayto started and stood up, his eyes wide.

‘Great Terra!’ he cried. Despite the scale of the hall and the size of the company present, all talking ceased, and all eyes turned to him.

‘Titus?’ Guilliman asked, confused.

Prayto stared at the Lion.

‘I felt it,’ he said. ‘I felt it there. The surge of minds. Hundreds of minds suddenly alert with anticipation. What did you do, my lord? What did you just do?’

‘I have no idea what you’re talk–’ The Lion began, but his words were cut off by the sudden chiming of multiple alert monitors, swiftly followed by the blare of the palace klaxons.

Guilliman threw back his chair and stood up.

‘Report!’ he demanded.

‘Mass orbital launch,’ Auguston reported, reading off his data-slate as he rose to his feet. He looked at Guilliman in disbelief. ‘The Dark Angels flagship has just… It has just launched a full drop pod assault on Macragge Civitas.’

‘What?’ Guilliman cried.

‘Four hundred drop pods,’ Auguston said. ‘Primary assault spread formation. This city is targeted. Planetfall in four minutes.’

‘Assault swarm confirmed by all stations,’ Gorod reported.

Guilliman’s dress sword was in his fist and aimed, tip-first, across the table at the Lion.

‘Is this your treachery?’ he snarled.

‘No!’ the Lion replied, not flinching from the blade hovering at his throat. Some of his officers had drawn swords at the threat to their master, and he waved them back urgently. There were far too many weapons drawn in the hall already.

‘I have done nothing,’ the Lion hissed. ‘I have not authorised anything!’

‘The grid does not lie!’ Auguston barked. ‘Drop pod swarm! From your ship! Inbound!’

‘You attack me?’ asked Guilliman.

‘I swear not!’ The Lion said. He glanced at the Dark Angels nearest him. ‘Stand down. Someone explain this!’

Holguin held out his data-slate.

‘Signal is confirmed. The Invincible Reason has launched a drop pod assault. Impact in three minutes and counting.’

‘Condemned from their own lips!’ Auguston cried.

‘This is a mistake!’ Farith Redloss shouted at the Ultramarines First Master. ‘A malfunction! A mis-launch!’

‘How exactly do you accidentally launch a drop pod assault, brother?’ asked Guilliman.

‘This is a malfunction,’ the Lion insisted to Guilliman. ‘I swear so.’

‘Accident or not, the pods will not reach the city,’ said Guilliman. ‘Our shields are raised. Our batteries have full lock. We will burn them out of the sky.’

The Lion swallowed hard and stared directly at Guilliman.

‘This is a mistake, brother. A terrible mistake. I swear it. And I implore you, spare my warriors.’

‘Your warriors?’

‘Four hundred drop pods. A great number of battle-brothers. Please, Roboute, this is a mistake. An error.’

‘All this time, while we talked of the future, your drop pods were loaded and ready with assault troops?’ Guilliman shook his head. ‘What do you suggest I do, brother? Lower the city shields?’

‘Yes,’ replied the Lion. ‘Drop your shields and allow the pods to make controlled landings.’

‘Two minutes!’ Gorod cried.

‘You cannot open the city to them, lord!’ Auguston yelled. ‘It is too great a risk! You must fire and eliminate them!’

‘Please,’ said the Lion, his gaze not leaving Guilliman. ‘I did not authorise this.’

‘But it is an attack force you had prepared and held in waiting?’

‘A precaution. You would have done the same.’

‘We must fire now!’ Gorod roared. ‘While they are still in optimum range. You must give the order!’

‘Please,’ said the Lion one last time.

Guilliman glanced sidelong at Prayto. ‘Tell me,’ he said.

‘Your brother is closed to me, but I can see enough to know that he is telling the truth. Perhaps not the whole truth, but enough of it. He did not authorise this attack. He is horrified by it.’

Guilliman looked back at the Lion. There was a long pause.

‘Your orders, lord?’ Auguston insisted.

‘Hold fire,’ said Guilliman. ‘Power down. Lower the shields and let them land.’

‘My lord?’ Auguston gasped.

‘Do it!’ Guilliman ordered. He returned his gaze to the Lion as Auguston spoke a rapid series of orders into his vox.

‘Do not make me regret this, brother,’ Guilliman said.

In the north-west deme of the great Civitas, Damon Prytanis paused halfway through the supper he had just purchased.

He was in Xanthi market, just north of the shadows of the granaries, where the day’s trade of clothing and livestock had shifted to farm produce and hot food in the late afternoon. He had bought a pastry stuffed with fish and vegetables from a trader with a clay oven, and then taken himself over to the market’s skirt wall nearby, so he could sit with his back resting against the foot of the wall and eat his fill.

He heard a murmur of voices, a change in the tenor of the crowd around him. Something was happening.

He lowered the half-eaten pastry, and got to his feet, wiping the grease off his lips as he munched.

Somewhere in the central part of the vast Civitas, alarms were sounding. People around him were pointing at the sky.

He looked up, and saw immediately the multiple heat trails slicing the darkening sky high overhead.

A massive drop pod assault. Unmistakable.

‘Holy living Emperor,’ he said out loud.

The leaves of the trees above him suddenly shivered in an evening breeze that had come out of nowhere.

John Grammaticus, his carrybag slung across his shoulder, was already walking quickly through the glade to find a patch of open ground where he might better see the evening sky.

He had taken shelter in the ornamental parkland at the foot of the Castrum’s mighty Aegis Wall and tried to sleep for a while, curled up on a grassy bank behind some lofty bluewoods, hoping that rest might help his mind unpack.

The commotion had roused him. He’d heard it, but he’d felt it too, felt it between his eyes like a sharp pain, the sudden agitation of hundreds of minds. It had come to him almost before the sirens had started to wail.

He saw the drop pods filling the eastern sky like a meteor shower. Their flame trails stretched out behind them in bright orange tongues.

John wondered exactly what he was seeing. A new enemy – that seemed certain, a new threat bearing down upon them all. He remembered the farseer’s enigmatic remark: In eight minutes’ time, this communion will be eclipsed by another, more powerful psykana event in the city, followed by a considerable crisis. Both will divert attention from you.

This had to be that ‘considerable crisis’. Which faction was this? Which wayward brother? Which friend-turned-foe?

John reached out with his mind. He wanted to dredge for something he could use, something that would give him an edge in the hours to come. If he knew what was about to transpire, he could decide the best place to shelter from it, or the best allies to seek out.

What he got first was surprise. John blinked. At this range, he would not have expected to be able to reach specific thoughts or individual minds, but the unity of this hot-read shocked him. The warriors in those distant drop pods were surprised. The decision to launch an assault had come suddenly, without warning.

John reached harder, searching for more defined information.

He hit something else. It made him gasp and recoil. He’d touched a single mind, a dark thing, a midnight thing, quite unlike any mind he had ever touched before. It was ferocious: a black, hot, repellant presence, radiating energy rather than light; like a neutron star, hyper-dense and menacing.

John didn’t know what it was. John didn’t want to know what it was. He just knew that it was a greater threat than the four hundred drop pods and the armoured squads they contained.

‘Don’t let it in,’ he said to the evening air. ‘Don’t let it in.’

Why weren’t the city batteries firing? Why weren’t the orbital weapon systems lighting up? Why was this being allowed to happen?

‘Don’t,’ said John. ‘Don’t let it come here. Don’t let it land.’

There was a pop, a slight but noticeable change in air pressure. A breeze hushed through the bluewoods again. John felt it. He smelled ozone.

The void shields protecting Magna Macragge Civitas had been lowered.

‘No!’ he cried. He turned and looked up in fury at the palace high above him, towering over the trees and the grey cliff of the Aegis Wall.

‘You idiots!’ he shouted, as if they could hear him. ‘Raise the shields. Raise the damned shields!’

He could hear the howling of the incoming drop pods. Two screamed low overhead, trailing streams of blue-hot ablative burn, their braking jets beginning to fire. To either side of him, more pods flashed across the gleaming towers and high blocks of the Civitas, riding the flame-plumes of their retros. The noise was deafening.

John started to run. He began to sprint up the slope into the trees, heading west along the hem of the parklands towards the main Castrum gate. He had to get into the palace. He had to find someone he could trust and communicate a proper warning.

Hell was coming to Macragge.

Something crashed into him and knocked him down. John rolled, dazed. He tasted blood in his mouth. He couldn’t clear his head. What… what?

There was a weight on him, a terrible crushing weight. A huge, mailed hand closed around his throat. Over the roar of the braking jets and the thunder of the pods landing in open areas all across the city, John heard a voice.

‘Well met,’ said Narek of the Word.

‘Mute the damned alarms!’ Captain Casmir ordered.

One of the medicae staff turned to a console and tapped out a code. The alarm sounds and flashing lights in the quarantine corridor of the Residency’s medicae hall shut off. Through the heavy bulkheads and sealed hatches, the alarms sounding through the rest of the great palace precinct came soft and muffled.

The cessation of the lights and sirens did not placate the confined primarch.

Vulkan continued to hammer his bleeding fists against the armourglass wall as he had done since the alarms first sounded. He was howling, his mouth wide, in despair, like a trapped animal. The mess of plasma, blood and half-formed tissue his fists and forearms were leaving on the glass was miserable.

‘What’s wrong with him?’ asked the chief attending medicae.

‘You’re the damned surgeon!’ Casmir returned. ‘I thought it was a response to the alarms. Our Lord of Nocturne has clearly suffered through extremity. I thought the alarms had triggered some traumatic response.’

‘It wasn’t the alarms,’ remarked a junior medicae nearby.

‘What?’ Casmir barked, turning on her. She bowed her head.

‘Sir, I simply said that it wasn’t the alarms,’ she replied in a low voice.

‘How do you know?’ Casmir asked.

The young woman looked nervously at her superior, the chief attending.

‘I spoke out of turn,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Junior Physic Patrishana is one of our most promising novices,’ the chief attending told Casmir. ‘Patrishana, please… Explain your comment.’

The young woman nodded. She turned to her console and punched up a data review on the main lithoscopic display.

‘I was monitoring the vitals of our… honoured guest,’ she said. ‘Please, if you will, observe the time-count indicator on this replay, captain. I have slowed it to one-tenth speed. Although it was close, so close as to suggest cause and effect, as you’ll see…’

‘Great Hera!’ Casmir whispered. ‘He began his agitation three full seconds before the alarms started. As if…’

The young woman looked up at Casmir.

‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘As if his response, like the alarms, was to something else.’

Casmir looked at the glass wall and the screaming figure beyond it.

‘What does he know?’ he asked. ‘What does he know that we don’t?’

Treads clattering off the basalt pavers, the Land Raider growled into Barium Square, just off the Via Laponis – the cardo, or north-south ‘heart street’ of the Civitas. Barium Square was a broad and pleasant area, the popular haunt of scholars and academics who used the many libraries and rubricatories there. Through to the west, the cross-streets afforded an excellent view of the majestic Titanicus collegium and the even more massive castle of the Mechanicum. In the centre of the square was a broad grass sward like a little green island, boasting a grove of handsome grey seamwood trees and some ornamental shrubs. Scholars would sit on the benches there on summer days and talk as they ate lunch.

Smoke fumed from the shrubs, and the grass was scorched. The drop pod had felled two of the seamwoods when it landed, and destroyed an ornamental bench. Its landing pads had cracked and dug up the pathway too.

Sergeant Menius of the Ultramarines 34th Company led his squad out of the Land Raider. He fanned them out with a gesture, weapons ready. The orders had come down from the First Master. Active and duty sentry squads were to attend and secure every landing site. Reports were already flooding back from across the Civitas of sites secured. The Dark Angels squads emerging from the landing pods had immediately submitted to the XIII Legion details, handed off weapons, and allowed themselves to be escorted to the holding centre at the Campus Cohortum. Some, it was reported, had apologised and begged for forgiveness from their battle-brothers.

There were also reports of minor property damage. No matter how carefully you tried to park a drop pod, it was not a subtle device.

Menius checked the area, and compared his visor data with the flow from the Land Raider’s more comprehensive auspex array. The square was quiet. Residual vapour rose off the drop pod, which sat at an awkward angle amongst the trees. Heat residuals were much hotter on the infrared display. It was bleeding out the fury of its atmospheric entry.

No contact. No life trace.

‘Power up,’ Menius voxed to the Land Raider’s driver. He heard the gunpods heat up behind him, and he rejoiced in the tight, metallic clatter the turret mounts made as they traversed, tracking for a target. Menius had killing power in his fists, in the hands of the battle-brothers around him, and almost excessive killing power in the vehicle behind them.

They wouldn’t need it.

Throne, this was already quite clearly a terrible mistake, and their brothers, the Dark Angels, were freely entering submission.

What was wrong with this one, then? Menius wondered. No life traces? What, a bad landing? It didn’t look that bad.

‘Summon an Apothecary on standby,’ Menius voxed to his subaltern. ‘There’s something off here.’

Bolters ready, the squad closed in on the smoking pod.

‘Hello?’ Menius hailed via his helm’s augmitters.

The evening light had gone an odd, blue colour, as before a storm. Shadows had turned grey. Menius was aware that every move they made was accompanied by an over-loud sound. Every footstep, every grind of armour, every hum of power-support.

The city shields had not yet been re-fired. Menius could hear the distant chop and hum of the Thunderhawks and Storm Eagles despatched to cover each and every landing site. He could see some of them in the distance above the rooftops, circling as they probed neighbouring districts with their stablights. According to vox-data, his air cover was inbound and would be with him in two minutes.

‘Hold steady,’ Menius told his squad. ‘Stand and cover me.’

He approached the drop pod. The hatches were wide open.

‘Hello?’ he called again.

Nothing.

He approached the nearest hatch and peered inside.

The pod was empty.

Must have been a misfire. An empty pod, mis-launched. The word was, the whole swarm had been due to a malfunction.

‘Clear the area!’ Menius ordered. ‘Secure!’

He turned away from the pod and scanned the square. For a moment, he thought he might have glimpsed something moving along the portico of the Tigris Library. He dismissed it as his imagination. Nothing could move so much like a shadow, so jittery, so much like a flock of crows.

‘Sergeant?’

‘What?’ Menius asked, turning.

His subaltern was facing him.

‘We scanned the interior,’ the subaltern said.

‘And?’

‘The entire interior is coated with blood, sergeant.’

‘What did you just say?’ asked Menius.

‘Blood, sergeant, about eighteen litres of it.’

From the portico above Barium Square, Curze watched the Ultramarines trolling around the drop pod. So stupid!

Curze had targets elsewhere, and he intended to find them, but the stupid Ultramarines were so terribly inviting.

He’d never killed one of Guilliman’s. It was enticing, even though they did have a big, bad Land Raider with them.

The Night Haunter stood up, proud and tall, and opened his wings and his dreadful claws.

‘Death,’ he murmured, as a sentence.

Eighty-eight seconds later, Sergeant Menius and his entire squad were dead and the Land Raider was on its side and burning.

Konrad Curze had come to Macragge.

14
Death in the Fortress of Hera

‘I am a brother to dragons and
a companion to owls. My skin is black upon me
and my bones are burned with heat.’

– from the Old Earth religious text known as ‘Job’s Book’

‘Our guests, my lord,’ said Verus Caspean, Master of the Second, ‘are being escorted to the Campus Cohortum.’

‘Any resistance?’ asked Guilliman.

Caspean shook his head. He had a sleek skull with very tightly cropped grey hair, and high cheek bones framing a blade of a nose. The shake of his head made Guilliman think of the warning sway of a mountain hawk.

‘Our guests have made no resistance,’ he replied, again stressing the word ‘guests’. ‘They have allowed themselves to be escorted to confinement.’

‘Have they surrendered weapons?’

‘Some of them have, lord,’ said Caspean, ‘but we have not made that demand of them. As per your instructions, we are treating them as respected battle-brothers, and regarding this as the unfortunate accident their lord claims it to be.’

‘How many?’

‘A strength in excess of five companies… as our Legion would consider it. I have little patience with their “wings” and cohort divisions.’

‘So… enough to kill this city?’

Caspean paused.

‘Easily,’ he replied. ‘Whatever else I think of them today, I am in no doubt of the capability and ferocity of the First. If we had dropped the city shields and their intent had been malicious, the Civitas would be burning, and the death toll unthinkable.’

‘Tell me when they are all confined,’ Guilliman said. ‘Have their drop pods recovered and transported for holding at Fortress Moneta. I will not have the reminders of an invasion, no matter how peaceable and unintentional it may have been, littering my city and scaring my population. Has Auguston made the announcements?’

‘Yes, lord,’ said Caspean. ‘He has made two statements over the Civitas address system, and they are being looped on the civilian datafeeds. I was impressed. He was quite reassuring. He insisted that there was no cause for general concern, and that it was merely a practical training exercise conducted in conjunction with the Thirteenth.’

‘Whose idea was that?’ asked Guilliman.

‘Auguston’s. It also helped that Holguin of the Dark Angels stood with him during the address and added his voice to the statement.’

‘For that we can be thankful,’ said Guilliman. He glanced along the length of the room. Through open doors, in an adjacent part of the Residency, he could see the Lion sitting alone, deep in thought.

‘Have the confined officers interviewed,’ Guilliman told Caspean. ‘Make it a polite but firm de-briefing. Make sure their story matches my brother’s. This may well be an accident, but I want to know how it happened.’

Caspean saluted, his mailed fist clunking off his breastplate. He turned and left the chamber.

Guilliman turned and looked at Valentus Dolor. The tetrarch was waiting attentively by the windows.

‘An accident?’ Guilliman asked.

‘A strange one,’ Dolor replied, ‘but why would you not trust his word?’

‘Because he is the Lion.’

‘He seemed mortified.’

Guilliman snorted. ‘He had a drop force loaded and waiting. A readied invasion. As he received my toast and sat at my table, he had an assault force of four companies set to fall upon this city.’

‘Consider, my lord,’ said Dolor, ‘if the situation were reversed, and we stood, at fleet-strength, off the proverbial green shores of Caliban, would you not have done the same? Would you not have had your finest prepped to move without any delay if the need arose?’

Guilliman did not reply.

‘I think you would,’ said Dolor with a sad smile. ‘In fact, I know you would. The core values of theoretical and practical would not have allowed you to do anything else. These are dark days, the darkest we have known. The events of this night are his fault.’

Guilliman shot another glance down the length of the chamber to look at the brooding Lion.

‘My brother?’ he asked.

‘Yes, but not the one you stare at,’ said Dolor. ‘I mean the Warmaster. This blight of conviction, this loss of faith, this caution and suspicion that means that the proud sons of the greatest family in the cosmos cannot trust one another… It is down to him and what he has done.’

Guilliman realised he had clenched both of his fists. He forced himself to uncurl them.

‘I believe I would have shown more trust in him than that,’ he said.

‘Would you?’ asked Dolor. ‘Do you? The long shadow of the Lupercal means we play our cards closer to our chests than ever. We keep our secrets tight. Have you, for example, told your brother of the one who resides, howling like a bedlam fool, in the medicae hall?’

‘I have not,’ Guilliman hissed, quickly raising his left hand to excuse his spark of anger.

‘Then think of your secrets and the reasons you keep them, while you examine his.’

‘Good counsel as ever, Valentus,’ said Guilliman. ‘Wait upon me here. I think it is time my brother and I talked more frankly.’

Dolor made his salute and a respectful bow of his head. Guilliman walked through the doors into the chamber where the Lion sat. The Lord of the First occupied one of the large-scale chairs. A fire had been lit in the chamber’s grate, and the Lion was intently watching the flames as they softly consumed the wood.

What was he thinking? Of forests, dark forests beloved by him, similarly consumed? It was a burden. Guilliman reminded himself that at least he knew the fate and status of his home world. What fears filled the Lion’s heart when he thought of his forested fortress, now presumably inaccessible beyond the Ruinstorm’s wrath?

‘Not the evening of feasting and good comradeship I was expecting,’ said Guilliman.

‘Nor I,’ the Lion agreed, looking up.

‘How much would you have needed, brother?’ Guilliman asked. He walked to a side table and poured wine from a jug into two goblets of frosted white glass.

‘How much what?’ asked the Lion.

‘Provocation,’ said Guilliman. ‘How many lines would I have had to cross? How many failings would you have needed to detect in me and my Legion?’

‘What, to attack you?’

‘Yes. It may indeed have been prudent, brother, but you came to my world fully prepared to strike at me if I was found wanting. Your men were loaded and ready, your pods primed, the vectors set. You have admitted to my face that you came here with no qualms about sanctioning me if I was found fit to sanction. So what would it have taken?’

The Lion took the goblet that Guilliman proffered.

‘Your ambition, Roboute. It was always your greatest strength and your greatest flaw. No two brothers more ambitious than you and Horus. It has seen you build an empire. If I had come and found you stealing another, then I would have struck.’

He rose to his feet and sipped the wine.

‘Honesty is your other great strength, brother,’ the Lion said. ‘Again, it is another strong trait you share with Horus.’

‘That name can only be spoken so many times within the Residency before I reach for my sword,’ said Guilliman.

The Lion laughed. ‘Quite so. But my point is a valid one. Before… before he fell, Horus was an honest creature. Noble and honest. I always thought of the two of you as very alike. Admire him or despise him, one was never in any doubt as to his ambitions. He was honest. He made no secret that he wanted to be the best of all, the first amongst equals, the first son by merit and not numerical fact. He wanted to be Warmaster. He wanted to be heir. His honesty was naked.’

‘But that honesty has gone.’

‘Indeed it has,’ said the Lion. ‘When he fell, however he fell, his honesty peeled away from him. He became a lord of lies, a great betrayer, a being capable of the worst deceit and falsity that we can imagine or even bear to think of. But you are honest still.’

The Lion looked at Guilliman.

‘When I came to you, you opened your heart to me. You told me of your fears, of the wounds you carry, of the principle and nature of your fight, and of your intentions for Imperium Secundus. That stayed my hand, to see the honesty in you still.’

He took another sip of wine. The goblet was made of white Servian glass, and it glowed like a chalice. It contrasted sharply with the dark gauntlet that held it, with the armour hued a shade of black known in the ancient language as calibaun. The goblet had more warmth in it than shone from the Lion’s pale skin. The wine looked like blood.

‘Part of your honesty, Roboute,’ he said, ‘was to remind me that I am not an open book. I have always found it hard to trust and be trusted.’

‘But you are admired and beloved–’

‘That is not the same thing at all. I have my secrets. Men may keep secrets for good reasons.’

‘Then if we are to put this behind us, and step forward from this day side by side as allies, I must open my heart further,’ said Guilliman. ‘There is something–’

The knock of a fist against the chamber door interrupted him. Guilliman paused, annoyed, wishing to unburden himself fully now that he had begun. Yet he knew full well that no one would knock without a pressing reason.

‘Enter,’ he said.

It was Niax Nessus, Master of the Third.

‘I apologise for the intrusion, my lord,’ he said, ‘but it is imperative that you see this. Also, your noble brother’s voted lieutenant wishes to speak with him urgently.’

Farith Redloss stood in the doorway behind Nessus, flanked by several of Gorod’s hulking warriors.

‘We will continue this conversation in a moment,’ Guilliman said to the Lion, drawing Nessus to one side and taking a data-slate from him. The Lion went to the door and stepped out to meet Farith Redloss. Redloss moved his lord down the hallway a little away from the bodyguards. He passed the Lion a data-slate marked with the First Legion’s icon.

The Lion read it.

‘Tell me this is not so,’ he said.

‘It is confirmed.’

‘This? This is the cause?’ the Lion growled.

‘It took a gene-print to launch the assault. We have swabbed the device. It is confirmed.’

‘Then he’s on the surface?’

‘Ingeniously so,’ said Redloss. ‘He used the lives of our battle-brothers to make Guilliman throw open the door for him.’

The Lion’s lips trembled in rage. ‘Find him,’ he whispered.

‘Lord, I–’

‘Find him.’

‘The Ultramarines will not permit free movement in the Civitas precinct, My lord, so–’

‘Then be ingenious. Find him.’

Redloss nodded.

‘Will you tell him, lord?’ he asked. ‘Will you tell Guilliman?’

‘We cannot explain it,’ said Nessus to his lord in a low voice. Guilliman thumbed his way through the slate’s datalog for the third time.

‘A squad dead?’

‘Menius’s troop, in Barium Square, not less than thirty minutes ago. They were not just killed, they were silenced. They were torn apart.

‘This isn’t the work of the Dark Angels…’

‘It does not look like their handiwork at all, nor would that answer make much sense. Why this one incident if all the others stood down peacefully?’

‘Something else was in that pod,’ said Guilliman.

‘Indeed. Theoretical, it slew the original occupants and took their place. We’re analysing the blood found in the pod now.’

‘What has he brought here? What has he brought to my world?’

‘Your noble brother?’ asked Nessus. ‘My lord, this may be something he has no knowledge of. He–’

‘It was on his ship. It was in his pod. It killed his men. He must know what he has brought here.’

Guilliman looked at Nessus.

‘Inform Auguston. We raise our security status to Ready One, city-wide and in the Fortress. Mobilise in strength. Household and Legion. Scour Barium Square and the routes out of it. Gene-traces, footprints, blood trails, anything. Access security picters in the deme. Something or someone must have caught a glimpse. I want to know what this is and where it’s going. I want it found, and I want it stopped before it kills again.’

Nessus snapped off his salute and turned to leave the room. The Lion was re-entering.

‘What have you brought here?’ Guilliman asked.

‘I’m sorry? What?’ the Lion replied, pausing in the doorway.

‘If my face is anything like yours, brother,’ said Guilliman, walking up to him, ‘and I believe it is a great deal more open, then we have both been recipients of disturbing news. So, I ask again… What have you brought here?’

‘Farith Redloss was simply confirming the facts of the incident,’ said the Lion. ‘A mechanical failure, probably the result of storm damage. I wanted an answer quickly, and it has been provided. The pod drop was–’

‘No,’ said Guilliman. He took another step towards the Lion. ‘We just spoke, brother to brother, of the need for honesty. We spoke more freely than we have ever spoken. You told me that my honesty is why you stayed your censure, and admitted to me that you could be far too closed at times. We agreed that only true honesty would allow the Emperor’s loyal sons to stand against the darkness and drive it back. So we start. Now.’

Guilliman held up the data-slate that Nessus had given him so that the Lion could read the report on its screen-surface.

‘What is this?’ Guilliman snarled. ‘Tell me what you have brought to Macragge, or by the name of Ultramar, I swear I will put you through that wall.’

‘You will try…’ the Lion replied, stiffening.

‘Damn you, brother! Trust me and speak the truth now or we are done and finished! What have you brought to Macragge?’

The Lion sighed.

‘Konrad,’ he said.

The wall was high, high and mighty, but it was just a wall. Walls could be climbed, and gates opened. Veins could be opened too.

Less than a shadow, Curze rippled up the Aegis Wall like a black autumn leaf fluttered upwards by the night breeze. Above him, like a geometric mountain, towered the bulwarks of the Fortress.

The sons of Ultramar marched from this great bastion, so eager to boast of their prowess and their fortitude, so eager to celebrate their courage.

Curze reached the rim of the wall and vaulted onto the parapet. He looked back over the city below, a sea of lights. The night sky, with its one foul glowing star, shimmered behind the re-lit void shields.

Sentries on circuit were approaching. He could see them in his mind before he smelled the dry heat of their power armour. He opened a shadow, slid into its embrace and extended his claws.

He was inside the Fortress of Hera, inside the cradle of the haughty Ultramarines.

Tonight, at last – and long, long past time – they would know fear.

John woke. He was in a basement or cellar, tied to a wooden chair. There was a tang of blood in his mouth.

The Word Bearer sat facing him on a metal crate. His weapon lay across his lap in its case. John’s carrybag stood on the floor at his feet.

‘What do you want?’ John asked.

‘To renegotiate and then conclude the business we began on Traoris,’ said the Word Bearer.

‘Narek–’

‘Call me lord. Show me respect.’

‘I do not feel I am in a position to negotiate much,’ said John. His head hurt, but he reached out with his mind anyway. Perhaps…

No. It was futile. John’s initial suspicions had been correct. The torc around the Word Bearer’s throat was a powerful psychic hood. Narek had come prepared.

‘You want it,’ said John. ‘Take it.’

Narek did not reply for a while. He kept his gaze fixed on John Grammaticus. Then he put aside his cased rifle and reached down to the carrybag. He took a bundle out of it, unwrapped it, and held the fulgurite spear up in the half-light. It didn’t look like much: a forked spearhead of dull grey mineral, unfinished, no longer than a gladius.

But it was a piece of the Emperor’s psychic lightning, fused into a fulgurite in the sands of Traoris. It was a weapon of extraordinary power. With it, one could kill a god.

Or, most certainly, one could kill the son of a god. Even the one son-of-a-god who was impossible to slay otherwise.

‘It is potent,’ said Narek. ‘I can feel the life in it, the power. It is… godlike.’

‘It is a fragment of divinity,’ said John. ‘Or something as close to divinity as we will ever know.’

‘I could take it, and leave you dead,’ said Narek.

‘This is entirely what I expect,’ said John.

Narek turned the spearhead over in his hands.

‘One thing has become clear to me,’ he said, ‘through my pursuit of you here and on Traoris. This is a powerful weapon, but you… you are a notable being too. You would not have been charged with the recovery and use of this if you were not something… special.’

‘I’m just an agent for–’

‘You are a Perpetual.’

John faltered. ‘I–’

‘So old, so rare, so forgotten. You are the legend of a legend, the myth of a myth. But the Word Bearers are the keepers of the word and the lore, and in our histories are even the ghosts of myths remembered… the old ones. The long-lived ones. The eternal kind. The first and last. The Perpetuals.’

‘It’s more complicated than that,’ said John, ‘a lot more complicated than that in my case. I–’

‘The details don’t matter,’ said Narek. ‘I know what a Perpetual is capable of. I understand. After all, we are all proof of what the oldest and most powerful Perpetuals can do.’

‘What is that?’

‘Build an Imperium.’

John let his head drop and he exhaled slowly.

‘Just kill me, Narek,’ he said.

‘Has your life been so endless that you long for death?’

‘I know when I’m beaten,’ John replied.

There had been a flash of truth in the Word Bearer’s remark. John was tired. But death was not a permanent state in his case. The Cabal saw to that. If he could goad Narek enough, death might become an escape route and–

‘The spear is powerful, John Grammaticus,’ said Narek, ‘but I fancy it is even more powerful when one of your kind wields it. So you become, you see, part of the weapon.’

‘There is some truth in that,’ said John. There seemed little point lying.

‘Then I will take you both, you and the spear. As one, you will be my weapon, for the purpose I have ordained.’

‘And what would that purpose be, Narek?’

‘Respect!’ hissed the Word Bearer.

‘What would that purpose be, my lord?’ asked John. ‘I know why I want the spear. I know what deed is expected of me. What do you intend to do with it?

‘I intend,’ said Narek, ‘to perform holy work. I intend to cleanse the soul of my Legion of the daemonic pollution that contaminates it.’

He held up the speartip. Despite its dull finish, they could both see the tiny flashes of power that coursed through it.

‘I intend to save the Legion of the Word Bearers,’ said Narek, ‘and you are going to help me accomplish that.’

‘How?’ asked John Grammaticus. ‘What exactly do you intend to do?’

‘I will cleanse the soul of my Legion,’ said Narek, ‘by seeking out and slaying Lorgar Aurelian.’

‘My lord. My lord, no!’ Gorod cried.

‘Curze?’ Guilliman roared. With one hand he had smashed the Lion back into the wall. He held him there by the throat. ‘You brought that monster to my world?’

‘Unhand me,’ said the Lion.

‘Answer!’

‘I have not resisted you, Roboute, but you molest me. Unhand me or we will swiftly discover which of us is the superior combatant.’

‘My lord!’ Gorod repeated. The bodyguard had closed around them, hoping that they would not be obliged to drag the primarchs apart. They did not want to lay a hand upon their master, the Avenging Son.

Guilliman did not loosen his grip.

‘Tell me how this happened. Tell me about Curze!’

The Lion’s hands remained at his sides. He did not resist the fury and the formidable pressure pressing him into the wall, but it was plainly a feat of determination not to.

‘Since Thramas, I have held several officers of his Legion prisoner,’ the Lion said, ‘including that bastard known as Sevatar. Curze was on my ship too, loose in the unregulated decks. I hunted him. He could not escape, but I could not capture him. It appears he has now… made his exit.’

‘Upon your arrival, this wasn’t the first thing you chose to tell me?’ asked Guilliman. ‘That one of the worst of our traitor brothers hides within your flagship?’

‘In hindsight, I could have been more… open,’ said the Lion. ‘In truth, as we are speaking plainly, I was ashamed that I could not confine him. I would gladly have brought him before you in chains, on his knees and pleading, so we might have sequestered him in your darkest dungeons. While he was free, however, he was my problem, my curse to contend with.’

‘But you didn’t,’ said Guilliman, ‘and men are dead because of it, and more will die, and we are at each other’s throats.’

‘Quite literally,’ said the Lion, looking down at Guilliman’s crushing hand.

Guilliman released his grip and stepped back. The Lion stood up properly.

‘That will not happen again,’ said the Lion.

‘It might,’ replied Guilliman.

‘Not that way around.’

‘Don’t test me, brother!’ Guilliman snapped. ‘Can you not see the anger in me?’

‘I can, but I am better at hiding things, and you clearly cannot see the anger in me. That will not happen again.’

‘Then make sure of it. Your men will help my men find this monster,’ Guilliman said.

‘Agreed.’

‘No more lies, Lion. No more secrets.’

‘Agreed. Let me contact Holguin and–’

Alarms started to ring throughout the Residency.

‘Perimeter breach. The Fortress,’ said Gorod, reading the dataflow off his visor.

‘Which means?’ asked the Lion.

‘Well, unless you have any other surprises you haven’t told me about,’ said Guilliman, ‘he’s here. He’s on the Castrum. He’s in the Fortress. Curze is here.’

His eyes widened. His mouth opened and looked as though it was screaming, though no sound came out.

‘I don’t like this,’ said Captain Casmir. ‘What’s he doing?’

The medicae staff shook their heads. Behind the armourglass, the insane primarch flexed his hands and howled without sound. His dark skin was still healing and still bleeding. He resembled some grotesque revenant, some grisly spectre that had fled death and returned from the grave.

‘Get someone!’ said Casmir.

‘Who?’ asked the chief attending.

‘I don’t know! Tetrarch Dolor! Guilliman himself!’

Several aides began to back away to do as he ordered, but no one wanted to take their eyes off Vulkan.

There was a sense of power in him, terrible power and terrible purpose. Madness still invested his eyes, but it was focused now, as though all his wrath and pain had been concentrated into one thing.

He was mouthing something, over and over again.

‘What is that? What’s he saying?’ asked Casmir.

‘He’s just raving,’ the chief attending replied.

‘No, that word…’ Casmir stepped forward. ‘Read his lips. He’s saying…’

Casmir turned and looked at the medicae staff and the guards.

‘He’s saying… Curze.’

Vulkan screamed the name of his tormentor. He locked his bloody fingers together and began to smash his fists against the glass like a pounding hammer in a forge, like the working, toiling beat of a smithy, making and unmaking, shaping and unshaping. The armourglass wall, smeared with the blood of his previous blows, shivered. It vibrated.

It cracked.

‘Seal this level! Now!’ yelled Casmir. ‘Seal it!’

Vulkan’s fists kept pounding. The glass cracked more broadly.

Then the whole wall exploded in a blizzard of fragments.

Vast, dark, murderous, Vulkan stepped out of his cage. Casmir and other Ultramarines rushed forward in desperation to restrain him, but he threw their armoured forms aside as though they were dolls.

Vulkan was free.

In his madness, he would not be stopped.

Not again. Not by anything.

15
Kill all the
Shadows

‘I know you are my eldest brother; and, in the
gentle condition of blood, you should know me…
You are the first-born; but the same tradition takes not
away my blood, were there twenty brothers betwixt us:
I have as much of my father in me as you.’

– from As You Alike (attributed to the dramaturge Shakespire), circa M2

‘Make your report!’ Guilliman demanded into his armour’s vox-link. He strode along the grand colonnade that linked the Residency to the Fortress proper, with the Lion and an assembly of bodyguards from both Legions at his heels.

‘Captain Terbis, my lord,’ the vox scratched back. Overlapping ambient noise suggested a great activity at the other end. ‘We’ve… we’ve found three men dead in the Portis Yard, strung from the Aegis Wall with wire.’

‘Our own men?’

‘Three Ultramarines from 27th Company. Roster confirms they were on sentry duty. Wait! Stars of Ultramar! One’s still alive! Hurry! Hurry, cut him down! Cut him down–’

‘Wait!’ the Lion cried, grabbing Guilliman’s arm. ‘Tell them no! Tell them–’

Despite the distance, they felt the blast. The vox-link scratched out, dead. A haze of red light glowed over the fortress wall, casting an infernal wash across the stately buildings of the Palaeopolis.

‘Terbis!’ Guilliman yelled into the vox. ‘Terbis!’

‘He mines the bodies,’ said the Lion. ‘I’ve known him use the method several times. He takes munitions and grenades from those he slays or maims, and sets them with time or motion triggers on the fallen. Such is his insidious poison. He spreads terror. We cannot trust our own dead.’

Guilliman looked at Gorod.

‘Issue a warning to that effect. All channels.’

‘Aye, my lord,’ rumbled Gorod.

Before the Invictus commander could begin the task, another ripple of blasts shivered the night air. This time, the detonations came from the direction of the Sword Hall. Beyond the Fortress wall, Guilliman could see flames scudding from the lip of a roofline. He looked at the men with him and drew his gladius.

‘He will commit no more injury,’ he said, ‘no more insult, no more outrage. Let it be known, we hunt him with maximum prejudice. No matter he is our brother, all warriors are hereby notified to stop Curze with lethal force.’

On the piered western walkway that skirted the Praetorium, Titus Prayto held up his hand sharply.

‘Stop. Stop dead!’

At his side, Captain Thales and his assault squad came to a sudden halt.

‘What do you sense?’ asked Thales.

‘Something… He’s here. Or, he was here,’ said Prayto. To the east of them, the blast of a grenade rang through the inner yards. Alarms and bells sounded from all quarters.

‘He’s… everywhere, it seems,’ Thales murmured. ‘Are we sure he is alone? It feels like a strike force has infiltrated the Fortress.’

‘We know nothing for sure, but I feel he is alone,’ said Prayto. ‘This is his art. He moves fast, and unpredictably. He leaves death and traps where he walks. Thus he is everywhere and nowhere, and so terror mounts.’

Prayto looked back along the walkway. Something had made him halt their urgent advance. He unclipped his lamp pack.

‘We are Ultramarines, captain,’ Prayto added. ‘He can sow all the terror he likes. We shall know no fear.’

Prayto had set his lamp to ultraviolet so that it might further enhance his transhuman ocular implants. He shone it along the walkway. The night’s shadowed darkness was mottled with the glow of distant flames.

‘There,’ Prayto said. The hard light of his lamp caught wires stretched taut between the piers of the walkway at shin height. It showed them as sharp white lines.

‘Trip wires,’ he said. ‘He’s wired the walkway. Thales, close off this area. Tell everyone not to enter by the western gate. You three, start clearing these wires. Make them safe.’

The Ultramarines moved forward, clamping their boltguns to free their hands. Another blast, from the direction of the Library, lit the night above the walkway’s roof.

‘My lord!’ one of the men called out.

‘What have you found?’ asked Prayto.

‘These wires, my lord… They are just wires. They are tied between the piers, but there’s nothing attached to them.’

Even his traps are traps, Prayto thought. He binds us and blocks us, merely with the idea of death…

‘More confusion,’ Prayto said to Thales and the men. ‘Every action is designed to wrong-foot us, occupy us, delay us. He is the opposite of all he does.’

Prayto turned to look back down the walkway, the way they had come.

The shadow standing silently behind them smiled at him.

Prayto was fast, but a rush of inimical malice flooded his brain with stunning force. It was as though Curze had kept his corrosive mind hidden, and now suddenly allowed Prayto’s sensitivity to read it.

Claws scythed the air. Prayto felt pain deep in his side. The impact hurled him sideways into one of the corridor’s stone piers, which he bounced off with a clatter of plate. Before he even hit the ground, he was covered in blood.

It belonged to Captain Thales. The officer was still standing, but his head had been removed. A considerable volume of blood was jetting from the stump of his neck, plastering the walkway like torrential rain.

One of the squad members got off two shots: bright flashes and deafening noise in the covered space. Almost instantly, the man sailed backwards through the air, his boltgun spinning out of his slack grip, his chest plating ripped open like torn foil.

Despite the terrible wound in his side, Prayto got to his knees. Bringing his bolter to bear, he fought to discern which of the night’s shadows was Curze.

There? There?

‘Kill all the shadows!’ he roared, and opened fire. The remaining men fired too, wildly, in all directions. The searing light of gunfire dispelled the darkness, and the furious bolt-rounds ripped into the stone work of the piers and the walkway, filling the night air with dust, micro-metal fibres and fyceline fumes. They kept firing until their magazines were empty. The pulsing, juddering flash of the shots showed them nothing but the emptiness of the shadows.

Curze had already moved on.

But Curze had let Prayto taste his mind.

Prayto had him.

Half-unconscious with pain, the Librarian opened his vox-link.

First Master Auguston heard the roar of bolter fire and turned.

‘That sounds like a whole damned squad unloading!’ he roared. ‘Where is that?’

The sergeant beside him checked his auspex.

‘Locator places the weapon discharge in the western walkway, my lord,’ he reported. ‘Beside the Praetorium.’

Auguston’s squad turned, weapons raised, as warriors approached along the hallway. It was the Lion’s man Holguin, and a band of his Dark Angels.

They faced each other uneasily for a moment.

‘Anything?’ asked Auguston.

‘He left grenades seeded in the beds of the ornamental garden,’ replied Holguin, ‘and two more of yours dead outside the Sacristy.’

‘I will have his head on a spike,’ said Auguston.

The vox crackled.

‘This is Prayto! Respond!’

‘Auguston,’ the First Master replied.

‘He was here, Phratus! At the Praetorium. Where are you?’

‘In the hall of the Eastern Communication.’

‘Then he’s coming your way, Phratus. I can sense him. He’s coming your way and he’s coming fast.’

‘Titus? Titus?’

The link was dead. Auguston looked at Holguin, his combi-bolter raised.

‘You hear that, Dark Angel? It appears we may be the ones to end this.’

Holguin was holding his executioner’s blade.

‘It is an honour I am happy to share,’ he replied.

Auguston gestured, and the Ultramarines spread down the long, high-ceilinged hallway. The Dark Angels moved to the left, covering the closest of the doorways.

‘This is Auguston,’ the First Master said into his vox. ‘I have it on good authority that our tormentor is moving into the Eastern Communication, heading towards the Chapel of Memorial. Available squads close in. Block access to the Sword Hall and the Temple of Correction.’

He waited.

‘Respond!’ he hissed.

There was a shiver on the vox, distant static, like the dry skeleton of a voice.

‘Roboute…’ it said.

‘Who speaks?’ Auguston demanded.

‘Roboute…’ the dry crackle repeated. It was almost crooning the name.

‘Flames of Terra,’ Auguston said, looking at Holguin. ‘He’s even inside the damned vox.’

A bang made them all turn. The light bank at the far end of the Communication went out. Quickly, in sequence, the other light banks along the hallway went out, each one with its own bang. Darkness marched towards them along the hall.

The lights went out overhead, and then behind them. Then the lights were extinguished all the way to the far end of the Communication.

Silence. No emergency power cut in. No secondary lighting. It was as though the darkness had obeyed Konrad Curze, and all light had fled from him in panic.

Every helm visor lit up, Ultramarines and Dark Angels alike. High resolution enhancement searched the darkened Communication for movement. Auguston and his men saw the area as a green twilight.

‘Roboute…’ the vox whispered.

Suddenly, Holguin was moving. The massive, round-tipped executioner’s sword caught the infralight on its edge as it swung. There was a shadow, just a shadow… No, even less than that. Just the hint or memory of a shadow. The blade caught something, a tatter of night.

Then there was an impact, bloody and crunching. Holguin lurched backwards and crashed against the wall. The Dark Angel beside him seemed to pivot oddly. His side came open, armour and torso parting to release blood and slippery organs.

Auguston began firing. They all began firing.

In the rapid, hellish flash of the multiplying gunfire, Auguston turned full circle, hunting for his foe.

He suddenly found a face immediately in front of his, just centimetres away, staring straight into his soul. The face had eyes like black suns, and skin as white as a bone desert, made sickly by the green infralight. Long, ragged, black hair half-stuck across the cheek and nose, glued by the blood of dead men. The mouth leered, revealing blackened teeth and blue gums. The leer stretched the mouth open impossibly, inhumanly wide.

Auguston heard laughter.

He lunged at Curze, firing his combi-bolter. The face and the shadow, even the insane laughter, all vanished in a moment. In dismay, Auguston saw that his shots had felled a Dark Angel on the far side of the hall.

Other men were still firing. It was madness, confusion. All discipline was lost. It had scarcely been seconds since the first instant of the fight. Auguston realised he was bellowing, expressing his fury as desperate non-words.

Was this fear? Was this actually fear?

He saw a legionary, an Ultramarine, struck into the air. The warrior had been touched by nothing more than a piece of shadow, the tatter of a butcher-bird’s black, ragged wing, but the impact was as though he had been fired from a cannon. Flailing, he struck one of the hall’s great windows, shoulders first, and went through it in a blistering cascade of broken glass.

The helm of an Ultramarines sergeant rolled along the stone floor at Auguston’s feet.

There was still a head in it.

‘Face me!’ Auguston roared. ‘Face me like a man! You coward! You night-thing!’

Curze’s answer was a clawed hand that punched through ceramite, armoured under-mail and fibre-sheaves into the living gut.

Auguston fell forward, blood spewing out of the eviscerating wound. So much blood had come out of the dead Ultramarines and Dark Angels that there was almost a pressurised tidal flow along the Communication’s floor. The darkness stank of blood – the blood of good Space Marines.

Curze paused for a second, a towering, skeletal shadow in the twilight, one clawed hand raised, clutching steaming ropes of Auguston’s viscera as some ragged trophy.

‘I’m not dead yet, you bastard,’ Auguston spluttered, bubbles of blood-froth bursting at his lips. Soaked almost head to foot in his own gore, he came at Curze with the executioner’s sword clenched in his right fist.

From inside the candle-lit Chapel of Memorial, the sounds of the Night Haunter’s campaign of terror could be distinctly heard: the alarms, the frantic vox, the sounds of running feet, gunfire, the random detonation of grenades and other devices from the east, the west, from every quarter.

‘It sounds as though a war rages through the Fortress,’ said the vision of Warsmith Dantioch.

‘Be thankful you are not here,’ replied Alexis Polux. ‘I have heard many tales of Curze’s malevolent and vicious talents, but this night he seems to be excelling himself.’

Polux glanced around as power failed in the hallway outside the chapel. He could smell burning. He drew his bolt pistol, favouring his right hand, not his healing new one.

‘I believe our audience for the day is over,’ said Polux. ‘I must take my leave and assist my brothers in halting this madness.’

‘Then I bid you farewell in your efforts, Polux,’ said the warsmith.

Polux glanced back at Dantioch icily, as if the earnest wishes of an Iron Warrior were more of a damnation than a blessing.

Three Ultramarines suddenly entered the chapel, weapons drawn, hunting for targets. When they sighted Polux, they lowered their aim.

‘Has he come this way?’ demanded the officer.

‘Curze? No,’ replied Polux.

‘This area must be secured,’ the officer told the two legionaries with him.

‘You think he’s close?’ Polux asked, walking towards him.

‘He’s everywhere,’ the officer replied grimly. ‘The order came “Kill all the shadows”. I thought… I thought that was nonsense at first. But he is like a daemon.’

‘He is a son of the Emperor,’ Dantioch said from the lustrous vision of Sotha’s tuning floor behind them. ‘He is a demigod. It is not possible to overestimate his potential.’

Dantioch had risen uneasily from his high-backed chair and come to the very edge of the communication field.

‘Beware,’ he said suddenly, looking around as he responded to the empathic vibrations of the quantum field. ‘My dear brothers, beware–’

All the candles in the chapel blew out. The sudden gloom was wreathed with tendrils of grey smoke roiling from the wicks. Now the greater proportion of light came from the polished cavern on Sotha, falling into the night-struck chapel through the communication field, and illuminated the room in an uncanny fashion.

The chapel had four sets of double doors, one at each compass point. The doors at the north end splintered open, demolished by brute force. Two figures came through, locked together, reeling across the chapel’s broad, paved floor. One was First Master Auguston, a raw-headed spectre drenched from head to foot in blood, Holguin’s long blade in his hand. The other was darkness manifest – a bigger, crueller, more elongated shape, an insubstantial horror, the fleeting ragged shadow left on the ground when a rook flies fast across a winter sky.

Polux and the Ultramarines rushed forward. The combatants were so interlocked that it was impossible to take a shot without risking Auguston. Polux hesitated, watching in horror. The Night Haunter seemed as a wraith, a mosaic, a suggestion of claws, of a ragged cloak, of long hair straggled and streaming, of a face white as a bared skull, of a black leering mouth.

‘He’s here!’ the Ultramarines officer yelled into his vox. ‘The chapel! The chapel!’

Auguston fell, broken, spent. He landed on his knees and, for an instant, Polux could see the appalling damage that had been wrought upon him. The First Master had been ripped open and gutted, half his face torn off. That Auguston was still moving spoke to his courage and transhuman thresholds.

The executioner’s sword was no longer in the First Master’s hand. Hurled, it crossed the chapel like a spear, and impaled the Ultramarines officer through the neck before he could repeat his call. He fell, drowning noisily in his own blood, air whistling out of the holes in his throat.

Polux and the two Ultramarines opened fire, but there seemed to be nothing to hit.

‘For Terra’s sake, Polux!’ Dantioch yelled from the edge of the communication field. ‘Flee! You can’t fight him. Flee now! Regroup!’

Claws came out of the smoking darkness and sheared through one of the Ultramarines. The other ran forward, firing repeated shots that hit nothing except his slain comrade. Darkness twisted around him, and his head turned through one hundred and eighty degrees with a brittle crack. The Ultramarine fell across his comrade’s corpse.

‘Polux! Run, brother! Run!’ Dantioch yelled in exasperation.

Polux had frozen. He turned slowly, bolt pistol raised, darkness melting and flowing around him. Silence hissed and breathed like a living thing. He could feel the monster close at hand. He could feel stinking evil circling him in the darkness. Nearby, Auguston let out a terrible gurgling sound. Spasms shook his kneeling form as death finally overwhelmed him. He toppled onto his side.

‘You’ve killed many tonight, monster,’ Polux told the darkness, still turning, still hunting. ‘None I doubt as great a warrior as that man now expired. None I doubt that put up so furious a fight against your evil. I hope I last half as long.’

The silence breathed.

‘Moreover,’ said Polux, ‘I hope I bathe in your blood before the night is done.’

‘To your left!’ Dantioch yelled.

Polux swung and fired. He heard something. Had he actually made contact? Drawn blood?

‘To your right!’ Dantioch shouted.

Polux turned again and fired two more rounds. The warsmith was using the field’s empathic vibrations to read the darkness and detect the Night Haunter’s movements.

‘Where now?’ Polux yelled back. ‘Where is he?’

‘At your back!’ Dantioch roared.

Polux wheeled, but he was not fast enough. He took a glancing blow that knocked him to the floor, hard. The bolt pistol skittered away from him across the flagstones.

‘Move!’ Dantioch cried.

Polux rolled sideways desperately. Claws came out of nothingness, sweeping in a downstroke that split the flagstones where he had been lying.

He struggled forward on hands and knees, groping for his fallen weapon.

‘No! Keep moving!’ Dantioch yelled.

Polux hurled himself aside again as the claws came again and again. He was almost on top of the fallen Ultramarine. Heedless, frantic, Polux wrenched the executioner’s sword out of the man’s neck.

‘Left! Left!’ Dantioch cried.

Polux struck left with the long blade, once, twice.

‘Ahead!’

Polux swung another blow. With this one, he felt a contact through the hilt. Speckles of black blood dotted the flagstones. He had left a mark. He would make a good account of his death, as Auguston had.

‘Right! And behind!’ Dantioch shouted.

Polux put his weight into the sword as he turned, and felt the heavy blade rebound off claws. There was a shower of sparks as the Caliban-forged steel deflected Curze’s talons. Polux followed the block with another swing, and then another wild strike, hoping to keep the monster at bay.

The Dark Angel’s sword was so large that Polux realised he was instinctively using both hands; old hand and new, clamped expertly around the grip.

He feinted left and then chopped into the darkness to the right, and then ahead.

‘Guide me, warsmith! Where is he?’

‘There. To your left!’ Dantioch exclaimed, pointing uselessly at the dark within the darkness.

Polux struck hard to his left. He could smell the stink of something in the gloom, feel the heat of its rage. It was an unwashed smell, the smell of a diseased animal. It was like fighting all the beasts of Inwit’s nightside at once.

‘Left. Now!’

Polux roared at the effort as he struck with the blade. He connected again. He felt it.

‘Did I cut you?’ he asked the darkness. ‘Do you bleed?’

The answer was a blow to the face that smashed Polux to the floor. Dazed, he tried to recover. His mouth was full of blood.

He could hear Dantioch yelling his name, telling him to move. He couldn’t clear his head.

Another blow, a kick most likely, caught him in the belly, and sent him rolling across the chapel floor. The sword was no longer in his grasp. There was no air in his lungs. He spat blood.

He had ended up right at the edge of the communication field, bathed in the eerie light of Sotha. Dantioch was standing over him, yelling in helpless rage and frustration, apparently centimetres away yet actually light years distant. The warsmith’s anguish was terrible: he could do nothing but watch, and cry at Polux to get up, and scream obscenities at the thing in the dark.

Polux tried to rise.

Everything went very still. He could hear Curze breathing, panting like a dog. He was aware of the Night Haunter beside him, standing over him, the tips of the long, long talons slowly, almost delicately, scraping across Polux’s armour, about to flex and strike.

‘Yes, I bleed,’ rasped a death-rattle voice, ‘but not as much as you are about to, Imperial Fist.’

Polux flinched, braced for the kill-stroke.

A gauntlet seized his left hand and pulled. It pulled with immense power. It pulled him sidelong and out of the way, so that Curze’s scything deathblow missed entirely.

Polux looked up to see who could have entered the fight and intervened. But only three were present: Polux, the shadow of Curze and the warsmith.

Dantioch had a tight grasp on Polux’s new left hand. The air was cool, and smelled entirely different. The acoustics around him had changed. Polux was no longer in the chapel.

He was on the tuning floor on Sotha.

‘Dantioch…?’

‘I don’t have an answer…’ the warsmith replied.

They looked back. Curze, a towering, leering shade, cheated of his prey, gazed back from the darkness of the chapel. He reached out a handful of talons and tried to touch them, but they were as solid as smoke. Where Polux had passed across, Curze could not.

‘You will tell me,’ Curze hissed, spittle flecking between his blackened teeth, ‘how this is done. How this is achieved?’

‘The faith and will of good men,’ replied Dantioch. ‘When they stand together against infamy, the galaxy fights for them.’

‘I would hardly put my trust in the galaxy,’ Curze hissed. He was so thin, so tall, a cadaverous herald of death. ‘I have seen what it dreams of, and it is quite run mad.’

His leering smile faded away.

‘Now come back where I can kill you,’ he said.

‘I believe neither of us will accept your offer, Night Lord,’ said Dantioch. ‘Furthermore, I believe you are about to have more pressing matters to concern you. Auguston and Polux have between them kept you here longer than you meant to stay.’

Behind Curze, light flooded into the chapel as two sets of doors opened, the south and the west entrances. Framed in the south, blade drawn and flanked by Ultramarines, stood the Avenging Son.

‘Back off,’ Guilliman told his men. Rage smouldered from him like a heat haze. ‘This wretch is mine.’

‘No,’ said the Lion, leaving his Dark Angels at the threshold of the west doorway and striding forward. ‘He’s ours.’

‘Well now,’ murmured Konrad Curze, hooking down the left-hand corner of his lower lip thoughtfully with the tip of one extravagant, bloodied claw. ‘Interesting.’

16
Blood Brothers

‘I may call you kin, but you are un-kind. You are entirely not of me.’

– Ferrus Manus to Konrad Curze, reported

Curze stepped away from the communication field and faced his brothers. Guilliman and the Lion approached him, Guilliman to his left, the Lion to his right.

Guilliman clutched his gladius – not his most magnificent weapon, but a favoured piece. He had made more kills than he had truly cared about with that utilitarian blade than any fine sword in his arsenal. He had a gleaming combat shield strapped to his left arm. He was bare-headed.

The Lion’s hair was loose, his jaw set. He held a charged longsword that Farith Redloss had passed to him. It was known far and wide as the Lion Sword, said to have been forged on Terra by the Emperor’s own armourers. It shone with a pale inner light.

‘Not a man intervenes,’ Guilliman said to the Ultramarines and Dark Angels crowded at the chapel doors.

‘This is between us,’ the Lion agreed. ‘Farith, you may strike down any other who tries to engage.’

‘You heard that, Gorod,’ said Guilliman. ‘The same applies.’

Both Gorod of the Invictus and Farith Redloss made murmurs of acceptance.

‘You do not come to my world and do this,’ said Guilliman, stalking Curze. ‘You do not enter my house and do this.’

‘I do what I please, brother,’ Curze replied. They could smell the stink of his breath from across the chamber.

The Lion glanced sidelong at Auguston’s pitiful remains.

‘You have piled up too many corpses this night, Konrad. My legionaries, and too many of Roboute’s. This warrior, the Master of the First, is an especially grievous loss.’

‘He was pugnacious,’ Curze hissed. ‘Even when I’d taken out his gizzard and lights, he kept walking.’

‘Bastard!’ Guilliman snapped.

‘Master Auguston fought like the champions of legend, my lord,’ said Polux from the gleaming field. ‘He defied death to fight on. I have never seen its like.’

‘And you have defied corporeal physics to escape me, Imperial Fist,’ Curze whispered, his words issuing as though they had been ground out between millstones. ‘Come. Does no one else wonder at that?’

Guilliman was close to Curze. He began to loop and spin his gladius.

‘Brother has killed brother,’ he said. ‘As we were raised, that is unthinkable, but brother has killed brother. Every time, it has been a heretic son who has slain a devoted brother: Ferrus, Corax, Vulkan.’

‘Ahh now,’ murmured Curze. ‘Tut tut tut, Roboute. Vulkan lives.’

‘Then I rejoice,’ said Guilliman, ‘but I believe it is past time that the heretics paid a price. A blood price. I think it is past time that a devoted son put a heretic in the damned ground.’

‘Agreed, sevenfold,’ said the Lion in a low, hunting voice.

Curze faced them. He stood tall, taller than either of them – a stark figure of lean, long bones and hollowed frame. He looked like a starved giant, towering yet emaciated. His tattered, black cloak flowed from his shoulders to the ground like the furled wings of a wounded bird. His slender arms hung at his sides, the huge, slack power claws making his hands disproportionately long. He tilted his head back, his hair lank. He closed his eyes.

‘Brother,’ he said. ‘And you, brother. Come and get me.’

Guilliman surged forward. The Lion was faster. Guilliman was robust and dazzling, but the Lion was elegant. The Lion Sword described a buzzing arc in the air as it circled, leaving a bright after-image briefly stamped on the vision of all the legionaries watching.

The blade scythed at Curze’s head. He did not move.

Then he was smoke.

The power claws of Curze’s right hand snapped out and drove aside the stinging bite of the Lion Sword. The claws of his left met Guilliman’s gladius and deflected it.

Guilliman struck again, driven by fury, and cut through something.

It was only shadow. Only the tatter of a cloak.

Talons snapped back at him. He raised his shield. Razored claws ripped sparks off its surface and shredded its edges.

Guilliman hacked again. Nothing. Shadow. Shadow!

The Lion rotated like a dancer, and swung the famous Lion Sword sidelong at Curze with a two-handed grip. Curze ducked, evaded, and rotated in turn, punching away Guilliman’s next strike as he did so. The Lion tilted and swung his sizzling blade in a strike designed to unseam Curze from the groin to the throat.

But Curze was no longer there.

He had flickered left and blocked the upswing. Then he smashed his hand into the Lion’s face.

Blood burst from the strike. A talon had punched clean through the side of the Lion’s neck. The Lion reeled backwards, his hand clamped to the wound to staunch it.

Some of his men mobbed forward in alarm.

‘No!’ the Lion yelled.

Guilliman slammed his ragged shield into Curze and drove him backwards. He stabbed twice with the gladius, rapidly, like a striking snake, and drew blood on the second jab.

‘Bastard!’ Curze hissed.

His talons struck Guilliman and knocked him aside, leaving four long gouges in his chestplate.

Guilliman recovered, sweeping in low with his blade, and then high on the return. Struck, Curze spun away and fell. When he rose, his right cheek was open to the bone.

‘Now we start in earnest,’ he hissed.

‘Now we finish in earnest,’ the Lion spat, coming at Curze with his sword ready.

Curze moved again, sliding into darkness. The blade ripped through smoke and shadow. The Lion turned and engaged again, striking once, twice, three times, each blow blocked by swift and savage claws.

‘Oh sweet Terra,’ Polux said. He looked at the warsmith. ‘Do you feel that?’

‘I do,’ agreed Dantioch. ‘I do most assuredly.’

The quantum field’s empathic effect was resonating through both of them.

They could both feel it. A truth, Curze’s truth. The efforts of Auguston and Polux had not delayed Curze too long. They had not kept him in place so that he might be trapped.

He had built this as a trap all along, a trap to kill one or more of his brothers.

‘Get out, my lords!’ Polux yelled. ‘Get out now! He has wired the Chapel! Get out, for the love of mercy!’

Driven back by Curze’s claws, Guilliman looked at the figures of Polux and the warsmith in the glow of the communication field.

‘He has what?’

‘Get out, my lord!’ Polux screamed.

Curze knocked the Lion’s blade aside.

He paused, and his black-toothed grin reappeared. It was a grin of triumph.

‘I have, since birth, been a staunch friend of death,’ he said. ‘I have learned that death is lonely, and so enjoys making new and lasting friends. Roboute? Great Lion? Let me make your introduction.’

Curze clapped his clawed hands.

The seventy-five grenades wired around the eaves of the Chapel triggered.

In a sheet of white flame and fury, the Chapel of Memorial ceased to be.

17
Hearth and
Home

‘Death does not discriminate. It is so even-handed,
so scrupulously fair, that it seems not fair at all.’

– Eeron Kleve, X Legion Iron Hands

‘Tell me, I implore you, what was that?’ Euten asked the captain of the praecental guard.

Vodun Badorum shook his head.

‘Mamzel, it is hard to say. Reports from the Fortress are… contradictory. Some say it is the Night Haunter, unleashed upon the Castrum, others claim it is an entire host of night haunters. There are reports of attacks and incidents on every level of the Fortress and–’

‘But you cannot tell me what the blast was that shook these very walls?’ she snapped.

Badorum shook his head again. At his side, four of his praecentals were urgently conducting conversations by vox, trying to gather accurate intelligence from the Fortress.

‘Then I will trust my own eyes,’ Euten announced, and stood up abruptly. Badorum had, previously, ordered her escorted into the private wing of the Residency for safety, but now she marched straight across the outer hall to the head of the main staircase. He hurried after her, calling her name. The August Chamberlain Principal moved with surprising speed when she wanted to.

Down below, at the foot of the staircase, warriors milled and waited. They looked up at her as she strode past. They were all Legiones Astartes, all castaway visitors to Macragge from the Shattered Legions. The lower halls of the Residency had become their barracks.

Like her, they awaited news.

‘Mamzel. My lady!’ one called.

Euten did not stop for him. She crossed the landing, opened the glazed doors to the west balcony and stepped into the night. Badorum followed her.

The night was especially dark. The Pharos glowed frostily like a white lamp in fog. A swathe of black air hung across the great Civitas below the wall.

From the unlit balcony, in the cold night, they had a direct view to the Porta Hera and the cyclopean eastern ramparts of the Fortress proper. Smoke and, in places, flames rose from the Fortress at several locations. They were all dwarfed by the huge coil of underlit smoke belching from the inner part of the Fortress into the night. It reminded Euten of the great, grumbling volcanoes in the far north of Macragge.

‘Great Darknesses!’ she whispered, that old Illyrian curse. ‘What has been done?’

‘Mamzel, you must come inside,’ said Badorum.

‘The Chapel of Memorial is burning, Vodun,’ she said, staring at the appalling view.

‘I think perhaps so,’ said Badorum. ‘Or perhaps the Praetorium.’

‘It is the Chapel,’ she insisted. She turned to look at him.

‘We must know something of what is transpiring in the Fortress. Guilliman is in there.’

‘And the Lion too, both gone to hunt their fell brother, who makes war on us tonight.’

‘War. Mischief. Dissent. Terror,’ Euten said, uttering each word as though she were spitting out pebbles. ‘The Night Haunter searches for one victim above all others: Ultramar. Macragge Civitas is the last stable, loyal place in the galaxy, Vodun, for our lord has made it that way, steadfast when all else withers and fails. This is what Curze has come to murder – our peace, our faith, our fortitude.’

‘They will stop him,’ said Badorum.

‘Will they? Or by dawn, will there be panic and rioting in the streets of the city? Will terror reign and blight the hearts of the citizenry? Will Macragge catch afire and blaze, the last true stronghold lost?’

‘No, my lady,’ he said. ‘Come, please, I fear it is not safe. Come, please, within.’

Euten allowed herself to be walked back into the Residency.

‘My lord has taken almost all the Ultramarines on the Castrum into the Fortress with him, and he has in addition his noble brother and good strengths of Dark Angels legionaries. Furthermore, the gates and base of the wall are guarded to prevent access to the Civitas.’

‘The monster Curze got in, Vodun. He can get out again, I expect.’

‘With every passing second, he has less and less surprise on his side, mamzel,’ Badorum replied.

She stopped at the head of the staircase and looked down at the patiently waiting Space Marines: Salamanders, Iron Hands, Raven Guard, a White Scar or two.

‘What have we here, Vodun?’ she asked.

‘My praecentals hold the Residency, mam,’ the commander replied. ‘Lord Guilliman’s direct order. He made me pull my men back from the Fortress.’

‘Because the praecentals would be outclassed?’

‘This hunt is a task for the Legiones Astartes at the very least. It is no small thing to corner and kill a primarch.’

‘We have not used our full resource,’ she said. She took a few steps down the staircase and addressed the waiting warriors.

‘My dear battle-brothers, worthy souls – this night is a grim one, a darkness through which we must abide and come out whole, together.’

‘We have come through much already, my lady,’ said one of the Iron Hands. ‘We have learned to endure. It is the steel in us.’

Many of those around him nodded.

‘Well spoken, Sardon Karaashison,’ Euten said.

‘We are yet in ignorance, lady,’ said a Raven Guard captain near to Karaashison. ‘We are merely obliged to wait, robbed of action and purpose.’

Euten nodded. This was a problem that had yet to be overcome. Since the light of the Pharos had been turned on Macragge, nigh on a thousand souls had come to the city from the Shattered Legions of Isstvan. They were sequestered in the Residency, and in several other barracks across the city. They were a resource of great potential, and their resolve and determination, having been witnesses to treason and atrocity, was beyond doubt.

A way had not yet been found, however, to resolve them into one force. Guilliman had begun to find duties for some, as suited their specialisms, and it was, of course, straightforward to place Iron Hands with Iron Hands and Raven Guard with Raven Guard. But to alloy them more permanently threw up problems of differences in Legion practices and methods, of motivations and loyalties, of intentions and desires. Would the flesh-spare leaders of the Iron Hands form a command backbone to a force of survivors? Would the Raven Guard or the Salamanders be content to follow that? Could command be shared? Could orthodoxies be matched? Could the survivors be inducted as additional squads to the Ultramarines or the Dark Angels?

As things stood, the Shattered Legions were hard to wield as one force. In an emergency, such as the one that presently hung like a shroud across Macragge, they could not be deployed with unified effect as could the Ultramarines or the Dark Angels.

The question of it had vexed Guilliman. Euten had seen him struggling to resolve the issue many times in the previous few days.

‘The individual character and characteristics of the Legions is what invests them with their strengths, and makes them wonders,’ he had said to her. ‘The idiosyncrasies of composition and method are precisely why there are eighteen Legions, rather than one Legion eighteen times the size. But it is a weakness too, a mortal flaw, when it comes to forging them together as one. It makes one long for a formal, martial codification that would burnish away the rough edges, clean out the differences, and provide for a perfect, easy fit.’

‘I sympathise with your ignorance, Verano Ebb,’ said Euten. ‘We all dwell in darkness this evening. I will tell you what I know, which is too little. Through guile and skill, and by exploiting the good faith of good men, Konrad Curze has made a visitation to our city this day.’

There was a general murmur of disquiet and anger.

Badorum, at Euten’s side, held up a hand for quiet.

‘To my best knowledge,’ the chamberlain continued, ‘he is loose in the Fortress, seeking to undermine the authority of Ultramar by breaking morale and the rule of law, and by magnifying hatred and fear.’

‘These were always his weapons,’ said an Iron Hands officer in mourning robes.

‘They always were, Eeron Kleve,’ said Euten with a solemn nod. ‘And they always shall be, until he is stopped or finished. My lord Guilliman and the noble lord of the Dark Angels are even now in the Fortress hunting for him. I pity any man, any demigod even, who has the like of those two at his heels.’

Another general murmur filled the entryway, but this time it was more emphatic and eager.

‘I dare say,’ said Euten, ‘that against a foe like the Night Haunter there is no such thing as too much help. If you can, go from here to the Fortress and add your power to the hunt. But hear me well… Do not do this thing if you are not prepared to respect and follow the commands of Ultramarines or Dark Angels officers. The field is theirs tonight. Order and discipline must be maintained, especially against a foe whose singular purpose is to breed disorder and chaos. There is no room for pride or individual action, battle-brothers. If you can obey and serve, then my lord will be glad of you.’

‘We will not abuse this trust, my lady,’ said Eeron Kleve.

‘Horus, cursed be his name, has done one good deed in this great treachery,’ said Verano Ebb. ‘He has made the greatest and truest sworn comrades of those he has wounded.’

‘It gladdens my heart to hear it on this cold night, sirs,’ said Euten. ‘As Chamberlain Principal, I own the full authority of the Lord of Ultramar in his absence. So with that power and pitch of command, I charge you all to go from here to the gates of the Fortress, and make perfect war upon the Night Haunter. Serve Guilliman, serve the Lion, and serve Macragge. Let no disobedience weaken this endeavour. May your blades, before dawn comes, run wet with traitor blood.’

The gathered legionaries, all looking up at her, made immediate salute, crashing mailed fists against their breastplates.

‘We march for Macragge!’ declared Timur Gantulga.

It was odd to hear the cry uttered in a strong Chogorian accent, but in an instant the declaration was echoed with vigour by his fellow White Scars, and then by every battle-brother in the hall. The war cry of Ultramar was coloured and invested by the accents of cold-hearted Medusa, of lofty Deliverance, of feral Fenris, of fire-forged Nocturne, of glacial Inwit and distant, holy Terra.

‘My lord Badorum,’ said Euten, turning to him. ‘Make it known by my seal and authority, via all channels, that this force of warriors is coming to the Fortress to render aid. Have the gates opened for them, and have them admitted and assigned without delay. Let us not waste this intent.’

‘At once,’ he assured her.

‘And, Badorum,’ Euten added, ‘make sure my lord Guilliman personally knows that I am sending this strength. Tell him they are of one resolve and ready for his command.’

‘I will,’ he said.

He had neither the heart nor the words to tell her that, since the blast that had ripped through the Chapel of Memorial ten minutes past, no contact had been made with Guilliman or the Lion at all.

‘Gorod!’

The fief commander of the bodyguard turned his massive armoured form and saw Titus Prayto approaching him. Prayto was limping and clutched a deep and bloody injury to his side.

‘Tell me,’ said Prayto.

‘I tell you squarely, Prayto,’ rumbled the Cataphractii, ‘I am a man of no honour. I have failed in my duty. My oath was to protect him, and I have not done so.’

He looked at the Master of the Librarius.

‘Guilliman is dead,’ Gorod said. ‘So too the worthy Lion.’

Behind them, across the courtyard, the great Chapel of Memorial was blazing in the night. Its roof and upper walls had collapsed. The heat was so intense that even armoured legionaries had been driven back while rescue crews were summoned.

‘No,’ said Prayto.

‘I may wish on every minute of every day for the rest of my life that it was not a truth to be spoken,’ said Gorod, ‘but it is plain. Curze has struck the foulest blow of all. He rigged the chapel, and made it so that our lord and the Lion found him there. Curze was bait in his own trap. He has murdered our master, and with him the noble king of Caliban. I only hope that this crime has cost him his life.’

‘No,’ Prayto repeated.

‘Why do you refute me?’ asked Gorod. ‘With my own eyes–’

‘Drakus,’ said Prayto, ‘I have, perhaps at penalty to my own soundness of thought, touched the mind of Konrad Curze. He showed it to me, so that I might know the nightmares that live there and be driven mad. Drakus, listen. I feel it still… still, in my head!’

Wincing and drawing sharp breath as he moved, Prayto looked around.

‘Curze lives. And if he escaped this conflagration, then so could better men.’

‘He knew what was coming. He planned his exit.’

‘If Lord Guilliman had died, Drakus, I swear I would have felt that too. He trusts me and lets me wait at his shoulder. I would have felt the instant of his annihilation.’

‘Then I do not know how or where he lives,’ said Gorod. ‘Forgive me, brother, but you have taken a great wound. I wonder if your perceptions are as sharp as they might be?’

‘In this, they are.’

Farith Redloss approached them. The Dreadwing commander showed no expression in his face.

‘A signal has come, of reinforcement sent from the Residency. You are to open the western gates. There is no trace of Curze, nor of…’

His voice fell away, wordless.

‘Master Prayto declares them all living,’ said Gorod, ‘despite the evidence of this inferno.’

‘Then Master Prayto gladdens my heart. You have hard proof, brother?’

‘I have my mind,’ said Prayto. ‘We must find them. Indeed, we must find Curze in particular. If he is still at liberty, then he will use this great confusion to sow greater woes. Let us open the gates, bring in the reinforcements, and lock the Fortress down entirely. I will attempt to focus. Perhaps with the aid of other Librarians I can locate the villain in the darkness.’

‘You need attention,’ said Gorod. ‘That wound must be dressed and bound. You should go to the medicae hall at once–’

‘The medicae hall has suffered attack too,’ said Farith Redloss. ‘I heard that it was sealed while the trouble was contained.’

‘Wait,’ said Prayto. ‘Curze struck all over the Fortress, but the Residency too? So far I had not heard of his acts extending beyond the precinct of the Fortress.’

‘I say only what I have heard,’ said Farith Redloss.

‘Are we haunted by more than one foe tonight?’ asked Gorod.

‘Let us concentrate on the one we know about,’ said Titus Prayto.

The eastern gates of the Fortress rumbled open, letting the stench of fire and smoke out into the cold night air. Attending without, on the pavements and colonnades that linked the Residency to the Fortress, the battle-brothers of the Shattered Legions roused and moved inside.

Niax Nessus awaited them, with senior officers of his Legion and the Dark Angels.

‘We are glad of your arms,’ Nessus said directly. ‘Confusion is our enemy. We have good reason to believe that the Night Haunter is still active within the bounds of the Fortress. He must be found. You will divide into search squads, and pair each squad with a team of Ultramarines or Dark Angels. You will move in concert, watch each other’s backs, and confirm each other’s sweeps.’

‘I have assigned areas,’ said Holguin. The Dark Angels had, it was clear, taken an almost crippling blow in combat. His determination to proceed was inspiring. ‘Brothers, Curze is evil and cunning manifest. At any sighting, sound the warning, stay in formation and maintain discipline. He has devoured too many good lives tonight by declaring misrule and disarray.’

‘He is a killer, right enough,’ Nessus agreed. ‘Take no chances with your lives, or the lives of the brothers around you.’

Ultramarines officers moved forward and began marshalling the reinforcement force.

‘I have studied his art,’ Gantulga said to Kleve as they awaited assignment.

‘His art?’

‘Little is written of the Night Lord’s methods, but what is recorded is stimulating.’ The White Scar paused. ‘He fancies himself a hunter, a stalker of prey. That is how he styles himself, at least. But it…’

‘What, friend?’ asked Kleve.

‘It is not convincing. I say that as a hunter myself, and as one who knows hunters. What I have seen so far of his work in the Fortress – it is expertise of a sort, but it is not hunting.’

‘His design is to spread terror and disruption,’ said Kleve.

‘And to wound, and to punish,’ Gantulga said. ‘He risks himself. He places himself at great jeopardy to strike these blows, as though he cares not for his own fate.’ He paused and looked back along the gatehouse to where the sentries were preparing to close and bar the eastern gates. The night outside, framed by the massive gate arch, was as cold, black and unfathomable as darkened glass.

‘Unless,’ he murmured. ‘Unless, Eeron Kleve, he is a hunter at heart.’

‘What do you mean, Gantulga?’

‘A hunter takes risks,’ said the White Scar, ‘but never excessive ones. He always protects himself, so that he may hunt again. A wolf stalks a herd, and perhaps causes panic, so the herdsmen drive the animals into a tight fold and pen them. Does the wolf persist? No. It is too open, too exposed. The herdsmen are alert, and they have gathered in numbers. To try to take from the fold would draw down their slingshots and arrows. That is an unacceptable and unnecessary risk for a hunter. So, while the herdsmen are occupied, guarding the herd, the wolf turns to where they are not – the larder, the granary, the stables, the bird cages.’

Gantulga turned, abruptly, and hurried towards the closing gates.

‘What are you doing?’ Kleve called after him, starting to follow. ‘The chamberlain was quite specific! This is no time for individual action or improvisation! We are here only if we conform to discipline and command! Gantulga! We have a duty!’

The White Scar turned and looked back at the Iron Hands legionary for a second.

‘We do,’ he said, ‘but he’s not here. We are here, all of us, circling the herd. He has done what he can, but it is too dangerous for him to be here. There are too many of us. So he has gone where we are not.’

‘The Residency,’ said Kleve, understanding.

‘The Residency,’ Gantulga agreed.

He found a hall. It was unlit. It was a private place. His eyes saw all the details, despite the darkness. This was a room for trophies and keepsakes, a room where a proud man kept the relics and reminders of his career: books, charts, coats of armour, weapons.

This was not merely a man, though. Even in its raving delirium, his mind recognised that. This was more than a man. This was a master of worlds, a demigod.

Here hung blades of great scale – falchions and broadswords, powered glaives and hooked axes. Here were suits of plate and wargear master-crafted for state occasions. Here were the scrapes and notches of their service. Here were mantles and cloaks, robes and banners, the raiments and decorations of kingship.

He reached out with bloody hands.

The enemy was close.

He needed to be ready.

‘Hello?’

There was no one there.

Euten paused, and then shook her head. Her nerves were taut. She was jumping at shadows.

She had retired to Guilliman’s withdrawing chamber, so recently refurbished and repaired that it seemed half-empty. So many items needed to replaced, and so very many never could. The walls were bare of paintings. The newly installed cognis-signum cogitator device purred softly, and seemed cold and clinical compared to the ancient machine it had replaced.

She poured herself a drink, a small amasec.

The night was bleak outside the windows, cut only by the baleful glow of the Pharos. She tried to ignore the way the low clouds were side-lit and ruddy from the fires in the Fortress.

She sat, but could not settle. Setting down her glass, she went to the chamber doors. An officer of the praecental guard stood guard outside.

‘My lady?’

‘I am bothered, Percel,’ she said. ‘Is there really still no word from our Lord Guilliman? Please, good sir. It has been overlong.’

‘I will check again, my lady,’ the officer replied.

Euten went back into the room and resumed her seat. Her drink remained untouched. She tapped her fingers on her knee.

Her back ached. Her joints were sore. How miserable it was to be human and old, no matter the sciences that prolonged the mortal span. Euten resented the way that her life and capabilities were slowing down. Oh, to be transhuman in measure – to be so strong, to possess such vitality.

The day is not far off, she thought, when I will be of no more use to him, when I will need to be cared for like a child, and my part in his life will finally be over. Soon thereafter, I will be gone from this vale altogether. Have I done enough for him? I have stayed the course, stayed it well, from the days of Konor to this dark night. Surely I can serve him yet–

A noise. Was that a knock at the chamber door?

‘Come?’ she called out.

No one came. A cloud passed across the solitary star, briefly.

Why was there still no word from the Fortress?

Euten rose and crossed to the door.

‘Percel?’

There was no one in the hall. Glow-globes sizzled softly in their sconces.

He has gone as I ordered, she decided. He has gone to seek word.

The chamberlain went back into the room. She felt that she might fidget herself to death with nervous energy. She felt great agitation. It was ridiculous to be so, in a well-lit chamber, in a fortress-palace, guarded by the best soldiers in Ultramar. It–

She froze.

The name was written plainly on the wall. It had not been there when she had gone to the door. It was there now.

Roboute.

It was written – and Euten knew this even though she knew not how she knew it – in the still-warm blood of Officer Percel.

Horror clenched her. It drove the air from her lungs and the power from her voice. Her heart had never beaten so fast.

On the desk, there was a switch for the alarm. It seemed to be leagues away from her.

She turned slowly, turned in a full circle, waiting to set eyes upon the grinning thing that she knew must be waiting behind her.

There was nothing there. Nothing. Nothing.

Yet the letters of her master’s name still trickled red down the wall.

‘Who is here?’ she hissed.

No answer.

‘Who? Who is here?’

Nothing.

She looked around, hunting for detail. That name, daubed across the wall.

‘I am not afraid of you,’ she said. ‘I am August Chamberlain Principal of the Five Hundred Worlds, and damaged fiends like you do not frighten me. Show yourself. Be a man and confront me. I dare you.’

What other details had changed while she had gone to the door?

Her glass. Her glass. It still sat where she had set it upon the side table, but it was no longer full of amasec. The spirit had gone. The glass was filled with blood.

Terror touched her heart. She could not fight it. Its fingers were like ice. Like a child, she fell to the floor and scrambled behind the nearest piece of furniture, staying low, crawling into shadows. Maybe she could hide. Maybe she could–

Officer Percel was waiting for her beneath the sofa. His severed head at least. His eyes were glazed. His mouth was half-open, as if in the middle of some great and dismaying surprise. He stared back at her from between the sofa’s elegant bluewood feet.

Euten recoiled.

There was someone standing over her, right behind her. His shadow fell across her. He was huge, silent and powerful, and he stank of blood and war.

She wanted to ask him, beg him, to make it quick, but her voice would not come out at all.

He put a massive hand on her shoulder. She flinched.

‘He’s here,’ the shadow said. ‘Stay down.’

She turned and looked up. Axe raised, alert, Faffnr Bludbroder stood over her.

‘You stayed,’ she whispered.

‘We don’t leave the hearth,’ he replied. He looked down at her. ‘Stay down. Run when I tell you. I will protect you with every drop of my blood.’

Still cowering, Euten looked around. As silent as falling snow, the other savage members of Faffnr’s pack were creeping into the chamber, weapons ready, ears pricked for any sound or motion. Their silence was extraordinary. They padded like…

…like wolves on snow.

Faffnr sighed. ‘Now we have it,’ he said.

Konrad Curze came out of somewhere. It was not exactly clear where. It might have been a shadow, or a fold of drapery, or even merely a tiny crack in the wall. He manifested. He was monstrously vast, a black shadow, power claws unfurled like the flight feathers of a raven. His hair was a halo of filth. His mouth was impossibly large, a yawning, blackened maw that stretched the thin white flesh of his angular skull as though it would split it. His right cheek was slashed to the bone and clotted with dark blood.

The Wolves went for him without hesitation. Their blades were thirsty.

Only Faffnr stayed his place, loyal Faffnr, covering her, defending her with his blade and body.

‘Run now,’ he told her.

‘I can’t run,’ she said, barely able to get up.

‘Hjold! You’ll damn well run if I tell you to run, female!’

A blur. Bo Soren swung his axe, but it was stopped dead by curved talons. Shockeye Ffyn lunged with his longsword, but cut only smoke.

Gudson Allfreyer came at the beast, but was smashed aside, spitting blood and broken teeth. Mads Loreson tried to swing, but was blocked by the reeling Allfreyer.

A primarch. A squad of the Legiones Astartes. One locked room. The same locked room. How would history repeat itself? How would it be revised?

The Wolves were the Emperor’s executioners.

But Curze…

Malmur Longreach, spear thrusting, and Salick the Braided, axe low, attacked together. One struck home, for blood spattered the floor and the furniture around Euten, but both were knocked aside. Kuro came in, Biter Herek, then Nido Knifeson.

Blades hammered off armour and drew flinty sparks from whirling claws. Curze grabbed Salick by the throat and threw him across the chamber into the wall. Biter Herek buried his axe in the depths of Curze’s darkness. Blood sprayed. Mads Loreson went down on one knee, clutching at his torn throat, trying to stem the blood gushing from it. Kuro Jjordrovk sailed across the chamber and demolished a chair and table as he landed.

Curze was laughing. His pale, harlequin face was split by a maniacal grin of delight in bloodshed. He threw Shockeye Ffyn through the chamber windows, which detonated as one sheet like a glass bomb. He kicked Biter Herek to the ground and cracked his skull with a vicious, armoured, driving elbow. He took Gudson’s sword away, broke it across the Wolf’s back, then drove the broken blade into Bo Soren’s cheek. Malmur grappled with him, and Nido Knifeson joined him.

Both were cast aside, bones snapping and armour cracking.

‘I told you to run,’ Faffnr said.

‘I’m sorry,’ Euten replied.

‘Last chance,’ he said, raising his axe and rushing the Night Haunter.

Euten found her feet. She got up and tried to run. A Wolf, bleeding and writhing, lay in her path, another to her left, and a third against the wall, who appeared dead.

The doors were close.

Something flew over her, a huge thing. It hit the doors ahead of her and smashed them down entirely.

It was Faffnr Bludbroder.

The pack-leader lay in the wreckage of the doors, and did not rise.

Euten stopped. She turned.

Konrad Curze bowed to her. He was a smile made of shadows and smoke and sickness. He was wickedness itself.

‘Tarasha,’ he sighed. A smile should not be that wide.

‘He will kill you for this,’ she said.

‘He’s dead, Tarasha,’ Curze replied.

All her strength left her. Grief felled her. She dropped to her knees.

‘No…’

‘I killed him,’ Curze cooed. ‘Roboute and the Lion both. I have studied his story, of course. As the little emperor he pretends to be, he does so chronicle himself. I have heard of you. Tarasha Euten, Chamberlain Principal, and to all intents a mother to him. A mother.’

Curze sighed.

‘Thanks to the genius of my father, my kind does not enjoy the luxury of mothers. You are rare. You are a rare and obscene thing, you ragged witch. I wish Roboute had been alive to suffer the damage of your death.’

Euten rose to her full height and looked the monster in the eye.

‘Go to hell, you bastard,’ she said.

Curze drew back his claws.

Something entered the room. It entered with great speed and force. Euten felt the rush of it, the shockwave. She recoiled, reeling, stunned.

Suddenly, her killer was no longer in front of her.

Curze was being driven towards the exploded window by an elemental force.

It was clad in mismatched armour plate and mail, all purloined from Guilliman’s trophy hall, armour built to fit a primarch’s scale. It wielded a battle mace, a fine piece that Roboute had used early in the Great Crusade.

The elemental force, raging and screaming, its skin sheened with blood, smashed Curze backwards and drove the mace into his slender chest.

The elemental force had a name, though it did not know it or remember it.

That name was Vulkan.

Locked together, he and Curze tumbled out of the chamber windows and into the precipitous gloom beyond.

18
Death Denied

‘There may, perforce, be one end of time, one end
of the long thread, that playeth out to such dimension that it
out-spans all things, and all things loseth their measure beside it:
the edges of our cosmos, the puissance of our gods,
the endeavours and limits of life, all would be found less
than the extremity of time. Indeed, so far may time extendeth
that it outstretches even death itself, so death itself must perish.’

– from The Night Sound of Insects,
by the Sage of Sanaa [antiquity]

The primarchs, wrestling and falling like rebel angels, dropped into the night.

The lower roofs of the Residency slammed up to meet them. Their mutual impact shattered tiles and broke finials from the caps of the roofline. Near to the site of their impact, the sprawled body of Shockeye Ffyn lay at an angle over a gutter pipe where he had landed before their plunge.

They were still a long way up. The Residency was of considerable height. Behind them lay the Aegis Wall and the even more significant drop off the Castrum of the Palaeopolis into the out-spread Civitas. To the west of them, the night wind blew in thick smoke from the burning Fortress.

The jarring force of impact barely interrupted their fight. Vulkan rolled across the broken tiles and rose at once, swinging the mace; it wasn’t a warhammer, but it was close enough to register in his damaged mind. Curze squealed in pain and indignation, and writhed at his attacker, lashing out with his talons.

‘You live! You live!’ shrieked the Night Haunter. ‘Still your damned life plagues me! Still you won’t let me take it! Why do you still deny me? Why won’t you let me take it? Eventually even you must die!’

Vulkan’s answering howl was incoherent. He slammed his mace home, and drove it against warding claws. Sparks billowed out in the night wind.

‘I have killed two brothers tonight!’ Curze yelled. ‘A third would make this hour most perfect in outrage! And your life, yours of all lives, so inextinguishable, would be the greatest trophy of all!’

Vulkan did not understand the words that were being yelled at him. He understood very little. His mind had been destroyed by unbearable pain, by suffering, by the meticulous and ingenious torment that Curze had forced him to endure over a period of months. Curze had annihilated Vulkan’s spirit and sanity, but he had been unable to terminate his actual life.

He had discovered that Vulkan possessed one inhuman trait that the other primarchs did not. This vexed Curze immeasurably. It offered a challenge that a being raised on murder, blood and terror could not resist.

All Vulkan saw was his tormentor, his abuser, the man who had killed him over and over again in search of a way of killing him permanently; the brother who had, through the uttermost cruelty, revealed Vulkan’s immortal gift. The rage to exact vengeance consumed him.

The claws of Curze’s left hand ripped across Vulkan, stripping away part of his borrowed plate in silvered metal shavings. Vulkan drove the head of his mace into Curze’s left shoulder-plate with a swift, short-arced blow, and then swung the weapon sideways into Curze’s head.

The haft, not the head, caught Curze across the cheek, and sent him reeling. He tried to rally, and turn to check his opponent, but shattered tiles slithered under his feet. He fought for a second to control his position.

Vulkan exploited that second, and drove a ferocious two-handed swing into Curze’s wavering body.

Plasteel cracked. Curze screamed, knocked clean off the slope of the roof. He pitched and fell, dropping ten metres onto the next shelf of the Residency roofscape. Grey slates, mined and shaped in the high peaks of Hera’s Crown, burst under him like sheet ice, throwing chips and slivers into the air.

Arms wide, Vulkan leapt off the roof and dropped feetfirst. Curze was not going to escape him.

On the slates below, Curze stirred. He looked up, saw Vulkan plunging towards him, and rolled desperately to avoid being crushed beneath his brother’s armoured bulk. Vulkan’s landing shattered more of the slates, and sent some large pieces whipping into the wind as shrapnel.

Instantly braced, Vulkan swung from the waist and drove his mace’s head at the sprawled Curze. The Night Haunter half-leapt, half-folded himself aside. The mace punched a significant hole through the roof, but the head wedged there for a second.

Curze retaliated, laughing with insane glee. He embraced Vulkan with his left arm, pulling their faces almost tenderly cheek to cheek. He drove his right arm in, a sharp understroke, palm up.

All four primary finger points stabbed into Vulkan’s side, coring through armour, underplate, flex sub-suit and directly into his torso. Blood gouted. Vulkan’s head snapped back and he clenched in pain, his blazing eyes closed. Curze held onto him, pulled the claws out, and repeated the stab.

Vulkan wrenched himself away. His side, left leg, and the tiles beneath him ran with blood. He staggered, and then fell onto the roof with a clatter of armour and cracking slates. He twitched violently and fell still.

Curze spat out clots of blood and phlegm. The wind whipped at his filthy hair.

‘See?’ he demanded. ‘This is death. Learn to accept it, brother!’

Vulkan’s eyes snapped open.

‘Oh,’ said Konrad Curze in disappointment. ‘That was quick.’

Gantulga raced up the central staircase of the Residency, sword in hand, with Eeron Kleve close behind him. Vodun Badorum and details of praecental guardsmen were already rushing to the private quarters across the landing and along the main corridor.

‘He’s here!’ Gantulga roared at them. ‘Have a care. He’s in this house!’

‘Curze?’ asked the guard commander.

‘Of course, Curze!’ Kleve growled.

Badorum barked orders to his men, orchestrating their advance. Weapons snapped up, aimed and ready. Powerfeeds whined to charge.

‘We have heard a terrible commotion from the private quarters,’ Badorum told the White Scar and the Iron Hands officer.

‘Get behind us,’ Kleve told him, ‘and ready those plasma weapons to fire.’

Gantulga led the way, slowing his advance to a prowl, his sword raised and ready. Kleve had his rotor cannon braced and armed. He swung the heavy thing from side to side, hunting for a target.

The main doors to the inner rooms had been smashed down. Euten knelt in the wreckage of the doorway, wiping blood from the brow of the crumpled, half-dead Faffnr Bludbroder.

‘Mamzel!’ Kleve cried, and ran to her. Gantulga flew past them into the chamber, and took a quick inventory of the scene. The place was wrecked, the floor littered with hurt and dying Space Wolves. The night’s cold air was gusting in through destroyed windows.

‘Great stars of Ultramar,’ Vodun Badorum murmured.

‘He was here, then?’ Kleve asked the chamberlain. ‘Curze?’

Euten seemed too shaken to move, speak, or even look up. She was wiping blood from Faffnr’s head with a strip of cloth torn from her gown.

‘He was here,’ she said at last. ‘The Wolves… They held him at bay. I think several have paid with their lives.’

Voices came from the hallway outside, ordering the praecentals to move aside. The tetrarch Valentus Dolor entered, escorted by Niax Nessus, Holguin of the Dark Angels, and a squad of Ultramarines. Eeron Kleve had voxed their alarm on all channels as he and Gantulga had rushed back to the Residency.

‘Your concern was correct, Kleve,’ Dolor said grimly.

‘Gantulga made the call,’ said Kleve.

‘Your instincts are sharp, White Scar,’ said Holguin.

‘Not sharp enough to save lives,’ said the White Scar, ‘nor to put a net upon him.’

‘Where did he go?’ Dolor asked. ‘My Lady Euten? Where did he go?’

‘The Wolves held him at bay,’ she repeated quietly. ‘For as long as they could, they held him at bay. Then… then he was going to kill me. But Vulkan stopped him.’

‘Vulkan?’ asked Niax Nessus.

‘It was Vulkan,’ said Euten.

‘That is not possible,’ said Holguin.

‘I know him,’ said Euten. ‘I have seen his likeness often enough. It could have been no other. He came upon us like a tempest, a storm-force. Curze was his sole intent. They clashed. They fought. The combat drove them back through the casement, out into the night.’

‘The lady is in shock,’ said Holguin. ‘She does not know what she is saying.’

‘I fear she does,’ said Dolor.

‘It is madness!’ Holguin replied.

‘Yes,’ said the tetrach, ‘but not of the kind you think.’

Nessus had reached the smashed windows and stood at Gantulga’s side.

‘I think there’s movement down there,’ said the White Scar. ‘Movement on the lower roofs. You see?’

Nessus nodded. He opened his vox.

‘This is the Third Master. We have located the Night Haunter. Move assault squads to the south side of the Residency. I want two Storm Eagles in the air, covering the lower roofs. Make it fast! Illuminate the roof tops and secure the yards so that no one can cross them. Invictus guard inside the Residency. When Curze sees his exit routes blocked, he will undoubtedly attempt to break back inside. I repeat the instructions you were given earlier – lethal force is not only permitted, it is expected.’

‘Let’s move,’ said Dolor. ‘With a purpose! I want to be there for the kill. Badorum, get medicae teams for the Wolves, and for the Lady Euten. Secure this level.’

‘Wait!’ Holguin hissed. ‘Tell me… tell me what you meant about Vulkan.’

Dolor paused.

‘Vulkan lives, Dark Angel,’ he said. ‘He is not in his right mind, but he lives, and if the Lady Euten was speaking the truth, it is likely that Vulkan is holding Curze in combat on the rooftops as we speak.’

‘Vulkan lives?’ Holguin echoed.

‘Who cares if Vulkan lives!’ Euten exclaimed, rising to look at them, her hands and sleeves bloodied. ‘What of the Lion and our dear Lord Guilliman? What of them? Curze told me they were dead! Curze told me to my face that he had murdered them!’

They looked at her.

‘Is it true? she asked. ‘Well? Someone speak! Someone say something!’

Flames surrounded them. White-hot, incandescent flames, so bright they hurt their eyes, so hot they would turn even the hardest plate to quicksilver dew.

Yet they felt no heat. A cool freshness surrounded them. A space… a silence.

‘You are alive, my lords, I am pleased to say,’ said Warsmith Dantioch.

He stooped, with some effort, to help Guilliman to his feet as Alexis Polux went to the aid of the Lion. Ultramarines from the 199th Aegida Company rushed onto the tuning floor of Primary Location Alpha to assist, and then hesitated at the strange wonder of the encounter.

Guilliman took in the polished black cavity of the vast cavern around him, then looked back at the vision of the fire-wracked chapel shown to him by the communication field.

‘Sotha?’ he asked, his voice dry.

‘Yes, my lord,’ said Dantioch.

‘We are on Sotha?’ Guilliman repeated.

‘I… Yes, my lord,’ said Dantioch, ‘and I am glad of it, for if you had not been here, you would have been there.’ He gestured to the sun-hot blaze of the chapel.

‘You brought us here?’ asked Guilliman.

‘No, lord,’ said Dantioch. ‘The Pharos did. Perhaps as a by-product of its process, perhaps deliberately.’

‘Deliberately?’

‘I am beginning to suspect this mechanism possesses some… sentience,’ said the warsmith.

‘I am beginning to suspect, brother,’ said the Lion, ‘that you are dabbling in technologies that no one, not even our father, would play with.’

Polux had stood the Lion up against Dantioch’s heavy seat and was examining the wound in his throat. Both Guilliman and his brother had taken several injuries during their contest with Curze, but the neck wound was the worst. It had stopped bleeding at least.

Guilliman leaned over, turned the Lion’s head with his hand, and regarded the wound.

‘That needs packing before it opens again,’ he said.

‘What, no comment, Roboute?’ asked the Lion. ‘Of all the things that trouble me about you and your dealings, brother, we had not even begun to discuss your extraordinary beacon. It was the first thing I saw as I approached Macragge, and thus the first hint I had that–’

‘But you saw it,’ Guilliman snapped. ‘That’s the point, brother. You saw it. It worked. It is as vital to the function and survival of the Imperium as a regent to watch over it!’

‘Yet you seem to know nothing of its function or potential,’ said the Lion. He pushed Polux away and stood up. ‘Am I to believe that we have been transported across space some… unimaginable distance from Macragge?’

‘You are,’ said Guilliman. He sighed. ‘Brother, it was with the greatest reluctance that I explored and then authorised the use of the Pharos beacon. I am fully aware of the great unknowns that attach to it. It was a calculated risk.’

‘I feel your calculations may be too optimistic,’ said the Lion.

‘Do you?’ asked Guilliman. ‘Yet you are alive. Had we remained in Curze’s trap, that would not be the case.’

The Lion sniffed.

‘Furthermore,’ said Guilliman, ‘I know I am not the only one who makes use of prohibited technology. The warp signature of your flagship, brother… Did you think the technicians of my fleet and the adepts of the Mechanicum would not analyse it? When were you going to tell me about that? Or was that a secret you hoped to keep, like the fact that Curze was at large aboard your vessel? You keep too many secrets, brother.’

The Lion looked away. ‘We will debate this further,’ he said. ‘Now, we must return. We came here. We must go back at once.’

‘That will require some consideration,’ said Dantioch.

The Lion glared at him.

‘My lord,’ Dantioch added, with a slight bow of his head.

‘We will go back, just as we came,’ the Lion insisted.

‘At the very least, my lord,’ said Dantioch, ‘I must spend some time re-tuning and focusing the device. I cannot send you back into that.’ He indicated the seething fire beyond the field.

‘Why am I even talking to you?’ the Lion asked.

‘Because the warsmith, appointed by me, made this Pharos device work,’ said Guilliman. ‘He knows more about it than any person alive. If anyone can return us, it is Dantioch. I suggest you address him in a more civil tone.’

The Lion looked at Dantioch.

‘It is hard to trust the face of an enemy,’ he said.

‘He is no enemy,’ said Alexis Polux firmly.

‘Then, warsmith,’ said the Lion, ‘explain how this device works, and how we may be transported back. My Navigator saw it as empathic rather than psychic. She said it showed us where we wanted to go.’

‘Your Navigator is perceptive, my lord,’ said Dantioch. ‘This is a site of ancient technology of pre-human origin. My study has shown that it is indeed empathic in its resonance. A principle of quantum entanglement, I speculate. Unlike our warp technology, it does not use the immaterium to bypass realspace. I think it was part of a much larger navigational network that once existed. By tuning it upon Macragge, we have achieved a navigation guide to conquer the Ruinstorm, as well as instantaneous communication.’

‘How did we get here?’ asked the Lion.

‘I am still pondering that, my lord,’ said Dantioch. ‘I had wondered if, in its original form, the network might have allowed for site-to-site teleportation on a scale we could scarcely imagine. I had presumed that function was lost, as it would require other gateways or beacon sites. I was wrong.’

He looked at Polux.

‘The successful transfer of Alexis to this place teaches us the most, I think,’ said Dantioch. ‘The communication field was already providing me with enough empathic resonance for me to be able, with some success, to detect Konrad Curze in the darkness and forewarn my friend. Then, when his life was in true jeopardy…’

Dantioch paused.

‘I wanted to save him. I wanted to reach out and take his hand, and save him from that monster. I think the empathic field responded to my great need and opened to allow it. Just as, when the two of us saw you, my lords, in peril of your lives, our will to save you opened the field again.’

‘So it cannot be controlled or set?’ asked Guilliman. ‘It cannot be switched on and directed? It simply responds to an innate, inarticulable need?’

‘I’m afraid so, my lord,’ said Dantioch, ‘which supposes that, if we cannot access or generate the appropriate emotive, empathic urge, we may not be able to return you to Macragge.’

There was a longer pause.

‘Of course, there is also the fact,’ Dantioch added awkwardly, ‘that we do not know with any certainty that the process works in both directions.’

There was an even longer pause. The polished, mirror-black dome of the cavern surrounded them with cool silence.

‘Then you had better find me a ship,’ said the Lion. ‘A fast one.’

19
Mortality

‘Common needs make for the strangest strangers comrades.’

– Zerksus, Proverbs

‘Look, I’ve told you – I cannot help you,’ John Grammaticus said to the Word Bearer.

‘And that is still not an acceptable answer,’ Narek replied. ‘My efforts to secure you involved a great deal of planning, preparation, effort and sacrifice. I would–’

‘Listen to me,’ said John. ‘I am the agent of a xenos power. The Cabal runs me. It owns me. I am here on their bidding, sent to perform a task that has been pre-ordained.’

‘And?’

John strained against the ropes that lashed him to the chair.

‘And? They are watching me. If I step away from my course, if I… defy them and refuse to complete my mission, they will come for me. And you too, if you are with me.’

‘They can try,’ Narek mused.

‘They will do more than try,’ said John. ‘They are quite resourceful. And determined.’

John relaxed and dropped his chin.

‘God knows, warrior, I should dearly love to see Lorgar brought down and finished. The galaxy would be a better place for it.’

‘“God”?’ Narek asked. ‘There are few true gods any more. Only the daemons of the warp that pollute the hearts of men.’

‘And the demigods that men have fashioned and manufactured,’ John countered. ‘Creatures such as Lorgar, polluted by the warp, are only as dangerous as they are because they were already primarchs. Mankind has made gods in their own image, and those gods have proven false.’

He looked at the Word Bearer. Narek sat, his face half in shadow, listening.

‘Believe me,’ John said, ‘I would help you if I could. I despise the Ruinous Powers more than all things. I would fight against any part of their influence.’

Narek stood up.

‘Then tell me,’ he whispered, ‘what is your task? What is it that you must perform for your alien masters? What duty must you complete so you can be finished with your service and free to help me?’

‘They want no less than you, Narek,’ said John. ‘They want a primarch dead.’

Narek grunted. ‘Whose life do they seek?’

‘That of Vulkan,’ said John Grammaticus.

‘Why?’

‘Their motives are too complex to explain easily,’ said John.

‘But Vulkan is here? He is here on Macragge?’

‘So I am informed. His arrival has been foreseen. He vanished by teleport into the aether more than a solar year ago, and was presumed lost – but I understand that the strange properties of the Pharos have brought him here, across the void.’

‘I care for none of that, human,’ said Narek. ‘Nothing except my Legion. Let us find Vulkan. Slay him as you are bidden. Then you can help me.’

‘Oh,’ John sighed, ‘if only it was as simple as that.’

‘Explain.’

‘I’ve been tracking his mind since I arrived on Macragge,’ John said. ‘Tracking him so I could find him. And I’ve learned that… well, Vulkan is mad. Utterly insane.’

‘How?’ asked Narek.

‘The best I can read it, he was tortured, extensively and extravagantly over a long period of time. It has quite broken his mind. In his state, he is ridiculously dangerous.’

‘So we will be cunning,’ said Narek.

‘That’s not all,’ said John. ‘It is possible to kill a primarch. They are demigods, but they are still mortal, to an extent. Enough fire-power, venom, or explosive force…’

John looked straight at the Word Bearer.

‘There is a reason the Cabal armed me with this specific weapon to take down Vulkan. They know that he has a very particular, unique trait. He doesn’t die.’

‘What?’

‘Like me, he is functionally immortal. He resurrects, even from the most catastrophic demise. To kill an entity like that, you need something really special. And that spear, Narek of the Word, is a ritual weapon if ever there was one.’

Narek glanced down at the fulgurite spear. It was lying on the top of the carrybag at his feet.

‘Oh,’ said John, ‘and according to my instructions, I can’t do the deed myself. I have to deliver the spear to another primarch who is willing to strike the blow.’

He paused.

‘So, Word Bearer… I have to kill an unkillable, immortal demigod who has the power of fifty men and also happens to be violently insane. Do you still want a part of that?’

Vulkan screamed his anguish. He swung the mace. The sweep of it made the air howl.

Curze dodged the almost certainly lethal blow. He turned, bolted along the length of the roof slope, and leapt over a broad gap onto the green-tiled crest of the Southern Portico.

Vulkan gave chase. The blood on his armour had already dried. The punctures that Curze’s claws had made in his torso had closed. The internal organs that had been shredded and torn were re-forming. Vulkan cleared the gap as easily as Curze had done, and landed on the end of the portico’s long roof.

He arched his back and turned the mace in a huge, one-handed rotation, launching it headfirst at the fleeing Curze.

Released, the mace flew like a missile. It struck Curze high on the left shoulder, and knocked him onto his face. He slithered down the slight incline of the roof. The mace crashed off the tiles beside him and slid to rest.

Vulkan came bounding along the roof to reach his enemy. There were lights in the yard below, dancing stab lights that chased hard, bright beams up at the roofline. There was the chop and whicker of gunship engines.

He closed on Curze. Curze struggled to rise. At the last second, as Vulkan’s powerful hands grabbed at him, Curze rolled over to face his brother. He had hold of the battle mace.

He drove the weapon into the side of Vulkan’s head. His jaw broke. Teeth shattered audibly. Blood squirted from his ear and nostril.

Vulkan staggered backwards, but did not fall. Curze came at him, pressing his advantage. He struck Vulkan twice more in the body with the stolen mace.

Powerful lamps flooded them with white light. They became two silhouettes trading blows in a colourless glare. Two Ultramarines Storm Eagles, engines howling, circled the portico roof, while dozens of others filled the skies over the Fortress.

One of them came in, almost at the level of the roofline, and sprayed two warning salvos of fire from its twin-linked heavy bolters. The grouped blasts blew out great sections of the portico roof, directly behind Curze. Flames, dust and fragmented tiles erupted in all directions.

Curze, furious at the intervention, turned and shrieked directly into the lights of the Storm Eagle. The gunship had a confirmed lock on him, and its weapons blazed.

In a huge bound that spread his cloak behind him like wings, Curze leapt clean off the portico and landed on the hull of the Storm Eagle. Its engines immediately started to wail as it recoiled from the roofline. Its nose dipped as it turned out.

Curze clung on. He punched his right fist through the cockpit canopy, and seized the human pilot-serf by the throat, the blades of his claw encircling the man’s collar.

‘Away from here,’ he hissed over the screaming engines and streaming wind.

The pilot looked at him, eyes wide, choking.

‘Now!’ Curze added.

Unsteady, yawing badly to starboard, the Storm Eagle turned and began to move across the gate yard away from the Residency. It was running at less than rooftop height.

‘Climb,’ Curze insisted over the headwind. ‘Climb!’

The gunship began to gain altitude.

Behind it, Vulkan braced himself and leapt too. He slammed onto the gunship’s starboard tail wing on his belly, and held on. The impact made the gunship sway laterally as it continued on its slow, advancing hover.

Vox channels went wild. The squads of Ultramarines in the Portis Yard and Residency quadrangle started to fire in a free-for-all at the wavering gunship, realising that it had to be sacrificed if Curze was to be stopped.

Bolt-rounds and las-bolts clipped and boomed off the Storm Eagle’s armoured hull. Sparks leapt and shrapnel flew. Fireballs bloomed and left scorched patches on its armoured skin.

Curze looked down the hull of the Storm Eagle and saw Vulkan. The gunship’s nose was coming up. It was approaching the line of the Aegis Wall. Curze kept his hand clamped around the pilot, threatening to shear his head from his shoulders.

‘Over!’ he said.

Vulkan clawed his way up the wing, over the starboard engine cowling. Curze judged the weight of the mace in his free hand. He waited until Vulkan clambered clear of the cowling. Then he hurled the weapon with a vicious snap-sling of his arm.

The mace’s head struck Vulkan in the face. He lost his grip, and flew sideways, into the Storm Eagle’s tail assembly, which he tried to grab hold of.

He failed, and fell off the gunship’s stern.

Vulkan plummeted about thirty metres. He neither landed on the yard inside the Aegis Wall, nor fell the greater depth of the wall and Castrum on the outside.

Instead, he struck the top of the wall, smashing into the castellations with a force that broke his spine. Then he dropped, limp, and folded onto his side on the wall-top walkway, a bright mirror of blood leaking out of his shattered body, his life seemingly extinguished once more.

The gunship, with Curze clinging to its cockpit assembly, continued over the wall. Ferocious hails of gunfire chased it from the yards and wall-top. It slugged on. The Castrum dropped away. Curze was high over the city and the parkland.

‘Down!’ he hissed.

The pilot gurgled. He had been bleeding profusely since Curze had first smashed the canopy in his face, and seized his throat. The gunship began to bank towards the towers and spires of the city.

Gunfire continued to track it from the walls and battlements. The second Storm Eagle, searchlamps blazing, thundered over the Aegis Wall in pursuit, taking a far more direct and aggressive path than its stricken twin. The other gunships aloft circled back to allow the Storm Eagle to take its kill.

Curze glanced back, the night wind lashing his hair, and saw it gaining.

‘Down!’ he ordered.

The Storm Eagle began to drop fast. The spires, city halls and residential citadel spires north of Martial Square rose to meet it, their windows lit. Raid sirens were blaring down in the streets. Curze could see the criss-cross light streams of traffic in the streets below. Titan’s Gate, immense and unlit, was a black henge, a silhouette against the distant bright radiance of the landing fields far to the south.

‘Down!’ Curze ordered again.

They were lumbering low over the high tops of towers and domed vaults, or even between the bulk of the tallest spires. Their course was arching east of Martial Square, swinging towards the high, block shapes of the Treasury and the new Senate House.

The Storm Eagle chasing them began to fire. Bright heavy bolter fire spat orange darts through the night, shots that reflected off the high windows of the towers on either side of them. They found their mark. Parts of the tail assembly burst away in a shower of spalled metal and a gout of burning gases.

The gunship that Curze was riding lurched, its engines straining.

They were losing height very fast, nearly smashing into the north face of the Consular Record Building. The starboard wingtip raked a flurry of squealing sparks off the building’s stonework.

Curze had been watching his visions all the while, letting them play through his head like that damaged pict-feed, sorting the true from the false, the trustworthy from the untrustworthy. His entire operation since planetfall had been guided and directed by his visions.

Vulkan. Vulkan was the only part of it that his visions had not shown, nor even hinted at.

He saw glass now. Water, fire. A specific dome.

More shots hit the diving Storm Eagle from behind. A greater chunk of it exploded and broke away. It fell rather than flew, no longer controllable, a chunk of mangled debris arcing like a meteor to impact, trailing fire and wreckage. Twenty metres above the rooftops. Curze saw the dome, the particular dome. He let go of the pilot’s throat and jumped, falling away from the plunging gunship.

Feet first, he hit the dome of the building, a great and ornate crystal canopy, which shattered under him. Pinwheeling in a torrent of glittering fragments, he fell hard and hit water in a plume of spray.

The Storm Eagle, leaving huge, jumping yellow flames in its wake, continued on for another five seconds, and struck the east facade of the Treasury building fifteen metres above the street. It made a dazzling orange fireball that punched through the wall and incinerated the chambers within, and simultaneously spat back into the night sky, lofting and expanding and raining burning fuel and micro-debris. A nanosecond after impact, as the fireball was forming, the Storm Eagle’s munitions payload went off, and a second, larger, brighter fireball engulfed the first, blooming like a small sun over the Treasury Yard. The orange glare was reflected in a million windows, except in the nearby streets where the blast blew all of the casements out.

Curze surfaced in a spray of water and shook his head. He was in the principal Nymphaeum of Magna Macragge Civitas. A large, circular building with columns supporting the famous crystal dome, it housed the oldest of the natural springs that had been worshipped in the days of the Battle Kings as sacred to the water spirits.

Curze thrashed to the edge of the stone pool and rose out of the water, letting it stream off him onto the flagstones. He glanced back at the spring-fed pool, polluted with fragments of smashed crystal. The clear water was stained. There was a fair measure of blood in it.

Not all of it belonged to Curze, not by any means.

He smiled, a black crescent in the sloshing blue twilight of the Nymphaeum. He walked towards the exit, towards a night-bound city lit by the fury of burning wreckage.

Curze understood cities at night. The secret was, you either made them darker, or you made them burn.

He waited for the visions to show him where to go next, and which of those things to do.

Tetrarch Dolor strode along the walkway, on top of the high Aegis Wall, staring at the fireball blooming over the eastern Neapolis. The night sky was full of circling, beating gunships.

Verus Caspean waited for him.

‘Is that a kill?’ Dolor asked.

‘His escape vehicle was brought down east of the Martial Square,’ said Caspean.

‘Can we confirm his death?’ Dolor asked.

‘Not yet, lord tetrarch,’ replied Caspean. ‘Forces are on the ground. We’re waiting for word.’

‘I want a body,’ said Dolor, ‘preferably one I can spit on. Burned bones at least.’

‘Yes, lord tetrarch.’

‘Less with the “lord tetrarch”, my noble and good friend, Verus,’ said Dolor. He looked Caspean in the eye. ‘Phratus has fallen. Until the Avenging Son can be found, I have authority in the Fortress, and I directly name you First Master to succeed Auguston.’

‘My lord.’

‘We must surely maintain and reinforce the chain of command in this black hour, Verus,’ said Dolor. ‘You will perform the duty in superlative fashion.’

‘Thank you, tetrarch,’ said Caspean, saluting and bowing.

‘We will know no fear, First Master Caspean,’ replied Dolor, saluting back. ‘Make your respect known!’

The Ultramarines around them clattered out brisk salutes.

‘Will we know no fear, Valentus?’ Caspean asked. ‘This night may have seen the violent death, in the space of one full hour, of four of the Emperor’s sons.’

‘These bold and dread facts are yet to be confirmed,’ replied Dolor.

‘One might be,’ Caspean replied. He led the tetrarch along the defensive platform to a section of the battlement that was wet with blood. Ultramarines stood all around, their heads bowed.

Vulkan lay in a broken heap, on the walkway, surrounded by a wide slick of his lifeblood.

‘In the spirit of our brothers, the Salamanders,’ said Caspean, ‘Vulkan lived. But he does so no longer.’

Dolor was about to reply when the vital sensors of every man in the vicinity, including his own, went off. They had all been set to maximum yield earlier that evening, in the hope of detecting the Night Haunter as he hunted through the dark.

A brand-new life trace had been detected within five metres of them.

‘Great Terra!’ Caspean exclaimed.

Vulkan sat up in the pool of blood. He gazed at them, his eyes like the hearts of red suns.

‘My lord,’ said Dolor, taking a step forward. ‘My honoured Lord Vulkan, we–’

Vulkan ignored him and got up. He took several deep breaths as if scenting the air, and gazed over the lip of the Aegis Wall towards the hot fire burning in the Treasury quarter.

‘My lord,’ Dolor urged, ‘will you speak to us? Will you tell us where you have been, what has befallen you, and how you come to us? My lord, I–’

Vulkan didn’t look back. He jumped onto the rampart of the Aegis Wall, spread his arms wide, and stepped off.

He fell, magnificent, like a cliff-diver, head first into the dark green space of the parkland below the Castrum.

20
Alignment

‘Cut in darkness, and you are called a monster;
cut in starlight, and you are proclaimed a god.’

– The Nocturniad, Eleventh Cycle.

They hurried through the subsystem of Strayko Deme, moving through the ancient but well-maintained network of sewers, outfalls and storm drains that lay beneath the paved streets and refined avenues. Occasionally, light fell upon them through drain gratings or grilles, and where it did, it was tinged with flame.

‘Why are we moving?’ John asked. Narek had unbound him, but hustled him along on a leash of dirty rope tied around the Perpetual’s neck.

‘You heard the blast.’

‘It could have been anything.’

‘Tell me it wasn’t.’

‘I can’t tell you anything, Narek–’

‘Respect!’

‘I can’t tell you anything, my lord,’ John Grammaticus repeated in a low voice. ‘This close to that torc you’re wearing, I’m limited to virtually nothing. And I’m in pain.’

‘That is a shame.’

‘Tell me what you know then.’

Narek came to a halt. They had just entered the cistern of a wide storm drain, circular in cross-section. Dark, pungent water rippled around their feet as they came to a stop.

‘Some form of aircraft crashed, not far from where I had you secured. The authorities of the city will be closing in. I can fight Ultramarines well enough, but perhaps not all the Ultramarines. So, we’re moving.’

‘To where?’

‘Wherever I can find. Come on.’

John paused.

‘Come on!’ Narek hissed, snapping on the rope. John lurched, his neck jerked painfully.

‘Look, Narek. My lord. I could help more than this.’

Narek of the Word looked at him carefully.

‘You are full of mind-tricks and deceit, John Grammaticus… or Caeron Sebaton… or whoever else you ever are. Our business on Traoris taught me that.’

John nodded.

‘Yeah, I bloody am.’ He ran an index finger around the inside of the noose to loosen it. ‘If I could escape from you, Narek, I would. There, I’m honest, at least. You are dangerous. You’re never more than a few moments away from killing me, and you don’t trust me. But this, Narek of the Word, this is not a good position for either of us to be in.’

John stepped towards the frowning Word Bearer. Oozing water rolled around his ankles.

‘There are worse allies to have than a Space Marine,’ he offered, ‘just as there are worse allies to have than a Perpetual. Of course, that’s true only if they get to work to their strengths. Take off the torc.’

‘No.’

‘Take it off.’

‘No,’ said Narek. ‘I am no fool. You are high-function. You would… blow out my brain with an aneurism with one thought-blink, and leave me dead. Or something.’

John shrugged.

‘I suppose,’ he said. ‘Though that would be worst case, and at least it would be quick.’

‘You could do that?’ asked Narek.

‘Of course I couldn’t!’ John snapped. ‘I’m a telepath, not a telekine. I can do all sorts of things, Narek. I can read your mind, or let you read mine, speak any language, be anyone I like, surveil the area for psykana sensitivity, or even look into the ghostly filaments of the near-past and near-future… None of which sound like bad ideas, right now. It would be good to have more immediate combat intel than “something crashed so we had to run”.’

Narek grunted.

‘I could read disposition,’ said John. ‘I could tell you where the Ultramarines are. I could guide us. I could alert us to proximate activity. I could find what we’re looking for.’

‘You’re dangerous,’ Narek whispered.

‘So are you. And right now, my lord, I think leaving me hooded is making this situation even more dangerous than it has to be for both of us.’

‘I don’t trust you,’ said Narek, clenching his steel-gloved fist around the rope to yank it again.

‘I know,’ John replied, ‘but you want to use me as a weapon to assassinate your dear, beloved primarch, so I think you’ll probably have to start trusting me at some point, or that’s never ever going to become a practical possibility. Weapons need love, respect, careful handling and a chance to excel in their particular way. Ask your sword. Ask that ridiculously large damned rifle of yours.’

John took a step closer. The rope between them slackened.

‘Narek, trust is the issue here. Let me open my mind. Let me allow us to see each other’s thoughts. There’s a lot of common ground, I think, more than you’d imagine. We’re never going to be alike, you and me, but I think we’re aligned.’

‘Aligned?’ the Word Bearer asked, his voice very small and hollow.

‘Yes. We’re in alignment. We’re not like the hands of a clock at midnight. We’re never going to point in the same direction. But think of the hands at six o’clock.’

He paused.

‘You know what a clock is, right?’

‘I’ve seen them,’ Narek nodded. He was more used to digital chronometer displays.

‘At six o’clock, the hands point in opposite directions, but they make a straight line,’ said John. ‘They are in alignment.’

‘I see.’

‘Do you?’

Narek nodded. ‘It is a metaphor for cooperation between two individuals who have conflicting aims, but many common values.’

‘Right. Shit, that’s right.’

Narek hesitated.

‘I am alone,’ he admitted eventually. ‘I have turned against my Legion. I have killed a certain number of my brothers. But my Legion has turned, so I am an outsider to all others. No loyalist would ever trust me, no Imperial Fist or Iron Hand, and – since Calth – no noble Ultramarine. I am cursed at every turn. All I can do is make amends. All I can do is cleanse and restore my Legion, for it was once so great! It was beautiful, John Grammaticus. It was the truest expression of the Emperor’s word.’

‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ John said, ‘and I’m not mocking you when I say that. You scare me half to death, Narek of the Word, but I admire you. The way Horus’s war has played out, the brothers of the Word Bearers are on the wrong side. You’ve thrown yourselves in with darkness. So, understand me. I’m astonished by you, by your resilience and loyalty to the original high principles of your Legion. The cosmos believes all Word Bearers to be traitors, heretics and rebels, but you, alone, have rebelled against their rebellion. I admire that. That’s why I’m even considering helping you in your cause.’

He shrugged.

‘But I wish you’d let me read you, so I could be sure the tale you’re spinning me is true. The Word Bearers manipulate truth. Your story could simply be a way of obtaining me and the spear for Lorgar.’

‘It is not.’

‘Prove it.’

Narek thought for a long time.

‘A comrade would be welcome on my lonely mission,’ he muttered. ‘A battle-brother, an ally. Even… a person in alignment.’

‘Take off the torc,’ John said. ‘Let’s find out where we are. Let’s get in alignment.’

Narek paused.

‘I do not trust you, John Grammaticus,’ he said.

‘I know,’ John replied, ‘but there’s no one else here, and you need to trust someone.’

Narek hesitated, and then reached out and removed the noose from around John’s neck. He slung his cased rifle over his shoulder, took a breath, and drew his bolt pistol from its holster.

He aimed the weapon at John, and, with his other hand, reached for the control stud on the side of the psychic torc.

Narek pressed the stud. At a deep, psychic level, there was a local suspension of vibration. The aching dullness that had been hobbling John’s hind brain for hours began to dispel.

It was an unpleasant, nauseating experience. John staggered, and rested his hand against the wall of the storm drain. His mind was rapidly becoming aware of its environs, an overload of restored psychic feedback.

Narek watched him warily. He unclasped the torc and handed it to John.

John took it.

‘Do not make me regret this,’ Narek said.

‘Oh, he won’t,’ said a voice from behind them.

Narek turned with transhuman speed to locate the source of the voice. His pistol wavered, aiming, seeking a solid target.

Damon Prytanis stepped out from behind the curve of the brick-built drain, an oddly slovenly figure in his dirty fur coat. He had a shuriken pistol aimed in each hand.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said brightly, and opened fire. ‘The Blessed Lady sends her regards.’

Narek fired once, but projectiles had already punched into his hand, arm and shoulder and ruined his aim. The discharged bolt shell shot wild and struck the ceiling of the drain tunnel.

Damon’s fusillade ripped across Narek, a blanket of whizzing monomolecular discs. Damon Prytanis employed none of the feather-finger restraint he had used against the praecentals to conserve ammunition. This was a fully armoured Space Marine. The blitz of razor-rounds shredded into Narek of the Word, and explosively peppered the tunnel wall behind him. John had to dive into the ooze for cover.

‘Johnny-boy!’ Damon yelled, still shooting. ‘Come to papa! It’s time to depart!’

Narek went down into the sluice water, hurt and gagging, his plasteel fingertips scraping on the limed brick walls.

John got up and staggered past him towards Damon Prytanis.

‘You bloody idiot!’ John yelled. ‘I had him. I had him right where I wanted him!’

Damon nodded. ‘Right. Eating out of your hand. You’d virtually broken that torc’s restraint, right? You were right in his head.’

‘No! I was negotiating. I had him. I was persuading him!’

‘Screw that,’ said Damon. ‘Life’s way too short. That’s your trouble, John. You like to solve problems the hard way. You don’t like to get wet. You’re too genteel. Let’s exit.’

They started to run along the drain, side by side, towards the next outfall.

‘What are you doing here?’ John asked him. He slowed his pace for a second and winced.

‘What?’ Damon asked. ‘What’s up?’

‘My head. It’s been blanked for too long. Everything’s coming back. Perceptions. It’s not pleasant. I asked you a question, Prytanis. What are you doing here?’

Damon grinned.

‘The usual. Gahet asked me to check you were performing according to schedule.’

‘You’re my insurance?’

‘Positively, yes.’

‘And if it looks like I’m falling down on the job?’

Damon Prytanis shrugged, Guh’hru in one hand and Meh’menitay in the other.

‘Guess I’d just have to mess you up to teach you a lesson,’ he said. Then he laughed.

‘I’ll tell you what you’ve messed up,’ said John. ‘This whole entire assignment. The Cabal should never have sent in the cavalry.’

‘Cavalry, am I? You know something, I actually was, once. Seventh Cavalry. Tell you what, those Lakota–’

‘You know what I mean,’ said John.

‘So do you. You know they had to,’ said Damon. ‘You were wavering.’

‘I was not.’

‘You so were. This job needs to get done, and done fast. Vulkan has to die. That’s the way it has to go. That’s the order of it all. You’ve got this spear thing?’

John gestured with the carrybag in his hand.

‘Good,’ said Damon. ‘Good for you. That’s all that matters. Let’s get this done. I’ll be there as your support. Your… guarantee. So tell me, Johnny, how is this supposed to work? Gahet was not specific.’

‘I place the spear in the hands of a primarch, and in his hands, that spear becomes capable of slaying another of the eighteen.’

‘Vulkan.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Do we know why Vulkan is the target?’

‘It’s just another version of the Alpharius Position,’ said John. ‘Horus has to win this war, and win it so brutally that the human race is engulfed and takes the taint of the Primordial Annihilator with it to its grave. The victory of Horus and the death of our species is the pyre that burns Chaos out. That means major loyalist players like Vulkan must be turned or taken out.’

‘So, the spear?’ asked Damon. ‘Which one of Vulkan’s brothers do you give it to? I mean, here on Macragge? I don’t see either Guilliman or the Lion being willing to take a pop at Vulkan.’

‘There is one viable candidate on this world,’ said John Grammaticus.

‘There’s another primarch here? Who?’

‘Curze,’ said John.

Damon stopped and whistled. ‘Curze? That maniac is on Macragge?’

‘Yes, he is,’ said John. ‘The last thing I sensed before the Word Bearer captured me was the Night Haunter making planetfall.’

Damon shuddered. He looked up at the sewer roof.

‘Screw that. I didn’t sign on for Konrad Curze.’

‘Well, Damon, let me put it this way… ‘ said John. ‘Boo hoo, too late.’

He didn’t hear Prytanis’s sardonic reply. A fierce migraine was knifing him suddenly, almost forcing him to his knees. Tears welled in his eyes.

‘John? What is it?’

John Grammaticus’s psykana gift was suddenly returning in full force. The flooding rush of restored perceptions was almost overwhelming. He was registering the unmediated auras and perceptions of the Civitas around him. It was too much, like a vox floating between channels, its volume turned up full. He struggled to establish some control.

He got sharp waves of pain, anger, outrage. He looked at Damon Prytanis.

‘I can feel…’ he tried to explain. ‘My psyk’s returning. Fast. Oh.’

‘What?’

‘It’s a good thing we’re not relying on Guilliman or the Lion,’ said John, struggling to maintain his wits.

‘Why?’ Damon asked warily.

‘Guilliman is gone. The Lion too. They’re dead, Prytanis.’

‘Are you joking?’ asked Damon. ‘Tell me you’re damn well joking!’

‘I wish I was,’ John replied. He was shaking with the intensity of the psyk-rush. ‘The sense of hurt and loss is so strong. I’m getting it from the minds of hundreds of Ultramarines and Dark Angels.’

‘Pull yourself together. Come on. If this is true, I need you sharp.’

John swallowed hard and nodded.

‘Yes. Right. I will,’ he mumbled. ‘It’s just a lot to deal with. You wouldn’t understand. Imagine being deaf for a few hours, getting your hearing back, and then getting shouted at by everyone in a city all at once.’

Damon maintained eye contact, concern on his face.

‘I’m all right,’ said John. ‘It’s becoming a little more stable now.’

He glanced over his shoulder.

‘You didn’t kill him,’ he said.

‘The Word Bearer?’

‘Yes.’

‘Damn. I thought I’d done that very nicely.’

‘Well, you didn’t,’ said John. ‘I can read him, getting back on his feet. He’ll come after us. He’s good at that, Damon.’

‘We had better keep moving then, hadn’t we?’ said Damon.

They used a stone rain chute to clamber back up to street level. It was a few hours before dawn. The sky was heavy with air cover from the Fortress.

‘That’s a major search,’ said Damon.

‘Curze ripped the heart out of the Fortress tonight,’ John replied. ‘They’re hunting for him and for Vulkan.’

‘Can you find either of them?’

John paused, concentrating.

‘Curze, no. It’s as if I can read him sometimes, and then at other moments he’s utterly invisible. As though he can cloak his mind. When I can read him, it’s unbearable, but the rest of the time he’s not even a shadow.’

‘What about Vulkan?’ asked Damon.

‘Wait, I’m trying.’

‘Well, we need them both,’ said Damon.

They walked slowly along a quiet backstreet between two grander avenues. John focused his mind. He had been attuning it to Vulkan’s thought signature since setting foot on Macragge. It was hard when that thought signature was so deranged. It was also hard in the middle of a city filled with so many agitated, unguarded minds.

He smiled.

‘What?’ asked Damon.

‘I think I have Vulkan. He’s moving south of us, south-east. Going into Anomie Deme.’

Damon nodded.

‘What’s he doing there?’

‘No idea. He’s hard to read. He’s… not entirely sane these days.’

‘Great. We’re tracking a mad primarch?’

‘Yeah. Didn’t the Cabal tell you that? Didn’t Gahet brief you? I hope they gave you plenty of ammo. And danger money.’

Damon scowled. ‘But you found him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Still no read on Curze?’

‘Not yet,’ said John.

‘Well, one of them is a start. Good job. Good job, John. You look pleased with yourself.’

John was. Focusing on Vulkan’s thought pattern had revealed something else to him. The enforced psychic isolation created by Narek’s torc had allowed his brain to quietly, subconsciously unpack.

Suddenly, he was able to see clearly what the farseer’s conduit had imprinted on his mind. He understood what Eldrad Ulthran wanted him to do.

He understood how.

He understood why.

He took a deep breath. Finally, here was a way he could serve the forces of light. He could defy the wishes of the Cabal, and fight for his birth-race. At last he could strike a proper blow for his species, something he had been longing to do since his xenos masters first dragged him into the Horus War.

Of course, it would cost him his life, but that hardly seemed a big price to pay.

The pair of them straightened up and moved off down the street, following a route that Damon had dug up on a data-slate, a route that would get them into Anomie Deme by the shortest path.

High up on a jutting, ornamental rain spout, a crouching shadow watched them move.

Curze licked his lips.

This piece was a fascinating new addition to the spilled jigsaw of his mind. From the moment he had stepped out of the Nymphaeum pool, new visions had been coming to him. The crazed, random flow of his waking dreams had shown him a possibility called John Grammaticus. There was something curious about Grammaticus. Curze wasn’t sure what it was exactly, but it was creepy and abnormal. Grammaticus was not a regular human. He was, somehow, like many humans all at once, or like a single human with inexplicable dimensional proportions. In particular, his fourth dimension, his time, was stretched, elongated…

It didn’t matter. The latest reflections had shown Curze one especially clear thing. There was a spear, a spear that could kill Vulkan. Not only that, Grammaticus was supposed to give the spear to Curze so he could use it.

He would use it. He would use it to finish what he had started in the Iron Labyrinth.

It would make the night perfect. Sunrise would reveal that Konrad Curze had descended like an eclipse upon bright Macragge and, in one period of darkness, had slain three of the Emperor’s sons, including the one that, apparently, could not die.

That was a fundamental achievement, a superlative ritual achievement, a crushing achievement: haughty Guilliman, the vainglorious Lion, the unkillable Vulkan.

All three, in one single night.

Horus could go burn in the warp! Nothing he had achieved was even half so impressive! Konrad Curze was about to anoint himself as the Emperor’s greatest and most formidable son.

He would do it by bringing his father’s Imperium crashing down more thoroughly and painfully than anything that the Lupercal had so far managed. He would do it by bringing about not a change of state or leadership, but utter galactic oblivion.

They would die. All of the primarchs would die, and in dying they would witness the sheer magnificence of his terror.

Curze rose. The two men on the empty street below him hurried out of sight.

He spread his tattered cloak and launched himself towards the next rooftop.

21
Dreams and
Visions

‘There is only one way to see, and that is through
the knowledge of one’s own eyes,
looking straight ahead.’

– Rogal Dorn, Principles of Sound Defence

The sun came up fast. It was bright and warming. He watched it glinting off the waters of the bay.

He tried to relax.

The farm workers had started their toil early, wandering up the mountain slopes from the settlement below before sunrise, their scythes across their shoulders. He could hear them, as he had heard them for the last two hours, taking their blades to the grasses that threatened to choke Sotha’s black halls, laughing, chatting.

He could smell the rich scent of cut stalks filling the early morning air.

Guilliman sat down on the grassy promontory, the upper slope of Mount Pharos. He wiped a hand across his brow.

Sotha was a good world, a peaceful place. All of the forces and influences that insisted he return to Macragge were somehow softened here in this summer light. Guilliman, to his shame, realised how much he craved this peace. Sotha was like a mythical Eden. For an irrational moment, Roboute Guilliman willed Dantioch to fail in his efforts to re-tune the Pharos, and wished never to return. A part of him knew that he could live out his days on Sotha in utter contentment, barebacked and tanned in the sunlight, careless, mowing the grasses with his scythe, season in and season out.

It was just a dream. Such simple, pastoral destinies did not lie in store for beings like Roboute Guilliman. Fate held, for him, a future of duty and responsibility, very different from that which might await an honest agri-worker. No common farmer would play a role in the final battle against Horus.

He heard a heavy tread crunching towards him and looked up.

‘My lord,’ Sergeant Arkus said, saluting. He was carrying his company’s standard.

‘At ease, Arkus,’ Guilliman told the Ultramarine. Arkus’s armour glinted in the sunlight.

‘You’re trying too hard,’ he added.

‘My lord?’

‘When I arrived last night, your armour was in perfectly respectable condition, as was the plate of the other battle-brothers in your company. I remember these things. This morning, you’ve buffed your plate to the point of insanity.’

‘My primarch is here,’ Arkus said, offended. ‘A surprise inspection of this post. What else would I do?’

Guilliman got up and faced him.

‘I’m sorry, Arkus. My remark was petty and uncalled for. Your armour code is perfect.’

Arkus nodded, and rested the base of the standard on the ground.

‘My lord,’ he said. ‘I am an Ultramarine. Trying too hard is the entire point of us, isn’t it?’

Guilliman smiled and saluted Arkus.

‘Make your report, brother,’ he said.

‘Warsmith Dantioch says we will be ready to test in one hour,’ Arkus said.

‘You can tell him I’ll be there,’ Guilliman said.

Arkus saluted and walked away.

Guilliman turned his face towards the sun and tilted his head back.

‘Brother?’

Guilliman turned and saw the Lion walking down the mountain slope towards him. Behind the Lion, a young Scout from the 199th Aegida followed anxiously.

‘Brother?’ Guilliman returned.

The Lion sat down on a boulder, tired and frustrated. He locked his hands over his knees.

‘Roboute,’ he said, ‘you should listen to this young neophyte. What’s your name, lad?’

‘Oberdeii, my lord,’ the Scout said.

‘Tell it to Roboute… My pardon, tell the primarch before you,’ said the Lion, ‘what you told me.’

Oberdeii looked at Guilliman.

‘It’s all right,’ Guilliman said. ‘Tell me, son.’

‘The most noble Lord of the First,’ replied the Scout, ‘was asking me about this site, about the experience of the posting here. I may have spoken out of turn.’

‘Then if the harm is done,’ said Guilliman, ‘you can do no more harm repeating it. Speak, Oberdeii. There will be no repercussions.’

‘Well, then, about this place, lord,’ Oberdeii said. ‘It is an odd place to be. An odd place to garrison for any time. The Pharos… It breeds dreams. It is alive with them. If you stay here long enough, or live here as we do, the dreams begin to permeate you. They are as much part of this mountain as the grass, rock and air.’

Oberdeii looked up at Guilliman.

‘I hope you believe me, lord,’ he said.

‘I do.’

Guilliman thought of the dreams he had just had, of renouncing his rule and living out his days in a careless pastoral idyll. The Pharos magnified things. It made truths and hopes seem very real. Just a night in its environs had given flesh to his private wishes of an end to duty and responsibility.

‘We have begun to notice things, patterns in our dreams,’ Oberdeii said. ‘We have learned to pay attention. Warsmith Dantioch, may blood be his honour, has told us that the Pharos here gives light upon an empathic vibration. This would account for much. We have all felt it. My worthy sergeant, Arkus, he had a dream. He dreamed that the Dark Angels were coming to Macragge. And lo! Two days later, this very thing happened. Captain Adallus, just two nights ago, had a dream of blood, and woke up calling out the name of Curze.’

‘Curze?’ asked Guilliman.

‘They saw it coming,’ the Lion said to Guilliman.

‘Thanks to this lighthouse,’ Guilliman said.

‘Thanks to this lighthouse and its xenos function,’ the Lion agreed.

Guilliman looked to Oberdeii. ‘There is something more, isn’t there?’ he asked.

‘There most certainly is,’ said the Lion.

‘All in my company first thought that the dream of the Dark Angels was merely a coincidence,’ said Oberdeii, ‘but then the dream of Curze persuaded us there was more going on. Last night, my dear lord, I had a dream.’

‘Share with me its contents, son,’ said Guilliman. ‘Tell me of this dream you had.

Oberdeii told him.

Dawn was not far off, a cold and dismal dawn. Drab smoke wreathed the Castrum and the high towers of the Fortress, a legacy of the bloody night that was only now passing. Aircraft and ground forces from the Fortress continued to make systematic sweeps of the Civitas’s vast grid. Until they had found what they were looking for, there was no telling that the bloody night would become just a prequel to a bloodier day.

John and Damon travelled south-east across Strayko into the neighbouring deme of Anomie, moving as best they could to avoid detection by the sweep patrols. A measure of martial law had been imposed to keep civilians off the streets.

They were following John’s track on the damaged thoughts of Vulkan. The pre-dawn was a pale blue hour around them. The empty, stately streets of Anomie felt like they were underwater. It reminded John of his last meeting with the farseer.

Every few minutes they were obliged to take shelter in an underwalk or beneath a portico as an Ultramarines search vehicle whined past overhead, or clattered across a junction in front of them.

Neither of them was aware of the dark shadow trailing them from roof to roof.

The more John considered the farseer’s plan, the more it made him agitated. It was enervating. It was entirely the type of duty he had longed to perform, for what felt like forever. It was a contradiction of the Cabal’s desires, a refutation of their philosophy and their control over him. John had a chance to fight, as a man, on the side of mankind.

It was, however, not going to be easy. John hoped he had the skill, wit and determination to see it through. The Cabal wanted Vulkan dead, for they had foreseen the epic role he would play in the final war against Horus and the warp. He was destined to be one of the most stalwart defenders of Ancient Terra. The Cabal did not want him alive to perform that conspicuous role.

Eldrad Ulthran had seen more. He had seen Vulkan’s insanity, the demented state forced upon the proud primarch by the foul Night Haunter. As it stood, Vulkan was already out of the game. He was in no state to fulfill his destiny as the Cabal had predicted it. If John took no further action, his mission would be deemed a technical success.

The spear was a potent weapon. In the hands of a primarch, it could kill anything, even an unkillable being. In the hands of a Perpetual, however… Eldrad Ulthran’s proposition was that under those circumstances, a different result might be obtained. Empowered by the touch of a Perpetual, the spear might cure instead of kill.

If John could strike the blow, then perhaps Vulkan might be restored. Rather than removing Vulkan from the war, John Grammaticus could repair and empower one of the Emperor’s most powerful sons and most important allies.

There were obstacles to overcome. The presence of Curze, lurking somewhere in the Civitas, was a significant one. The Ultramarines and authorities of Macragge were another. Vulkan himself was a problem – how did one get close enough to stab an insane, hyperaggressive primarch?

Then there was the Cabal, of course, and the agent they had sent to be John’s handler. John had known Damon Prytanis for a long time. They had never really been friends, but there was a lot of common ground between them. Though both Perpetuals, they were very different. John had always been very much the spy, the infiltrator, the covert operative who manipulated through disguise and dealt in information. Damon called himself a soldier, but he was a killer, pure and simple. He was an assassin, a taker of lives, and he did this with impunity. Damon Prytanis would not hesitate to take John’s life if he thought John was reneging on his mission.

Or would he?

As they walked, John glanced at Prytanis, watching the easy gait, the casual demeanor, the shabby fur coat and muddy boots, the affectless manner that actually covered a hard-wired combat readiness.

There was doubt in Prytanis. There was misery. Like John, Prytanis had served too long, and against his own breed. John sensed in Damon Prytanis much of the resentment that was bottled up inside his own soul.

A Storm Eagle flew overhead, circling slowly on whickering engines, probing the lanes and back-walks between habs and insulae with cool blue-white stablight beams.

Damon and John ducked in under an arch, waiting for it to pass on.

‘Can I ask you something?’ said John.

‘Sure. How I remain so effortlessly cool, while you’re a hectic jangle of tics and quirks? It’s because you’re a psyker, Johnny, and I’m a fighter.’

‘Well, not that, but thanks for the assessment.’ John paused. Then he said, ‘How do you live with it?’

‘With what?’

‘Serving the Cabal?’

Damon shrugged. ‘They pay well,’ he said.

‘I thought so too, but they’re using us as weapons against our own kind,’ John said simply.

Damon made a face. It was an I-want-you-to-stop-talking face, a we’ve-had-this-pointless-conversation-a-hundred-times face.

‘You really are having a problem with this mission, aren’t you?’ Damon asked.

‘Aren’t you?’

‘No,’ Damon replied. ‘Hell no.’

He glanced out to see if the gunship had moved far enough away for them to get moving again. It had not. He pulled back inside the arch and scowled at John.

‘I agreed to serve them,’ he said. ‘I’m a soldier. I’m loyal. End of.’

‘I can read that you’re not,’ John replied.

Damon jerked back, eyes widening in alarm. ‘Get out of my damn head, Grammaticus. I didn’t invite you in.’

John held his hands up to show no intent.

‘I’m not trying. Besides, you’re warded against me,’ he remarked. ‘Very clever warp-magic, Damon. The Cabal’s not above using anything, is it? Whatever works?’

Damon leaned back against the bricks, scratched his temple and sighed.

‘Look, John… If you want the truth, I am sick of it, sick of it all. I am sick of serving those xenos pricks. I hate the fact that humanity has to take the fall to save the cosmos. I’m like you in that. But I was also telling the truth just now. I agreed to serve. I’m a soldier. I’m loyal. They showed me the bigger picture and I accepted it. I didn’t like it, but I accepted it. They showed me the greater good. I’m a soldier, John. I understand expediency, pragmatism and necessary evil.’

‘We were all soldiers, once,’ said John. ‘All that experience taught me was the power of comradeship.’

Damon sniffed. ‘Yeah? Fine. I’ve got more heart than you think I have, Grammaticus. This whole thing hurts me more than you know. Maybe I’m not a soldier, then. Just a killer. An assassin. That’s how the Cabal has employed me these last few thousand years. I work well. I work wet. The first thing I ever killed was my own conscience. It was a mercy killing. You still have yours, Johnny, and I really pity you for that.’

He grinned at John as if he had revealed some deep and profound truth.

‘Okay?’ he asked.

John smiled at the use of the archaic slang. ‘You sound like Oll,’ he said.

‘That loser?’ asked Damon sourly. ‘Screw it, John. If you want to see what happens to a man when he listens to his conscience, then look at Ollanius-fugging-Persson. That surly old bastard could have used his gifts for good, but where is he?’

John smiled, a blank kind of well-you-have-me-there look. He hoped to hell that the Cabal had not detected the risky clandestine efforts he had made to assist Oll Persson during the Calth disaster. Moreover, he hoped that they were blind to the new course that he had set Oll Persson upon. Unwillingly, Oll had embarked upon a thankless and thoroughly hazardous journey at John’s bidding, to do something John knew full well that the Cabal would abhor…

That was why John hadn’t been able to do it himself. That’s why he’d had to recruit Oll.

It seemed that they were both about to strike blows for mankind against the interests of the Cabal. This truly was an age of rebellion and revolt.

Damon stared at John. He smiled, but there was very little warmth in the smile.

‘Let’s go, Johnny. You’ve had your moment. I get that you don’t like this any more. Sorry. That’s tough. “Boo hoo, too late,” as someone recently said. We’re going to do this. We going to do it properly, and square it away. We’re going to complete this damned mission if it kills us.’

‘It just might,’ John said.

‘Comes with the territory.’ Damon replied. ‘I’m ready. Always have been.’

‘What if I refuse, Damon?’ John asked.

The gunship had moved on. Damon stepped onto the pavement. He looked back at John.

‘Why would you go and do a silly thing like that?’ he asked cheerfully. ‘Besides, I’m not going to let you refuse. That’s why I’m here.’

‘I wish to serve,’ said Faffnr Bludbroder.

‘You have already served, brother,’ Verus Caspean assured him, ‘and served honourably.’

Entering the Audience Hall of the Residency, Faffnr had bowed before the new First Master of the Ultramarines out of respect. He got off his knees, and there was some effort involved. He had to lean on his axe.

‘Curze left one of your pack dead, and put three more in the apothecarion,’ said Caspean. ‘You ought to be there too. Your service is–’

‘We are hunters,’ said Faffnr. ‘Curze must be stopped. Allow the able members of my pack permission to deploy into the town, and we will find him.’

‘For a re-match?’ asked Dolor, standing at Caspean’s side.

Faffnr grunted.

‘Wolf, your valiant efforts are noted,’ said Caspean. ‘But we do not even know if Curze still lives.’

‘Have you seen his corpse?’ asked Faffnr.

‘No.’

‘Then he still lives,’ said the pack-master.

‘I say you should allow the Wolf to assist you,’ said Euten. She stood to one side of the Legion commanders, her arms hugged around her, her face more pale and gaunt than ever.

‘The Space Wolves have displayed the most devoted and emotional loyalty to the rule of law,’ she said. ‘I owe them my life.’

Faffnr looked at the Chamberlain Principal, and nodded in appreciation.

‘I would, however, wish that the pack-master saw to his wounds before he set to inflict the same upon others,’ she added.

‘It’s nothing,’ Faffnr said.

‘You leave blood wherever you walk.’

‘I’ll allow you to hunt,’ said Caspean to Faffnr, ‘but you wait an hour for our first search sweeps to be finished. Let’s see what they pick up. If Curze is still out of our sight by then, the Wolves can join the hunt.’

Caspean glanced over at Timur Gantulga who was waiting nearby, fronting a group of his own battle-brothers and Eeron Kleve’s Iron Hands.

‘The White Scar’s petition is also granted subject to similar conditions. It was astute reasoning that led you to see that Curze had switched from the Fortress to the Residency. Both you and the Wolves clearly have insight into his tactics.’

‘How reassuring should we find it that the Space Wolves and the White Scars think like Konrad Curze?’ asked Farith Redloss.

Dolor looked at him sharply.

‘I mean to say,’ said Farith Redloss, ‘perhaps we can learn much from our more feral brothers.’

‘Like manners?’ suggested Dolor.

‘My lords! Lady Euten!’

They turned to see Titus Prayto limping into the hall. His face was tight with pain. Like Faffnr Bludbroder, he had not spent anything like enough time in the apothecarion.

‘I bid you all come with me, quickly,’ he said directly.

They followed him out of the hall and along a banner-lined terrace into the Reading Room of the Residency. The chamber was lined with glass-cased cabinets filled with books and slates.

‘Look,’ said Prayto.

An odd glow had formed in one corner of the Reading Room. It was distinctly an other light, the displaced luminosity that accompanied the Pharos’s communication field. The curious light reflected eerily from the glass cases of the cabinets.

‘I believe that Warsmith Dantioch is attempting to retune the link,’ Titus said.

‘This is good news at least,’ said Caspean.

‘We must set up a watch, to see if contact improves,’ said Prayto, ‘and also have patrols tour the Residency and the Fortress. There were multiple location manifestations before stable contact was originally established.’

The First Master was about to issue the instructions, but he stopped dead as the unworldly light washed over them with a brighter, flickering radiance.

The field had expanded and suddenly resolved into greater clarity. A figure stood before them, half-manifested, like a shade of the dead walking at midnight. It was impossible to identify.

‘There, I knew it could be done,’ a voice said, from all around them. ‘Did I not say it could be done?’

‘Who is there?’ Caspean called out. ‘Who hails us from far away Sotha?’

The communication field flickered, and then disappeared all together. The odd light drained from the Reading Room.

Caspean, Dolor and the other Ultramarines officers looked to each other.

‘I’m afraid this process could take days or weeks to establish,’ said Prayto.

‘I do not comprehend this trickery,’ said Farith Redloss, ‘but perhaps–’

‘–no, no, not lost!’ the voice suddenly cut in, speaking out of the cabinets, out of the very books around them. ‘Not lost at all! Patience! The field must be stabilised, that is all! Just a small adjustment, and–’

Silence.

‘That was Dantioch’s voice, I would swear it,’ said Dolor.

‘My Lord Dantioch? Warsmith?’ Caspean called out again. ‘This is Macragge! We hear you! We almost see you!’

‘–I insist it is not lost! I will not let it be lost–’ the voice boomed and cut away.

Abruptly, the light returned.

This time it was brighter and more steady. Everyone stepped back involuntarily as a portion of the Reading Room filled with the gleaming black mirror-stone of Primary Location Alpha, as if some ingenious mechanical scenery for a play had been rolled out across a stage.

The clarity of the background was astonishing. They could almost feel the cool black rock and the soft air. The immediate foreground was slightly out of focus, creating a hazy cloud in the shape of a man or some man-thing.

The focus popped. The figure resolved into perfect clarity to match the background.

It was the warsmith, slumped uncomfortably upon his great wooden seat on the tuning floor. He appeared tired and haggard, propped up by his crude throne. He looked like the ancient monarch of a dying kingdom – the last of his line, waiting wearily in an abandoned throne room for his life, his rule and his name to become history.

‘There, as I said,’ the warsmith announced, ‘not lost at all. Sensitive, but not lost.’

‘My Lord Dantioch,’ Caspean said.

‘Well, I can’t do anything about the sensitivity,’ said Dantioch. ‘There is still so much about the process to learn and understand.’

They realised that he was not addressing them. He was speaking to one side, to a person or persons not in the field.

‘My Lord Dantioch?’ Prayto called.

The warsmith peered out of the field at them.

‘My Lord Prayto,’ he said. ‘It is good to see you. Transmission was disrupted for a while.’ Dantioch looked to his left. ‘Move to your right,’ they heard him say. ‘The focus is here. I see Prayto and others.’

Other figures appeared beside him, repositioning themselves in the field: two Ultramarines, then a figure in yellow plate, unmistakably the Imperial Fist, Alexis Polux.

‘How is Polux there?’ Prayto exclaimed. ‘How–’

His words died away.

Roboute Guilliman and the Lion loomed into the field beside the seated warsmith.

Everyone in the Reading Room dropped to their knees.

‘My friends and brothers on Macragge!’ said Dantioch. ‘Do not make me attempt an explanation, for it is too complex. In short, I am happy to confirm that your primarchs, along with the worthy Alexis Polux, are alive and here with me on Sotha.’

‘The Emperor be praised,’ said Caspean.

‘I feared the night’s losses were too great for us to bear,’ said Farith Redloss.

‘There is the small matter of us returning,’ said the Lion. ‘We have stepped across eternity, so it seems, by simple force of will, of need. It was not a conscious decision, but rather one of the emotions.’

He stepped forward, but did not seem able to pass into the Reading Room. Every time he came too far, he simply vanished from the field. Striding back into view, he glanced at Dantioch in frustration.

‘It did not promise it was a two-way process, my lord,’ said the warsmith, and sighed. ‘Try to focus on your greatest need, your greatest wish.’

‘I should make a wish?’ said the Lion. ‘You make it sound like a fairy story.’

‘Perhaps such technologies and their functions are the root of such stories,’ said Dantioch.

The Lion scowled.

‘I do not wish to be here,’ he said. Again, he seemed to have no success in stepping out of the field.

Guilliman stepped forward beside him. Just like the Lion, he too passed out of sight, unable to step across. Guilliman shook his head and smiled a sad smile, regarding his failure more stoically than had the Lion. He stared out at his officers.

‘I have news,’ he said, ‘which if I cannot cross over I must at least urgently impart to you. First, though, tell me – has Curze been captured? Slain, even?’

‘Not yet, my lord,’ said Dolor.

‘You will update me,’ Guilliman replied, nodding. ‘He must be apprehended. In the meantime, I command you, at once, to prepare the fleet. Visitors descend on Macragge. You must be ready to greet them.’

‘It will be done,’ said Caspean.

Euten stepped forward.

‘I am glad of the sight of you at least, lord,’ she said. ‘Curze told me you were dead.’

‘Curze told you?’ Guilliman asked in alarm.

‘Curze almost killed our dear lady last night, my lord,’ Caspean explained.

Guilliman started forward, grave concern plain on his face, and took her by the hands to comfort her.

‘Are you well? Did he hurt you?’ he asked.

She smiled.

‘I am well now, lord,’ Euten said. ‘I am well now. Look. What did you wish for?’

Guilliman looked down and realised that he had stepped across.

‘I did not wish for anything,’ he admitted, ‘except that you were unharmed. Evidently, I needed to be here, to make sure of your safety.’

He looked back at the Lion. He had never seen his brother so stricken with frustration.

Guilliman faced the field and reached out his hand.

‘Give me your hand,’ he said.

‘I cannot!’ the Lion cursed.

‘I need you here with me, brother,’ Guilliman insisted. He leaned in, seized the Lion’s hand through the edge of the field, and pulled.

The Lion stepped through into the Reading Room.

‘How did you do that?’ the Lion asked Guilliman.

‘I think,’ said Guilliman, ‘that I am more open with my needs and my hopes. I do not sequester them as you do, brother. The field could not read you. In that theoretical there is perhaps a practical that we both might heed.’

The Lion hesitated, then he nodded and placed his left hand around their already clasped right hands.

Behind them, Dantioch shifted painfully on his wooden throne. His latest efforts had sapped much of his strengths. He looked at Polux.

‘Will you go?’ Dantioch asked Polux.

‘I think the field will permit me,’ Polux replied, ‘for I need to be on Terra, and Macragge is one step closer, but I fancy the mysteries of the Pharos might be more expediently uncovered if comrades work together.’

Dantioch held out his hand. Polux took it.

‘I will be glad of the help, Alexis,’ he said.

‘As I am already glad of yours,’ Polux replied.

Polux looked out of the field at Guilliman.

‘I will stay here for the while, lord,’ he said, ‘with your permission. We will work to unravel further the mysteries of this light, and this link.’

‘With my blessing,’ said the Avenging Son. Polux saluted.

‘Tell me about Curze,’ Guilliman asked his officers. ‘How close are we to finding him? What other crimes has he committed?’

‘There is much to tell,’ said Dolor.

‘But first,’ said Euten, ‘you say we are to ready the fleet? For whose arrival? Who comes to Macragge, Roboute?’

‘Another brother,’ said Guilliman. ‘Another Angel.’

22
Where the
Hammer Fell

‘Death must occur so that life may prevail.’

– literal translation of the
ciphered rune of the Cabal

He came back to the place where the sky had dropped him.

Dawn had stolen in, grey and damp. Magna Macragge Civitas seemed wounded and tense, its golden lustre dimmed. Beyond the shimmer of the city shields, the coastal wind brought the grumble of thunder, and an oceanic storm threatening to blow inland and break against the sheer wall of the Hera’s Crown mountains, thus shedding its rain upon the old city.

Vulkan came back to where the sky had dropped him, his mind dislocated and hurt, his garb a bloodied mis-match of purloined plate and sub-suit. His hands shook. He recoiled from shadows. His eyes smouldered. Sometimes, he chattered nonsense sounds at the sky or the earth.

The earth had once been his friend. The heat of that friendship was long gone. Vulkan’s mind simmered with a fire of its own. It was hotter than any fire of the earth-rock, hotter than any magma, hotter than any core.

Sometimes he fell to his knees, and moaned or sobbed, and touched his hands to the ground and then to his face, marking his ebon skin with dust as grey as ash.

Curze had tested him by exploring the limits of his unusual life beyond its breaking point. Curze had to pay for that.

Vulkan was subliminally drawn to the object that would be pure enough to deliver his vengeance.

John glanced at Damon and nodded. They hurried across the empty street, the mumble of distant thunder in the air, and clambered their way into the burned-out ruin of a building.

The air smelled of soot and charred paper, and also of chemical fire-retardant. John could feel the heavy rain sizzling off the city shields high overhead. He wished that the shields were down, so that the rain could purge the site and wash the city clean. Magna Macragge Civitas was a city at war, however, and its armour was permanently buckled tight.

Damon Prytanis drew his pair of sling pistols. It was a deft, oft-practised gesture: slip-slip, from under his fur coat. He checked their loads. John knelt, and opened his carrybag.

‘You think he’s here?’ Damon asked.

John nodded, unwrapping the parcel he had pulled from the bag.

‘Hunch, or clear read?’ asked Damon. ‘It makes a difference.’

‘Clear read,’ John replied. ‘This is where he landed.’

Damon looked at a brick arch above the entrance to the building’s quadrangle.

‘The Antimon Machine Works,’ he read. ‘It’s seen better days.’

‘He hit it like a meteor,’ John replied. ‘Set the place alight. It was a good thing the building was derelict.’

John rose. The fulgurite spear, unwrapped, lay in his hands.

‘Is that it?’ asked Damon Prytanis.

‘Yes.’

‘Not much to look at, is it?’

‘The most potent things often aren’t,’ John replied.

‘S’why the ladies love me, Johnny,’ Damon smiled. He waited. ‘Nothing? Not even a courtesy laugh?’

‘Let’s get on,’ said John Grammaticus. ‘I’m not getting any younger.’

Damon regarded him quizzically.

‘I thought we had to wait for… you know… the other primarch,’ he said. ‘It’s got to be another primarch who does it, right? Isn’t that what they had foreseen?’

‘Yes.’

‘So we need the other primarch?’

‘No,’ said John.

‘No?’

‘I’ve thought about this,’ John said. ‘A primarch would be ideal, but I don’t think it’s essential. We can do it, either of us, you or me.’

‘No, that’s not what they told you,’ Damon began uneasily.

‘Maybe, but we’re on the ground, and we’re making the choices now,’ John replied. ‘Curze is too dangerous. He’s too much of a liability. We can’t control him; we can’t even predict what he’ll do. In fact, that’s the point. Curze is psyk-invisible most of the time, so they can’t have foreseen him in this situation. If the Cabal had known Curze was the only option, they wouldn’t have gone for it.’

He looked at Damon.

‘If we’re going to do this, and do it right, it has to be us. It has to be me.’

Damon Prytanis gave him a long, probing look.

‘You’re not trying to pull some crazy shit on me, are you, Johnny?’

‘No.’

‘Johnny?’

John Grammaticus turned to look at him.

‘For Terra’s sake, Prytanis. We’re about to do something that’ll change the course of galactic history. We’re about to betray our kind. Again. I just told you I’m prepared to do that. So give me a break, okay?’

John had the spear in his right hand. He held out his left.

‘Can you spare one?’ he asked.

Damon looked down at the twinned sling pistols he was wielding and realised what John meant.

‘Nice try,’ he replied with a dark chuckle.

‘He’s not likely to come quietly,’ John said. ‘All I have is the spear. We may need to put him down first so I can use it.’

‘Well, let’s see how we go. I’ve got your back.’

‘You’re not making this any easier,’ said John. ‘He’s a primarch!’

Damon sighed, briefly holstered one of the murehk, drew his short-pattern chainsword from under his fur coat and tossed it to John.

John caught it.

‘Look after it,’ Damon said, drawing his other sling gun again. ‘Look after it, and it’ll look after you. That baby will cut through anything. Even a primarch.’

They entered the machine works.

The inner quadrangle was a rockcrete yard layered with dust, grit and shards of ceramic and glass. Each side of the quad was formed by a massive fabricatory shed, with a pillared walkway around the perimeter. The western end of the layout was flattened and smashed, as though a missile had torn through it and delivered a thermic warhead.

Damon and John crunched forward, a shabby rogue in a coat of black fur and a tall man in the dark garb of a repatriation officer, funeral watch division. How appropriate, John thought.

‘Got a fix on him?’ Damon hissed, prowling along the northern side of the quad, his guns ready. For the first time, he really looked like a soldier to John. In a million years, John could not have imitated that skill, that readiness, that capacity.

John focused.

He’s all around us, John thought. Vulkan is here, and he’s everywhere. His mind is so raging, so powerful. I need–

‘Johnny?’

‘Give me a second,’ John replied.

I can taste the hurt. He’s so wounded. I recognise that. I recognise that! What is it? What is it? He’s feeling something I feel–

Vulkan came out of the shadows. He was right on them.

‘Shit,’ said Damon Prytanis.

Vulkan was an immense shape, eyes blazing. He looked like a massive stone statue brought to life, for he was covered in dust and dirt. He had spent the last fifteen minutes digging in the pit of the crash site. He had a hammer in his hands. It was his hammer – Dawnbringer – the one he had fallen with, the one that had brought him to Macragge. It had been buried much deeper than the level his body had been recovered from.

Howling, the maddened primarch flew at them.

‘Shit!’ Damon cried again, backing up fast.

Vulkan swung the hammer at them. It came cross-wise at human head-height, whistling through the air. Damon ducked. John threw himself to the right.

Both Perpetuals cheated death by a hair’s breadth. The hammer-swing sliced the empty air and demolished one of the quad’s pillars.

Damon had ducked so frantically that he fell. Vulkan loomed over him. Damon rolled, barely in time to avoid the next swing, which smashed the paving stones where he had been sprawled a moment earlier.

Damon kept rolling, turning fast – a combat move. He tumbled out of Vulkan’s immediate kill-radius, and then rocked up on one knee, firing.

‘Son of a bitch!’ he exclaimed, letting rip with both of the murehk. Vulkan, four times his size, plated and raging mad, charged at him, with Dawnbringer raised.

Damon Prytanis expended both of his plasti-crystal ammo cores in less than four seconds. Vulkan was a big target, and Damon shot thousands of razor-rounds through his bulk.

He shredded him. The pavement behind Vulkan, for a distance of some eight or ten metres, became a huge splatter pattern of blood and ruined tissue, where separate through-wounds and impacts had gouted.

Vulkan dropped to his knees a few feet short of Damon, blood venting and squirting from hundreds of wounds.

Then he vanished, leaving nothing but the vast pooling spatter of blood behind.

Damon got up. ‘What the hell?’ he muttered.

Nearby, John was getting back on his feet.

‘That hammer of his,’ John said. ‘It has a teleport function.’

‘Oh goody,’ Damon replied. He ejected the smoking stubs of his spent cores and loaded new ones. Then he began to circle, both sling guns out in front of him, straight-armed.

‘You feel him?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said John.

‘Tell me when you feel him.’

‘Obviously.’

A long second passed.

Damon looked around. ‘What’s taking so long?’ he asked. ‘Some sort of teleport lag?’

‘Behind you!’ John yelled.

Damon turned in time to see Vulkan appear behind him in a swirl of charged dust. He was no longer a dirt-grey statue. He was a revenant thing, painted head to foot in his own blood.

Damon narrowed his eyes and opened fire again.

‘Yeah, you great big bastard?’ Damon said, his pistols whipping and wailing. ‘Teleport all you like. You mess with me? End of.’

A second relentless hurricane of razor-fire ripped through the primarch. John could feel the air dampening with blood mist. Vulkan staggered into the lethal streams of gunfire, but only made a step or two.

He fell, first to his knees, then face-down. His body and skull were deformed and misshapen from the sheer structural damage wrought by the murehk overkill.

Vulkan tried to rise. He was shuddering, and weeping blood like a fountain. He got halfway to his knees, using his hammer as a crutch.

‘Oh, just give it up,’ Damon said.

He stepped forward, put both Guh’hru and Meh’menitay to Vulkan’s forehead, and blew the back of the primarch’s skull out.

Vulkan dropped dead.

Damon looked around at John. Damon’s face was dappled with spots of Vulkan’s blood. He began to reload again. His hands were shaking.

‘I don’t know how many times I can kill him,’ Damon said desperately. ‘Will you please do it? Fast?’

John approached the fallen primarch, raising the spear. The copper stench of blood was overwhelming.

Vulkan came back from the dead once again.

It was happening faster. It was happening faster and faster each time. New life followed each death at an increasingly fearsome rate. Vulkan’s rage was such that he would not let death keep him for even a second.

He lurched at them with a roar of unimaginable pain, his ruined head still re-forming and becoming whole again. Muscle, tissue, flesh and bone knitted and reconstituted in front of their eyes.

Damon let out a snarl of dismay. He hadn’t even had time to finish his reload. Vulkan grabbed Damon by the throat and threw him across the quad. The Perpetual landed badly. John heard a bone break.

Vulkan turned to face John.

‘I can help you,’ John said. ‘Please. I understand your pain. I recognise it. The pain of life and death, of life and death after life and death… I understand. Please, let me help you…’

Vulkan took a step forward, glaring down at John Grammaticus. He was breathing hard, wheezing through shredded lungs that were still regrowing. Blood leaked out of him, through multiple puncture wounds that were still closing.

‘I understand,’ John repeated, trying to sound reassuring.

+I understand,+ he sent, simultaneously.

Vulkan wavered slightly.

‘I understand. Dying is hard,’ said John. ‘Dying hurts. Believe me, I have been there. Please, Lord Vulkan, let me help you. Let me spare you. Let me cure you.’

Vulkan paused. He was still dripping blood, and his ramshackle armour was peppered with razor-slits. Slowly, hesitantly, he held his hand out towards John Grammaticus.

Then Vulkan’s head vanished in a mist of blood and brain tissue.

The shot echoed around the quad long after Vulkan’s virtually headless body had fallen.

Painted with gore, John staggered back.

Narek of the Word walked into the quad, lowering his Brontos-pattern sniper rifle. He stood over Vulkan’s body and put two more rounds through the torso at close range.

‘He’s dead,’ said Narek.

‘Not for long,’ John replied.

‘Long enough. Use the spear. Do the deed. Then you’re coming with me.’

John was suddenly very quiet. The temperature in the quad dropped by ten degrees.

‘He’s here,’ John gasped.

‘Who? Who’s here?’ Narek asked.

An unnecessarily tall shadow leapt from the quad roof and landed between them. Slowly, it straightened up.

‘I dreamed of you,’ it hissed to John Grammaticus. ‘Suddenly, I saw you in my waking dreams. You have something I need. Give me the spear.’

John shook his head. ‘Never.’

Narek growled and raised his rifle to fire at Curze, but the primarch punched him aside without looking. Blood flew into the air from the impact. Narek landed several metres away.

‘Give me the spear,’ Curze repeated.

‘Never,’ said John Grammaticus.

Konrad Curze smiled.

‘No one ever, ever refuses me,’ he hissed.

‘Yeah?’ said Damon Prytanis from a few metres away. ‘Welcome to a whole new painful world.’

He opened fire on Konrad Curze with both sling guns.

23
Life for Life

‘In all things there is an exchange; of death for life, of darkness for light, of life for death, of light for darkness. Thus is universal equilibrium sustained.’

– Ulthrion Aledred, Precepts of Fortitude Against
the Primordial Annihilator (translated)

Vulkan, monolithic, had soaked up Damon’s streams of expertly placed razor-shot.

Curze merely sidestepped them. The eldar munitions, screaming like a billion angry hornets, passed through and around the fold of smoke that Konrad Curze had become. He was untouched.

Unchecked by any object, the razor-shots screamed on, ripping a long, broad blizzard of stone chips out of the quadrangle wall.

Curze left his laugher behind him.

Aghast, Damon stopped firing for a second, turning, trying to see where his target had gone. How could anything so big move so fast, so unnaturally?

A shadow slapped the sling pistols out of his hands. Damon winced and cried out. He had broken a shoulder blade and several ribs in his fall, and the impact across his wrists jarred him badly.

His pain had only just begun.

A single metal talon slid under his chin, punching up under the jaw through the floor of Damon’s mouth. He gurgled in agony, his tongue pushed sideways, his mouth and throat rapidly filling with blood. Curze laughed again and lifted Damon off the ground on the hook of his single talon.

‘A whole new painful world,’ Curze hissed, sing-song.

Damon struggled. It felt as if his face was about to be torn away.

Whining furiously, the chainsword tore into Curze from behind. John drove it in with all his might. He’d considered using the spear, but he was afraid of what that might do to Curze.

The chainsword was a more reliable choice.

Curze yelped. Blood and shreds of black armour and cloth were flung out by the sword’s cycling teeth. He let Damon fall, and wheeled at John. His visage – hateful eyes, black-in-black, and a biting black maw in a spectral white face – was the most terrifying thing John had ever seen.

He didn’t stand a chance.

But Vulkan did.

The decompressive pop of a teleport displacement drove John back as Vulkan materialised between him and the lunging Curze.

A hammer blow drove Curze back. A second made him reel sideways. Curze swung back with his claws, deflecting the hammer’s third and fourth attacks.

The action between them began to accelerate. They rapidly became post-human blurs, trading blows back and forth with unimaginable speed.

Vulkan abruptly connected in a fundamental way. His huge broad back and massive arms slammed the hammer into Curze’s torso. Plasteel cracked like a gunshot. Curze, seemingly no more than a bundle of black rags, was hurled backwards. He brought down two of the quad’s pillars in a rain of stones and dust, and smashed through the wall into one of the empty sheds.

Broken masonry slithered and dropped in the aftermath of the impact. Vulkan surged forward, using Dawnbringer to break the wall down further and get at his foe. Fully half of the fabricatory shed’s outer wall collapsed in an avalanche of stonework and dust. Vulkan churned on in the rising dust, smashing debris out of his way to find Curze.

The Night Haunter came at him, screaming, claws wide.

‘Why won’t you just die? This is nothing more than the end of the fight we began months ago, brother… and believe me, it will be the end!’

He drove Vulkan back through another section of the shed wall, bringing down another cascade of masonry. Vulkan stepped back on his right foot, braced, and slammed the haft of the hammer around like a bludgeon, ramming the base into the side of Curze’s head. Curze jolted sideways and then met the hammerhead coming the other way, and the blow sent him stumbling and flailing back into the yard.

Vulkan followed, whirling Dawnbringer in a vertical undersweep that struck Curze in the solar plexus, cracking him up and over onto his back.

He rolled out of the way of Vulkan’s next strike, and screamed at John Grammaticus.

‘Give me that thing! Give it to me!’

John was at Damon’s side. Damon’s mouth, chin and shirt-front were soaked with blood, and he was spitting out more as his mouth kept filling. He couldn’t speak, but he looked at John. His eyes were wide. Curze, a rapid shadow, rushed at them to claim the spear and finish Vulkan any way that he could count on as permanent.

Damon shoved John out of the way, and pulled out the last of his four weapons. It was the small, red-glass bottle. He hurled it at Curze.

The bottle was a tiny and very precious thing. The vessel had been carefully charged by Cabal specialists with warp-magic for use in utter emergencies. Damon had learned its method by rote, and it had saved his life in the mountains, three days after his arrival on Macragge.

As it shattered at Curze’s feet, it released the thing that Damon had trapped in it that day.

Ushpetkhar re-entered realspace, freed from the prison of Damon’s vessel and driven mad by its confinement. There was a brief and sickening suggestion of something massive and glossy sprouting from the floor of the yard; something muscular and segmented, like a vast, jet-shelled centipede writhing with wet pseudopods. Ushpetkhar attacked the first thing it saw – it shot up in an instant, out of nowhere, curling over to collapse and constrict Konrad Curze. He fought back, astonished, screaming, shredding its noisome flesh with his claws. Ushpetkhar locked around him. The giant figure of the primarch was engulfed in the greater, more fluid mass of the daemon.

It tightened its coils. It rippled.

It squeezed them both out of realspace, and they vanished together.

Only a smear of iridescent black slime and broken fragments of red glass remained where they had been.

Damon flopped back, gurgling blood as he tried to breathe.

John rose to his feet and faced Vulkan.

‘You know what I’m trying to do, don’t you?’ John said. ‘Even in your distraction, you sense our kinship. Lives and deaths, over and over again. All that pain. We’ve both known it.’

Vulkan didn’t respond, but he kept watching John with his burning eyes.

John stepped closer, the spear in his hand.

‘Life for life, my lord,’ he said. ‘My life to cure yours. Take it. Take it gladly, so that you may fight for us all.’

Behind him, Damon made a wretched sound. He tried to rise. He understood what John was about to do.

John raised the spear.

Damon spat out a mouthful of blood. ‘Don’t. Don’t!’ he managed to splutter.

Vulkan saw the spear and recognised that he was about to be struck by a weapon. Involuntarily, he made to block it and break John with his hammer.

John was already too close.

He plunged the spear into the primarch’s chest. It went in without resistance, cutting clean through what was left of his armour plate, and transfixed Vulkan’s heart.

Electric fire wreathed them both. Corposant ignited and burned around the stricken primarch and the man driving the weapon into him.

Holding on, yelling in pain, John felt his life – his long, long Perpetual existence – flowing out of him through the spear into Vulkan.

He hoped it would be sufficient.

They fell. Vulkan landed on his back, the spear penetrating him. John fell across him. The lightning crackled around them for another few seconds, and then it sputtered out.

In great pain, Damon Prytanis got to his feet. He limped over to them.

They were both dead. This time, there was absolutely no sign of Vulkan rising again.

John had been wrong. Whatever madness he had been thinking, whatever had made him defy his orders, he’d got it wrong, and now, he too was dead.

‘You bloody idiot,’ Damon said, chewing and spitting the words, painfully, out of his mangled mouth.

He could hear gunships circling, the ominous howl of Storm Eagle engines. The fight had attracted a great deal of attention.

It was time to go. It was long past time to go.

Narek of the Word stirred and sat up. His transhuman metabolism had finally clotted and closed the wounds Curze had left upon him.

He got to his feet. Further devastation had evidently swept through the machine shop quad while he had been unconscious. Curze had vanished, and the two humans were gone too.

Vulkan still lay there, however.

Narek could hear the enemy approaching, but he limped over to Vulkan’s side and bent over him.

The primarch was dead. The spear impaled his chest. Narek thought to pull it out, to take it and escape so he could put it to his own purpose.

When he touched the spear, however, it was cold and inert. It no longer felt godlike. There was no power left in it. He tried to pull it out, but it absolutely refused to move.

Gunships chattered in overhead. He heard the crunch of heavy footsteps.

The Cataphractii of Guilliman’s Invictus bodyguard entered the broken quad from all sides.

Narek rose to meet them. He tossed his rifle aside and slowly, reluctantly, raised his hands.

‘Get this bastard contained,’ said Drakus Gorod. ‘Now.’

24
The Unremembered
Empire

‘Those who urgently wish to rule are the last people
who should be allowed to do so.’

– Konor, private writings

On the morning of the next day, the main strength of the Ultramar fleet put out from Macragge and, by the light of the Pharos, met the ships that Oberdeii’s dream had foretold were coming to them.

From the bridge of his flagship, clad in ceremonial plate, Guilliman looked into the hololithic projection before him. He saw the face of his brother looking back.

Guilliman smiled.

‘Well met, Sanguinius,’ he said. ‘I welcome you to Ultramar and the Five Hundred Worlds. It is good that you are here. Now we can begin.’

Sanguinius, Primarch of the IX Legion Blood Angels, entered the Audience Hall, trailing an honour guard of his finest warriors, clad in their bright crimson wargear.

He was always a breathtaking figure, dressed in golden armour and a mantle of spotted carnodon fur. His face, so noble of feature, was framed by a radiant sunburst. His great wings, of course, made him more like an angel than anything else.

Guilliman stepped forward to meet him, and they embraced. Then Sanguinius turned to the Lion and embraced him too.

‘Whence come you, brother?’ Guilliman asked.

‘From Signus Prime,’ Sanguinius replied. His voice was, as ever, like music, but Guilliman could sense pain deep within it. ‘From a bloody fight and a hard betrayal. I fear that my fleet has been adrift in the warp for a long time since, and only your strange light has shown us the way out.’

‘What strength are you?’ asked the Lion.

‘To all sensible purposes, my entire Legion,’ Sanguinius replied.

‘And what befell you on Signus Prime?’ asked Guilliman.

Sanguinius seemed reluctant to reply.

‘We faced down an enemy the like of which we have never known,’ he replied. ‘It cost us. It is now my dearest intention to make best speed for Terra and stand alongside our father, against the treachery of Horus Lupercal.’

‘Return to Terra at this time is not viable,’ said Guilliman. ‘I am sorry to say that the Ruinstorm chokes all travel out.’

‘We too wish to stand with Terra, if Terra still stands,’ the Lion said, including both himself and Guilliman in the remark. ‘For now, we must abide here, and build other strengths.’

‘In what particular?’ asked Sanguinius.

‘I want Roboute to tell you about his efforts to keep the very essence and spirit of the Imperium alive,’ the Lion said. ‘I want him to tell you about Imperium Secundus.’

The three brothers stood and looked upon the body of Vulkan for a long time. The fallen primarch had been placed in a golden casket, fashioned by artisans of the Mechanicum.

‘Vulkan. Terra, you should have told me, Roboute!’ said the Lion.

‘Just as you should have told me about Konrad,’ Guilliman replied.

‘What was it? “You keep too many secrets, brother”,’ the Lion reminded him.

‘Point taken,’ Guilliman said. He sighed.

‘It is a preservation capsule,’ Guilliman told his brothers. ‘It is intended to sustain our dear brother Vulkan’s body in the slightest hope that his extraordinary gifts may yet return him to life.’

The top of the casket was clear glass. Vulkan’s body had been dressed in fresh wargear taken from Guilliman’s armoury and decorated in the livery of the Salamanders. His hammer, Dawnbringer, lay upright across his breast. No one had been able to remove the spear lodged in his heart.

‘It is a sorry sight,’ whispered Sanguinius. ‘How many more of us must fall? How many more of us will Horus take?’

‘Vulkan lives,’ said Guilliman. ‘This is the cry of the Salamanders, and I heartily uphold it. Even in his state of death, he represents the will in us to survive.’

‘It is still a sad fate,’ said Sanguinius, ‘to be held in a casket here in the cold cellars of your Fortress, consigned for all eternity.’

‘It is not a fate I would wish,’ Guilliman agreed. He gestured towards the figures of Zytos and the other Salamanders survivors who had blown to Macragge from the bosom of the storm. They knelt around the golden casket, forming a mourning vigil.

‘I have pledged that, once the storm has abated, good Zytos and his brothers will transport our brother’s body back to Nocturne and inter him in the clean soil of his home world.’

‘This is more fitting,’ the Lion said.

They withdrew from the vault. Guilliman turned and took a last sad look at the casket.

Engraved upon it, on a gilded scroll, were the words ‘The Unbound Flame’.

‘Will he do it?’ Euten asked.

‘I believe the Lord Sanguinius is somewhat unwilling,’ said Farith Redloss.

‘Well, they are talking at least,’ Dolor pointed out.

The three primarchs had withdrawn to the seldom-visited chamber where Guilliman had set the long table and the twenty-one seats draped with banners. The broad doors were closed. Euten and the ranked officers of all three Legions were obliged to wait in the hall for a verdict or command.

‘He is the most suitable,’ Euten said. ‘To see him up close… Lord Sanguinius is the most…’

She searched for a word.

‘He is angelic,’ said Dolor.

‘He is numinous,’ added Farith Redloss. ‘He is more like his father in that respect. Some of the primarch lords are very much of the flesh. Horus is one, and your lord Guilliman another. They have physicality. But the Emperor… To be in his presence is to be in the presence of that which is spiritual, and has no constant form. It is said the Emperor appears to each man in the image that man wishes to see. I think Lord Sanguinius has inherited much of that trait.’

Euten nodded.

‘It is true. I do not think of him as a face or a figure. I think of him as a light. The very colour of his hair and his eyes seems to change with his mood, and with mine.’

‘This has been noted by others,’ Dolor agreed. ‘Several of the primarchs have this quality beyond simple physical stature, but none more than Sanguinius.’

‘He would be perfect,’ she said.

‘Many think so,’ said Farith Redloss. ‘Just as many wonder why Horus and not Sanguinius was chosen as Warmaster after Ullanor. If Horus was preferred, and yet has revealed such mortal flaws since, one wonders what secret flaws reside in the Lord of the Blood Angels?’

‘Imperium Secundus represents continuity,’ Guilliman said. ‘Since Calth, it has been all I can do to hold the fractured parts of the Five Hundred Worlds together. Ultramar is all that we know we have. If the Imperium endures, then we will re-join it when the storm dies, but if it has not endured elsewhere, then we have preserved it here.’

Guilliman had sat in the seat marked with the cobalt-blue banner of his Legion. Likewise, the Lion had placed himself in the seat covered by the Dark Angel’s proud flag. Sanguinius had chosen to remain standing. He paced, troubled but thoughtful.

‘Roboute has made this argument to me at length,’ said the Lion, ‘and though I have been troubled by some of its details, I find myself seeing the value of it more and more.’

‘How so?’ asked the angelic lord.

The Lion sat back, his hands flat upon the edge of the table.

‘The events of last night alone,’ he said in a quiet tone, ‘have made me value life and kinship more than ever. We have lost another brother, and Macragge, great heartstone of the Five Hundred Worlds, was almost brought low by the deeds and machinations of just one demented traitor. I have witnessed the venom of our enemy, and I have seen the sad fragility of those assets and lives that remain to us. Roboute and I do not think alike on many subjects. We disagree. But we also stand together, loyal. We fight for the Imperium, and this is all of the Imperium that we have.’

‘But regent?’ Sanguinius said. ‘That smacks of usurpation…’

‘It smacks of necessity,’ replied Guilliman. ‘If Terra and our father have gone, then so has Malcador. We must rally our shattered strength before it is too late. Neither the Lion nor I can stomach the other assuming the role, but we are unanimous when the choice is you.’

‘You always were the most like our father,’ said the Lion.

Sanguinius looked up at the light of the storm spilling through the chamber’s high windows.

‘Let me say, brother,’ said Guilliman, ‘you showed no great delight in being delivered from the storm and reunited with us. You seem troubled and burdened. That tear marked beneath your eye? Is that a new notation of your anguish?’

‘We have all seen troubles,’ said Sanguinius. ‘Brothers fight and fall, and the stars die. Daemons walk abroad. I fear that Old Night steals in upon us anew. I would rage against that.’

‘Then make your stand here, for now,’ said Guilliman. He stood up. ‘Take this oath of moment, and I will make a pledge. The first moment the storm abates, the first moment we see the light of Terra or hear word that she still stands, I will light my ship-drives, and, with all measure of my forces, guide your Legion back to the home world. There will be no delay or argument. We do not build a second empire here. We maintain the original, founded anew on this globe as circumstance demands.’

‘You would make this pledge to me?’ asked Sanguinius.

‘With all solemnity,’ Guilliman replied.

‘And you will back this?’ Sanguinius asked the Lion.

‘With my blood,’ the Lion replied.

Sanguinius sighed.

‘I notice, in the hours since I set foot upon the soil of Macragge, that there are no remembrancers in your court, nor in the retinue of the Lion.’

He regarded them.

‘Is this mere coincidence?’

‘Discretion,’ Guilliman replied. ‘If Terra stands, then future generations may see, whether true or not, a heresy and usurpation in the foundation we make here. I would not stain the memory or legacies of the loyal sons with such a smirch, however unintentioned. Therefore, I did conclude early in my deliberations, that no piece of this undertaking should become history until history it needs to be. No chronicles will be made, no remembrancers charged to observe this business and commemorate it. If Ultramar is all the Imperium we have, then in due time and with great effect, its histories will be written and will become the single Imperial record. But, if Terra yet survives, as I most dearly hope, then this will become, in future days, an unremembered empire, an unthinkable act undone and unthought.’

Sanguinius took a deep breath. ‘Then it is down to us? We three decide?’ he asked.

‘There is only us,’ said the Lion, rising to his feet.

‘Tell us, Sanguinius,’ Guilliman said, ‘which seat will you take at this table?’

It may have been the moment, or merely his imagination, but Magna Macragge Civitas seemed to glow, as it had done in more glorious years. The great towers and spires of the city shone with a golden lustre, as they had done in the first era of the Five Hundred Worlds.

The sky was full of ships. They moved overhead, in series and formation, a procession of honour and a display of might. High up, illumined by the light of the Pharos star, the great capital ships drifted like leviathans. Below them, in the lower atmosphere, formations of fighter craft and gunships made fly past after fly past. The six great war horns of the ancient Battle Kings sounded across the storm-lit Civitas in unison.

The streets were full. Cheering crowds filled every via and avenue, and processions of the Legiones Astartes, Army, Mechanicum and praecental forces converged from their various barracks and fortresses on the broad space of Martial Square.

Guilliman took the salute of the roaring crowds on the platform of the Propylae Titanicus.

He turned to the Lion at his side.

‘This we do?’ he asked.

The Lion nodded. ‘This we do, for it is right,’ he said.

Guilliman stepped to the side of his brother Sanguinius. He grasped his right wrist and raised his hand to the sky in triumph.

Sanguinius raised his head and looked out over the cheering sea of faces and punching fists. He allowed his hand to be thrust aloft. He spread his mighty wings in a salute, like the sign of the aquila.

At the top of his voice, Guilliman declared the regency, but the noise of the multitude was too great for the words to be heard.

25
Ends and
Beginnings

‘Alpha and Omega, the first and last, each within the other.’

– The Apocrypha Terra, date unknown

Lights came on. The heavy cell door opened. Titus Prayto stepped into the chamber.

Seated upon a metal bench and shackled by the throat, ankles and wrists to pins set in the rockcrete floor, Narek of the Word looked up, but did not speak.

‘So, friend. We begin again,’ said Prayto. ‘Will you say more today?’

‘There is no more to say,’ replied Narek.

‘You are hard to probe, Word Bearer, and hard to open,’ said Prayto. ‘I am impressed. Others would have broken days ago.’

‘There is nothing in me to break,’ said Narek.

‘Did you slay the lord primarch Vulkan?’ asked Prayto.

‘Asked and answered,’ Narek grumbled.

‘For the record today.’

‘No, I did not. Though I would have if I had possessed the means.’

‘Who did?’

‘I don’t know. I can only offer the conjecture that it was the immortal human known as John Grammaticus, or perhaps his unknown confederate.’

‘We have no record of a John Grammaticus on Macragge, or–’

‘I told you,’ said Narek. ‘Where he passes, he does not leave traces. I do not know what happened to him, but his aim was to slay Vulkan.’

‘What was the weapon he used?’

‘I do not understand it. A spear, forged from the power of the Emperor.’

‘And this is what he employed?’

‘Perhaps he did. Perhaps it was Curze. Curze was there too.’

‘What happened to Curze?’ asked Prayto.

‘I know not.’

‘Were the eldar present? There were clear signs of eldar munitions.’

‘No. Grammaticus’s confederate used those weapons. Though it was told to me that their masters are eldar-born.’

‘Anything else?’ asked Prayto.

‘Nothing else,’ said Narek of the Word.

Prayto stepped out of the cell, and closed the hatch. It slammed shut. In the gloomy corridor outside, one of the lowest level spurs in the Fortress of Hera, the Avenging Son stood waiting for him.

‘Has he changed his story?’ Guilliman asked.

‘There is not a hint of variance, my lord,’ Prayto reported. ‘He maintains this strange tale of immortal assassins and Curze. I cannot tell if it is true or false, but it matches the physical evidence, and from my read of him, he believes it utterly.’

‘He does not lie?’

‘He appears, my lord, to have no reason to do so.’

Guilliman shook his head.

‘I don’t understand. He’s a Word Bearer, reviled by our Legion more than any other. He’s on Macragge, alone, after Calth, yet he seems to display no guilt or shame or deceit, nor even fear.’

‘I think he is a very singular being, lord,’ said Prayto. ‘I think perhaps, he is a little similar to Warsmith Dantioch. A good man drawn by fate on the wrong side.’

‘He’s an ally?’ asked Guilliman.

‘Not like the warsmith. Dantioch has come over to us and renounced his Legion. Narek is still dangerous. He sees us as the enemy, and he remains true to his Legion. But he is loyal.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Guilliman.

‘Each day, as I ask my questions to occupy his mind, I probe deeper to unlock the hidden truths. He is loyal to his Legion, but it is a loyalty to the spirit and foundation of his Legion, not to what his Legion has become. I see two things clearly.’

‘And they are?’

‘First, he is remarkably single-minded, determined. There is a fixed purpose in him that is almost frightening to read. The second thing is what that fixed purpose is. He wants, with an urgency that is alarming, to kill your brother Lorgar. It is all he lives for.’

‘Is this an act?’ asked Guilliman.

‘If it is, it’s the best piece of psychic conditioning I’ve ever read,’ Prayto replied. ‘What do we do?’

‘Come back tomorrow and ask him the same questions,’ said Guilliman. ‘Keep doing that, every day, until we have the truth.’

‘And then, lord?’

‘And then,’ said Guilliman, ‘I will order his execution as a traitor and a heretic.’

He woke up, and knew the pain of life again. Without even opening his eyes, he knew that he was on a craftworld.

He could smell the eldar.

He sat up. The chamber was small. He was on a cot which, like the rest of the room, was made of wraithbone. It glowed with an inner light that he found nauseating.

‘You brought me back,’ he said.

‘Oh, I had to, Johnny,’ said Damon Prytanis. ‘Never leave a man behind, and all that.’

‘I mean, to life.’

‘Yeah, that was their choice. After what you pulled, Johnny, I think they want you alive enough to punish you soundly.’

John sighed.

‘Vulkan?’

‘He stayed dead. Your trick didn’t work. Plus, it killed you. It was stupid, Johnny. Technically, you completed the mission. But they know what you were really trying to do.’

‘Why? Because you told them?’

‘I didn’t have to,’ Damon Prytanis replied. ‘Gahet’s waiting for you. Slau Dha too. They want to know who you’ve been talking to. They want to know where you’re getting these ideas from. They want to know what else you might have done.’

He paused. He rubbed the dressings on his throat and jaw.

‘Basically, they want to know how you’ve betrayed them,’ he said, ‘and why.’

‘Because I’m human,’ said John Grammaticus.

Prytanis laughed.

‘Funny, actually. Because that’s true now. That crazy stunt? Pushing your life energy into Vulkan? It took everything out of you. It took everything, Johnny. They brought you back to life, but it’s the only one you have left. They can’t do it again. You’re not a Perpetual any more, Johnny, you’re just a man. You’ve got one life remaining, and they’re going to tell you exactly how you’re going to spend it.’

The door behind Damon Prytanis hummed open.

‘They’re ready,’ he said. ‘Shall we?’

The deep vault was silent. The memorial flame fluttered on its stand. Zytos knelt beside the golden casket.

The sound came and went so quickly that Zytos thought it was in his imagination. He waited, listening. It did not come again.

He waited longer, willing it to return.

It did not repeat.

It had merely been in his imagination.

For a second, he thought he had heard a heartbeat, the du-dunt of a single heartbeat.

But no. It was wishful thinking.

Zytos of the Salamanders bowed his head and resumed his mourning vigil.

Realspace tore open like a gut wound. A bloody, mangled figure tumbled out, lean limbs flailing, and left red stains on the mountain snow as he rolled down the slope. Behind him, the realspace tear bulged and spasmed. The torn and wet mass of Ushpetkhar, choking on its own black ichor, shuddered and died, collapsing backwards into the warp and closing the tear behind it.

At last. Dead at last. The combat had been far too long and far too gruelling. How many days, how many weeks had it lasted in that no-place, no-time wasteland of the immaterium?

Almost dead, cadaverously thin, and soaked wet-black from head to toe in daemon blood, Konrad Curze got to his feet. He was shaking with cold, pain and hunger.

He looked around with his wild, black-within-black eyes, struggling to identify his location. He was high in a range of mountains, huge mountains, snow-capped. A single toxic star shone in the storm-ruined sky.

His visions began to flow again. They ran through his demented mind like shadow-play. They showed him that a city lay not far off, perhaps just a fortnight’s trek through the mountains. It was a great golden city on a coastal plain, watched over by a mighty fortress.

Magna Macragge Civitas.

His visions showed him the cheering crowds, the streets full of people, the great triumph of the declaration. He saw the Lion and Guilliman, alive after all. Alive after all. He saw Sanguinius between them, proclaimed as master of mankind.

They were trying to save the Imperium by shoring it up on Ultramar and the Five Hundred Worlds, and declaring it re-founded.

Curze began to laugh.

It was nothing. It was pitiful. It was an empty gesture made by desperate men obsessed by notions of nobility.

It was just another empire for him to raze to the ground and annihilate.

He started to walk.

He left many bloody footprints in the snow behind him.

~ Dramatis Personae ~

The Primarchs

Horus, The Warmaster, primarch of the Luna Wolves

Jaghatai Khan, The Warhawk, primarch of the White Scars

Leman Russ, The Wolf King, primarch of the Space Wolves

Rogal Dorn, The Emperor’s Praetorian, primarch of the Imperial Fists

Sanguinius, The Angel, primarch of the Blood Angels

Magnus the Red, The Crimson King, primarch of the Thousand Sons

Mortarion, The Death Lord, primarch of the Death Guard

Fulgrim, The Phoenician, primarch of the Emperor’s Children

Alpharius, Primarch of the Alpha Legion

The V Legion ‘White Scars’

Hasik Noyan-Khan, Lord commander

Jemulan Noyan-Khan, Lord commander

Qin Xa, Master of the Great Khan’s keshig guard

Shiban Khan, Brotherhood of the Storm

Sangjai, Apothecary

Jochi

Chel

Torghun Khan, Brotherhood of the Moon

Hibou Khan, Brotherhood of the Dawn Sky

Halji, Seconded adjutant

Targutai Yesugei, Zadyin arga, Stormseer

Lushanm, Commander of the Sickle Moon

The VI Legion ‘Space Wolves’

Gunnar Gunnhilt, Jarl of Onn

Ogvai Ogvai Helmschrot, Jarl of Tra

Bjorn‘The One-Handed’, pack leader

Godsmote

Eunwald

Angvar

Urth

Ferith

Beorth Ranekborn, Commander of the Fylskiare

The Shattered Legions

Xa’ven, Captain, XVIII Legion ‘Salamanders’, 34th Company

Bion Henricos, X Legion ‘Iron Hands’

The XVII Legion ‘Word Bearers’

Kal Zedej, Cadre sergeant, and commander of the Vorkaudar

Ledak, Yesa Takdar cadre, 256th Company

Rovel, Yesa Takdar cadre, 256th Company

Imperial Personae

Malcador the Sigillite, Imperial Regent, First Lord of Terra

Constantin Valdor, Captain-General, Legio Custodes

Jian-Tzum, Star-speaker, Mistress of Astropaths, Swordstorm

Ilya Ravallion, General, Departmento Munitorum

‘Matter is a slave in whatever realm of being it occupies. In the world of the senses it is constrained by the silent laws of space, time, logic and number. In the other world it is shackled to other immutable rigours – dreams, hopes, vicious desires. These things are the tenets of physics in that place. As our nightmares are but shadows in this world, banished by the hard-edged dawn of reason, order is but a shadow in that one.

‘Which is the more real? Which endures, and which is doomed to destruction? You may say neither, for they are reflections of one another. This is false. You must choose. We learned this during seven years of blood and compelled maturity.

‘You must choose.

‘Daemons and mortals alike may have dignity. Only the vacillator, the equivocator, the cautious – only he has no place in the heavens.’

– Reflections,
Targutai Yesugei

Prologue

Brothers

He rolled onto his front, coughing blood between broken teeth. His chest dragged across the hard, grassy earth before he felt hands reach down for him again.

Withdraw, then return.

The words ran through his mind as hands tugged at his torn kaftan. That was the first principle of the Khin-zan way of war – to unbalance, to force into overreach, to hit on the counter.

Tamu pulled his knees up sharply and pushed back against the clutching fingers. He heard a grunt of surprise as his wiry body thrust upwards, sending one of his assailants tumbling.

He twisted around, loosing a tight-balled fist and feeling it connect. Another grunt, another body swaying away.

Something hit his temple, knocking him down again. He saw the grass beneath him blur. His face thudded into the turf and he tasted flakes of grit between clenched teeth.

More blows came in – kicks to his legs, thumps against his exposed back. He writhed, trying to find a way back up. A hot, wet pain started up at the back of his head.

One of them stooped, thinking him finished, reaching for the scruff of his neck, ready to drag him up and cast him down again in the way the Talskar did to demonstrate mastery over an opponent.

Withdraw, then return.

Tamu waited, just for a fraction of a second. Then he bucked again, arching and squirming his body like an eel, swinging up and round, grabbing his assailant by his chest. He looked up into a face full of surprise, and laughed. Then he jabbed his head, butting against a looming brow, watching the blood speckle out and his captor reel from the impact.

He thought then that he might break free of them, scatter the group and somehow tear away, back down the dry river course and to safety. It proved a fleeting hope – he was grabbed again, more securely this time, two hands at his shoulders gripped him fast. He was hurled onto his back. He saw three faces hovering over him, each one bruised and angry. Another kick came in, hard into his midriff. He curled up, gasping.

‘Enough.’

They stopped immediately. They paused. They turned their heads. Uncertainty rippled through them.

Tamu lifted his head. His vision was blurry. He saw one of them scamper off, breaking into a limping run. Then the others followed – two heavy-set men from Alju’s hearth wearing the red sashes of the old man’s keshig. They didn’t look back. As they ran they picked up speed, as if some strange panic had suddenly kindled in them.

Tamu felt blood trickle down the back of his neck. He tried to rise and failed. The wind felt cold against his clothes despite the sun being high in the sky.

He couldn’t see the one who’d spoken. Light glared painfully off the plains, dazzling him. He pushed himself up onto his elbows.

‘What quarrel did they have with you?’ came the voice.

Tamu twisted his head towards the sound. A man walked out of the haze, his outline shimmering in the clear air. He was tall and broad – incredibly tall, incredibly broad – and clad in bone armour plates that glittered in the brightness. He carried a staff topped with a skull and wore an elaborate hood over his bare head.

Only then was Tamu afraid. Where had the giant come from? The grassland had been empty a minute ago – just him and the three others, grappling and running across the wind-ruffled Altak.

It took some force of will to reply.

‘I do not know,’ Tamu said.

None of the man’s features moved, but Tamu detected amusement.

‘What quarrel did they have with you?’ the man asked again, inflecting the words identically.

Tamu felt dizzy. The trickle of blood slowed but did not stop. The man made no move to help him.

‘I stole aduun,’ Tamu said, opting for the truth. He’d opened Alju’s corral in the night, leading three of his steeds away and taking them down the river to Erdil’s hearth. That had earned him a gulp of fermented milk and a slice of belly meat; worth a beating.

‘Three grown men against one boy,’ the man observed. ‘You hurt them almost as badly as they hurt you.’

Despite the pain, Tamu grinned. He knew he had.

The man crouched down, coming closer to his level and looking at Tamu closely. Tamu saw a long, jagged scar on his tanned cheek. The man had an unusual aroma, and a faint hum came from his body, as if a beast murmured somewhere in the folds of his cloak. His eyes were strange – golden, soft and glistening. They were like an animal’s eyes.

‘What is your name?’ he asked.

‘Tamu.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Twelve years.’

The man pursed his lips. ‘Eight in Terran,’ he murmured. ‘Not too late.’

Tamu frowned. ‘Not too late for what?’

The man rose to his feet again. ‘Come with me.’

Tamu hesitated. His head was beginning to ache.

‘Come where?’ For some reason he thought of his mother, his father, his brothers, huddled in the ger, down in the valley, busy with a hundred mundane things. They would not miss him until dusk. Perhaps longer.

‘Do not question,’ said the hooded man. ‘Do as I say.’ Then, for the first time, he really smiled. The gesture was not without warmth, his bright white teeth flashing between leathery dark lips. ‘Unless you think you could take me, too.’

Tamu didn’t move. He tensed his body, just as he had done before the others had caught up with him.

Withdraw, then return, he thought.

Rain angled down from a slate-dark sky, hammering and cold. The wide training ground was open to the elements and the water bounced from the rockcrete, glittering under flood-lumens arranged around the perimeter. In the distance rose spires: Iphigenis, Teleon, Morvo. Their ranked lines of hab-lights were faint, blurred by rain and the night and the atmospheric haze.

A line of two dozen boys stood shivering in the downpour, each dressed only in a grey shift. The youngest might have been seven, the oldest no more than nine. They stared directly ahead, chins jutting with determination, water running down their tight faces.

Haren shivered just like the others. Despite his origin in Skandmark his lean frame made him feel the cold. His fingernails pressed into the palms of his hands as he clenched his fists, determined not to lose control. On either side of him he could sense the other boys doing the same – Trevi, Amada, Kenet, all steeling themselves against the freeze, the dark, the fatigue, the nerves.

No backward step, he thought to himself, remembering the words of the man who had taken him from his home in the frozen north and brought him halfway across Terra to the training centres in Imamdo. He’d learned later that those words were a credo of the organisation, something whispered by the battle-brothers to themselves before battle. It was said that the Legion had never retreated. He wanted to believe that. If true, it made them even more glorious, even more worthy of worship.

‘The test is of endurance,’ said the instructor, a severe-faced man with cropped black hair, standing to one side of the line, barely looking at them. Haren had hated him on arrival – they all had. Now he felt nothing towards him, just a vague sense that he was one more obstacle amid a life of obstacles. For the last two months Haren had been tested, tried, pummelled, moulded, degraded and exhausted. The trials no longer hurt him, but they did remind him of the goal. He was close now. After so long, he was so very close.

The instructor glanced upwards and rain spattered against his face. He looked sourly at the heavens. ‘You will be observed. Do not aid your brothers – this is an individual exercise. Begin with the gong.’

Haren tried to loosen up. He looked out across the rockcrete arena before them. A long, looping track ran around the edge of it. Obstacles stood in the way: ramps, pits, walls, waterlogged tunnels. He’d been around the same course many times, sometimes more than once in a day. Every crevice and muddy puddle of it was familiar to him.

He wondered how long the test would run for. They would make it long enough to weed out the weakest, to see how their conditioning programmes had fared.

Haren considered his chances. They were good. Standing still and shuddering in the cold was the worst part; his muscles would respond once he was moving.

Trevi leaned close. ‘Good luck,’ he said.

Haren nodded in response. His stomach was too knotted for him to speak. It felt as if the tension in his muscles might spread to his heart.

The gong sounded.

The boys broke into a run. None of them sprinted, for they all knew how arduous the test would be. None of them dawdled, for they all knew what the punishments were for insufficient effort. All twenty-four of them jogged out onto the track, quickly settling into the rhythms they had been taught, letting their breathing adjust, inhaling through their nostrils and exhaling through half-open mouths. They stayed together in a loose huddle, padding around the damp surface in worn training shoes.

Haren fell into his stride in the middle of the group. He let his mind glide into the semi-aware state that it always adopted during endurance exercises, repeating the empty phrase over and over again in time with his thudding feet.

No backward step. No backward step.

Some boys started struggling immediately – they’d let their muscles go cold during the long wait, or were under-hydrated, or were carrying injuries from previous sessions. Haren gave them no thought. He ran steadily, scaling the ramps, leaping over the pits, hauling himself up the walls and throwing himself down on the far side. He slipped easily into the run-rhythm, feeling his heart and lungs match the metronomic beat he played in his mind.

His mind wandered. It was hard not to remember his previous life – his red-cheeked mother with her blonde hair in a tight bun, his father with his thinning pate, his older sister with her quiet voice and quick eyes. The exercises were designed to help you to forget the ones you’d left behind, but memories would come back when you least expected them to. Haren sometimes wondered if they would ever really leave. Perhaps after Ascension they would. For all he knew, Ascension wiped all your memories, scraping your mind clean.

No backward step.

He kept running. Loops of the track passed in sequence, over and over again. He began to feel the first stabs of muscle-burn. He felt old scars in his knees ache. He felt his lungs throb as he drew cold air in deeply. Circuits passed by, merging into one another.

After two hours the first boy dropped out, shuddering as he tried to inhale, his limbs trembling in the rain. Attendants helped him up and carried him away.

Haren allowed himself a flicker of surprise. Surprisingly weak. Perhaps he’d been sick, though it had surely ended his quest for Ascension. What would happen to him now? They had never been told. Perhaps they sent you home. Perhaps they didn’t.

No backward step.

The next one dropped out much later. Then several gave out, all of them collapsing in little exhausted bundles. They were whisked away.

Haren found himself at the front of the group after that. He maintained his pace, careful not to speed up. He attacked the ramps hard, recovering on the far side. He felt his feet become heavier, his chest muscles tighter. He became light-headed, and sensed the first surges of nausea gather. More loops passed, one after the other, hypnotic in the rain.

Amada was next to go, his thin face drawn and agonised. Kenet followed shortly after. Then they were dropping like flies, stumbling into the water or slumping by the side of the track. Haren got weaker. Breathing became harder. His feet ached as they hit the floor, his knees spiked with every impact. Still the second gong didn’t sound. He began to yearn for it.

Trevi was on his shoulder by then. Haren caught a glimpse of his face – a rictus of pain. Barely half a dozen still ran with the group. Two more hobbled after them, a long way back.

The pain intensified. More time passed, dragging as if mired in tar.

No backward step.

His vision shrunk down to a long, black tunnel. His pulse thumped, muffled, in his temples. He lost sight of Trevi. He lost sight of everything. He kept moving automatically, cut loose from conscious thought. His jaw hung slack, his arms went limp, bashing against his thighs as he stumbled onwards.

He thought he heard the gong, then realised his mind was playing tricks on him. He kept going, head down, feet dragging. A wall approached, blunt and black in the downpour. He tried to jump up against it, but missed the handholds. He scrabbled briefly, unable to see anything but overlapping circles of red and black, before his frozen fingers lodged into a crack of masonry. He tried to pull up, to drag himself to the top, but something was wrong. His feet found no purchase. The rockcrete blocks were too smooth, too curved.

It took him a long time to hear the laughter. It took him a long time to realise that he’d veered far off the track. It took him even longer to realise that it was no wall he was trying to climb up, but a giant figure of a warrior in white armour and with glowing slits for eyes.

Haren collapsed at the giant’s feet, bewildered. The giant gazed down at him, immense and immobile. His outline shone dully from the flood-lumens, glossy with trailing beads of moisture.

‘Good,’ said the giant, amused. His voice was a low machine-growl. ‘You do not give up easily.’

Haren felt himself begin to faint and squeezed his muscles to push blood to his head, desperate not to shame himself. He was shaking uncontrollably. Dimly, he heard attendants running towards him. He wondered how far he’d got before his body had given up.

The giant crouched down beside him. Even stooped, he was huge. Haren saw a massive curved shoulder guard hover above him. It had a wolf’s head painted on it, set against a crescent moon.

‘Last on your feet,’ said the giant. ‘Keep that up and you’ll be wearing this armour. Sixteenth Legion, lad.’

Haren felt consciousness slipping away. His body ached, his limbs were quickly freezing, his lungs were raw with gasping. He’d never been in such pain.

But as he gazed up at the wolf-moon device and heard the vox-
filtered voice of the giant, imagining himself in a similar suit of power armour, imagining himself marching to war amid the ranks of those peerless fighters, he couldn’t help but let slip a smile of pure happiness.

I will become one of you, he thought as his body seized up at last. For Horus. For Horus and the Emperor, I will become one of you.

Tamu looked out across the Altak, feeling the wind brush against his bald head. Unconsciously he flexed his fingers, feeling the tough skin of his hands move. His chest ached still. The last implantation had not gone smoothly and he had woken six days ago on the operating table to see the floor of the laboratorium covered in his own blood.

The Apothecary, an owlish Khitan from Choq-tan named Jeldjin, had been concerned for a while.

‘I have seen it before,’ he’d said, running a scanner over Tamu’s puckered scar tissue and shaking his head. ‘The flesh of Chogoris, it is tough, but these things were designed for Terrans. We are learning, but it all takes time.’

Tamu had listened silently, gritting his teeth against the pain and refusing analgesics. Jeldjin hadn’t really been talking to him. Few of the full battle-brothers ever did. What could they have to say to a sixteen year-old stripling, raw from the grassland, eyes still wide with what he had witnessed in the monastery? Tamu doubted that they ever remembered their own Ascensions. He’d heard it said the memory faded quickly.

Now Tamu had recovered most of his strength. He stood on the edge of the cliffs below the Khum Kharta fortress, breathing deeply again. It already hurt less.

Below him, fifty metres down where the crumbling rocks of the monastery-bastion met the Altak, the plains began: ridged at first like sand dunes, then breaking into the eye-aching flatness of the eternal grass – blue-green, glossy, rustling as the wind eddied across it. The sky arched above, pale and unbroken, bright with diffused sunlight. On the far horizon he could see the eggshell smudge of the Ulaav range, just a whisper against the curve of the world.

Tamu narrowed his eyes. He was a year away from receiving his occulobe implants, after which he knew his eyesight would rival that of the berkuts, the hunting raptors that circled the high airs. Of all the changes, he yearned for that one the most. He yearned for the day when he would gaze out across the empty land and see each blade of grass picked out sharply, like a frond of steel.

As for now, I am half-finished, he thought. Half-boy, half-man. Half-man, half-god. Everything is incomplete.

He smiled. He liked those contrasting pairs. He would find a use for them in a poem, and that would please the training masters, who liked to encourage the aspirants to adopt one of the Noble Pursuits. Most chose hunting, some Khorchin calligraphy. Only a few had the patience for the spare, hard, compact forms of ci verse, and so they had encouraged Tamu particularly strongly.

Half-boy. Half-man. Half-god.

He heard footsteps, and listened for the tread signature. Targutai Yesugei was coming down the citadel steps to join him. Tamu turned his head, watching the worn-earth edges of the monastery’s foundations soar away above him. Flags rustled at its summit – the red and gold of the khans, the black and silver of the Imperium.

Yesugei made his way slowly down the wide stairway. Clear sunlight glinted from his armour. Tamu waited patiently, bowing respectfully as the zadyin arga approached.

‘Feeling better?’ asked Yesugei, looking at him intently.

‘The implant took,’ Tamu replied.

‘I was told you were near death.’

Tamu grinned. ‘I eluded it.’

Yesugei returned the smile. It did not take much for him to smile. Ever since Tamu had been plucked from the Altak and taken to the monastery, Yesugei’s smile had been somewhere close by him, emerging from weatherbeaten flesh the colour and toughness of beaten bronze.

‘I remember when I found you,’ Yesugei said. ‘You had a gash at the back of your head that should have killed you. And you tried to fight me, the first chance you got.’

Tamu bowed his head, embarrassed. ‘I did not know–’

‘I was pleased. It made me think I had made the right choice.’ Yesugei’s smile faded a little. ‘I will not pretend I do not grieve when our choices are wrong.’

Tamu felt self-conscious. He remembered very little of the time after Yesugei had taken him. He did not like being reminded of it.

He looked down at his hands. They were too big, like most of his body. He already had the bulky frame of a grown man and knew that it would keep getting bigger. The stimulants and accelerants he took in his food made his muscles bunch and swell. At times he felt freakish, like a changeling left out on the steppe to die, all awkward limbs and fleshy growths. At others he felt invincible, bursting with power and energy and desperate to find an outlet for it.

‘I have a long way to go,’ Tamu said.

‘I do not think we will lose you now. I have a superstition.’

‘About me?’ Tamu asked.

‘About the universe,’ smiled Yesugei. ‘Have I never told you of it? The principle of the minor flaw.’

Tamu shook his head.

‘A foolish thing,’ said Yesugei. ‘I found myself believing that every soul should possess a flaw. Some exhibit it early and survive. Others do not, and it grows, and when it emerges it has become monstrous. The greater the soul, the greater the monster. So it is better to have had your brush with destruction now.’

Tamu squinted at Yesugei in the sun. He didn’t know whether he was being serious. ‘Then I no longer need worry.’

‘Of course you should.’

‘And you, zadyin arga?’

‘My flaws were identified a long time ago.’

‘And the Khan?’

Yesugei looked at him sternly. ‘He will be an exception to the rule.’

They stood together for a little longer. Yesugei was a companionable soul. It was strange to think of him as he really was: a master of the Arts of Heaven, a zadyin arga of prodigious power. Acolytes whispered along the corridors of the monastery that Targutai Yesugei had killed more men than any of the Legion, other than the Great Khan himself.

Tamu believed it. He was not fooled by the soft voice or the sparkling eyes in that good-natured face. Yesugei was the embodiment of the Legion’s core principles: he killed without rancour, without angst, without obsession. His station did not require him to take an interest in the aspirants he had selected, especially as the demands of the Crusade took him away from Chogoris often. The fact that he paid his charges so much close attention had taught Tamu a lesson, one that he had absorbed far more readily than most others – that warriors need not be brutes.

‘I am leaving soon,’ Yesugei said. ‘I do not expect to return before you complete Ascension, and by then your name will no longer be Tamu.’

‘Where are you going?’

Yesugei glanced up at the ice-blue sky. ‘Where the war leads.’

Tamu felt a sharp pang of jealousy. Ever since he had begun his training he had burned to leave the home world. He dreamed often of other worlds, of stars burning in the vaults of the deep void, of combat against real enemies rather than drill-drones and sparring partners.

Yesugei gave him a reassuring look. ‘We are inducting more Chogorians every cycle. Soon we will outnumber the Terrans. Perhaps it is unworthy to admit this, but I look forward to the day. The Khan is one of us, after all.’

‘He was not born here.’

‘All the same.’

Tamu considered what Yesugei had said. ‘Do they follow the same training?’

‘Terrans? I doubt it.’

‘Is it easy to fight with them?’

‘Easy enough.’ Yesugei shot him a wry look. ‘We are all united now, of course. All united under one Throne.’

Tamu gazed back out over the plains. ‘I can only imagine Terra.’

‘You may yet witness it.’

‘If I survive Ascension.’

‘I told you. You will.’

Tamu flexed the muscles of his chest, breathing in heavily and feeling his ribs ache. ‘It cannot come soon enough.’

‘Patience,’ said Yesugei, resting a gauntlet on Tamu’s shoulder. ‘Work. Study. Live. Take advantage of this time. Once you are in the ordu you will have no space for anything but war-craft.’

Tamu had been told the same thing many times. It had always troubled him. ‘Then I wonder why they make us learn so much.’

‘It is important,’ said Yesugei. ‘I am glad you are a poet. Only poets can be true warriors.’

‘Do the Terrans think the same?’

Yesugei laughed. ‘I do not know,’ he said. ‘One day you will meet one. When you do, ask him.’

Haren stepped forward as the doors slid open. The chamber beyond was dark, lit only by slants of orange light from the neon night sky. Streaks of rain trickled down the outside of armourglass windows. It had been raining for a long time. It always seemed to be raining in Imamdo.

The man behind the pedestal desk looked up at him as he entered.

‘Haren Svensellen?’ he asked.

Haren clicked his heels together and stood rigidly. ‘Sir.’

The man looked Haren up and down. His flesh was grey and he looked tired. A glitter of augmetics ran down his right cheek, breaking the skin and pinning tight under his jaw. One eye glowed a soft red, the other was natural.

‘Your time here is complete,’ he said. ‘Are you prepared to serve?’

‘I am.’ The words made Haren swell with pride. The first stage – the selection, the physical conditioning – was over. He felt strong. His lean, immature limbs had hardened, his chest had broadened. More would come – the gene-therapy, the psycho-conditioning, and then, finally, the implants that would make him one with the Legion.

The man looked down at the desk. Runes scrolled down its reflective surface. ‘Twenty-sixth out of thirty-two in your cadre. It was a good cadre – you have nothing to be ashamed of.’

‘Thank you.’

‘But it presents us with a problem.’

Haren felt a twist of unease. Something in the man’s cold, clipped voice suddenly made him nervous.

‘The Luna Wolves had marked you for selection, but that means nothing until they come to collect,’ said the man. ‘They exceeded their targets, which is not easy. Other Legions have not been so successful. Some are under-strength. If you had made twenty-fifth or higher then it would have been different, but as it stands…’

Haren listened warily. He remembered the wolf-moon device on the Space Marine’s shoulder guard. He’d seen the same image a thousand times in the years since, plastered over every surface in the training facilities, the medicae bays, the tactica lecture halls, the dormitories. He’d begun seeing it in his sleep.

‘You did everything necessary,’ the man went on, methodically, coolly. Haren felt his cheeks begin to flush. ‘Reassignments happen. They are nothing to be ashamed of.’

Reassignment. The word hit Haren like a blow. He heard his blood pumping hard in his ears. After so many years dealing with the rigid ways of the selection facility he should have known better than to question, but the words came out anyway. ‘I do not wish to be reassigned,’ he said.

The man flicked his tired eyes – one brown, one red – up at him. A thin eyebrow raised by a fraction.

‘Are we here to facilitate your wishes, Svensellen?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Is that what we are here for, to facilitate the wishes of our aspirants?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Others have been reassigned. Do you think they felt differently?’

‘I doubt it, sir.’

‘And do you think we made special dispensation for any of them?’

‘No, sir. Sorry, sir. I…’

The man lowered his eyes. Haren trailed off.

One place away. One place.

The man ran a pair of metal-tipped fingers over the desktop, dragging rune-clusters to and fro absently on the touch-reactive surface. ‘You will make the transfer to Luna in two weeks. Onward transport will be arranged there. You will complete your remaining programme with your new Legion. They have been given a full record of your progress with us. You will be welcomed. Our stock is highly prized.’

Haren almost blurted out another protest. Is there no alternative? No other way? I can re-take the tests! Is this even permitted? I’ve absorbed the doctrine, the training, the methods...

The man seemed to read his mind and his hands stopped moving. ‘You have at least ten years before you are due to enter a battle company,’ he said. ‘You will adjust. In the decades to come you will forget that this was even an issue.’

That was perhaps meant as a kindness. Haren drew in a long breath through his nostrils, keeping his shoulders in place, his back straight. He wanted to be sick. ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said. ‘And is it… is it permitted…?’

‘It is. You are assigned to the Fifth Legion.’

The Fifth Legion. The White Scars. The mystic savages.

It could have been worse: the Wolves of Fenris, maybe, or the War Hounds. Still, the White Scars...

‘I know nothing of the Fifth,’ Haren said.

‘You’ll learn. A liaison officer will join you on Luna, but you should commit to study before then.’

Haren remained where he was, static, lost for words. The man looked up at him again.

‘Do you need anything else?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ said Haren, his mind drifting. ‘Do I?’

The man thought for a moment. Something clicked in his augmetic, like clockwork. ‘You’ll change your name,’ he said. ‘That is one thing I do know – they are given new names on entry to the Legion.’

‘A new name,’ said Haren absently. ‘What kind of name?’

The man shrugged. ‘I have no idea,’ he said. ‘You have ten years to find out.’

Tamu moved forward. The lights in the hangar were bright and the rows of warriors in white armour were dazzling, as pristine as the snows on the Ulaav in winter. Every so often he had to remind himself that he was one of them.

One of them. One of the Legion. A Space Marine.

Hasik Noyan-Khan stood before him. He held Tamu’s gaze for a moment, scrutinising him. Tamu looked back into Hasik’s brown eyes fearlessly. Despite Hasik’s immense and gilt-edged Terminator war-plate, despite the thousands of warriors standing to attention in the Dergun’s cavernous interior, despite the vast display of weaponry around him, he felt nothing but joy.

‘Tamu,’ said Hasik. His voice was a rumbling baritone, made harsh by more than sixty years’ service in the Legion. It was rumoured he was one of the very first to be raised from Chogoris, just as Yesugei had been. Looking up at his hard, ravaged features, Tamu could believe it. ‘Talskar?’

Tamu shook his head. ‘Khin-zan,’ he said, referring to the clan he had been taken from on Chogoris. The Talskar were the Great Khan’s people, but many dozens of nations had been subsumed into the Legion. They were all White Scars now.

‘Show me,’ said Hasik.

Tamu bared his left cheek, exposing the flesh to the hard light of the overhead lumens. Hasik ran an armoured finger down the raised flesh of the scar that stretched from Tamu’s cheekbone down to his chin.

Hasik nodded, satisfied, and reached behind him. An adjutant delivered up the chosen weapon – a two-handed guan dao glaive with a disruptor-edged blade. Hasik held it before Tamu as an executioner might, poised to swing.

‘You were Tamu of the Khin-zan,’ he said. His voice filled the huge space. ‘Now you are of the ordu of Jaghatai and your old life is no more. What name do you take to mark your Ascension?’

Tamu had spoken it out loud many times in the days prior to the ceremony, getting used to the feel of it on his lips, trying to ease the strangeness of the transition. When he replied, it still felt jarring.

‘Shiban,’ he said.

Hasik handed him the glaive. ‘You are one with the ordu, Shiban. You are of the brotherhood. You will not leave it except in death – may it be long in coming, and may glory accompany your deeds until that day.’

Shiban took the glaive in both hands. The weapon felt pleasingly heavy in his gauntlets. He ran his eyes up and down the blade, noting the glyphs on the metal, the gilding on the disruptor casing.

It was perfect.

‘For the Great Khan,’ he said, bowing respectfully, his hearts full to bursting.

It took more than ten years.

In all, nearly fourteen passed before Haren was ready. The physical changes were hard, the surgery painful. The cultural ways of the V Legion were too different to be absorbed readily, and he had to learn Khorchin, the strange language of Chogoris. That alone tested him – despite his improved recall and mental agility, getting his tongue around such alien sounds remained a challenge.

It was not just a matter of vocabulary and grammar; Khorchin had inflections and subtleties not shared by any Terran language. His first tutor, a stocky woman from the mega-grav world of Boe-Phe, had developed her own theory on the origin of the differences.

‘They are a poetic people,’ she had told him. ‘Their home is an empty place. It loosened their imagination, so they filled their minds with words.’ She had curled her lip. She did not especially admire Chogorians. ‘They are prolix. And they do not learn Gothic well, hence all this fuss.’

‘Why is that?’ Haren had asked.

‘I do not know. Perhaps they do not know themselves.’

Haren mastered the speech in the end, just like all the other Terrans who had been inducted into the Legion. The inductees studied together, poring over curved character-clusters and diacritics, rolling their eyes at the complexities and cementing friendships in the face of adversity.

Many of the others had been taken from the Asiatic hive clusters. Haren disapproved of that. After Unity the Imperium was meant to have moved beyond racial and ethnic stereotyping, so the fact that the V Legion remained mired in the physiognomic traits of their backwater world was an irritant.

Much else about them was an irritant also: their archaic customs, their introversion, their exceptionalism. They placed enormous importance on speed – on being the first into combat, on being the first out, on movement, on shams and counterfeits.

Withdraw, then return, they told him, over and over again.

No backward step, he would occasionally remind himself.

As time went on, though, Haren learned to admire their tenacity, their toughness, their energy. The combat drills were hard, just as hard as they had been with the Luna Wolves. The Scars could fight, that was certain, and he took some solace in that.

His initial orientation took place in the Sol system. Then he was moved out with the others to off-world training facilities – a decommissioned battleship over Vhomarl, a jetbike squadron billeted temporarily on the lead-hard plains of Yyem, specialist combat units deployed on the aqua-world of Kail IX and the gas giant Revelet Taredes. He performed well throughout. The Chogorian instructors were fulsome in their praise, unlike the grudging hard-men of the Luna Wolves.

‘Take pleasure in your prowess!’ they would chide him, mocking his earnestness. ‘A warrior is a blessed thing, the most fortunate of creatures, gifted by heaven with unmatched power. It would be polite to acknowledge that, from time to time.’

Haren did his best, but their cheerfulness never sat well with him.

They take so little seriously, he thought. They are playing at this.

Of course they weren’t. He knew that, but the nagging accusation would not leave him.

‘When are we going to Chogoris?’ he had asked them near the end.

Tajik, his last instructor, had shaken his scarred head. ‘We will not go.’

‘So I will never see the home world?’

‘You will. Just not now.’

Haren had frowned. ‘It seems strange, not to visit the centre.’

‘It is not the centre,’ said Tajik, lapsing into inscrutability as White Scars were prone to do.

‘It is where we are based,’ insisted Haren, using ‘we’ as he tried to do always.

‘We are based nowhere,’ said Tajik, smiling. ‘Nowhere is our home, and everywhere is. That is the difference between us and the others. You will learn it.’

Haren wanted to ask more questions, but merely bowed and let the matter drop. Sometimes it was easier that way.

And so, at last, Ascension arrived. The final ceremony took place in the humid equatorial zone of Taranagea: two hundred aspirants lined up on a rockcrete square as hot rain whipped and skipped across them, each decked out in newly crafted power armour in the V Legion colours of ivory, red and gold. Haren stood among them, feeling much as he had on the sodden training quads of Imamdo.

But now, of course, he was far from being a boy on the cusp of a new life. He was a man.

More than a man. A demigod. An angel. A guardian of Terra’s new order.

Jemulan Noyan-Khan had made planetfall to oversee the Ascension. Like all Chogorians he was compact and wiry even in the standard battle-armour he had opted for on that day. As Jemulan reached Haren’s place in the line, Haren noticed that he was taller than the old lord commander. That unnerved him somewhat.

‘Haren,’ said Jemulan. ‘Which part of Terra?’

‘Skandmark,’ said Haren.

‘Good,’ said Jemulan. ‘Hard country. I know it. Show me.’

Haren bared his left cheek. The cut had been made just a few weeks earlier by his own hand and was still tender. He had pushed the blade deep, keen that the results would be worthy of a Chogorian’s approval.

Jemulan nodded, satisfied, and reached behind him. An adjutant delivered up the chosen weapon – a power sword in the V Legion’s tulwar styling. Jemulan held it before Haren as an executioner might, poised to swing.

‘You were Haren of the Skandmark,’ he said. His voice sounded flat in the humid air. ‘Now you are of the ordu of Jaghatai and your old life is no more. What name do you take to mark your Ascension?’

Haren had struggled for a long time to think of one. He had taken advice from his instructors and had spent hours poring over Khorchin almanacs and lexicons. In the end he had chosen a name from Talskar mythology – a servant of an ancient khan who had returned from a hundred years in the wilderness looking as young as the day he had left. The symbolism seemed appropriate.

‘Torghun,’ he said.

Jemulan handed him the tulwar. ‘You are one with the ordu, Torghun. You are of the brotherhood. You will not leave it except in death – may it be long in coming, and may glory accompany your deeds until that day.’

Torghun took the tulwar. He would need time to get used to it; he was still more proficient with straighter blades.

‘For the Great Khan,’ he said, bowing respectfully and trying to banish, for the final time, the residual memory of a white-armoured giant in the rain, looking down on him with the wolf-moon icon on his shoulder guard.

One

The White World
Bodies
Minds

It was possible to remember too much.

Ilya Ravallion had taken a long time to learn that. For a long time she had assumed that most lessons were behind her, mastered in her youth or not at all, back when she had the quickness of mind and body to change as circumstances demanded. It had turned out, though, that she was still capable of evolving, even after her hair had turned grey and her face was creased with lines like the folds of sun-dried fruit.

Chondax had changed everything. The White World, the Scars called it. They liked giving things interesting names. Imperial cartographers labelled it Chondax Primus EX5,776 NC-X-S. The ‘NC’ meant non-compliant, the ‘X’ meant xenos occupation, the ‘S’ meant scheduled for visitation by an expeditionary fleet. All of those labels would have to change now: the xenos had been exterminated, and what remained on the surface was as compliant as anything ever could be. The 915th Expedition and all the other fleet elements would soon muster at the jump-points, seeking new assignments, and the cartographers and planetary cataloguers would get to work.

Until then, she preferred the White World.

In her old life she would have found it fanciful. Then again, in her old life she would have found most things fanciful. The Departmento Munitorum was not an institution that rewarded creativity – the logistical arm of the Great Crusade demanded officers with a command of detail, with perfect recall, with a love of statistics and the kind of mind that could manipulate them accurately, quickly, carefully.

That had been her. She had started out at the signals facility on Palamar Secundus as a cypher breaker. The work had been demanding, particularly when it came to xenos codes that skirted the borders of insanity to decrypt. After an initial phase of excitement, she had not enjoyed it – the mathematics were frighteningly intense, as were the colleagues she worked with.

Only when her other aptitudes had come to light did things change for the better. On that day it had been hot and the section chief’s office was sweltering. He was in a bad mood: they were behind on their targets and field commanders in six theatres were getting impatient.

He’d rubbed his tired eyes, staring miserably at the piles of data-slates on his desk.

‘Now they want figures from the Irax campaign,’ he’d said, his voice hollow.

‘I remember them,’ she had said.

He’d stared at her. ‘It was a year ago.’

‘I know. I can recite them.’

She still could. The first entries sat in her voluminous mind, ready for access.

Relay point Aleph: Six transports, nine landers, twelve regiments.

Relay point Varl: Three transports, two landers, three regiments.

Relay point Thek…

And on, and on.

That had got her out of cyphers. She left Palamar and transferred closer to the core. Her life became a matter of getting soldiers from one place to another, on time, with ammunition, with food, with support, without confusion. It was repetitive. It was laborious. It was lonely.

She loved it. She climbed the ranks, each promotion getting her a warp-stage or two nearer to Terra. Once the Departmento was folded fully into the Imperial war administration it adopted military ranks. She became lieutenant, then colonel, then, finally, general. She enjoyed the respect that earned her from those in the regular army. They knew what a general was, and what she could do to them if they ever forgot it.

So the campaigns passed, one after the other. The numbers started to boggle even her capacious mind. Thousands of carriers, billions of troops, trillions of lasguns with quadrillions of charger packs. At times she would lie awake at night, tracing the patterns of the Crusade in a giant imaginary web. She would see the expeditionary fleets crawling out along invisible lines towards their destinations, each one bearing statistical tags denoting deployment types and complements. She liked doing that. Parts of that web were her doing. No one would ever know it, let alone record her contribution, but it made her smile nonetheless.

For a long time, that was all she wished for. It gave her purpose and a healthy share of fulfilment. The fact that it was an isolated fulfilment seldom occurred to her. She never missed the presence of a companion, male or otherwise, which in any case would have been an intrusion upon the sense of order that she had created around herself. There was no room for another soul in her life, no room for mess or uncertainty or compromise.

By the time she had begun to question that doctrine she was nearing retirement. Her short hair had been grey for a decade. Her neat, trim uniform bore decorations from a generation ago, and her most junior subordinates seemed to treat her like a relic from a forgotten age.

So these are the choices I have made, she thought. She supposed they were not choices many others would have made, but that was fine – the galaxy was a big place, and the Emperor found tasks for all sorts. It had been a good life, one she could be proud of and satisfied within.

In the end, though, it had taken Chondax to open her eyes.

What had she known about the White Scars? As little as anyone else. They were the elusive ones, the Legion who roamed too far, the ones who had almost broken away entirely, rampaging outwards from the thrust of the Crusade and angling off into the deep void. Prodigal, her superior had called them.

It had been a surprising final assignment for her, an unlikely marriage of very un-likes. From Ullanor, in a whirl, then on to the Scars’ next campaign, given a service rank and charged with organising the unorganisable, imposing some sense of discipline upon a Legion that treated warfare like a kind of carefree, joy-filled art form. She wouldn’t have predicted it.

Halji, at least, had been kind to her. Her assigned adjutant was as diligent and cheerful as anyone she had ever met. It was still easy to be exasperated with the rest – not least the Khan himself – and they clearly found her as amusing as they had from the start, but some progress had been made.

They called her szu-Ilya. The sage Ilya. For all its idiosyncrasy, it was hard not to enjoy that.

She missed Yesugei, though. From the start, the Stormseer had been the one to treat her seriously. He was a master of elemental forces beyond her limited imagination, but he had always been courteous, always respectful. Yesugei had seen something in her that she hadn’t noticed herself, and it was that, in the end, that had dragged her into the Scars’ perilous orbit. It was a shame that he had not accompanied the fleet to Chondax, but such was war.

So it was that she had ended up with her own quarters on the huge Legion flagship Swordstorm and had begun the long process of cataloguing assets and rationalising deployment patterns. They didn’t always listen, but sometimes they did. They made an effort. They were aware of their shortcomings, and wished to improve.

She liked that. It acted as a challenge to her. She tried to loosen some of the rigours of her past life. She tried to forget a few things, or at least not to hang on to them too closely. An eidetic life, she found, risked being an arid one. They learned from her, she learned from them, and so she discovered that it was possible to care too much, to insist upon too much. To remember too much.

‘I will try to let things go,’ she told herself, particularly when tempted by the urge to reorganise some typically scattergun requisition plan. ‘In all things, there is a happy medium. Compromise. An open mind.’

She heard a low chime at her doorway.

‘Come,’ she said, raising her head from her console.

Halji entered, bowing politely.

Ilya still found it odd that they bowed to her. Halji was a third taller than her in his armour, hugely powerful and with a warrior’s prowess that almost defied belief. Like all Chogorians, though, he wore his genhancement lightly. A certain kind of self-effacing courtesy seemed to come naturally to them.

‘Forgive intrusion, szu,’ he said. ‘You wished to be informed of progress in Choir.’

Ilya leaned back in her chair. ‘I did. Anything to report?’

‘No,’ said Halji, smiling awkwardly. ‘They cannot receive, cannot send. Everything tried has failed. The Mistress of Astropaths sends you her apologies.’

‘It’s not her fault,’ said Ilya, her heart sinking. ‘How long has it been?’

‘Since arrival in Chondax.’

‘We have been here a long time, Halji.’

‘Master says blackouts are not uncommon. He says warp is fickle place. Once we were on campaign in Kleimoran and Choir heard nothing for two years. He is not concerned.’

Ilya frowned. The White Scars were cavalier about losing touch with the rest of the Imperium. They liked it. She did not – it made her nervous, as though suddenly deprived of gravity or oxygen.

‘Please tell him to keep trying. Perhaps some locations in the system are free of the effect.’

Halji shrugged. ‘I will. But he says nothing sent or received for some time.’

Ilya glanced back down at her desk. A schematic of the fleet distribution glowed softly on the glassy surface showing battlegroups spread out widely, running down the last elements of enemy forces that still lingered in far-flung corners of the system. Resistance across the Chondax cluster was coming to an end, and with every standard reporting period came a slew of kill-tallies and compliance certifications. Soon their work would be done here and the next assignment would come. The White Scars would be on the move again, just as they always were.

‘We’re reaching an end-point here,’ she said, half to herself. ‘How am I supposed to receive fresh orders from Terra? What will our next move be?’

Halji smiled. ‘Do not worry, szu,’ he said, as calm as ever. ‘Something will come.’

‘Khan, you will wish to see this.’

Shiban stiffened. Jochi’s voice was strained over the comm. That was unusual; Jochi was usually in good temper, even when the bolt-rounds were flying.

But then Phemus IV was the kind of place that got under your skin. There was nothing good to say about Phemus – blisteringly hot, creeping with black-crusted magma and riven with electrical storms. It was like a vision of the underworld given gruesome, uncomfortable form.

‘Hold position,’ voxed Shiban, noting his brother’s location on his helm display and pulling his jetbike round in a wide curve. ‘With you in a moment.’

He gunned the drive, sending his mount sweeping across scabs of charred rock. Above him the burned-orange sky sent flickers of forked lighting dancing across the horizon. A bank of chemical-lurid cloud glowered in the magnetic west, underlit with a pall of dull red. Vast plains of jet extended in all directions, ringed by hunchbacked mountains and streaked with the vomit of an unquiet world.

Shiban crouched low, feeling the intermittent hum and growl of his mount’s engines working. The bikes struggled in the smoggy filth. He’d had to change his twice already in a deployment lasting less than a month. That was an irritant. In all the time he’d fought on Chondax he’d never had to submit a mount for maintenance.

The White World had been kind to them. It had been the crucible of the whole campaign, the heart of the greenskin defences. Warfare on that world had been of the most glorious, the most agreeable, kind. Shiban remembered the wide, cold skies; the touch of the salt-like earth under his fingers; the three suns, whose light blended and melded in a soft melange of green and blue and yellow.

He could have fought on that world for an eternity and never grown weary of it. In the end, though, they had killed all there was to kill. The xenos had been exterminated, their bodies burned and their crude structures melted down. When the Legion had left it for orbit, Chondax had looked pristine – a ball of translucent crystal in the heavens, scoured clean of infection.

Now the outlying worlds were the target. Epihelikon, Teras, Honderal, Laerteax; all of them flung far out into the void, all of them infested with the residual taint of greenskin occupation.

Phemus IV was the furthest out, the last to have its fire-licked tectonic plates certified free of the enemy. Every time it looked as if the greenskins were gone, though, another nest would be uncovered, teeming with life and hatred, requiring kill-teams to be deployed and burn-teams to follow them.

Shiban was weary of it. The Legion needed a new challenge, something grand to aspire to. The dregs of a campaign were the worst time.

I hate this world, he thought. I wrote verse about Chondax. No words shall be written about this place. It deserves none.

The Khan would move them on soon. Shiban had seen him fight, and so knew the order would come swiftly. He had seen the dao sword wielded with such casual expertise that it made his eyes shine to remember. The primarch was less a mortal warrior, more an expression of the elements. He would be restless too, like all predators when the prey was exhausted.

They said that Horus Lupercal was the finest commander in the galaxy. They said that the Angel Sanguinius was the mightiest in combat, or maybe Russ of Fenris, or maybe poor tortured Angron. They said Guilliman was the greatest tactician, the Lion the most imaginative, Alpharius the subtlest.

None of them gave the Khan a second thought. But then, they hadn’t seen him.

A long time ago, before Ascension, Shiban remembered asking Yesugei why they made aspirants learn the Noble Pursuits when their destiny was for warfare. Now, so many years later, he understood the answer he had been given.

Killing is nothing without beauty, and it may only be beautiful if it is necessary.

He smiled as he rode. The memory lifted some of his torpor.

When the Khan kills, it is beautiful.

He caught sight of Jochi’s outline ahead of him, dark against tumescent slag-piles of flickering magma. The light, such as it was on Phemus, was fading to a deep, resentful umber. Distant thunderheads were grinding closer across the plain.

He skidded his bike round and cut the engine, dismounting in a single movement.

‘What, then?’ he asked, walking over to his second-in-command.

Jochi had kept his helm on, as they all did in that foul place, so Shiban caught nothing of his expression. ‘Bodies,’ he said.

Shiban glanced at the magma piles. They rose up in bulbous lumps, heaped in steadily accumulating mounds like folds of carbonised fat. Phemus IV was littered with such sites, some as large as starships, produced by the myriad despoliations that the world inflicted on itself at regular intervals. The hills of slag crept across the cracked surface of the world as if alive, crushing anything they came across.

Three bodies lay at the foot of the pile, one of them still partially enveloped. Each one was encased in coal-black armour, cracked by pressure.

Shiban knelt beside the nearest. He ran his finger along the curve of an arm-guard, watching sooty residue smear away to reveal a line of ivory underneath.

‘Which brotherhood?’ he asked.

‘Of the Talon,’ said Jochi. ‘Posted here six months ago.’

Shiban looked over the dead White Scars legionary. Many of his brothers had died on Phemus, and some of their corpses had been swallowed by the voracious magma. Even so, it was never pleasant to find another. ‘Gene-seed?’

‘Not yet,’ said Jochi. ‘Sangjai is on his way.’

Shiban leaned closer, wiping more of the grime from the battered armour. He smelled none of the putrescence normally found with corpses, just the acrid stink of long-burned material. ‘How did they die?’

‘This one, by the blade,’ said Jochi grimly. ‘At the throat. The others, unclear. Possibly torso-wounds...’

Shiban noticed a deep cut through the seals at the corpse’s neck. He gently prised the edges apart, seeing the segments pull cleanly away. The edge of the wound was as black as everything else, blistered where thick blood had boiled away.

He took a deep breath. He wondered what the fallen warriors’ stories were, how they had been bested, how many greenskins they had fought off before the finish. It was a shame that no tales would be told of their ending.

He looked up and around him. The black land glared back, void-dark and fissured, lit with the ghostly flickers of orange fire. ‘Where are the xenos bodies?’

Jochi shook his head. ‘No signs. Unless, perhaps, buried deeply.’

Shiban felt uncomfortable. Something nagged at him. ‘Odd,’ he said.

‘Khan?’

Shiban considered it for a little while longer. He brushed more filth clear of the legionary’s breastplate, exposing Chogorian glyphs engraved in the ceramite. He let his eyes wander over the broken outline of the cadaver, watching, absorbing, thinking. Eventually, he rose to his feet.

‘Three dead sons of the ordu,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘No hain beside them.’

Jochi remained silent. Shiban could sense his uneasiness.

You feel it too.

‘They lost their battle,’ Shiban went on. ‘Tell me, Jochi – what do hain do with the bodies they take?’

Jochi nodded, as if his khan had confirmed something he had also noticed. ‘There is no mutilation.’

‘And these cuts…’ Shiban trailed off. He looked up at the sky. ‘When does Sangjai get here?’

‘He said within the hour. He is bringing a lander.’

‘I want the third one extracted,’ said Shiban. ‘I want all three taken to the Kaljian.’

‘What are we looking for, khan?’ asked Jochi.

Shiban didn’t answer immediately. He stared out across the plain, out to where the atmosphere was curdling into fresh storms.

This world is sick. Its soul is hateful.

‘I do not know, Jochi,’ he said quietly.

Torghun walked down the corridors of the Starspear. His movements were fluid. He barely felt the wounds he’d taken on Chondax any more. The whole Legion was patching up, making good, and he liked the feel of it. Some of the old disarray seemed to have been purged from the White Scars’ planning recently, replaced by what looked like some clear-headed concern for practicalities. He did not know why that was, though whispers ran through the fleet that a Terran had been appointed as a new counsellor to the Khan. They said it was a woman, someone high up in the Administratum, someone with the patience and the stubbornness to take some control over the Legion’s erratic direction.

Torghun hoped that the rumours were true. It would be good to see some control imposed. Over the years he’d come to appreciate some virtues of the Chogorian way, but that didn’t mean he’d ever found it easy to accept their shortcomings. If someone had finally decided to do something about that, so much the better.

The corridor around him was lit low, barely illuminating the pale walls. He passed a few ship-ratings as he went, all of whom bowed respectfully. They were mostly Terrans, though some from other worlds mingled among them. As time went on the Legion was less drawn from the Throneworld. He’d heard it said that in time all White Scars would be recruited from Chogoris.

Not yet, though the Terrans were a clear minority. It was hard not to become defensive about it. Chogorians were far too courteous for outright hostility – but occasionally Torghun had caught… looks. Or maybe gestures, passed between members of the same culture that he was excluded from by his own ignorance.

Or perhaps he imagined it all. That was also possible.

He reached the chamber he’d been heading for and pulled a hood up over his head. The lumens burned even lower, and the place had the look of a dormant area. The Starspear was a big ship, with capacious crew-holds and half-empty weapon-bays, and several decks were underused. He hadn’t passed any ratings for some time.

Torghun looked both ways before depressing an entry chime. After a pause, a low voice came over the comm. ‘State nature of business.’

‘Open the door, Nozan,’ Torghun said wearily.

It slid back, revealing a large space beyond: a hangar, largely empty, also poorly lit, with just a few transit-crates stacked around the edges. The floor was polished to a high sheen and reflected the lumens glassily. Above them, huge in the darkness, hung the emblem of the Legion, the lightning-strike in white and gold.

Thirteen figures waited for him, all Terrans, all out of armour and draped in cowled robes, all Space Marines. They remained still as he entered, completing them, bringing the number to fourteen.

‘Welcome, brother,’ said one with Hibou’s voice, inclining his covered head. ‘We were beginning to wonder if you would turn up.’

‘I was detained,’ said Torghun, taking his place in the circle.

‘I hope you were not observed.’

Torghun shot the speaker a withering look, not that he could have seen it. ‘What do you think?’

Hibou smiled thinly under his hood’s shadow. ‘So you have it?’

‘Really?’ asked Torghun, increasingly annoyed. Hibou was a khan just like him, commander of the Brotherhood of the Dawn Sky. ‘Do we have to do this?’

‘It is a formality. Then we can get started.’

Torghun shook his head and reached into his robes. He withdrew the medal – heavy, silver, marked with the head of a hawk imposed across a lightning-strike. ‘Satisfied?’

Hibou nodded. ‘Entirely.’ He gestured to the others, who pulled their cowls back.

Torghun knew all their names, their ranks, their companies. He knew each of them better than some of his own battle-brothers. Some matched his rank, though most were below him.

Brotherhoods everywhere, overlapping and contradicting. We have woven a strange tapestry here.

‘So we are gathered,’ said Hibou. ‘Let us begin.’

Torghun drew in a deep breath. Something about the early stiffness of lodge gatherings always wearied him. They were more satisfying once the wine started flowing and the real business could be done.

But that was just him. The others all took it very seriously. He had to respect that.

Soon it would begin, though. The real work.

Two

Home world
Licking wounds
Outriders

It had all started with Nikaea.

Targutai Yesugei had known it even at the time. Every month that passed only reinforced his certainty. He had been there, with Ahriman, Magnus and the others. He had spoken, he had argued. Much of the debate had taken place in the corridors around the great arena, some of it in the presence of the greatest of all of them.

But after the Master of Mankind had spoken, of course, there was no longer any debate to be had. So many great minds, great warriors – they had all fallen silent at once. Perhaps they should have worried about that then, but no one did.

Something defining had taken place on that world. At times Yesugei thought that a terrible mistake had been made; at others, that one had been avoided. No matter how hard he turned the matter over in his mind, the truth of it eluded him.

He stood now, alone, out on the Altak, watching the wind brush the grass and feeling the sun on his exposed face. The empty landscape of Chogoris yawned off in every direction, unbroken by hill or tree. The vastness of it never failed to make one humble. It freed the mind.

Yesugei had heard it said that the human mind coped poorly with the immense vacuity of his birth-world, and that those who had been raised there were doomed to a kind of madness of insignificance.

He narrowed his eyes, watching the blue-green haze of the horizon blur out of focus.

Significance, he thought to himself. That is the real madness – to assume that we matter at all.

He allowed his mind to run free of the shell of his body, drifting out of itself and sighing like a spectre on the immortal wind.

He considered himself.

What do I see?

He saw a weather-worn figure, knee-deep in rustling rejke grass. He saw archaic battleplate, reverently cared for but age-blunt at the edges. He saw leather-brown flesh, hard and mottled with ink tattoos; oil-black hair gathered in a topknot; a dome of crystals over his head that flashed and winked in the sun.

He saw the trappings of his craft – a staff, topped with a bleached aduu-skull; the totems, the symbols, painted or engraved on the ivory of his armour.

Look deeper.

He saw the faint penumbra of force in the air, the heat-shimmer of power, the harmonics in his movement. He saw the world respond to him, reaching out, aware of him in its dim, eternal way.

That was all proscribed now. Since Nikaea, such things were to be put away.

He let his mind return to his body. He looked at the world with his own eyes. He breathed with his own mouth, and felt his own augmented lungs take in cold, clear air.

‘It is what I am,’ Yesugei said out loud. ‘I can no more put it aside than I could put out my eyes.’

His brow furrowed, making the long scar down his left cheek twitch.

Something defining had taken place.

It had all started with Nikaea.

The passage of time had passed like this.

On Ullanor, the Warmaster had been invested. Yesugei was there, standing by the Great Khan’s side, watching with approval as Horus Lupercal took up the office. The two of them, Horus and the Khan, had fought together to take the system. They liked one another. Of all his brothers, the Khan had only ever been close to two, and Horus was the first.

Yesugei heard them confer in the aftermath.

‘I hope that I can call on you,’ Horus had said.

‘You call, I answer,’ the Khan had replied.

Then they had parted. The grand gathering of primarchs and commanders and battleships and officials dispersed, setting course for a thousand destinations and making the warp light up with the trails of their passage. The Great Crusade commenced again, though this time with a Warmaster at its apex, not an Emperor.

The Khan had been sent to the worlds of the Chondax System. He was sent to hunt the remnants of the empire destroyed on Ullanor, the last slivers of Urlakk’s greenskins. Perhaps some would have balked at that – it was not prestigious work – but the Khan was happy enough. It was hunting, and in a way that he understood: cavalry charges across open spaces, going up against prey that had no concept of capitulation or self-pity. He had never complained.

Nearly all of his Legion went with him, ranked in their various brotherhoods, eager for the hunt. Scores of white ships cut the void, each crammed with warriors of the ordu, all desperate to get back in the chase.

Yesugei did not go with them. Other duties called. An obscure world had appeared on Legion communiqués during the final phases of the Ullanor campaign. The Sigillite’s marker had been on many of them – others were classified, for the eyes of the Emperor’s gene-sons only.

That was the first Yesugei knew of Nikaea. Back then he had thought little of it. What was one world amongst the thousands the Legion had already charted? So many worlds had come and gone, falling one by one under the aegis of the ever-expanding Imperium of Man.

But it turned out to be more than that. In the end, it became everything, the fulcrum upon which the fate of a species turned.

He wished he had known at the time. Perhaps he might have found some way to prepare for it better. The outcome might have been different.

‘We will look back on this and weep,’ Ahriman had told him after the verdict.

Yesugei had nodded. ‘You are right,’ he had replied.

He walked through the grassland. The stems parted before him like water. Khum Karta was days distant, long since fallen below the smooth horizon. He was in the lands of the Khan now, the old Talskar hunting ranges. Few prey-beasts remained – they had become too good at hunting them, too careless at restraining themselves.

Yesugei thought that if he had taken a berkut out with him, perhaps he would have spied something cowering out in the openness, belly pressed against the earth and ears twitching. Then he could have gone after it in the old way, using the strength of his body and the agility of his mind – no weapons, no weather-magic.

No, that would be a sham. He could never go back. Everything had changed, for better or worse.

‘I do not know what to do,’ he said out loud, as if the Altak could hear and answer. ‘My dreams do not answer. Why is that?’

The wind said nothing. It pushed against him, buffeting across his breastplate and wearing at the ceramite edges of his shoulder guards.

Something strange was happening. He had no words to describe it precisely. He had awoken one night with the sense that the entire galaxy was convulsing, like some vast creature disturbed in its sleep. He had heard screaming from far away. It had felt as if the screams were coming from worlds on the edge of knowledge, burning like candles in the infinite dark, but that was impossible.

If he had put his gifts aside – as he had been commanded to do – he might have avoided such dreams, but the tests of heaven did not come and go. They were not like clothes that one could discard. They were in his blood, in his breath.

Since the Khan – whom the Chogorians called Khagan, the khan of khans – had left for Chondax, nothing had been heard of him. It was as if a great veil had been draped across the sector. No astropaths penetrated the shroud, no communications of any kind came from the other side.

Such blackouts were hardly rare – the way of the warp made any kind of long-range communication unpredictable and prone to interruption – but something about the completeness of it made Yesugei uneasy. Other sectors had also gone quiet. He had heard rumours that the light of the Astronomican was becoming intermittent. The Master of the Orbital Defence Grid on Chogoris told him that some ships had been lost entirely, something that with Legion-sanctioned Navigators was rare.

By themselves such signs were not sufficient to cause alarm, for the galaxy was a perilous place and the Great Crusade had only succeeded in banishing some of those perils. For all that, it was hard to shake the creeping sense of something happening.

Yesugei snorted to himself.

Something happening! Can I be no more exact that that?

But he could not. There were no interpretable patterns, no signs that could be read and understood. That alone was cause for concern.

He stopped walking, still knee-deep in grass, alone amid an ocean of nothingness. He saw the tips moving in gentle waves, travelling in ripples like whispers.

Some comfort was in those movements. Such undulations had swept across these lands long before the first explorators had arrived in bulky colony ships, ready to seize mastery of the emptiness and bend it to their will. When the hand of mankind was gone again, as it most assuredly would be one day, the grass would still be there, whispering and undulating in a hollowness of cold air and hard sunlight.

I cannot stay here.

The resolve had been growing for days, and now it reached crisis-point. His orders after Nikaea had been clear: return to Chogoris and await further instruction. He had waited for those instructions a long time, and it could no longer be believed that they were likely to come at any point soon.

Yesugei was, and had always been, the Khagan’s counsellor. The two of them had forged an understanding, a way of dancing around one another until the truth emerged. Yesugei knew that he needed the primarch; he flattered himself that, in some less obvious way, the primarch needed him. They had complementary skills. They had shared enough long campaigns and endured enough hardship to trust one another’s judgement.

He would not have failed to summon me. Something is wrong. I have lingered here long enough.

No more insight would come to him on Chogoris. He would have to find his way to the Legion, swimming against the turbulent warp currents until the mystery of the veil could be resolved.

From the enquiries he had already made, he knew that would be difficult.

‘It’s like a storm,’ the Master of the Orbital Defence Grid had told him. ‘A huge one, eating up systems. I’ve never seen the like.’

It would have been safer to stay on Chogoris, perhaps wiser too. But safety had never been a concern of his, and ever since Nikaea the limits of wisdom seemed to have been soundly breached.

Yesugei stood square, leaning on his skull-topped staff and gazing up into the clear heavens.

‘I could walk these plains for a lifetime and not find the answer,’ he said out loud, his voice snatched away by the wind and turned to nothing. ‘The time has come to seek it in the void.’

Then he remembered what Ahriman had told him on the last day that they had spent together on Nikaea.

‘Magnus will not stand for it,’ he had warned. ‘Once a mind is opened it can never be closed.’ He had leaned closer. Yesugei remembered how it had been: the closeness between them, the shared understanding between kinsmen of the Librarius. ‘Speak to your Khan. He has always been with us. He understands.’

Yesugei had nodded. ‘I will, when I can, but he can be hard to find.’

‘So I hear. Try, though. Magnus has need of friends, and we have need of allies. Speak to him.’

Since then, nothing. No word from Prospero, or Chondax, or Nikaea, or Terra. It was as if the universe had closed in on itself, holding its breath, tensing for some terrible trauma to come.

Yesugei started to walk again. He would go back to Khum Karta, and from there he would take ship. He had been alone for too long, and now a change needed to be made.

It had all started with Nikaea. He still had no idea where it would end.

Ships gathered like sleek, grey sharks in the void, ghosting on low-thrust above the rusty glow of the Alaxxes Nebula. Dozens of capital vessels hung at rest, immense and turreted, prow-lights blinking gently above the abyss. Each was attended by a school of lesser craft – fleet-runners, frigates, outriders, gunships. All of them had the same battle-burned look, the same scorched enginarium flanks, the same pockmarked hull plates. Some limped along on a scintilla of normal power, enclosed in webs of scaffolding and gun-drones. Others were carved open, exposing striated lattices of inner decks. The flickers of a million arc-welders danced across the honeycombs, pricking the soft murk of the gas clouds.

Only one type of fleet in the galaxy had such a profile. The Imperial Army possessed larger complements – vast conglomerations of swollen troop-carriers and supply behemoths – but they had nothing to compare with such concentrated killing power. Only a Legiones Astartes battlegroup could muster such monsters of murder.

Each was gunmetal-grey, adorned with runes and bearing the shamanic company-signatures of Fenris. Each had been made to reflect the savage hearts of those who piloted them: the prows were muzzles, replete with the curving lines of jowl-snarls over jutting forward lances. They were slivers of ferocity hammered into dagger-shaped lines and given hearts of growling, unending fire.

Hrafnkel was at the centre of the muster, heavier and more brutal than any other, ploughshare-bowed, spine curved with the jagged profile of a thousand defence towers and drive housings, belly lit with the dull light of ruinous weapon batteries. The shadows of its attendants – fleet-tenders, maintenance vessels, shuttles, guard-destroyers – crawled across its colossal flanks like clouds across a mountain face.

Its command bridge was huge and echoing – a dome of bronze and marble supported by pillars of glittering granite. Tiers of decking rose up on the inside of the circular walls, each humming with subdued activity from the thousand grey-shifted crew members at their stations. The central vault, a wide expanse of bare stone under the colossal armourglass roof, flickered with a series of hololith route projections, rotating kaleidoscopes of neon light that swirled and reflected from countless pict screens and observation lenses.

It smelled of stone and leather, the aromas of forge and fire-pit. Naked flames burned in iron grates and stained the walls black. Runes were everywhere – carved into the walls, the floor, even the glass.

One figure dominated that space – the embodiment of every savage aspect that looked down on him, as bestial and magnificent in profile as the vessel he commanded. He was the master, the undisputed alpha-beast.

The primarch Leman Russ, though, did not move. The operations of his flagship took place in a seamless dance around him, like lesser satellites spinning around a gas giant. Every so often his piercing eyes would dart towards some hololith readout or lens-feed. Then they would flicker back, inscrutable and frost-hard.

Two grey-pelted wolves with yellow eyes and grizzled haunches slunk at his heels. Every so often one of them would growl low, sending soft vibrations running across the marble, like the crack of glaciers sliding over scree.

The Wolf King’s jarls stood in a loose ring around him, each one a lord of combat in his own right, swathed in pelts and armour-plates and totems. Rune Priests stood amongst them, their bone-white hair and painted skin vivid in the dancing light.

In normal times they might have laughed with one another, growling in jest and challenge, gold-pinned eyes glittering with coarse-edged humour.

No one laughed now. Not since Prospero. Not since they had all slumped to the earth on that fire-scoured world and saw what they had done to it. For some reason, Prospero had been different.

Russ had always laughed before, sometimes with genuine humour, sometimes with a kind of wintry satisfaction in violence. Now he hardly even smiled. The cut lines around his sun-dried face seemed a little deeper.

‘So when will we be ready?’ the Wolf King asked at last.

Gunnar Gunnhilt, the one they called Lord Gunn, spoke first, as was his right. His voice had grown hoarse since the battle of Tizca; he’d taken a blade across the throat that had kept him under the knives of the fleshmakers for two days.

‘Ten days, Terran sidereal,’ he said.

‘More,’ objected Ogvai Ogvai Helmschrot, Jarl of the Third Great Company. ‘Two weeks.’

‘Not good enough,’ said Russ.

Ogvai bowed. ‘We will work harder.’

The primarch didn’t so much as glance at them – he seemed distracted, his mind lost in another place. ‘This delay harrows us. We should have been on Isstvan. Now we must respond.’

His jarls did not respond. Some nodded grimly, others looked doubtful.

‘Has such a thing happened before?’ asked Russ, talking to himself rather than them, his expression caustic. ‘Do sagas exist in which the Wolf King was drawn to the wrong place, doing the wrong thing? Has our shame ever been greater?’

Still no one replied. When the silence broke, it was not a jarl who spoke.

‘We have no shame,’ came a younger voice. ‘At least, I do not.’

Heads turned. Russ’s twin wolves let slip a snickering purr-growl. The Wolf King’s eyebrows lifted. ‘Who speaks?’

A warrior of Tra moved forward, pushing his way to the heart of the circle. His face was riddled with new scars. It made him look like a phantom of the old ice, criss-crossed with hexes and witch-marks. His head was part shaven, his remaining hair as black as engine-oil. He had a mournful face. He had always had a mournful face, even before Prospero had dulled the Wolves’ animal spirits en masse.

He had no left hand. His armour-clad arm terminated at the elbow in a mess of augmetics and iron caps. A new gauntlet had not been fitted yet – the demands had been many.

‘Bjorn, of Tra,’ the warrior said.

‘One-Handed,’ said Russ, nodding in recognition. Bjorn’s saga was already being crafted by the skjalds. He had been there with the Horus-daemon and heard the words of mystery spoken by that thing. His stock had risen, and he was being spoken of as if some deep wyrd had locked itself on him. ‘That is a poor name.’

‘It suits,’ Bjorn replied coolly, flexing his half-ruined arm with something like pride. ‘It stands for all of us.’

‘You wished to say something?’

‘I am not ashamed,’ said Bjorn, his sad eyes unwavering. ‘I saw the thing that brought us to Prospero. I heard some of what it said. The skjald told me the rest. We ended evil.’

‘No doubt,’ growled Russ.

‘And Magnus was already lost,’ said Bjorn. ‘I speak boldly – he was your brother – but it was right that he die.’

Ogvai, Bjorn’s jarl, nodded slowly, chewing his lip. Russ noticed, and his nostrils flared in anger.

‘We were a side-show,’ muttered the primarch. ‘Ferrus is dead. We should have been with him. We could have stopped it.’

Reports of Isstvan V had filtered through to the fleet in broken snatches, blurts of astropathic half-dreams across an ocean of warp storms. Nothing had been reliable, everything needed multiple readings and confirmations, but in the aftermath of Valdor’s departure the hammer-blow had gradually become clear. Now they knew the shape of the tragedy.

The Iron Hands, Salamanders and Raven Guard were destroyed or crippled. The Sons of Horus, Alpha Legion, Emperor’s Children, World Eaters, Death Guard, Word Bearers, Iron Warriors and Night Lords had turned traitor. When the star-speakers had finally confirmed the interpretations, bringing the rune-webs with them to demonstrate the pattern of the scry, it had felt as if the universe were falling apart around them, collapsing into ruin in snatches of strange and incomprehensible gibberish. Even now the shock of it resonated, hanging like a pall of smoke over all of them.

‘We would not have stopped anything,’ said Bjorn evenly. ‘We would have been part of the massacre, and few would miss us.’

At that, Russ almost smiled – the hooked, sardonic grin he used to flash regularly. ‘Aye. Just a few.’

‘The question is,’ said Lord Gunn, ‘what next?’

‘We have Dorn’s summons,’ said Ogvai.

‘Summons,’ spat Gunn.

‘That is what we are for, are we not?’ asked Russ wearily. ‘We come when called.’

‘When the Allfather calls,’ corrected Ogvai.

‘And He is silent,’ said Russ. ‘Valdor would not tell me why, but he knew. Of everything that has happened, out of all the mistakes, that wears at me the most. Tell me this – what has happened to the Emperor?’

None of them replied. None of them were qualified to. They averted their eyes and closed their mouths. Only their minds ran with answers – suspicions, guesses, fears.

He is stricken.

He has abandoned the Throneworld.

He is dead.

Russ laughed then, but it was not his laugh of old. It was a strangled, half-committed sound. ‘This is what we need.’ He looked at each of them in turn. ‘I will not take orders from my brothers, only my Father. He will speak to me. We will set course for Terra, not because Rogal demands it, but because we choose to.’

Lord Gunn looked up. ‘When, then?’

‘Five days.’

The jarl of Onn took in a deep breath. Ogvai looked pensive; some of the others doubtful.

Russ glared at them. ‘No longer,’ he said. ‘Return to your ships, do what must be done – in five days we leave.’

His expression remained dark, but somewhere, sunk deep into his lupine face amid the cracked flesh and golden eyes, a flicker of resentful fire still burned. The dead weight of grief was lifting.

In its place came something else.

‘Never, not until now, have I been truly angered,’ Russ snarled, and the twin wolves stood up at the sound, hackles raised. ‘I am curious to see where it takes me.’

Beorth Ranekborn eased back into the Fylskiare’s command throne. He’d slept well enough during the off-shift and felt alert. The servitors and mortal crew in the pits below him were working away quietly, and the entire bridge worked with a calm buzz of activity.

Commanding an outrider frigate like the Fylskiare wasn’t glorious work. They’d been stationed a long way from the main Wolves muster, and the stellar sprawl of the Alaxxes Nebula was a barely-visible smudge on his rear viewers. Still, it gave him a chance to run the real space engines properly again. They’d taken a hit over Prospero from one of the few surface-to-orbit salvoes that the Thousand Sons had managed to launch, and it had played havoc with his systems ever since. He’d had his tech-priests working on it continually, but the core of the problem continued to elude them.

It really needed the attention of an Iron Priest, but they were all fully occupied with the big capital ships. All things considered, the Fylskiare had done all right. Patrol duty on the edge of fleet sensor range was at least moving.

‘Anything to report?’ he asked his bridge-lieutenant, Torve, a sandy-haired kaerl from one of Fenris’s tribute worlds – he could never remember which one.

‘Sensor ghosting at our augur limits,’ Torve replied, his honest face looking up for a moment from a cluttered console. ‘Probably nothing. Want to take a look?’

Ranekborn didn’t, not really, but there was little else to do, and the crew got restive with nothing to occupy them but vector plotting. ‘It’s why we’re out here,’ he said. ‘Course adjustment?’

‘A nudge,’ replied Torve, glancing up at a roof-mounted pict screen with glowing lines picked out on the glass.

‘Do it then.’

Torve complied. A few seconds later Ranekborn felt the dull whine of the engines altering pitch. It still wasn’t quite right – a grinding, rather than growling. Trajectory markers on various pict screens scrolled away, plotting new routes.

‘Anything?’ he asked after a while, absently adjusting the arm-rests on his throne. Aerolf, his watch-officer, had done something strange to them last time he’d been in command on the bridge.

He watched Torve run more tests. He watched the augur-lenses on his throne console begin to feed him fresh locator runes. He heard the dull chatter of the bridge crew pick up by a notch and saw a servitor down in one of the relay pits insert a spare interface node into a vacant shunt-coil and start clicking excitedly.

‘Maybe.’ Torve was looking intently at the sensor records. ‘Hold this heading.’

Ranekborn sat up a little straighter. He looked up at the real-view ports – a cluster of lead-lined crystalflex panes forming a blister over the upper bridge. He didn’t know what he expected to see there. An unmoving screen of stars twinkled back at him, just as ever.

‘Yes, something,’ murmured Torve. ‘Getting something now. This is not a glitch, this is a reading.’

Ranekborn felt the hairs on the back of his hands stand up. ‘Detail.’ As he spoke he activated priority links to the enginarium and void shield stations.

‘Feeding to bridge display,’ said Torve, switching his incoming data-stream to the main roof-mounted monitors.

Ranekborn looked up at them. For a moment he saw nothing special – a blurry cubic schematic of local space picked out in glowing green lines, all overlaid with rune-symbols and known vessel courses. It didn’t change immediately. Then, just at the edge of augur range where the definite gave way to the probable, something flickered into life.

Ranekborn clicked open a brass keypad housing on the side of his throne and began punching buttons. ‘Void shields up,’ he snapped. ‘Bring us about, two points nadir. Ensure a line to the fleet.’

The bridge immediately shifted into action – they’d all seen the same thing. The low drone of chatter changed in tone, turning tighter, more urgent, more directed.

‘Line established,’ reported Klaja, the comms officer.

‘Insignia yet?’ Ranekborn demanded, keeping a close eye on the Fylskiare’s trim and heading – it would be a bad time to lose the enginarium. ‘Hull-markings? I’ll need to give them something.’

‘Almost there,’ said Torve, working furiously at his console. ‘They’re still a long way out, but… Yes. Here we are.’

The picts updated. Something resolved in the corner of the screen, shot down data-lines to the cogitators. A single shape shuddered into clarity on the tactical display, rendered in glowing lines of phosphor. The pict was poor – taken at an angle and extreme long range, partly shadowed by the overhanging lip of what looked like a lance housing – but it was there.

A many-headed snake, rearing up against a circle of gold.

‘What is that?’ asked Torve, twisting to look up at Ranekborn.

Ranekborn felt his pulse pick up as he looked at it. ‘I suspected you hadn’t read my intelligence briefings,’ he said stiffly. ‘That’s a new one. They seem to want to announce themselves.’

He patched into the comms station. As he did so, more pin-points of light started to spread across the augur-cube – first a few, then dozens.

‘Priority message to command,’ ordered Ranekborn. ‘Perimeter sighting of hostiles. Major deployment. Tell them we’re scanning further before withdrawal. Assumed intercept course.’

He watched the points of light continue to grow, like bacilli multiplying on a specimen dish. The numbers were getting more than uncomfortable.

‘Ensure we pass those images on,’ said Ranekborn, his voice hardening as he calculated how long they had. ‘Make sure they take them. Tell them it’s a traitor fleet.’

He swallowed, wondering how operational the ship’s weapons really were.

‘Tell them it’s the Alpha Legion.’

Three

The Lords of Terra
Players of games
Legionary blade

The Observatory had been built in the north-east reaches of the Imperial Palace. Its domed roof was lined with turquoise mosaic tiles shining in the light of a hundred candles. Esoteric devices on the curved surfaces sparkled and moved with the soft play of shadow.

It was not easy to see what was picked out by those designs – astrological symbols, perhaps, or maybe mythical beasts from a forgotten age of Terra. At the very summit was shadow, a lacuna out of the reach of the candlelight. A face had been created there a long time ago but the detail could no longer be made out. It sat in the darkness, gazing featurelessly down on the floor below.

The Observatory had not been used to scry the stars for a long time. Ancient brass telescopes, orreries and astrariums cluttered the aisles, unused, most of them covered in heavy tarpaulins. Rosewood cabinets were locked. The dust on the bookcases was a finger-width thick.

The floor was marble, a chequerboard of ivory and sable, and the walls around it glittered with faded gilt. Twenty pillars sustained the dome above, each with a stone emblem carved into the capital. Some were illuminated clearly – a wolf, a serpent, a lion. Others were obscured.

Three lords stood in the centre. Two were titans, their huge frames enclosed in extravagant shells of armour. The third was hunched and frail.

For a long time they did not say a word. Their silence seemed immense in that place. It seemed as if the first one to speak might shatter the walls and bring the dome down upon them.

The first to break the calm was the tallest and the most physically imposing. His face was slabbed and hard, crowned with a shock of white hair cropped close to the skull. His golden battleplate looked as solid as the stonework around it – its owner might just as well have been one of its statues. A thick cloak hung from his shoulders, pooling darkly in the flickering half-light.

‘Anything?’ he asked.

The speaker had many names. From his origins on the ice-world of Inwit he had been Rogal Dorn. Later he was the primarch of the Imperial Fists. In recent times he had slowly become accustomed to being the Emperor’s chosen praetorian.

His voice had the timbre of a hammer thudding into timber. It was the voice of a man who desired nothing more than to man his ships, to rally his Legion and head into the void to face the enemy that he knew was coming.

And yet that was the one thing, the only thing, that he had been expressly forbidden to do. It was a strange burden, to be condemned by one’s own expertise.

‘The Sigillite has not spoken,’ answered the second figure.

This one was scarcely less imposing. His armour had the same baroque quality the Observatory had – decorated with the phases of moons and symbols of what might have once been called the occult. Like Dorn he was clad in gold and bronze and enveloped in rich fabrics of crimson, and yet where Dorn seemed as solid as the bedrock upon which the Observatory rested, this one seemed somehow more ephemeral, more liable to burst into sudden movement. Words of power had been painstakingly engraved into his elaborate battleplate – ancient words, in characters so small that they might have been the near-silent whispers of spectres.

This man’s full name was so long that it could not be contained on a single sheet of bronze. He most commonly answered to a single version of it: Constantin Valdor, Captain-General of the Legio Custodes. When he spoke, his voice was surprisingly quiet. His eyes, though, were never quite still, flickering almost imperceptibly, forever searching for the next threat to be countered.

‘No, I have not,’ said the third. ‘I am struggling to find something to say that has not already been said.’

Malcador the Sigillite had none of the grandeur of his companions. His robes, though richly made, were simple. The staff he leaned upon looked to be made of little more than iron, though the aquila device that topped it was artful. His voice gave away his physical weakness – it sounded destroyed by age. None, save perhaps the Emperor himself, knew just how old he was. He had no known birthplace, no cultural identity. As far as the wider Imperium was concerned, he had just always been there, as solid a presence as the Palace itself.

Malcador and the Emperor. The Emperor and Malcador. They were like light and dark, sun and moon – each as inscrutable and unknowable as the other.

Except that the Emperor was gone, locked away in the deep Throne chambers, his unmatched power deployed to an end that even the Lords of Terra did not speak of openly.

‘Then let me tell you again,’ said Dorn. ‘Perhaps you have forgotten where it is that we stand. Magnus has broken the wards around the Throne, and now this, the mightiest fortress in the galaxy, sits upon a foundation of madness.’

‘It is contained once more,’ insisted Malcador. ‘For now the world knows little of the actual truth.’

‘It is contained only because the Emperor binds Himself to the hidden war,’ Dorn replied. ‘This respite has been bought with the sacrifice of a thousand souls. That is why the world does not know.’

‘Not yet,’ said Valdor bleakly. ‘But they will. Perhaps a few more weeks, perhaps months, but it will spill out eventually. Rumours are already running wild.’

‘It will do,’ agreed Malcador. ‘But as long as He holds firm…’

‘Yes, as long as He holds firm,’ said Dorn, bitterly. ‘That is what we are reduced to. No actions, no movement – just hope.’

‘We cannot help Him,’ said Valdor. ‘We know this. So let us turn to what we can do.’

Malcador chuckled dryly. ‘I never asked you how it felt, Constantin, to see Prospero burn. Did even your callous soul blanch at that?’

Valdor didn’t miss a beat. ‘No. It was necessary.’

‘Was it?’ sighed Malcador. ‘I did not give the order. I wanted Magnus censured, not destroyed. What was it that made Russ do it? You never could give me an answer.’

Dorn exhaled impatiently. ‘You know all of this, Malcador. You know all that happened there, just as we do.’ He was coldly furious. ‘Does this need repeating? The Warmaster is at the heart of it, poisoning everything we do, and now he has the blood of three more Legions on his hands.’

At that, Malcador seemed to wince. The slaughter of Isstvan V was still raw. None of them, save the implacable Valdor perhaps, could refer to it without provoking that hollow, draining, sense of loss.

‘Ferrus is truly gone, they tell me,’ admitted Malcador. ‘Vulkan and Corax missing. Eight Legions declared traitor, even now carving the void apart to get to us.’ He smiled grimly. ‘Shall I go on? The aether in turmoil, blighting the Astronomican and making us blind? No word of Guilliman or Sanguinius. Are they with us? Or have they also turned?’

‘Not the Angel,’ said Dorn, firmly. ‘And I will not believe it of Roboute.’

‘But they are lost to us, for now at least,’ said Valdor. ‘So we must survey what we know. Russ is at Alaxxes. When I left him, they were badly mauled, for the Sons gave us a hard fight, but they will hunt again.’

‘And the Lion,’ said Malcador. ‘What of him?’

‘He pursues his private feuds,’ said Dorn. ‘And when has he ever been anything but his own master?’

Malcador smiled. ‘You brothers – such a nest of rivalries. I warned him to make you sisters, that it would make things more civilised. He thought I was joking. I wasn’t.’

Dorn didn’t smile. His face seemed permanently rooted in a kind of frozen tension.

‘There is one other,’ said Valdor quietly.

‘Ah, yes,’ said Malcador. ‘So easy to overlook the Khan. Why is that?’

‘It is his gift,’ said Dorn dismissively.

‘The Khan was in the Chondax system,’ said Valdor.

‘Which, like so many others, is beyond our reach,’ said Malcador, his voice bleakly humorous.

‘What of Jaghatai’s loyalty?’ asked Valdor.

‘I did not know him, not well,’ said Dorn.

‘None of us did,’ said Malcador. ‘That was the point of him – in any system there needs to be uncertainty.’ He smiled at Dorn. ‘You, my friend, were an exercise in the opposite. No wonder you two did not understand one another.’

‘So who was he close to?’ asked Valdor.

Malcador thought for a moment. ‘Horus, of course. They were so similar. I believe they conferred on Ullanor.’

‘Magnus, too,’ said Dorn, somewhat hesitantly. ‘They fought alongside one another for a long time.’

‘Yes,’ said Malcador, nodding pensively. ‘The Librarius – the Khan, Magnus and Sanguinius were behind it. That was the root of their connection, such as it was. They all believed in the need for psykers within the Legions.’

Valdor took a deep breath. ‘So there it is. The Khan’s known allies, Horus and Magnus, traitors both.’

‘All of us trusted Horus,’ said Dorn.

‘Quite,’ said Malcador ruminatively. ‘As I said at the time, Nikaea was the root of this. We should have explained things better, though there were reasons, some of which we could never disclose, not there.’ He pursed his thin lips. ‘We were too caught up in what needed to be done. That may be the tragedy of it all – we did not explain.’

Dorn looked at Malcador coldly, as if he fully agreed. Valdor remained as implacable as ever.

‘Too late for regrets,’ said Malcador wearily. ‘We must summon him. Russ and the Khan standing here beside you, Rogal, would make me sleep easier. The Executioner and the Warhawk – that would give even Horus pause.’

‘Chondax has gone dark,’ warned Valdor. ‘But I can instruct the astropaths to focus their efforts there.’

‘And if he fails to answer?’ asked Dorn.

For a moment, neither Valdor nor Malcador answered. The space around them seemed to shrink a little.

‘Then we must assume that Jaghatai has fallen too,’ said the Sigillite at last, no trace of wry humour left in his voice. ‘Another name to add to the tally of the lost.’

Ilya sat back in her chair after placing the ivory token. Her move had taken her a long time. With so many places to choose from, and so many tokens at her disposal, they always did.

Her opponent shook his head. ‘Poor choice.’

‘Really?’ she asked, waiting to be shown why.

‘Yes,’ he said, reaching over the large, square board to position a black slate counter. She studied the results. They became sobering – he was close to capturing a straggling, kidney-shaped slice of territory, and there was almost certainly nothing she could do about it. The choice therefore became simple: to fight the inevitable, or carve out some new area of her own elsewhere. It was a choice she had become used to making.

‘I don’t see the possibilities closing, not in time,’ she complained.

‘That is the skill of it. But you’re getting better.’

Ilya allowed herself a brief glance at her opponent, checking to see whether he mocked her.

As ever, it was hard to tell. Jaghatai Khan lounged back in a low-slung seat of furs and leather, limbs loose, his proud face as inscrutable as stone.

Ilya remembered when she’d first met him, back above Ullanor. For some reason she’d nearly fainted, even after Yesugei had warned her about it. It was said that primarchs sometimes had that effect – the force of their superactive souls strained at the bonds of sense. She had also heard it said that the human species had never evolved to cope with presentations of such power within simulacra of their own bodies. The effects were well-documented: nausea, light-headedness, panic.

That had all passed now. Spending time with the primarch hadn’t become mundane – it could never become mundane – but it was containable. The flutters of anxiety in her stomach now rarely troubled her. Their conversations had become a trifle less formal. They shared a glass of wine from time to time. They played games.

‘Am I really getting better?’ she mused, picking up another ivory stone and pondering where to place it. ‘I think you tell me that so you don’t lose an opponent.’

‘Qin Xa plays.’

‘Does he ever beat you?’ she asked.

‘He’s very good.’

‘I’ll take that as a no.’

The primarch’s physical presence could be a distraction. It wasn’t just the size of him, though there was something inescapably incongruous in addressing a man nearly twice as tall as her. It was more the unconscious… splendour.

The Khan was lean, rangy, cut harshly like the talons of a hunting bird. He spoke sparingly. When he did, his voice was cultured, tinged with an aristocratic idiom. His face was long and sleek, dark-skinned like all Chogorians and framed by long black hair. The scar that ran down his left cheek was pronounced, the zigzag of an old wound. Ilya heard that the legionaries had to add poison to the knife cut to get it to scar, for their superhuman flesh otherwise healed too perfectly.

He took care over his appearance. His cloak was trimmed with white fur: ermyet, it was called by his fellow Chogorians. He wore a kaftan of deep burgundy, lined with silk. Bands of gold sat on his fingers, around his neck, enclosing the topknot of glossy hair.

Even out of armour he looked dangerous. The folds of his clothing failed to hide the warrior’s training of the body beneath. Every movement he made, whether reaching for more chinyua wine or setting his own stones in position seemed to take place in a refined world of swordsman-like precision.

Halji had told her about it many times. ‘Nothing is wasted,’ he had said, sweeping his tulwar though the air in front of her to prove the point. ‘Every movement as efficient as muscle allows. No flourish, no flair. Just the principle.’

The Khan, fittingly enough, seemed to have perfected that.

‘Do you wish me to give you a piece of advice?’ he asked.

Ilya raised an eyebrow. ‘By all means.’

He sat back in his oversized chair. The light around them played with the gentle movement of candles. The strains of a Prosperine silverharp sounded faintly in the background. The Khan was very fond of music – an enjoyment he and Magnus shared, so they said.

‘You play regicide?’ he asked.

Ilya nodded.

‘Not as sophisticated as Go,’ said the Khan. ‘Regicide gives you one enemy, one trajectory – kill the Emperor, you are the victor. In Go there is no Emperor to kill. Or perhaps it is better to say there are many Emperors.’

Ilya listened. She thought the White Scars tried too hard to explain the superiority of their cultural preferences. They were so used to being overlooked and ignored; something of that must have sunk into their psyche somewhere.

‘My warriors are trained by this game,’ the Khan went on. ‘They learn to see threats from all sides. They learn to counter many targets.’

‘I can see that,’ said Ilya. ‘Damn it. I struggle to keep everything in my head.’

‘You do very well.’

‘There must be times, though… Times, in reality, when you do have one enemy.’

‘It is easier for a subtle mind to adjust to simplicity.’

Again, that edge of defensiveness.

That is because you know you are seen as barbarians.

Ilya sighed, and placed her stone. It would probably do little to stem her losses; she expected to be given back handfuls of her counters fairly soon. ‘So what is the next target?’

The Khan studied the board. ‘After Chondax? I do not know.’

‘No orders from the Warmaster?’

He did not reply. He hadn’t spoken about Horus since the final stages of the conflict on the White World, though before he had often mentioned him. Qin Xa was the same. She knew that they hadn’t received any firm news from the Warmaster whilst on Chondax – she would have seen the logs – but something, perhaps some half-heard star-speaker vision, might have eked its way through.

It was as if they were all starting at shadowy rumours, fragments of uneasiness that moved through the void like gossip between infantrymen.

‘So do you have plans?’ Ilya asked, wondering if she would get a clear answer.

The Khan stared intently at the stones, not lifting his eyes. ‘I feel the need to speak to Yesugei again. If we cannot make contact soon, then we will need to make our way home.’

Ilya smiled. ‘Really? You’d bring the whole Legion to Chogoris, just for him?’

The Khan did not smile. Smiling was rare with him, which was odd: the rest of the Legion hardly ever stopped. ‘Of course I would.’ He placed his stone, predictably enough beginning the encirclement of another of her dwindling groups. ‘I have relied on Yesugei for centuries.’

Ilya took a sip before moving again. The wine wasn’t very good – Chogorians didn’t really appreciate viniculture. ‘So why didn’t he come with us to Chondax?’

‘He was needed on Nikaea.’

‘Nikaea?’

‘A summit.’ The Khan gave her a shrewd look. ‘I would have been there too if I could have been, but Yesugei was my representative. He spoke for me. You see how much I trust him?’

‘I do. What was he doing there?’

‘Arguing for the right of the zadyin arga to exist. I hope he was successful.’

‘And if he wasn’t?’

The Khan shrugged. ‘It makes no difference to me, but I would prefer that my more assiduous brothers don’t have to make a difficult choice.’

Ilya smiled. She had come to find the White Scars amiable indifference to Imperial edicts more endearing than exasperating. They weren’t rebellious, exactly, just themselves – no more, no less. Out alone. Unconcerned. They would never give up the Stormseers.

‘The ruling could have gone against you months ago,’ she observed. ‘We would have no idea.’

‘Lots of things may have happened about which we have no idea,’ said the Khan. ‘That is the advantage of this agreeable place.’ But the primarch’s expression faltered for a moment then, as if he knew, or perhaps guessed, something more than he said.

‘Do you wish to tell me more?’ Ilya asked carefully.

‘I do not,’ the Khan replied, putting his stone down and launching a fresh attack on her beleaguered positions. ‘Now concentrate. You are nearly dead.’

‘So tell me what you think,’ said Shiban.

The body of the dead legionary lay in front of him on a slab of steel, rendered in uncomfortable detail by the overhead lights of the Kaljian’s apothecarion. His armour had been cut away and the flesh inside was black, like overcooked meat.

Jochi stood beside Sangjai, who rubbed his chin.

‘Progenoids gone,’ Sangjai said with regret. ‘The heat.’

‘How did he die?’

‘You can see for yourself,’ said Sangjai, moving up towards the warrior’s neck and parting the flaking folds with gloved hands. ‘A single blade thrust down to the spine. He was held in place while they did it.’

Shiban leaned on his hands. ‘Ever seen an ork make a wound like that?’

‘I do not know. Do they make wounds a certain way?’

‘You have seen the way they fight,’ said Jochi. ‘They mutilate what they kill.’

‘Perhaps they did not have the chance,’ said Sangjai.

‘They had plenty of time,’ said Shiban. ‘That is not the issue.’

Sangjai looked back at the corpse. He studied it long and hard. He bent over and stared at the wound again. Shiban heard a faint whine as his augmetic left eye adjusted focus.

Eventually Sangjai straightened. ‘It could have been hain. I have seen them use a blade well enough. But yes, perhaps unlikely.’

‘What, then?’

Sangjai looked at him evenly. ‘You want my guess?’

‘Say it,’ hissed Jochi impatiently.

‘This is a long knife cut. A legionary blade. They knew where to angle it. It was done quickly, and they trusted the lava to hide it.’

Shiban nodded. He felt vaguely nauseous. ‘Anything else?’

Sangjai shook his head.

‘Legionary blade,’ murmured Jochi, appalled. ‘They were fighting among themselves?’

‘Who knows?’ said Shiban.

‘There was nothing on Phemus but greenskins,’ Jochi went on, getting increasingly agitated. ‘Greenskins and us. Did they go mad?’

‘That’s enough.’

‘How many died this way?’

‘Enough,’ Shiban snapped.

He pushed away from the table. His mind crowded with thoughts. Phemus IV had taken a long time to pacify, far longer than it should have. The expedition fleet commanders had put it down to the hostile terrain, but Shiban had seen the campaign logs prior to his transfer, complaining of higher casualties than expected, poor communications, regular setbacks.

They were fighting amongst themselves?

Hard to believe. Tensions always existed between the brotherhoods – he had experienced them himself – but not to that extent. Never to that extent.

‘This cannot be ignored,’ he said at last. ‘I am going back down.’

‘The cleansing is over,’ said Sangjai doubtfully. ‘We have our recall orders – the Khagan will move the fleet soon.’

‘Comms have been bad for months,’ said Shiban, smiling bleakly. ‘If we are slow in answering, he will understand.’

‘You will not solve this,’ said Sangjai. ‘Not on Phemus.’

Shiban started to walk away.

‘You have to start somewhere,’ he said.

Four

Helridder
Into the storm
Betrayer

It took a long time for a fleet formation to respond to orders. Legiones Astartes battle cruisers were gigantic things – kilometres long, like dark cities in space. Building them was the labour of decades, drawing in millions of workers and thousands of Mechanicum creation engines. Once sent into the deep void they continued to grow, to evolve, to change. A ship’s own forges were never still, never at rest.

Moving one was an exercise in logistics. A million crew-serfs needed to be at their stations, priming weapons, activating power coils, manning command nodes. Thousands of line officers needed to make their decisions, ensuring the enginarium caverns delivered drive to the thrusters at the correct pitch and frequency. Hundreds of section commanders needed to keep track of the relative movements of other ships and feed a trillion augur readings to the cogitators and sensors to prevent collision with other behemoths manoeuvring ponderously in the void.

But in the end, even the biggest warship was driven by a single soul – a lone captain, gifted suzerainty by the Imperium’s relentless drive towards hierarchy in all things. One voice gave the order to move, to train weapons, to light the black with the world-burning power of lances and torpedo volleys.

The order was given, the ships moved.

Across the VI Legion fleet, every ship fired up low-burn engines and sent void shields shimmering down snarl-edged flanks. Escorts raced ahead, engines blazing, machine-souls eager for the hunt. The true giants lumbered in their wake, wallowing as they came about before gunning drive-trains into life.

The shoal of sleet-grey ships spread out, slotting into assault formations. Fire-angles were established in all directions, a three-dimensional sphere of destruction spreading from the centre. The rust-red bloom of the nebula suddenly glowed with a thousand points of intensity, swiftly extinguished as the fleet pulled up into attack speed.

Ahead of them, thousands of kilometres distant and out of unaugmented visual range, the Alpha Legion did the same. Their vessels were similarly gargantuan, similarly bristling with weaponry of almost absurdly destructive potential. Some vessels were adorned with new Legion symbols – edged with sapphire and emerald, the sigil of the striking hydra. Others still bore the colours of fidelity, crowned with the old chain-linked Alpha-Omega device. As ever with the XX Legion, nothing had been entirely settled. Everything was still in flux.

Bjorn watched the enemy from the bridge of the Helridder, studying their formation, noting the patterns. The two fleets still weren’t visible to one another in the real-view ports – his images were the grainy, poorly resolved feeds from long-range augurs.

He didn’t feel any particular emotion. Prospero had been the same – a task, much as countless others that the Wolves had been given; something to be carried out efficiently. Only later had the dull sense of wrongness fallen over them.

We are outgunned, he thought.

He performed rough calculations in his head and knew that the strategeos in the flagship would be reaching the same conclusion. They would already know how many more ships the Alpha Legion possessed and how quickly their lethal complements could be brought to bear.

‘We are outgunned,’ said Godsmote, just a fraction behind, standing next to Bjorn on the command plinth of the bridge with the rest of the pack. He was in his armour, the dirty grey of it streaked with bloodstains and ritual kill-marks, and his voice came tinnily from behind his helm’s death mask.

‘Looks that way,’ agreed Bjorn, studying the incoming feeds.

‘Wise to meet them head-on?’

‘Probably not.’

Godsmote grunted. No use questioning a decision once it had been made, and the Wolf King hadn’t been in any mood to back down from another fight no matter how badly mauled they were.

We are a blunted blade, thought Bjorn bleakly. We have been used too much.

All Legions had taken casualties during the Great Crusade, but some assignments had been bloodier than others. The Wolves numbers had never been among the highest, a feature exacerbated by their aggressive drive to limit recruitment to Fenris, and their constant deployment – usually self-appointed – to some of the most arduous warzones of the campaign. Prospero had hurt them further, perhaps more than they truly understood.

‘I wondered if it would become easier,’ Bjorn mused.

‘If what would?’ asked Godsmote.

‘Killing another Legion. Killing kinsmen.’

‘We’re not there yet.’

‘Yes, we are.’

Bjorn already saw how it would play out: comms would be transmitted from the Hrafnkel to the Alpha Legion flagship demanding that they stand down. No answer would come back. The Space Wolves would hold fire until the last moment, right up until the range of the main lances had been reached, issuing demand after demand. Then the killing would begin.

Helridder would play its part. It was built for fast-attacks: agile and weapon-heavy, sparsely crewed and with scant berthing for anything but fuel and ammunition. The entire legionary complement on board was six. A lean pack, but one in command of an agile hunter-killer.

‘They’re moving to an attack spread,’ noted Godsmote, glancing at the screens.

‘Strange, isn’t it?’ Bjorn watched the pulses of green light crawl across his tactical readout, creeping towards one another with deceptive slowness – the velocities were now incredible. ‘What do you know of the Alpha Legion?’

‘Not a lot,’ said Godsmote.

‘Ever heard of them mounting a major fleet action?’

Godsmote paused. ‘Should I have?’

Bjorn shrugged. ‘I’ve never heard of it. Not really what they’re known for.’

To the extent that anything was known about the Alpha Legion, it concerned subtlety, subterfuge and infiltration. Guilliman, famously, thought little of them. Russ, less famously, thought much the same. They didn’t like getting their gauntlets bloody, it was said.

Once the news had come in from Isstvan V, once it had been given time to settle, some treacheries had seemed more obvious than others. The World Eaters he could understand. The Iron Warriors similarly, and so too Mortarion’s strange Death Guard.

But the Alpha Legion. Something about their switch of allegiance bothered him. It felt… unsound.

‘Why are they here, doing this?’ Bjorn asked, speaking as much to himself as to Godsmote.

Godsmote smiled bleakly. ‘Looks obvious.’

Bjorn didn’t smile. Even before losing his hand to the daemon he had never smiled much – now, less than ever. He knew that the packs laughed about it, poking fun at his unremitting seriousness, but they could laugh as much as they wanted.

He felt a weight on his soul, sometimes – like an anvil resting on his chest. He’d sit on the edge of the fire-circle while the others sang or recited, listening but not speaking. For a long time he’d not envisioned himself becoming an integral part of the Legion, just one of its fringe elements, destined to die in some blood-drenched campaign on some world or other.

Now that feeling had left him. Oddly, just as everything changed, his old sullen desire for withdrawal had ebbed, replaced by something else. After time long spent on the fringes, Prospero had begun to draw him into the Rout’s heart. The primarch knew his name now. The sagas mentioned him, guaranteeing a kind of immortality in the cold halls of the Aett. It felt as if the centre of gravity had shifted, dragging him closer towards the savage embrace of a Legion whose temper had always contrasted so badly with his own.

‘It is not obvious,’ said Bjorn. ‘Not to me. There are mysteries here.’

The lights on the bridge began to lower. From somewhere far below a warning chime sounded. Guns were being hauled into position, firing solutions were being calculated.

Far ahead, in a slender line on the very edge of vision, the first pinpricks of light from the enemy positions crept into the real-viewers, like a string of jewels slung against the void.

‘Well, that may be,’ breathed Godsmote, his voice already heavy with relish. ‘But here they come, and for myself I wish only to discover how they die.’

Yesugei leaned closer to the viewport and watched the plains of Chogoris fall away into a pale blur. For a few moments after takeoff he’d been able to see the Khum Karta monastery laid out below him in all its sprawling glory – the old towers of the Khitan, the training grounds, the gardens ripe with plum trees. Gold pinnacles had glinted in the sunlight. Soul-pennants had snapped in the stiff breeze.

Then it was gone, lost in a haze of pale greens and browns. He watched the Altak stretch out, spreading out across the continental mass, devouring everything. Only a few wisps of cloud scudded across the emptiness, ephemeral against the vastness.

All worlds looked much the same from space. The colours varied, but the real differences were all hidden in ground level details – the smells, the feel of the gravity, the taste of the wind. Yesugei had trod upon a hundred different worlds and none had ever really resembled another. Humanity had spread itself across a bewilderingly wide range of habitats, conquering each one with the remorseless patience and ingenuity that was, so he had come to learn, the mark of the species.

Soon Chogoris ceased to look different from any other planet – a blank sphere hanging in the uniform blankness of starlit vacuum, its distinctiveness lost.

Yesugei turned away from the viewport and settled back in his chair. He never enjoyed leaving the home world. Before the Master of Mankind had arrived and brought the Great Crusade to them, Yesugei had been quite content with the limits placed upon them by a single world. They had enemies to fight, kingdoms to lay low, prey to hunt; he had never wanted for more than that. The Khan had been the same.

He remembered talking to him once as the moons rose, back in the old days when Khum Karta had been a tenth the size and built of red-tinged stone rather than underpinned by rockcrete and steel.

‘What will we do when all enemies are conquered?’ Yesugei had asked, feeling warm dusk breeze against his skin.

The Khan stood on the parapet, his long, lean frame proud against the lowering light. By then he was the master of the whole continental mass, the conqueror of the Khin-zan, the Qo, the Khitan, the Nyomen and a hundred other nations.

‘Let them go again,’ he said calmly. He flexed his fingers against the red balustrade. ‘I have no desire to become their master.’

Yesugei laughed. ‘Then why conquer at all?’

‘Because we must.’ The Khan looked up into the heavens. Perhaps he knew what would be coming soon, the arrival that would change everything. ‘We hunt, because we are hunters.’ His expression became sour. ‘There is no point in saying, This is it, this is the end, you have achieved what you set out to do. The world will not remain still around you. You move with it, or you are swept away.’

Yesugei looked up at his master. The Khan’s physicality had never lost its power to impress. Everything about him was demanding. Some of the men of the ordu were already calling him khan tengri, tantamount to bestowing godhood. Yesugei couldn’t blame them. They’d all seen what he was capable of.

‘I do not know if I believe that,’ Yesugei said lightly. ‘You rule the land from here to the ocean. You will not give it up.’

The Khan turned his eyes on Yesugei. Those eyes, too, never lost their terrible power. Yesugei remembered when he’d first seen them, recovering in a fire-warmed ger after the powers he’d been born with had nearly killed him. They were like a god’s eyes – deep-set, unconsciously scrutinising. Pitiless.

‘I will, one day,’ the Khan said softly. ‘Do you know what I fear, Targutai?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Only beasts fear nothing.’

Yesugei smiled. ‘Decrepitude, then.’

The Khan nodded. ‘You do know me, zadyin arga.’ He looked back out over the plains. ‘Decay is the enemy. Every emperor we have deposed has been fat. They reached the limits of their power and sat back on golden thrones, satisfied with what they had done when they still had vigour. By the time we came for them, they could barely lift a tulwar.’

‘You will not become fat,’ observed Yesugei. ‘I do not think you are capable of it.’

The Khan shrugged. ‘My body, perhaps not, but my mind?’ He seemed to shudder, not from the cold – it was still warm – but from a lack of motion. Yesugei had noticed it before: he needed to be moving, out on the saddle, chasing something down. ‘There is only one unforgivable lie. That is the lie that says, This is the end, you are the conqueror, you have achieved it and now all that remains is to build walls higher and shelter behind them. Now, the lie says, the world is safe.’

The Khan shook his head. ‘All emperors are liars, Targutai. Safe.’ He spat on the balustrade. ‘No fouler word exists.’

That exchange had been over a hundred and forty years ago. Since then, of course, everything had changed, but Yesugei had never forgotten it. Sometimes he wondered whether he might ask the Khan about it again, seeing if he had revised his views. He doubted it: the Khan’s moods and temper seemed burned into him, like the Talskar imprint on his left cheek.

The lander neared its destination, and banked around for the final approach. As the starfield wheeled past the viewports, Yesugei caught a glimpse of the transport he’d requisitioned: the Legion frigate Sickle Moon, its spear-shaped profile standing starkly, picked out by the white livery and gold-red trim. The lightning-strike sigil, the mark of the khans for a thousand years, had been painted proudly along the forward flanks.

It looked fast. That was good – it would need to be.

The lander swept up towards the frigate’s dorsal hangar, guided by twin lines of strobing lumens. Once touched down inside, Yesugei stirred himself, got up and walked down to the lander’s embarkation ramp. He took a moment to smooth his robes and collect his staff before emerging out into the hangar – appearances were important, and despite everything that had happened the Legion still placed store in its Stormseers.

The lander’s outer doors hissed open. The hangar was lit brightly, as was usual on V Legion warships. Every surface was highly polished, glistening softly under hanging lumens. The interior smelled of steel polish, engine oil and falang, the Khitan ceremonial incense. Two lines of White Scars stood to attention on either side of the ramp, clasping their fists across their chest in the ritual greeting.

Still they respect us, even after all this foolishness, thought Yesugei as he descended. He found the display of respect touching. I am glad to belong to such a Legion.

The ship’s commander inclined his head as Yesugei approached.

‘Welcome, zadyin arga,’ he said. ‘You honour us with your presence.’

Yesugei bowed in turn. ‘I have taken you away from important duties.’

‘You have saved us from tedium. We are happy to have you.’

The two of them walked together towards the hangar’s exit. Behind them servitors began to unload the lander, hauling grav-crates from the cargo bay.

‘So can you get me to Chondax?’ asked Yesugei.

The commander gave an equivocal gesture. ‘We will try, but you know about the storms. The Navigator says nothing can be promised.’

‘When has a Navigator ever said different?’

‘That is true.’

‘And you have me with you now,’ added Yesugei. ‘It has been a while since I peered behind the mask of heaven.’

‘This is a good ship,’ said the commander firmly. ‘A harmonious ship. Twenty major engagements since first launch and still harmonious.’

That was reassuring. Chogorian captains had taken all sorts of esoteric concepts up into the void with them since their sudden and enforced leap in technological progress, and ancient ideals of harmony and balance still counted for a great deal.

They reached the far end of the hangar and Yesugei paused before a set of double doors. ‘What is your name, commander?’ he asked.

‘Lushan.’

‘Khitan?’

‘Yes, from Xiam.’

‘From the beginning, then, Lushan, let there be no secrets between us. This turmoil is not natural. I do not understand its origin, but it makes our star-speakers deaf and dumb, it silences the galaxy and it masks the primarch. Defying it will certainly be dangerous. I say this only so you are aware.’

‘All of us are prepared,’ said Lushan, looking perfectly unconcerned. ‘We can head out to the jump point on your command.’

‘Good,’ said Yesugei, opening the doors with a gesture. ‘Then do so now. My dreams have been troubled – until I am reunited with the Khagan I fear they will become worse.’ He gave the commander a weary look. ‘And it would be nice to have some sleep.’

Torghun strode towards the Starspear’s command deck. He was curious. It wasn’t common for Jemulan to call the khans together. The noyan-khan preferred to run his fiefdom in the Chogorian manner: loose control from the centre, maximum autonomy extended to the various brotherhoods. Now, though, the order had come in and his commanders were hastening to comply. Those stationed on other vessels had taken shuttles over to the Starspear; some still located in the outlying regions of the cluster had arranged to be present by secure lithocast.

‘What do you think?’ asked Manju, his lieutenant, walking alongside him. His face, light-complexioned and framed by blond hair, was creased with uncertainty. It was a markedly youthful face for a Space Marine, one upon which the Legion-scar looked oddly out of place.

‘No idea,’ said Torghun. He’d heard rumours that the astropathic veil was beginning to fracture, that some messages were beginning to get through at last, though nothing firm enough to place any confidence in.

‘The new assignment?’ offered Manju, his tone giving away his hope.

‘It would be about time.’

As was typical, the White Scars straggling Legion structure made coordination difficult – many brotherhoods were still engaged in the last gasps of xenos cleansing out in the far reaches. Others had been in their ships for weeks, hanging in orbit over the White World with nothing to do but practise their bladecraft in cages until fresh orders were issued from the Swordstorm.

The Chogorians seemed happy enough with that. They were used to their inscrutable primarch and his impulsive decision-making. The Terrans took it harder, at least those who hadn’t long resigned themselves to the Legion’s haphazard methods of command and control.

‘I thought they’d improved things,’ said Manju. ‘The Terran they brought in.’

‘She’s just one woman,’ said Torghun, smiling wryly. ‘She can’t change it all.’

They passed from the corridors into a capacious antechamber crowned with a high dome of glittering crystal. Fleet attendants bustled across the floor clutching data-slates, stepping clear of drone-like servitors in their paths. On the far wall was a Legion lightning-strike inlaid in alabaster and slate. The sigil of the Horde of the Earth stood next to it, a stylised mountain-peak modelled, so Torghun had been told, on Temudan, one of the holy peaks of the Legion’s home world.

Below the sigils were the huge doors of blast-grade adamantium that led into Jemulan’s audience chamber. Two warriors of his keshig stood on either side of the entrance carrying heavy glaives. Their faces were hidden behind sloping grilles of Mark III power armour, the helms crested with horsehair plumes dyed black.

Other summoned khans were making their way through to the chamber beyond. Their shoulder guards carried their brotherhood emblems: a double-headed arrow, a falcon, a dawn sky. At the sight of the last one – a golden sun with spear-tip rays – Torghun’s gaze met Hibou’s.

Torghun nodded his head fractionally in greeting. Hibou did the same.

Once they were through, the blast doors shuttered closed behind them. The chamber glistened from reflective white walls. Bronze-caged lumens hovered above head-height. Perhaps seventy White Scars stood on the tiled floor, though some outlines flickered with the crackling aura of hololithic projections. A low murmur of expectant discussion rippled across the gathering.

Jemulan entered the room last and ascended the dais at the far end. The noyan-khan was as imposing a presence now as he had been when he had presided over Torghun’s Ascension. The many intervening decades had only hardened his ravaged, hawk-sharp face, making the zigzag scar on his face even whiter. His battleplate was ancient, reverently maintained but carrying its own sets of cherished burns, chips and dents.

‘Brothers,’ he said, turning to face the crowd and bowing perfunctorily. His face looked haggard. ‘My earnest thanks for attending at such notice. I know you are diligently preparing for the next stage of the Crusade, wherever that might be.’

Torghun and Manju exchanged brief glances. Jemulan sounded exhausted, as if fresh from combat. His voice, for the first time Torghun had ever heard it, gave away the old warrior’s age.

‘I would not have called you together had it not been of signal importance,’ Jemulan continued, sweeping his weary eyes across them all. ‘I wish the news I have to give were better. I wish it were not…’ He faltered, then recovered himself. ‘I have come from the Swordstorm. I have spoken to the Khagan. He wished me to tell you all how proud he is of your achievements here. He knows how much blood you have shed. He told me it will be remembered.’

Something has happened, thought Torghun, narrowing his eyes. He can barely bring himself to tell us.

‘As you know, the astropaths have been out of contact with the Imperium. The darkness is lifting now, though only partially. For reasons we do not understand, star-speakers on the flagship are receiving visions again. Our interpreters have been working hard to decipher them. Some images are still hard to discern, but at least we are getting them.’

Jemulan paused, seemingly unsure how to continue.

This is good news, surely. Why is he so reticent?

‘I hardly know how to tell you what we discovered,’ said Jemulan. ‘Since there is no way to tell it well, I will tell it plainly – the Great Crusade has been split. Treachery. The unthinkable has happened – a primarch has fallen into madness. A world lies in ruins and loyal warriors have been butchered. We do not know how many Legions are involved. We do not know why this has happened, but we are being asked to intervene, to leave Chondax.’

Jemulan’s words were as heavy as lead ingots. No one in his audience spoke, no one responded. Torghun, just like the rest, stood dumbfounded. A collective paralysis seemed to grip the chamber.

‘As I speak to you, others across the expedition are being told this news. Our orders are to accelerate the muster and bring the fleet back to a war-footing. There is much we do not know yet, but this much is clear – heresy has emerged among the Legiones Astartes. The only remedy is to root it out. This means war. This means going after those who until this day we called brothers. Their guilt is clear. They are murderers. They are faithless murderers.’

Jemulan spat the final words out with venom. His gauntlets clenched, trying to still hands trembling with fervour.

The crowd began to murmur again. Their initial shock gave way to a terrible curiosity – the basic mortal need to have questions answered, to know in all details what had taken place. Some instincts had not been quelled by the rigours of their transhuman conditioning.

‘Who?’ rose from the floor – first in lone voices, then as a chorus. Torghun found himself joining the clamour almost by default, adding his voice to those raised in outrage and disbelief. ‘Who?’

Jemulan raised his hands, stilling the tumult. His expression remained dark.

‘This is what we know,’ he said as the chamber fell quiet again. ‘The home world of the Thousand Sons has been destroyed, the Legion annihilated. Magnus the Red is slain, his back broken and his city lain waste.’

Jemulan looked as if he half disbelieved what he was saying.

‘These tidings come from the hand of the Warmaster himself, bearing his signs of surety,’ he said. ‘They are the first authenticated sendings we have received since the veil fell, and though much remains to be determined, at least now we know the name.’

Jemulan’s dark visage swept the chamber, animated by pure fury – the fury of a betrayed comrade in arms.

‘Only death awaits the traitor,’ he proclaimed. ‘So shall it be for Leman Russ, betrayer and heretic.’

Five

Voidwar
The medal
Unanswered questions

Bjorn planted his feet apart, compensating for the sudden tilt of the bridge deck. The Helridder’s grav-structure coped well with sudden shifts but it wasn’t perfect. His assembled pack – Godsmote, Urth, Eunwald, Angvar and Ferith – adjusted stance automatically, eyes fixed on the tactical readouts.

‘Come about, five points zenith,’ Bjorn commanded. ‘Take it out.’

Shudders ran down the chamber’s walls, the kind of ripple-vibrations that might have shattered a less robust structure. Already the armourglass forward blisters were cracked and two servitor-manned stations had lost power from ruptures below.

They were being hit hard. They were hitting back hard. Such was voidwar.

Every screen filled with signals. Twin fleet profiles sprawled across the void in a clogged swarm of eerily silent explosions, radiating out from the skeletal corpses of burning starships. Escorts died like firecrackers, igniting in blue-white flares of detonating engine cores and shooting through formations of the battle cruiser giants. Bigger warships – frigates, destroyers – powered through the debris, backs aflame, broadsides flickering with a thousand pinpricks of las-discharge. Then came the leviathans, their void shields smeared with feedback splashes the size of asteroids, their lances vomiting crystalline beams of killer energy.

No communications had been received from the Alpha Legion flagship – no demands, no challenges, just a wall of white noise, followed by the first volleys of las-beams across the vacuum. The Wolf King had no need to give any further orders. His Legion responded with the frustration born of enforced inactivity, launching itself at the enemy like baresarks of the old ice.

‘More speed,’ growled Bjorn, watching the carnage unfold, plotting lines of evasion and attack, his gold-pinned eyes shining.

Another shudder ran through the deck as the lances fired. The forward scanners disappeared for a fraction of a second, lost in a white-yellow blaze, before clearing.

The target lay ahead and above them, burning hard to escape the Helridder’s pursuit. It wasn’t much smaller than its hunter – a sapphire wedge of burning adamantium, limned with bronze swirls and carrying a ragged-edge wound along its ventral hull plating. Squadrons of gunships buzzed around its outline, some of them as grey as slush, some gleaming like jewels in the night. Coronas of las-fire surrounded them all, whiplashing against the prey’s half-buckled shields and slicing through the solid armour beneath.

The target was haring for the cover of an Alpha Legion cruiser formation up ahead and the Helridder went after it, engines swelling. Both ships had taken damage, and every second spent in the maelstrom of venting plasma and raking las-spears added to the tally.

‘Can we get it?’ mused Godsmote eagerly, bracing himself against another yaw of the bridge.

‘Ten more seconds,’ snarled Bjorn, desperate not to see it get away. He would have to pull out before they came within range of the cruisers, and that would anger him.

‘Incoming Stormbirds to port,’ reported one of the servitors flatly.

‘Losing port void seven,’ intoned another.

‘Lances at ninety per cent.’

‘Diverting C-deck lumen power to drive relays.’

The information washed over Bjorn, just part of the incoming barrage of tactical data. He felt the tremble of the ship beneath him, shivering like an animal, adjusting course on his every command.

‘Getting a lock…’ reported the master gunner, his half-augmetic head buried in a wiry nest of pict screens.

Ahead of them the target bucked and wheeled. The Helridder followed it tightly, corkscrewing through the backwash of a dying mass conveyer before shooting clean ahead and gaining space.

‘Now, gun-master,’ warned Bjorn, leaning forwards, bracing himself against a granite wall. ‘Now or never.’

‘Got it,’ the crewman confirmed, yanking a control column and swinging round in his swivel-mounted seat.

The Helridder’s forward lances opened up. Twin lines of coruscation impaled the enemy’s blazing engine-quarters.

‘Hjá!’ roared Urth, cracking a fist into his gauntlet’s palm.

The target exploded, blasted apart by one chain-linked detonation after another, and its ship-corpse keeled over, spinning out of control as fuel chambers were sucked into the destructive orgy.

‘Away now!’ commanded Bjorn. ‘Away and down.’

The Helridder plunged into a steep dive. Fresh targets hove into view, interspersed with incoming enemy markers. A three-dimensional tumult raged unabated about them, swirling and interlocking.

‘Ship-kill,’ reported the gunner, grinning like a child as he ran sensor checks on the target’s spreading debris. ‘By the Allfather, a fine ship-kill.’

‘Stormbirds still closing,’ repeated the sensorium servitor. Its voice sounded more suitable for reporting a minor fuel leak in the bilge-level redundancy coils.

‘How many?’

‘Twenty-four. Close formation. Firing imminent.’

Bjorn cursed under his breath. Stormbirds were a threat to a vessel the size of the Helridder – fast, heavily armoured and carrying all sorts of imaginative payloads. ‘A broadside, gun-master. Do not let them get in tight.’

The Helridder jerked in mid-trajectory, kicked by a sudden burst from the sub-warp drives. Like a wounded dog it tumbled over itself lengthways, falling into what looked like a terminal dive. At the last minute it righted, some hundred kilometres above the heaving carcass of a crenellated battle cruiser in Fenrisian livery, and thrust hard to starboard.

The escape figure had been expertly performed, angling the port gun batteries up at the incoming lines of Stormbird gunships.

‘Flay them,’ ordered Bjorn coldly, watching the enemy scream in closer.

The Helridder’s ranked guns erupted, peppering the blackness with a barrage of torpedo trails. Stormbirds crashed through it, some erupting into blazes of ruinous fire-trails, some weathering the conflagration and powering clear.

‘Again.’

A Stormbird blew apart on the attack run, its debris flung out in a wild, tumbling arc. Another ran head-on into a projectile cluster and dropped away sharply, engines guttering out. One of them got a clean shot off, overloading one of the Helridder’s rear void shields with a single precision strike.

Then, just as abruptly, the squadron altered course, angling up and thrusting in unison across the Helridder’s dipping prow.

‘Track them,’ ordered Eunwald.

Bjorn spun around to the sensorium operators. ‘Belay that. Keep close sensor sweep.’

One of the command staff – a woman with flame-red hair and iron-cast eyeballs – swivelled to look up at him. ‘We have boarding torpedoes incoming. Nine.’

Godsmote cursed. ‘They were screening them!’

‘Guns to port,’ ordered Bjorn, glaring at the gunner.

The gunner was already in action, coordinating the close-range cannons, filling the danger-zone with a dense thatch of crackling las-beams. The boarding torpedoes exploded in a ragged line, the flashes of their demise lighting up the Helridder’s scorched armour-plates starkly.

‘Did we get them all?’ Bjorn demanded, grabbing a cable-mounted pict screen and swinging it round.

His answer came in the form of five heavy hits somewhere far below, punching like bullets through leather. The ship shivered as its skin was broken.

‘The only gap in our void shields,’ breathed Godsmote appreciatively as he looked at the glowing impact markers. ‘What an aim.’

Bjorn unlocked his axe from its back-strapping and flicked the disruptor field into blue, glimmering life.

‘You have the bridge, shipmaster,’ he said, his voice already descending into a battlefield growl as he addressed the senior officer on the bridge. ‘Run those gunships down, then look for cover from Ogvai’s battlegroup.’ Then he turned on his heels, beckoning to the pack as he did so. His movements were loosening, gearing up for the close work he’d been bred for.

‘Come, brothers,’ he snarled. ‘We have snakes to skin.’

Shiban looked down at the excavation site. He would have to speak to Hasik about it, but needed more information; all he had at the moment were half-formed suspicions, none of them convincing.

‘Khan!’

The hail came from the far end of the site, a few metres from Shiban’s vantage point and down in the pits carved by his warriors. A dozen of them still laboured at the lava-face, drilling into the semi-cooled and glowing rock with plasma weapons and heavy chainblades. They had found a few more elements from the slain White Scars patrol – fragments of armour and jetbike components. Above them the sky glowered like a hot oil slick.

Shiban scrambled down the slope. Time was short. If they didn’t turn anything up soon then he would have to call off the operation and return to the Kaljian.

‘Tell me you have found something useful, Chel,’ he said, approaching one of his warriors stooped at the foot of a slope of semi-cooled lava.

Chel turned towards him. ‘Perhaps.’ He held up the mangled remains of detonation charge casings, and a few shrapnel fragments. ‘These were buried further up.’

Shiban looked them over. He had used similar devices himself, many times; they might have been used to collapse the walls of a lava channel, redirecting the flow. Perhaps the patrol had used them, prior to their final battle. It was impossible to tell for sure – the pieces were little more than blackened shards.

‘And this,’ said Chel, extending his gauntlet.

Shiban took up a metal disc less than half a palm’s width. It was heavy, ridged at the edges. He turned it over, then back again. One side was blank and the other had a hawk’s head engraved on it. The workmanship was not sophisticated – it reminded of him of tribal ritual images from home, although the style was not recognisably Chogorian. The surface was pitted and tarnished, and he couldn’t identify the metal from touch alone. Whatever it was, it was clearly robust to have survived the heat.

‘Where was this?’ Shiban asked.

Chel pointed up the slope. ‘Where we found the last body. The auspex nearly missed it.’

Shiban looked back at the medal. It seemed innocuous. The dull light of Phemus reflected from its mottled silver face like an echo of old blood. His skin, insulated beneath the ceramite of his gauntlet, pricked with sweat.

‘Seen anything like this before?’ he asked.

Chel shrugged. His body language gave away his doubtfulness – he wanted the excavation over and saw no purpose in digging more ground away from the bodies of slain brothers.

Shiban turned to the rest of the squad, holding the medal up. ‘Any more of these?’

No answers came. They gazed at it blankly, their demeanour much the same as Chel’s.

Shiban closed his fist over the medal. ‘So be it. Not much of a return.’

He glanced up the slope to where the hunchbacked outline of the Stormbird waited for them. As he did so, his comm-link crackled into life.

‘Khan,’ voxed Jochi. ‘Transmission from the fleet.’

‘Relay it.’

Jochi hesitated. ‘It might be better if you come back up. They want us back. Everyone back to Chondax. No exceptions. Something has agitated them.’

Shiban felt a chill. That sounded familiar. He remembered how the Khagan had stood amidst the ruins of the greenskin fortress on Chondax, bending his head to listen to some troubling tidings from his keshig.

Something has agitated them.

But that was some time ago, and he couldn’t say that he would be sorry to see the back of Phemus.

‘Understood. Ready the Kaljian for transit.’ He cut the link and turned back to the squad. ‘We are done here, brothers. Our next assignment, heavens willing, will be more rewarding.’

They started to move out, and Shiban gazed over the site one last time. It was a poor graveyard for those who had fallen. He looked down at the medal again. He liked nothing about it – something about the way it had been made offended his aesthetic senses.

‘Hateful world,’ he muttered, trudging back up the slope to where the Stormbird waited to take them back to Chondax.

Bjorn jogged down the Helridder’s transit corridors, closely followed by Godsmote and the others. The six Wolves were followed by two ten-strong units of kaerl ship-guards, each wearing carapace armour and hefting a heavy autogun. The clatter of massed boot-falls echoed messily in the confined spaces – this far down, the capillaries were narrow, poorly lit and hanging with cables.

Bjorn’s glowing axe lit the way in stark, pale blue. Its energy field rippled and snarled, already eager to tear into ceramite. The weapon’s name was Blódbringer, and he carried it in his right hand, his left still being an unfinished matrix of gears and metal spurs.

One-Handed, he thought grimly. This will be interesting.

Godsmote loped close by carrying a chainsword in his left fist and a bolt pistol in the right. His armour looked devilish in the flickering blue light.

‘They’re close,’ he said.

Bjorn grunted. He didn’t need to be told that – he could hear it from the bolt-clashes and screams up ahead. The boarders had worked fast, not bothering to fight their way up to the bridge but heading down as quickly as they could, going for the sub-light engines. If they stopped Helridder moving then they’d have killed it as surely as if they’d let off charges in the heart of the warp engine ducts.

It was a decision that Bjorn might have made in their place. Fighting another Legion was an unsettling experience: they thought like he did, were as quick as he was and almost as familiar with the layout of his vessel. It was like fighting a mirror.

The Thousand Sons had been different. They’d already been half beaten once the Space Wolves had made planetfall, and their defence had been desperate and messily, confusedly defiant. The Alpha Legion had no such disadvantages: they were in better shape than the Wolves, better resourced and with the advantage of the initiative. They had coming looking for this fight, for reasons that even Russ hadn’t fathomed with any precision.

We understand so little – they hold all the cards. How has this been allowed to happen?

Bjorn reached the end of the corridor and burst through the doors into a massive, half-ruined vault. Octagonal walls soared up into the darkness, enclosing a shaft over a hundred metres high. In the centre stood a principal power-relay for the sub-warp drives – a hulking spire of pipe-webbed ironwork and glowing plasma conduits. It jutted up into the roof-space in a grotesque thrust of industrial majesty, wreathed in forks of electrical discharge that sent streaks of lightning dancing across the chamber.

Bjorn’s helm display gave him five targets, each in scale-patterned power armour, each knee-deep in corpses and charred engine components. The enginarium defence crew were down to a few dozen mortal warriors, hunkered down behind whatever cover they could find and firing furiously.

‘Hjolda!’ roared Godsmote, thundering across the pipework floor towards the closest Alpha Legionnaire. The pack fanned out in his wake, aiming with precision, adding to the furious volley of shells already ricocheting off the enemy’s power armour.

Bjorn was faster. He raced across the chamber, veering around piles of debris and swaying through the bolts loosed at him by the legionaries. Two shots connected – one glancing off his pauldron, the other cracking his vambrace. That made him stagger, but not lose speed.

‘Heidur Rus!’ he bellowed, feeling spittle lace the inside of his helm.

This was his ship, his environment. Everything about it – the shouts of guttural Fenrisian from the warriors, the stink of oil, brazier-coals and blood-wet pelts, the savage aspect of the raw, unfinished ironwork – was home ground. Such things were important.

He crashed straight into combat, trading blows with Blódbringer and knocking the first Alpha Legionnaire back a pace. From the corner of his eye he caught Urth tearing into another; Angvar had fallen back and opened fire with his bolter.

‘This is no place for you,’ Bjorn snarled, working his axe blade with fury, giving the legionary no time to do anything other than parry. ‘Traitor.’

The enemy said nothing – no taunts, no jibes. His masked helm was blank and unmarked. He fought expertly, swiftly, countering the axe blade with a disruptor-shrouded gladius. When the weapons clanged together, the energy fields snarled and spat, sending throbbing vibrations down Bjorn’s arm.

Blood raged thickly around his system, fuelling a hot burn behind his eyes. He hated the warrior before him: he hated his silent efficiency, he hated his brazen effrontery in coming to his ship, and above all he hated the lack of explanation.

Why are they doing this? Why are they here?

They clashed again, blades ringing from the impact, both swung with equal strength. Bjorn’s hatred was the only difference between them, and in the end that made the difference – his blows were fractionally wilder, fractionally harder to predict.

‘Allfather!’ he roared as Blódbringer plunged down a final time, cutting through the legionary’s last, hasty defence and biting deep into armour-cables. The energy-field tore through them, issuing a hiss of escaping gases, swiftly mingled with an aerosol spray of blood. Bjorn dragged the blade in deeper, severing the warrior’s neck in a froth of mingled gore and coolant. The Space Marine crumpled, gasping for a breath that would now never come.

By then Bjorn was already moving, leaping over the twitching corpse and seeking new prey. Godsmote and the others were busy with their own fights, locking the enemy down on the chamber floor amid the echoing clash of hard weapons-fire.

The last Alpha Legionnaire had broken free of the battle, racing over to the power-spire and leaping up at it, lit gaudily by flickering blades of arc-lightning. Bjorn went after him, mag-locking his axe and sprinting to the base. The two of them clambered up the filigree of pipes, racing up it like rats on a hawser.

A bolter-blown rupture in the spire’s outer shell yawned above them, revealing a glowing grille that seethed and fizzed with barely contained energy. Forks of plasma lashed against the edges, silhouetting the approaching legionary and licking against the moving shadow of his power armour.

Bjorn pulled himself higher, hampered and made weaponless by his single functioning hand. The legionary was almost at the rupture, poised below the lip with his fist clutching a brace of krak grenades.

A full detonation could take the whole chamber out, dragging half the enginarium with it and leaving the Helridder crippled and drifting.

Bjorn halted, planting his boots solidly. Braced, he retrieved the axe from his back, hefted it, then threw.

The axe flew end over end before thunking solidly into the Alpha Legionnaire’s back. The edge pierced deep into his backpack, cracking open the protective housing that covered the suit’s power cabling, and the lines shorted with a burst of crackling discharge.

The legionary spasmed as if paralysed, suddenly inert and twitching. His grenades, unprimed, fell from his outstretched hands.

Bjorn hauled himself upwards, clambering level with his enemy. Robbed of a weapon, he curled his hand into a fist.

‘Get down,’ he snarled.

The Alpha Legionnaire could do nothing to avoid the blow – Bjorn’s gauntlet slammed into his helm-mask with the force of a forge-hammer, hurling him away from the spire’s flank to crash down upon the deck.

Bjorn leapt down after him, driving his armoured knee into the legionary’s stomach as he landed. Then he punched again, and again, smashing the warrior’s face until the eye-lenses were shattered and his head lolled back in a thick slough of blood.

Bjorn ripped the helm free, exposing a ruined and pulped face within. One eye had been torn from its socket and was little more than a well of bubbling blood. The legionary’s breaths came in a wet rattle.

‘Why?’ Bjorn hissed.

The Alpha Legionnaire looked barely conscious. His one functioning eye focused weakly on Bjorn, and something like a weary smile flickered across his bleeding gums.

Bjorn felt his rage flare. ‘How long were you planning this? Ullanor? Before?’

The legionary coughed up more blood. His eye lost its focus.

‘Do not die!’ roared Bjorn, grabbing him by his charred scalp and rocking his head back and forth. ‘Why are you here? Give me a reason!’

He wanted to hurt him, to pour out some of the agony of betrayal, to inflict damage upon those who had ripped the Imperium open.

The legionary lost his smile. He didn’t laugh or spit defiance or promise vengeance. He just lay there, slowly dying, his ruined face resigned.

It was then that Bjorn smelled it, the faint tang of nerve toxins, fast-acting, already in the blood. The warrior hadn’t planned on being taken alive.

I hate this Legion.

Bjorn lowered his helm towards the legionary’s face, as if inviting a confidential whisper. He could hear the last breaths of his victim, soft and untroubled.

‘Tell me, brother, just one thing.’ Bjorn spoke then as one warrior to another, desperate to extract something – anything – concrete. ‘Why are you doing this?’

At that the dying legionary looked regretful, as if he wished he could do better but protocol restrained him.

‘For the Emperor,’ he said weakly.

Then his eye rolled upwards and the thin breaths stopped.

Bjorn stared at him, baffled. Only slowly did he register that the chamber around him was silent, save for the growl and crackle of the power-spire operating at full pitch. The fight was over.

Godsmote strode over to him, limping badly. His bolt pistol had been discarded and his chainsword was plasma-scorched.

‘I don’t like the way they fight,’ he rasped through damaged augmitters.

Bjorn said nothing. He clambered to his feet.

Godsmote looked down at the battered corpse on the floor. ‘Are you sure you need two hands?’ he asked, knocking his helm to try to get his vox-filters working properly again.

‘For the Emperor,’ murmured Bjorn. ‘Was that a joke?’

His comm-link activated. ‘If you’ve finished,’ came the shipmaster’s voice, ‘you may want to get back up here.’

‘Status,’ ordered Bjorn, starting to walk.

‘The fleet’s falling back,’ said the shipmaster. ‘Taking heavy fire on all fronts. They have more guns than us.’ He paused then, as if unwilling to go on. ‘And the Hrafnkel. I think they’ve crippled it.’

Bjorn started moving faster. ‘Do not fall back,’ he ordered. Russ had been on the flagship. ‘Hold course until I get there.’

A sigh came over the vox, as if the shipmaster had predicted such a command. ‘And what course would that be, lord?’

‘Direct for the Hrafnkel,’ Bjorn growled. ‘If it goes down, we go down with it.’

Six

Resentments
Breaking in
The Crimson King

Above the serenely cleansed orb of Chondax, the darkness of space was beginning to fracture. One warship after another burned in close from the jump-points, gliding to a halt in high orbit above the White World, each one as immaculate as the planet below.

At the centre of the gathering hung the Swordstorm, as ornate as the old palaces of the Khitan emperors. Its hull bulged with the modified engine-coils that made it just about the fastest thing in the Imperium’s many battlefleets. Like all White Scars vessels it was kept in spotless condition, scoured and cleansed by armies of crawler-cherubs until it glowed in the velvet void like a jewel.

Beyond its escort perimeter waited other cruisers – the Tchin-Zar, the Lance of Heaven, the Qo-Fian, each one attended by a flock of smaller craft. Other V Legion task forces were spread across the galaxy in scattered bands, but only here on Chondax was the core strength of the Legion mustered, and it was a formidable sight.

Trying to get her head around the rapidly coalescing formations, Ilya hurried down the spinal corridor of the Swordstorm, heading from the main operations chamber toward the command bridge and strategium. Halji strode effortlessly beside her, matching her frantic pace with easy, languid strides.

‘Do we have word of the Uzan?’ she barked into her vox-bead. ‘What about the Kaljian?’

Responses came back in delayed bursts. Her liaison officers were getting much better, but they still found it difficult keeping account of the straggling set of Legion assets.

‘Kaljian is incoming,’ came an answer at last. ‘Nothing yet from the Uzan, or the Hawkstar. We will keep trying.’

Ilya spat out an old Terran curse, and Halji chuckled.

‘You have done well,’ he said approvingly. ‘I think Khagan will be pleased.’

‘He is never pleased,’ muttered Ilya. ‘Everything has to be faster, faster, faster. That’s all he thinks is important, but there’s more to deployment than speed.’

‘There is?’ asked Halji, looking interested.

‘Any more information on what this is all about?’ asked Ilya. ‘I could really use it.’

Halji’s dark face was apologetic. ‘You know as much as I do, szu. Some treachery has been enacted. I heard talk of Wolves of Fenris, which, if I am honest, would not surprise me.’

Ilya stopped walking for a minute. She was feeling a bit light-headed – the past few hours had been a non-stop flurry of orders and counter-orders with no respite. Ahead of her she could hear rapid footfalls as ship crew hurried to their stations.

‘Just what is it with you and the Wolves?’ she asked. ‘Every time they’re mentioned you go quiet.’

Halji gave her a wary look.

‘Seriously,’ said Ilya.

‘For me? There is no issue,’ said Halji, nonchalantly. ‘Their reputation goes before them.’

‘There’s more to it.’

Halji paused. ‘I am not sure it is easy to explain in way you will understand.’

‘Try me,’ said Ilya testily. ‘I’ve lived with you all for long enough.’

‘All Legions have reputations,’ Halji said, awkwardly. ‘Some… overlap. The Wolves boast of it. We have difficulties in past because of it. Others assume that we were the same. They see ritual marks, the scars, and make judgement.’ Halji winced as he spoke, as though he were ashamed of it all. ‘We are not savages. We do not wish to be seen as savages.’

Ilya laughed. ‘You’re… jealous?’

Halji looked stung. ‘That is not what I said.’

‘It was what you meant,’ smiled Ilya, shaking her head in amusement. The Scars were still capable of surprising her. ‘I would never have thought it – the Emperor’s perfect killing machines, and you’re still capable of envy.’

Halji turned away from her and started walking again, looking irritated. ‘I told you, hard to explain.’

‘You explained perfectly,’ said Ilya, trotting to keep up with him. ‘But what worries me is what happens next. If they’ve committed some crime, what are you going to do? Go after them? You’re right about one thing – they’ve got a reputation.’

Halji halted then and turned on her. His expression became uncharacteristically dark, like the sun filtering behind a cloudbank. ‘Listen to me,’ he said firmly. ‘We may not be “executioners” or “world eaters” or “the perfect”, but we are what we are. We have never demanded respect from anyone, and if they know nothing of us then that is their loss, because we know about them. We are faster – we move faster, kill faster. They are brothers, but if Russ has committed crime then the Khagan will swat him aside like ragged dog he is. Have you ever seen our primarch fight? That is perfection.’

Ilya stared back at him, startled. Halji almost never raised his voice, but now it shook with fervour.

They resent it so much, this disregard, she thought, and yet they will not change. But then, why should they?

She bowed in apology. ‘I was not speaking seriously, Halji. I have offended you. I’m sorry.’

Halji shook his dark-skinned head dismissively. ‘The fault is mine. I should not be troubled by it.’

Ilya looked up at him thoughtfully. The sigils and devices that had once seemed so alien to her – tribal marks, jagged-edged brotherhood kill tallies – were now a part of her own life. If she stayed with the Legion much longer then she might even come to understand their mindset. A bit longer still, and she would start to share their resentments.

‘So will it come to that?’ she asked, seriously this time. ‘Will the Khan take on the Wolf?’

Halji started walking again. ‘Loyalty matters,’ he said flatly. ‘If Warmaster orders it, how could he not?’

The Hrafnkel wallowed in a torrent of incoming fire, slewing amidst a silent cloud of las-beams and torpedo trails. The mighty guns still returned volleys, lighting up its gunmetal flanks in flashes of sudden brilliance. The corpses of a dozen vessels circled it like moons around a planet, their shells hollowed out by the vast explosions that had ended them.

The flagship was pulling back towards the beleaguered core of the Space Wolves fleet now, its escorts gone and its shields flickering out. A typically rash plunge into the heart of the battle-sphere had brutalised its magnificent outline, despite the carnage it had caused on the way in.

It was isolated, out of position, exposed. Those Alpha Legion warships that had withstood its initial charge were now returning fire in organised volleys, staying at long range and peppering the crippled beast with lance strikes.

Bjorn watched the carnage though the realview blisters on the Helridder’s bridge. Every impact on the flagship’s broken hull felt like a strike at his own heart. He’d seen boarding torpedoes loosed, just as they had been against his own frigate. The Alpha Legion’s skill with those Hel-damned things was phenomenal.

‘Bring us in close, shipmaster,’ Bjorn commanded.

The Helridder wasn’t the only ship burning towards the crippled Hrafnkel – attack craft from both fleets had scented blood and were racing into position. The Alpha Legion warships came in waves, ramping up the volume of incoming fire; the Wolves vessels responded with increasing desperation, hurling their already damaged hulls into the path of the withering barrage.

‘We won’t last long in this,’ replied the shipmaster. His voice betrayed no fear, just a blunt openness to the facts.

‘That is understood. What’s the Hrafnkel’s status?’

‘Void shields are down, though it’s still got power and lances. We’ve tracked repeated boarding impacts.’

Bjorn looked out at the incoming ranks of Alpha Legion warships, most of which outgunned the Helridder by an uncomfortable margin. His ship might divert some fire from the flagship for a while, but he guessed it would be a painfully short respite.

‘They’ve landed hundreds,’ observed Godsmote, looking at the sensor readings streaming in from the flagship.

Bjorn nodded. ‘That’s the fight we need to be in.’ He licked his tongue along his fangs, feeling a faint acid-tang. ‘This seems to be the day for torpedoes. Time to show them how good our aim is.’ He turned to the master. ‘Wait until we’re away, then take the ship into the Alpha Legion firing line and do what damage you can. You know what that means?’

The shipmaster looked up at him, his grizzled Fenrisian face defiant. ‘The Hand of Russ be with you, lord.’

Bjorn bowed respectfully. ‘Until next winter.’

Godsmote, Eunwald, Angvar, Urth and Ferith were already itching to go – Bjorn could sense their kill-pheromones, as rich and animalistic as predator-musk, and they fed into his own.

‘Time to hunt,’ he said.

The torpedo chamber was far below the bridge level, surrounded by thick adamantium bulkheads and lit with red combat-lamps. Each boarding pod lay at the head of a circular launch tunnel ringed with protective rune-carvings. A larger vessel would have carried whole banks of hull-rippers or Caestus rams, their prows tipped with clusters of magna-meltas and their chassis capable of carrying an entire squad into combat, but the Helridder had the minimum complement for its class: ten slender tubes, each one kitted with a single melta-burst prow and reinforced impact zone. The torpedoes were less than six metres long in their launch-berths and had room for a lone power-armoured occupant.

‘Holy Hel,’ swore Godsmote, looking doubtfully at his coffin-like receptacle.

‘They’re minimally guided once launched,’ said Bjorn, clamping his axe to the front of his breastplate and lowering himself into the torpedo. ‘Try to get a lock once you’re in the flagship. If we can muster, so much the better. If we can’t, just kill everything you find.’

The pack clambered into position and shackled down their restraint cradles. Warning lights began to throb angrily and the last of the launch crew scuttled free of the chamber. Bjorn lay back in his capsule, feeling the growing vibration of the device’s thrusters.

‘Journey well,’ he said, his parting order as the coffin-door closed over him. Locking bolts slid shut with a cascade of clangs.

Bjorn heard his breathing, hot and heavy in the dark. He clenched the fingers of his hand, feeling confined.

This is how Dreadnoughts must feel, he thought. Poor bastards.

The thrusters behind him keyed, rising quickly to a dull roar. He heard blast-hatches slide open, followed by the rush of escaping air. The torpedo trembled like a living thing. Bjorn’s helm display, interfacing seamlessly with the capsule’s onboard systems, gave him a countdown.

Here we go.

The torpedo blasted down the tube. Bjorn slammed back against his harness, his whole body thrown up against the rear bulkhead. He had an impression of immense straight-line speed for a few seconds, then a wild change of trajectory as the torpedo swung down and towards the reeling behemoth of the Hrafnkel.

Gritting his teeth against the colossal pull, he studied the sensor readings tearing down the interior of his rattling helm. He saw the glowing points of the other torpedoes following him down, spiralling through burning zones of las-fire. The flagship loomed up with horrifying speed, a huge block of glowing wireframe against a black void-field.

He braced for the impact, and then it came – a burst of melta-detonation that made the torpedo shudder, followed by a massive explosion that hurled Bjorn hard against his restraints. Even in power armour and protected by the torpedo’s outer shell the impact was ferocious, wrenching him forwards and nearly causing him to black out. The tube ground onwards for a few more metres, shivering as it carved its way through solid hull-casing.

A second later and the torpedo’s locking bolts withdrew with a hiss. Shaking his head to clear it, Bjorn thumped the restraint cage’s release mechanism. His capsule opened up, and he clambered to his feet, unlocking his axe and sweeping it around him.

Debris slewed past, caught in the howl of the rapidly depressurising ship-atmosphere. He leant against it, fighting through the maelstrom, his armour dragged at by guttering flames. The metal decking around him was twisted from the melta-impact – he had to clamber up through the wreckage before finding surer ground, all the while fighting against the roar and rush of racing oxygen. The lumens had shattered on his way in, and his helm’s night-vision was a smear of movement.

Only once past the next bulkhead along was he able to seal a blast-door behind him and halt the depressurisation. He was inside the Hrafnkel, somewhere down in the lower decks. He activated Blódbringer’s disruptor field, flooding the confined space with ice-blue luminance.

‘Report,’ he voxed over the pack-wide comm, blink-summoning locator runes for the others.

Nothing came back: no locators, no responses. His display looked damaged – a criss-crossed maze of feedback and half-resolved target-locks. He clanged the haft of his axe against the side of his helm, jolting the signals and forcing a quartet of fresh target locks to swim across the display.

‘Skítja,’ he spat, frustrated, pressing on down the corridor and opening up another slide door.

On the far side was a supply depot, its ceiling lost in the distance and its shadowy walls soaring up on either side. Towers of transit crates reared away in every direction, locked together by hulking metal scaffolds. Chains hung down from the roof-space from inert cargo loaders, themselves suspended from the chamber’s summit on heavy metal rails.

Ahead of him the darkness was broken by muzzle-flares and explosions. Throttled cries echoed down the narrow paths between the towers, swiftly cut off. He smelled the familiar odours of combat: fyceline smoke, blood, human fear.

Where is my pack?

He started to run down the canyons, cursing the junk swarming over his tactical display. He sprinted straight ahead, eventually breaking into an open space beyond the first wall of stacked crates. A lifter had been brought down ahead of him in a tangled mess of broken metal and severed chain links, bigger than a Warhound Titan even in its ruin.

For a moment Bjorn saw nothing else – no bodies, no targets. Then the tower to his right blew apart in a welter of burning plasteel. A warrior in pearl-grey armour flew across the plasteel deck plates in front of him, broken limbs rolling, skidding to a halt and leaving a long slick of blood in his wake.

Bjorn whirled around, hackles up, wondering what could cast aside a fully armoured Space Marine with such disdain.

Then the enemy stepped from the shadows, and he understood perfectly.

The Khan stood in his private meditation chamber, high up on the terraced shoulders of the Swordstorm. Before him rose a many-faceted crystalflex dome looking out into the void beyond. He watched his ships suspended in the blackness, lined up ready for action, every one of them poised for his command.

Many thousands of souls crewed those ships, both Space Marine and mortal. Each one alone had the potential to annihilate worlds; together, their power was almost incomprehensible.

Has this much power ever been concentrated in so few pairs of hands, he wondered? The entire galaxy entrusted to twen– no, eighteen brothers. The peril of it is obvious.

The Khan’s proud, aquiline face lowered towards his ornate breastplate gorget.

My father knew the risks. He must have done. Why is He silent now?

He turned away from the observation dome. Artefacts lined the walls around him – ancient flintlocks, sabres, mauls and halberds. His boots sunk into a thick fur rug. Books from a thousand worlds and from the span of ten thousand years lined hardwood shelves lit up by the soft light of a real fire.

His movements were quietly powerful, like a tyger prowling back and forth in its cage. His cloak rippled all the way to his ankles, brushing against the ivory and gold of his battleplate and shrouding the scabbard of his dao blade.

Magnus, he brooded, staring into the flames. My good friend.

He remembered their initial encounter on Ullanor, meeting on the Triumph Plain with the last blood of the slain greenskins still stinking in the air.

‘Greetings, brother,’ Magnus had said, grinning across his strange ruddy face, striding down from his lander with his rouged and cartouched cabal in tow. ‘You were actually fighting here, they say.’

The Khan bowed. ‘In the system. Horus took the core world.’

Magnus clapped his big hand on the Khan’s shoulder. ‘Of course he did. How are you? You look leaner than you were, if such a thing were possible.’

The Khan gave an equivocal shrug. Magnus was a little taller than him, a little broader, with his florid scarlet mane and decked out in flamboyant ornamentation. He looked like one of the Qo Golden Emperors the Khan had killed.

‘I dislike these gatherings,’ the Khan said, looking out over the plain at the gathering masses. Thousands of Legion battalions had already made planetfall, and the polished-stone expanse milled with the heavy equipment of half a dozen different Legions. The air was thick with engine fumes and kicked-up dust. Above them, low in the atmosphere, hung the massive shadows of bulk landers.

‘You and I both,’ agreed Magnus. ‘Will we have a chance to speak?’

The Khan drew closer. ‘I hope so. The Angel is here – we need to confer.’

‘About the Librarius.’

‘You must have heard the rumours.’

Magnus smiled sadly. ‘There are always rumours. Russ can shout his ignorance as much as he likes. I think the rest of the Imperium is learning to ignore him.’

‘It is not just Russ.’

‘Worry less,’ said Magnus. ‘There will always be suspicion of the gifted. We have to manage it, to explain it. Trust in enlightenment.’

‘You forget, brother, I am not gifted.’

‘Are you not?’ asked Magnus, smiling shrewdly. ‘If you say so.’

‘They will destroy what we have built. Angron, Mortarion, Russ. None of them rest easily with it. If we do not guard what we have won–’

‘You forget one thing.’

‘Which is?’

‘Our father,’ said Magnus, fondly. ‘He set this thing in motion – can you imagine him letting the attack dogs ruin it? Mortarion and Russ will be given their chance to fulminate, I have seen it. Our only task, my elusive friend, is to remain true to reason.’

The Khan looked into Magnus’s one eye, seeing the trust in it. The faith.

You are wise in so many ways, he thought grimly. But you are a scholar, not a warrior, and you do not truly see the danger.

‘A reckoning will come,’ the Khan warned. He turned to one side, gesturing for Yesugei to approach. ‘This is my counsellor, Targutai Yesugei, master of storm-magic in our Legion. It would be wise to nominate counterparts – an alliance between the like-minded.’

‘A cabal?’ asked Magnus.

‘A conversation,’ said the Khan.

The Crimson King regarded Yesugei for a moment. His lone eye glittered in Ullanor’s foul sunlight, as if probing deep into the unseen.

‘Mighty,’ he said at last, his voice properly respectful. ‘You would have found a place by my side, had you been born under Prosperine skies.’ He motioned for one of his entourage to join them – a tall figure wearing ruby power armour and carrying a staff of ivory.

‘Zadyin arga Targutai Yesugei,’ said Magnus, speaking the Khorchin with perfect inflection. ‘This is Ahzek Ahriman. I think you and he might get on.’

Ahriman bowed, as did Yesugei.

‘I am honoured, weather-maker,’ said Ahriman, his voice as cultured and subtle as all his kind.

‘Honour is mine,’ said Yesugei, less fluently, betraying the poor command of Gothic that plagued so many of the V Legion.

Magnus looked back at the Khan, still in good humour. ‘So there we are,’ he said. ‘Your conversation is established. Now, must we linger on this dust-clogged plain all morning, or does the Imperium’s munificence here extend to something to eat?’

The Khan remembered how Magnus had behaved then – the smiles a little forced, the bonhomie a little relentless. Magnus had been worried about something on Ullanor and his attempts to disregard it were not successful. He was no dissembler: the truth shone from him like light from a star, pure and naïve.

Ullanor was the last time they had spoken. It was strange – too strange – to think of that massive soul lying under the crude, hacking blades of the Space Wolves. The Crimson King had been so consummately powerful, so steeped in the rich arts of heaven, the very stuff of the veil; if he had truly fallen, then the galaxy had become a warped and confusing place.

‘Khagan,’ came a voice from the open doorway.

The Khan turned to see Qin Xa standing before him. The keshig master was already in battle-armour, a hulking suit of blast-scorched Terminator plate covered in the trophies of his unmatched combat record.

‘I need more,’ the Khan told him. ‘More information. I will not attack my brother without confirmation.’

Qin Xa bowed. ‘The star-speakers receive more visions.’

‘Do they confirm it?’

‘Some do.’ The master spoke haltingly. ‘Others do not. We have contradictory interpretations.’

‘Explain.’

‘Some tell us what we already know – Leman Russ has turned rebel, driven by hatred of Magnus. The Warmaster orders us to bring him to judgement. The Twentieth Legion may already have engaged them.’

‘Alpharius’s snakes,’ said the Khan contemptuously.

‘But we have other reports,’ said Qin Xa. ‘Just listen to this: they say that the Warmaster has turned renegade and taken many Legions with him. We are commanded to return to the Throneworld and stand beside Lords Dorn and Russ to defend it.’

For that, the Khan had no words. He stared at Qin Xa, feeling the blood coursing hard in his temples.

‘Madness,’ he said weakly. Thoughts raced through his mind in quick succession, each one half-formed and pregnant with possibilities.

It had begun on Chondax, right at the end – the first inkling that all was not well. There had been no detail then, no authentication, just a stray star-speaker vision of dubious provenance. It should have been easy to dismiss, to put down to the warping power of the veil, but it hadn’t. It had worn at him, unravelling his sleep.

The Warmaster stands upon a precipice.

It had been hard to know what to make of that. Should he have recalled the Legion to find out? What did it even mean?

‘Madness,’ he said again.

‘Indeed,’ replied Qin Xa calmly. ‘Every star-speaker in the fleet is having a different dream. The zadyin arga are working to uncover the truth.’

‘The truth?’ The Khan laughed hollowly. ‘Which truth?’ He felt his hand instinctively reaching for his blade, and pulled it back. ‘I need more. Why has the darkness lifted only now?’

Qin Xa bowed in apology. ‘Every effort is being made to–’

‘Is he dead?’ demanded the Khan, frustration mastering him momentarily. ‘That is the first task. I need to know if Magnus lives. Tell them that.’

‘Nothing can be divined from Prospero. It seems likely that–’

‘Not good enough!’ roared the Khan, balling his immense fists. He felt fury welling, not the wholesome rage of the battlefield, but a choked, impotent rage of ignorance. ‘I have the strength of the Legion arrayed before me, ready to strike. The ordu is assembled, and yet none can tell me who the enemy is. Tell them if they cannot interpret correctly then I shall come up to their spires and hammer their dreams into order for them.’

Qin Xa weathered the storm, standing silently while the primarch raged. ‘It will be done.’

‘Quickly,’ insisted the Khan, giving in to the urge to grasp the hilt of his dao. ‘I give them twelve hours. We will not remain in this backwater while the galaxy burns – wherever this war is, we will find it.’

A low chime sounded from a large pedestal writing desk in the far corner of the chamber. A hololith flickered into existence over the varnished surface and the old scar-latticed face of Hasik Noyan-Khan crackled into life.

The Khan swung to face it. ‘News?’

‘Of a kind,’ replied Hasik, his voice wavering with static. ‘Ships are materialising on the edge of augur-range. No response to our comms, and they appear to be deploying for attack.’

‘The Wolves?’ asked the Khan. ‘Or more of ours?’

‘Neither,’ reported Hasik, his normally flat voice punctuated by uncertainty. ‘Alpha Legion vessels.’

Qin Xa’s eyes narrowed. The Khan almost felt like laughing. Nothing made sense. After years insulated from the rest of the galaxy, locked in a campaign that had promised little glory and much routine hard work, every certainty seemed to have been twisted into a comical level of incongruity.

Our warriors are trained by this game. They learn to see threats from all sides.

‘Hold position,’ ordered the Khan. ‘Try to talk to them, and do not fire unless fired upon. Some witchery is at work here and I will not be dragged into it without knowing why. I will join you shortly. Until then, you know your craft.’

Hasik’s hololithic head bowed and the link guttered out.

Qin Xa raised a quizzical eyebrow. ‘I would offer counsel, Khagan,’ he said, ‘if I had any.’

The Khan clasped his gauntlets together. No patterns emerged. His tactician’s mind – far more acute than Guilliman or Dorn ever had the grace to recognise – fell into its familiar run: analyse, project, counter, surprise.

‘We must be light on our feet here, keshiga,’ he murmured. ‘We are like blind men fighting the sighted.’

Despite everything, he felt the first stirrings of enjoyment kindle in his soul. He looked out at the starfield beyond the chamber viewport, weighing options, balancing likelihoods. This was what he had been born for: not the running down of greenskins, but the Great Game, the clash of powers.

‘Do you remember, Xa?’ he said. ‘You, Yesugei, Hasik and me against a whole world – a hundred empires, each with a thousand blades. It has been too long since we had a real challenge.’

Qin Xa looked unsure. ‘Then who is the enemy now, Khagan?’ he asked. ‘That is all I need to know.’

‘They are all the enemy,’ said the Khan, striding to the doorway that would take him to the bridge. ‘They always have been.’

Seven

Contemptor
Inscrutability
Aether tides

Bjorn spat blood as he ran, crashing into a line of empty crates and scattering them across the floor. By instinct he lurched to his right, just evading a hurricane of shells that screamed over his dipping shoulder. He reached cover, of a sort – the wreckage of the cargo lifter – and flung himself into the shadow of the mangled cockpit.

The enemy came after him, crunching through the remains of five dead Space Wolves. Its massive feet clanged dully against the deck, its huge clawed fist rotated and its steaming assault cannon clunked as another magazine was shunted into the chamber.

A Contemptor, Bjorn thought ruefully. This was a short boarding action.

The Dreadnought towered over him, lumbering after him with the remorseless certainty of some gigantic saurian on the prowl. Twin rear smokestacks gouted oily smoke as it stomped through the wreckage, shrouding a chassis that hummed and sputtered and hissed with mechanical activity.

In the space of a single heartbeat, crouched behind the flimsiest of protection, Bjorn assessed his options.

Decision made.

He burst back out, powering clear of the lifter debris even as the Contemptor’s assault cannon opened up again, shredding through the wreckage in a storm of firepower. Sprinting up one of the lifter’s half-crushed claws before it was blown away, Bjorn gained some height – just enough to see the Contemptor’s glowing eyes flash back at him.

‘Hjolda!’ he bellowed, almost laughing at the absurdity of what he planned, then hurled himself through the air.

He sailed clear of the assault cannon’s fury and collided with the Dreadnought’s shoulder. Bjorn swung his crackling axe-blade, slicing deep into the casing of its armoured hood, lodging himself halfway up the torso. The Contemptor swung wildly, nearly dislodging him on the first attempt. Bjorn pulled himself higher, scrabbling clear of the whirling power claw. He landed a punch hard into the Contemptor’s helm, then another, hammering at it with his half-hand. His fist’s unfinished mechanics shattered quickly, but he smashed one of the slanted eye-pieces and let slip a growl of satisfaction.

The Contemptor lurched round again, wrenching Blódbringer loose. Bjorn was swung clear and tumbled through mid-air – he crashed to the ground three metres away, just managing to keep hold of his blade. He twisted around, only to stare right into the barrels of the assault cannon.

‘Skíthof!’ Bjorn roared defiantly, bracing himself for the shell-rain that would end him, determined to keep his eyes open.

But then a volley of mass-reactive bolts slammed into the Dreadnought from over to its left, blazing against its armour plating and dousing it in a rippling curtain of mini-explosions. The Contemptor’s assault cannon barrels slewed to one side, knocked clear by the barrage and unloading less than a metre from where Bjorn lay.

‘Fenrys!’ came Godsmote’s frenzied war-cry. ‘Fenrys faerir mord!’

Three of his pack had made it, charging towards the Contemptor and loosing a hail of kicking bolter-fire. Bjorn leapt to his feet, scrambling out of the path of the still-firing assault cannon and flinging his axe at the Dreadnought’s damaged head. The blade scythed towards the target, but the Contemptor angled away. Blódbringer lodged fast on its upper carapace, spitting harmlessly.

Bjorn drew his bolt pistol and fired with the others, darting from one crumpled mass of cover to the next as the hangar rang with the hard bang of bolter-rounds. All four of them emptied their weapons at the target, swamping it in a blaze of detonations.

It kept coming. They damaged it, but it kept coming, wading through the firestorm just as it had been designed to do. The assault cannon swung round in a ruinous arc, smashing clear what remained of their scant cover. One of the Wolves – Eunwald, Bjorn thought – was too slow leaping clear and was knocked onto his back by the impact. Godsmote was bludgeoned aside almost as an afterthought, his armour split down the breastplate.

They couldn’t bring it down. They couldn’t get close enough, and they didn’t have the weapons to hurt it at range.

‘Allfather!’ Bjorn roared, charging in close again, hoping against hope to somehow get a zero-range shot into its more vulnerable cabling before the Hel-damned thing’s claw ripped him away.

He never got the chance. None of them did.

The gale came from nowhere, as if the chamber-wall had been punched out to the void. The force of it knocked him sideways, flooring him once more. His vision reeled and his helm cracked hard against the deck. He heard what sounded like thunder breaking, followed by the actinic crackle of energy weapons igniting.

With a lurch of recognition, he realised the rush was not that of decompression, nor was it natural – the winds that howled across the chamber had the ice-rimed redolence of Asaheim.

Bjorn lifted his head, groggy from the impact, to see the Contemptor facing a new foe. Despite everything, he couldn’t resist a crooked grin at that.

The game was over. The Wolf King had arrived.

Shiban brought the Kaljian up into one-third speed, keeping a close eye on the tactical scanners clustered around his command throne. The bridge crew worked at their stations while Jochi, Chel and the others of his legionary command retinue stood in a loose semicircle close by.

‘Keep this heading,’ he ordered. ‘Do not exceed this speed.’

The Kaljian had only just arrived at the muster, one of the last to respond to the summons, before being ordered right back out on fleet perimeter patrol as part of Hasik Noyan-Khan’s response to the Alpha Legion approach.

Orders from the centre had been clipped. Shiban guessed that was because they had no idea what was going on – he certainly didn’t.

‘They’ll be in visual range soon,’ observed Jochi.

Shiban could hear the doubt in his voice. The Alpha Legion were an unknown quantity. They hadn’t responded to communication requests and had just hung back on the edge of the system, quietly accumulating more warships across a wide sweep of local space.

‘Maintain the line, master,’ warned Shiban, noting a minor deviation in their trim respective to the vessels on either side of them. The White Scars response had been almost painfully proportionate – a thin line of attack-craft spread out within a lance-strike’s range of one another. The bigger warships of both fleets remained at the rear, brooding on the edge of detection.

Everything had changed so quickly, garbled in a flurry of contradictory astropathy and secure comm-bursts: Russ of the Wolves had gone rogue; or the Warmaster had; the White Scars were ordered to reinforce the Alpha Legion at Alaxxes; they were commanded to return to Terra; Ferrus Manus had killed the peacock Fulgrim; Mars was in open revolt. Some of the warp-translated messages bore chrono-marks from months previously; some had been sent, it seemed, only hours ago.

Shiban had reported his findings from Phemus immediately upon entering communications range of Chondax, but he had no doubt that they had sunk into the morass of briefings without trace.

‘Why do they vox nothing?’ asked Jochi. He’d complained of the same thing three times already, vocalising what the entire crew was feeling.

Shiban smiled wearily. ‘This is the Alpha Legion, brother. Their gift is to be irritatingly obtuse.’

Ahead of them, a thin line of glowing dots became visible through the real-view ports. At first they seemed like little more than a few extra stars. Then they became steadily brighter.

A pinprick glimmered on his retinal display, indicating that Hasik’s orders had been updated. Shiban blinked to activate them.

No response from XX Legion command. Attempts to make contact continue. First wave of ships incoming on planar trajectory. Do not escalate situation. Do not fire unless fired upon. Maintain perimeter integrity. Do not permit incoming craft to penetrate within range of core fleet. Stand by for further instruction.

Shiban drew in a deep breath. Those orders had altogether too much of a whiff of contradiction to be entirely helpful.

‘We are being targeted,’ came a report from one of the bridge’s sensorium crew.

‘Pinpoint the source,’ Shiban replied. ‘Gain a lock and prepare main lance. Do not fire until I give the command.’

The Kaljian crept forwards, moving far slower than he generally liked to power it. Everything about the frigate had been designed for sudden, violent movements in the heat of battle; nudging along at such meagre velocities exposed the rough edges of the engine design.

‘We were told the Alpha Legion had engaged the Wolves,’ said Chel thoughtfully. ‘Or was that just another scry-glitch?’

Shiban couldn’t give him an answer. Either the XX Legion had a suspiciously large number of operational warships, or something had gone awry with a star-speaker’s auguries. Both were possible.

He felt tense. This was not the sort of encounter he enjoyed: a cagey, stepwise testing of boundaries.

‘What do they want?’ asked Jochi again, watching warily as the closest Alpha Legion vessels drew even closer.

‘It does no good to speculate,’ said Shiban. ‘They desire to keep us guessing, so I suggest we do not indulge them.’

The lead Alpha Legion vessel emerged from the void, advancing as part of a line of warships in the mirror-image of the White Scars own deployment.

Just like us, thought Shiban. Everything was similar – the ships, the weapons, their configurations. The Alpha Legion had sent lesser craft ahead, leaving the behemoths clustered at the rear. The symmetry of the advance was eerie.

‘Energy spikes?’ Shiban enquired, scrutinising its growing profile.

‘Nothing, khan,’ replied the sensorium operator.

By then Shiban could make out details of the vessel’s hull on the magnocular viewers. It was blue, a deep, indigo blue, and marked with the chained Alpha device of the XX Legion. Marker lights flickered along its serrated flanks, blurry behind the interference of active void shields.

It came forward steadily, neither hurrying nor dawdling. Something about the brazenness of its approach was annoying – the whole Alpha Legion presence smacked of arrogance, of a knowing superiority.

They understand what has happened while we have been absent. Of course they are arrogant.

‘Any break in their formation?’ Shiban asked.

‘No, khan.’

‘Any break in ours?’

‘None.’

He felt his fingers itch to drum along the armrest of the command throne. Every warrior instinct screamed at him to act, to seize the initiative, to transform the uncertainty into something he could take control of.

‘It has stopped, khan.’

Shiban glanced down at his throne’s tactical hololith projection. The line of Alpha Legion warships had come to a standstill, strung out in a vast holding pattern.

‘Full halt,’ he ordered.

All across the White Scars fleet, the other advance vessels did the same. The two fleet vanguards hung in the void, both immobile, a wall of ivory and gold staring at a barrier of blue and copper.

Silence descended across the bridge, broken only by the movement of fingers over consoles and the click-click-click of servitor motors working.

‘So what now?’ asked Jochi, staring gloomily at the forward viewers.

Shiban pressed his fingers together, bridging them in front of his face, his elbows resting on the command throne.

‘We see who blinks first,’ he said.

Leman Russ slammed into the Contemptor, roaring a war-cry that made the distant ceiling tremble. He carried the frostblade Mjalnar two-handed, its toothed length spitting and shimmering with barely constrained energies. His ruddy, helmless face blazed with the fury of the god-marked, and his blond hair flailed around him like a corona of winter sunlight.

Bjorn caught the look in those sky-blue eyes, just for a second, and felt even his war-seasoned hearts misgive him. The Wolf King in combat was like an avalanche crashing down a mountainside. The aura of murder he projected was incredible; the air hummed with it, a wall of soul-shock that crashed like a bow wave across everything in his path.

The Contemptor swung around to meet the threat and was blown away. Russ charged through assault cannon shells in a hail of armour-deflected impacts. He smashed hard into the Dreadnought, hacking wildly. Mjalnar took out the cannon in a single swipe, severing the multiple barrels and sending them clattering.

Rocked, the Contemptor lashed out with its claw, aiming for the primarch’s throat. Russ evaded the choke-hold and crunched his elbow into the Dreadnought’s helm. Then the blade jammed down again, clanging from the Contemptor’s ravaged carapace. The war machine staggered away and Russ surged after it, his blade sweeping in haymaking arcs that cleaved through ceramite and smashed armourglass.

It was not artful, it was not elegant – every blow was brutal with primal potency, and the end came quickly. Russ hewed down, smashing open the Contemptor’s torso below where Bjorn’s axe-blade was still lodged. Its shell cracked open with a wet schlick, exposing bubbling amniotic tanks within. Russ piled in, switching to a one-hand grip so that his gauntlet was free to seize the enclosed flesh.

The final scream was sickening – a thin, barely audible shriek of agony from the sliver of once-warrior that still endured within the Contemptor’s innards. Russ wrenched the meat-chunk free, dragging a tangle of feeder-tubes and neural bundles with it. Fluids – blood, tank nutrients and engine lubricants – splattered across his gold-rimmed armour.

For a second, Russ held the Contemptor’s mortal elements before him. The creature was meagre and dripping, a sordid collection of barely viable organs. Something like a lung trembled wetly on strands of sinew; a lone eye stared out from a pulped cranial mass.

Russ drew the remnant closer to him. ‘You should have stayed dead.’

Then he twisted his fist closed, throttling the last life from the Contemptor’s erstwhile occupant and casting the corpse-matter to the floor with a damp, gory slap.

Only then did Bjorn notice other souls: Lord Gunn was there, as were more than fifty warriors of Onn. The noise of bolter-fire echoed across the cavernous chamber as more infiltrators were hunted down.

‘You,’ said Russ, looking at Bjorn accusingly. ‘What are you doing on my ship?’

Bjorn clambered to his feet, feeling awkward and superfluous. ‘The shields were down. We thought–’

‘I know they were down,’ said Russ disdainfully. ‘I brought them down.’ The Wolf King’s face was rigid with outrage. ‘I thought he might meet me, face to face. I thought I might get a reason. Not his way, it seems.’ He spat on the floor in the direction of the downed Contemptor. ‘Just this filth, and they give us no answers before they die.’

Bjorn stared at the Dreadnought cadaver. He remembered the final words of the Alpha Legionnaire he had killed on the Helridder.

For the Emperor.

‘Then... are the voids operational?’ Bjorn asked. ‘Is the ship secure?’

Russ stalked over to the Contemptor’s empty chassis and yanked Bjorn’s axe free. ‘It’s always been secure. Think I’d risk the Hrafnkel just to blood Alpharius?’ He paused. ‘Actually, I might. But I didn’t.’

Russ threw the axe back at Bjorn, who caught it with his right hand.

‘We’re pulling back,’ Russ announced, glancing over at Gunn. ‘Clear the rest of the filth from the lower levels, then report to me on the bridge.’

Bjorn saw, with a lurch of humiliation, that he had never been needed. The whole episode had been pointless. He thought about the Helridder, and how in Hel they were going to get back to it – if it even still flew.

‘But you,’ said Russ, turning back to him with a thunderous look on his bloodied face. ‘You can come with me.’

The sky was too dark, as if the stars had been snuffed out by some gigantic hand. The earth was bone-hard, as black as onyx, crystalline and glinting dully in the light of a single moon. Dust drifted across the landscape, pooling for a moment then stirring again.

The Khan fought something – hard to make out what it was, the view was blocked by his swirling cloak. He moved fast, so fast, faster than Yesugei had ever seen him move before. The dao blade darted out, catching what little light remained and spilling out across that strange, black land.

Yesugei caught his breath. Watching the Khan fight was like watching pure energy, like the forks of heaven-lightning that formed his emblem. The clouds above parted, revealing nothing but empty void. Dust kicked up from the Khan’s boots, hanging in the air before puffing away into nothingness.

This is the land of the dead, Yesugei thought. Has he died? Surely I would know.

Jaghatai was a lone shard of light in the infinite darkness. Defiant. Beautiful.

You told me you had no gift. I did not believe you then, and do not now. This is not the fighting of a mortal creature.

The Khan pressed his attack, wielding his blade in both hands, his movements blurred by speed and precision. It was impossible to follow the pattern of the dao – the point flickered on the edge of sight.

Why are you here? Why are you in this place?

The thing he fought was massive, a shroud of null-light that seemed to suck vitality into its maw. Something about it was eternal, measureless and immortal.

Death. Do primarchs die? What kills them?

The Khan fought on. He was alone. The empty world stretched away from him, its horizons empty, its skies empty. Even the wind was listless, the last gasps of a million extinguished souls.

When the Khan fell, Yesugei woke.

The Stormseer jerked out of his sleep. The single blanket of his cell’s bunk was soaked in sweat. For a moment he remained locked in the memory, transfixed by the vision of the primarch slumping to his knees, lost amidst the black land. Defeated.

His breathing was ragged, and he could feel both his hearts hammering. He opened his palms and saw the glossy sheen upon them, cooling fast in the chamber’s chill.

‘Lumen,’ he croaked, and the light in the chamber rose. On the far side of the room was a metal washstand enclosing a basin and a steel cup. He got up shakily and padded over to it, running water and splashing it over his face. Then he drank, draining the cup twice. Its contents tasted like water always tasted on void-craft – thin, briny, sterile.

Yesugei looked at himself in the mirror above the washstand. He saw his face, creased with age, criss-crossed with tattoos and clan-marks, his bald pate raw from where the crystalline hood jutted against the skin.

He thought he looked pale. His skin was bleached by the harsh light, casting deep shadows under his eyes.

I look like a monster.

He rubbed his face with his hands and stood up straight. The chamber hummed with the low grind of warp engines. The Sickle Moon was deep into the aether and the going had not been easy. The chronometers had whirled frantically ever since breaking the veil, warning them that the jump would be a wild one.

Yesugei leaned against the wall, feeling the vibrations of the metal against his sweaty skin. The whole ship groaned and creaked as though buffeted by physical winds, though he knew that they were worlds away from anything physical.

He remembered talking to Ahriman about it when the two of them had been on Nikaea together. Even that hellish place of volcanoes and heat-shimmered air was preferable to the raw flux of the warp.

‘You say there is nothing bad in… what you call it? Great Ocean?’ he had asked, hesitant in his broken Gothic.

Ahriman had smiled softly. The Chief Librarian’s power was obvious in every gesture. Like so many of Magnus’s protégés, he was suffused with it, stuffed full of it, saturated and soaked in it. The Thousand Sons tried to be modest, but deep down they knew perfectly well that they were the most gifted. It lent them an indefinable air of understated superiority and it was that, more than anything else, that made the others hate them.

‘There is plenty bad in it,’ Ahriman had replied, ‘just as there is in the world of the senses. But in its wholeness? No, I do not think so.’

‘Have you ever travelled with Navigator?’ Yesugei had asked him. ‘Seen things they do?’

‘Of course.’

‘And you not see the faces?’

‘The faces?’

Yesugei had struggled for the words. ‘Screaming. Clawing at ship.’

Ahriman had laughed then – not in mockery, just in amusement. It was the quick, warm laugh of an intelligent mind, one used to taking delight in the world around it and finding nothing to fear. ‘I think perhaps you were dreaming. Void travel does make one dream.’

Void travel does make one dream.

Yesugei rubbed his eyes. He’d not had an unbroken cycle’s sleep since leaving Chogoris, and though he coped with the lack well enough it made his mind feel dull and cloudy. Every snatched hour or so had been plagued with nightmares. Lately he’d had the same one, over and over: the Khan in the land of the dead, duelling with some vast creature of null-light, alone under a starless sky.

The dreams of the gifted were never random, but Yesugei was too old to be fooled into thinking that they were ever literal. If he was being told something, then interpretation – the proper interpretation – was everything.

Still, it was hard to see the primarch driven to his knees.

He activated his vox-bead. ‘Commander, the ship feels unsettled. Is all well?’

Lushan’s voice, when it came, had a barely perceptible undercurrent of tension. ‘The Navigator has been having… difficulties.’

‘Warp storms?’

‘That, he tells me, fails to capture it.’

Yesugei reached for his robes. ‘I will be with you shortly.’

Yesugei went quickly up the corridors and gantries towards the bridge. As he went, his mind failed to clear. The ship’s atmosphere felt muggy and close, as if a huge, humid thunderstorm were on the cusp of breaking around them. All around him, crew members went about their business, bowing as he passed them. They looked as haggard as he, worn out by the business of piloting a ship through the turmoil.

Yesugei had never accepted Ahriman’s theory of the benign aether. The White Scars treated it warily, dipping into the shallows to extract the powers they employed over the elements, never probing deeper. Such was the cautious heritage of Chogoris, the legacy of the old seers of storms who had birthed their powers in the Ulaav mountains. The zadyin arga had always treated with the powers of heaven, but they had never trusted them.

Yesugei knew that other Librarius brotherhoods thought the Stormseers dull and unimaginative for that. Yesugei didn’t mind the slights; he knew what benefits their limitation brought. Despite Ahriman’s gentle taunting, he also knew that he had not been dreaming when he had seen those screaming faces and clawing fingers.

The warp was not benign. It never had been. That was why the Librarius had been created: not to extend the Legiones Astartes’ control of warp powers, but to limit them.

Nikaea. Such a disaster.

Yesugei reached the bridge, and a pair of metre-thick blast doors slid open to welcome him.

The scene beyond the doors was a picture of controlled anxiety. Crew members in white tabards hunched over display screens, their fingers dancing across consoles. Massive iron shutters covered the real-view ports, shuddering. The whole bridge – an amphitheatre crowned with a bronze-edged dome and centred on Lushan’s control throne – filled with the creak and snap of alloys under stress. Several cogitator stations had blown and were crawling with worm-like flickers of electrostatic.

‘Things are bad, then,’ said Yesugei, spotting Lushan standing amid a worried-looking huddle of drive technicians.

The armour-clad ship commander smiled grimly. ‘If you had not made contact I would have been forced to wake you. The Geller fields are losing strength.’

‘That is indeed bad. What can you do?’

‘The Navigator says we should drop out of the warp. He is very insistent.’

Yesugei pursed his lips. Above him, suspended from copper-lined chains, hung a large status screen. Most of its indicators were already red; another flickered critical while he looked at it.

‘Where are we?’ Yesugei asked.

‘I asked him a few hours ago,’ said Lushan. ‘He started shouting. I do not think he knows.’

Yesugei nodded. ‘We knew this would be difficult. So, let us take the Navigator’s advice – it sounds as if he could use the rest.’

‘As you command.’ Lushan looked hesitant. ‘I was trying to get a fix on our position before committing to real space.’

As he spoke, a deep resounding clang sounded from the decks below. The whole structure listed, as if bouncing from something vast and unmoving beyond its outer limits.

Yesugei looked up at the warp shutters. It would be a trivial matter to peer beyond them, to stare into the seething non-matter that boiled beyond. He was tempted to, just to see the ferment that made their progress so painful – the entire galaxy gripped by warp fissures in a way that couldn’t be natural.

‘If we remain in this, the ship will be torn apart,’ Yesugei said. ‘Trust him – the Navigator sees what we do not.’

Lushan bowed, and moved to bring the Sickle Moon’s sub-warp engines online. As he turned away, Yesugei suddenly felt a prickliness ripple across him, a cold shudder playing over his skin.

‘How is our combat readiness?’ he asked.

Lushan looked surprised at that, and a little affronted. ‘We are fully prepared.’

‘Good. Place the ship on alert before we break the veil. I will need my armour.’

‘Have you sensed something?’

Yesugei’s gaze remained fixed upon the shutters. They were clattering like ger-fabric in a plains-gale, warning of the growing turmoil outside their fragile protective skin.

Do primarchs die? What kills them?

‘Standard procedure, commander,’ he said, moving to send commands to the armoury servitors. ‘Ensure all the crew do likewise.’

Eight

Back to dust
Sons of Horus
The hawk’s cage

It was hard to maintain a sense of self-importance on the bridge of the Hrafnkel. Surrounded by Gunn, the High Rune Priests and the heart of the Legion command, Bjorn kept his mouth shut and his eyes down.

There had been more fighting before they’d made their way back. Alpha Legionnaire operatives had been landed in numbers throughout the lower decks, some decked out in their own colours, others in passable replicas of Fenrisian livery. That hadn’t helped them: the Vlka Fenryka could smell their own.

Damage had been done, sometimes severely, but the entire ship had been placed on alert prior to the temporary drop in shields and so it was contained. Perhaps Alpharius had known that all along and the boarding parties had been just yet another feint. He could hardly have riled Russ more by doing so – the Wolf King raged and cursed all the way back up to the command levels, ripping apart any enemy troops in his path with brutal excess.

‘Angron faced me!’ he had raged, flinging the broken bodies of the legionaries away. ‘Magnus faced me! What was it? Why would he not come?’

The anger had been real – the kind of anger that had been building for weeks in the aftermath of Prospero – but for all that, Bjorn detected a false note to it, just an echo of something that did not quite ring true.

Did you really expect him to teleport over? Would you have done it, in his position?

In any case, the Hrafnkel had eventually been secured, its shields restored, and Russ’s retinue returned to the cavernous bridge. Once the primarch was back in full possession of the tactical situation, his mood did not improve.

The Alpha Legion maintained the superiority they had enjoyed from the start of the encounter. Their ships had gone into battle undamaged, fully equipped and more numerous. The Wolves had blunted their advance with a typically ebullient counter-charge, but the momentum was now failing. Dozens of warships had been destroyed; even the biggest were taking heavy damage. Slowly, like a pair of hands creeping around an exposed neck, their sphere of command was shrinking.

Bjorn kept out of the primarch’s eye-line, slinking into the shadowy margins of the bridge space. Though he tried to block it out, he could not help but overhear the incoming glut of droning servitor reports on the priority comm.

‘Losing void shields… Losing void shields… Adopting ramming course and speed… Engines overloaded… Jarnkel is gone… Jarnkel is gone… All ships in zone tra-fyf pull back to contingency… Incoming swarm on Heimdl… Losing hull integrity… Losing hull integrity… Core breach detected… Heimdl is gone…’

No amount of voidwar genius would reverse the losses now. A desperate gambit had been attempted, and it had failed.

They all waited.

For a long time, despite more voxed reports of damage and destruction, Russ said nothing. Every time a vessel destroyed notice flickered up on the viewscreens, he winced. The gesture was unfeigned: this primarch cared about his Legion as much as any other, perhaps more so. Bjorn thought that Russ looked strangely old then, as though the years had suddenly piled deadening weight upon his brawler’s shoulders.

‘That’s enough,’ Russ growled at last. ‘We’ll get torn to pieces if we stay in this.’ He drew in a long sigh, flexing his gauntlets with frustration, as if they alone could turn the tide. ‘Beat for the nebula, rendezvous with the reserves and withdraw to the deeps. The dust will at least blunt their sensors.’

Gunn nodded. ‘It’ll be hard to pull clear of this.’

‘We’ll be the rearguard,’ said Russ flatly. ‘The flagship goes last, no matter how much it hurts us.’ His eyes flickered towards the duty communications officer, a grey-robed kaerl hovering at the rear of the command retinue. ‘Ensure that Terra gets this message. Sixth Legion engaged Twentieth Legion at Alaxxes. Taken heavy damage, retreated to cover of inner nebula. Will attempt to regroup and hold them there. Calls for reinforcement go unanswered as of chrono-mark one-zero-eight, zero-zero-seven. Will maintain engagement until further orders received.’

The officer took in the information with a blank stare, committing it to memory for transmission to the choirs.

‘Why are we facing them alone?’ Gunn asked irritably.

‘The warp has been turbulent, lord,’ replied the comms officer. ‘In truth I do not know if anything we have sent has been heard. But we will keep sending it, hoping for something.’

‘Chondax,’ murmured Russ.

All eyes turned to the primarch.

‘We cannot be far from the Fifth Legion campaign,’ Russ went on, his eyes narrowing with sudden revelation. ‘Why have our messages not reached the Khan?’

The officer gave him an equivocal look. ‘The storms have been… unnaturally acute in that region. I doubt that anything has penetrated.’

‘Keep trying,’ urged Russ. ‘Concentrate your efforts there.’ He looked at Gunn. ‘A strange one, Jaghatai, but I’ve never seen a sword handled better. He hasn’t fallen. He can’t have done. Why did I forget him?’

Bjorn watched the doubtful expressions on the others’ faces. He didn’t blame them; the White Scars, of all the possible Legions, were the least likely to inspire confidence. He had never seen them fight, and he knew no one who had. By reputation they were almost as mystic as the Thousand Sons, in thrall to their arcane caste of Stormseers and beholden to no one but themselves.

The officer bowed. ‘If they can be reached, they will be.’

‘And if we’re dependent on them,’ muttered Gunn, ‘then we’re truly neck-deep in it.’

Russ shot him a warning glance. ‘He is my brother, Gunnar. Watch what you say.’

They were all your brothers, thought Bjorn. And look how that turned out.

The deck trembled – the Hrafnkel taking another heavy pounding along its prow. That ended the conversation; the Lords of the Wolves moved off, ready to begin the retreat that would take from them open space and back into the rusty embrace of the Alaxxes shoals.

‘Go warily!’ Russ called out after them, half in jest, but mostly in earnest. ‘We will live to skin them yet.’

Soon Bjorn was alone with the primarch on the bridge’s lowest tier – alone, that was, except for the two colossal wolves that prowled at his feet.

‘Did you want me, lord?’ he asked cautiously, watching the yellow eyes of the nearest beast as it regarded him steadily.

Russ stirred out of his thoughts, seemingly having forgotten that Bjorn was there.

‘Of course I do,’ he said.

The primarch turned to look up at the massive armourglass viewports, each of them a picture of fire-streaked turmoil. The Hrafnkel was just one island amidst hundreds, each aflame, each moving to a deadly dance of thrust and counter-thrust.

‘Much work to do,’ he said, his voice deep, almost mournful. ‘Watch and learn, One-Hand. This is how a primarch faces defeat.’

The Sickle Moon shuddered for a final time, as if relieved to be dropped out of the warp gales and easing back into real space. Its fractured Geller fields rippled clear of the outer hull, skittering with half-doused energies as the barrier fell. A second later the sub-warp drives kicked into life, their mechanical hammering replacing the dull, massive throb of the warp engines.

Yesugei rolled his shoulders as the last plate of his power armour was drilled into place. Its weight reassured him, as did the familiar hum of its servos and the oily aroma rising from the freshly serviced joints.

He held his skull-topped staff loosely in one hand. His crystalline hood fizzed a little as the implants took, sending a frisson of static across his bare scalp.

The crew, even those of the Legion, struggled not to sneak glances in his direction. Yesugei smiled a little at that, knowing how strange and magnificent a Stormseer looked when fully arrayed in the battleplate of his order.

These fanciful costumes we wear.

‘Warp shutters up,’ ordered Lushan, seated in the command throne. ‘Bring us to quarter speed. I need location readings as soon as possible.’

The iron barriers swept open with a series of loud slams, exposing the void once more. A few stray straggles of warp essence ran down metres-thick armourglass panes, glowing and multi-hued, before gusting away to nothing.

‘So where are we, commander?’ Yesugei asked quietly, staring up at newly-exposed stars. He couldn’t shake the skin-prickle sense of foreboding that had dogged him since waking.

Lushan, wearing his helm like the rest of the Legion contingent, didn’t reply immediately. ‘I think…’ he began, then trailed off as more readings came in. ‘Is that a ship?’

‘Confirmed, commander,’ replied Ergil, his sensorium officer. ‘Destroyer, Sixteenth Legion profile, though with unknown markings.’

Yesugei blink-clicked a link from the Sickle Moon’s tactical cogitators to his helm. ‘That is attack speed, commander.’

‘I noticed,’ said Lushan. ‘And its void shields are up.’

‘May I suggest we do the same?’

Lushan turned to him quizzically. ‘It is a Legion vessel.’

‘Do as I say.’

Lushan turned back to his throne-mounted console. ‘Power all weapons, raise shields.’

‘Luna Wolves warship closing to within main lance range,’ reported Ergil. ‘We are being targeted.’

‘What in hell?’ muttered Lushan. ‘Pull away from it. Vox them. Ask what they think they are doing.’

The Sickle Moon swung round, rolling over on its axis and thrusting powerfully. The whole vessel shook as the engines ramped up to full power and kicked the ship into a sharp dive.

Yesugei watched the enemy vessel carefully as it approached. It was a brutal looking ship, blackened by scorch-marks along its prow and with las-damage mottling its flanks. It was bigger than the Sickle Moon, with a much larger weapons array.

‘We’re being voxed, commander,’ announced the comm-servitor.

‘Relay it,’ ordered Lushan.

‘Fifth Legion warship,’ came the comm-burst. ‘Declare yourself or be destroyed.’

Lushan shook his head in disbelief. ‘What are they doing?’

Yesugei’s gaze remained locked on the incoming vessel. He opened his mind to the aether, just a fraction, like inching a door ajar. He felt war-lust bleeding from it – a blind, obsessive war-lust he’d never sensed before from a Legiones Astartes deployment.

And… something else.

‘These are the Sons of Horus, commander,’ Yesugei said. ‘Best not to rile them.’

‘Enemy lances priming, commander,’ reported Ergil.

‘Fifth Legion warship – evasion will get you killed. You know the situation. Declare yourself.’

‘Vox them back,’ replied Lushan, sounding angry now. ‘Ask them what they mean. And tell them to power down their–’

Before he’d finished, the void briefly lit up. A lance-beam seared past, missing the aft-decks by less than five hundred metres. The scarred profile of the enemy warship continued to grow, racing after them on full-burn.

‘They know we are faster once we reach full speed,’ advised Yesugei. ‘They will not let us pull away. Talk to them.’

Lushan turned on him. ‘And say what?’

Another lance-burst screamed across the void between the two vessels. This time it hit, slamming directly into the Sickle Moon’s engines and making the void shields shriek and crackle.

The frigate bucked wildly, corkscrewing away from the impact. Banks of warning lights, already blinking red from the damage taken in the warp, went into overdrive.

‘Can we get a broadside away?’ demanded Lushan, rocking in his command throne as the bridge decking shook.

‘That will not help,’ observed Yesugei. ‘They outgun us handsomely. I suggest another course of action.’

‘Broadside prepared,’ reported a gun-servitor flatly.

‘Fire at will,’ Lushan ordered it. He looked up at Yesugei. ‘Believe me, if you have something to add, I will take any suggestion.’

More las-bolts and lance beams criss-crossed the void, flickering and dancing in the strange, ruinous silence of inter-ship batteries. The Sickle Moon took another direct hit, making the strained void shields shimmer like oil flung across water.

Yesugei’s eyes narrowed beneath his sloped visor. He could sense something unusual from the vessel, something strange in the collection of psyches locked within its adamantium hull.

‘This will not be solved by lances,’ he said, his mind working to decipher what he had sensed.

More impacts rang out. A spar from one the bridge’s upper galleries came down in a crash of broken steel struts, weakening the dome above them and sending cracks shooting out across the armourglass. A second later and the void shield over the bridge shattered in a rain of sparks. Warning klaxons blared, accompanied by the blood-glow of emergency lighting at floor level.

You are not sure about us yet, thought Yesugei, beginning to understand part of what he had felt. You, too, are uncertain.

‘Teleport loci detected,’ announced Ergil.

Lushan pushed himself to his feet, hefting his bolter. The six other White Scars stationed around the bridge did likewise.

‘No, not this way, commander,’ ordered Yesugei, planting his feet firmly and bracing the heel of his staff on the deck. ‘We need answers – let them come.’

Lushan hesitated for a moment, weapon ready, torn between his psycho-conditioning and a direct order from a Stormseer.

‘Multiple void shield failure,’ came Ergil’s voice again. ‘They are inbound, commander.’

‘As the zadyin arga commands,’ voxed Lushan to his troops, his voice thick with reluctance. Then he looked at Yesugei, as if to say, over to you.

Twelve ozone-bangs radiated blast shocks through the bridge atmosphere, crackling and solidifying into Space Marines in dark power armour. They swung out of their teleport zones and scattered across the deck with their weapons trained.

‘Stand down!’ roared a monstrous voice from a war-helm, deafening in its artificial amplification. ‘Surrender the ship!’

‘Do not be foolish,’ replied Yesugei calmly in Gothic. ‘Please, put weapons away.’

Twelve muzzles immediately locked on to him.

‘Storm-witch!’ shouted one of the boarders.

All twelve weapons opened up in that instant: a drum of bolt shells, followed up by the furnace-rush of a flamer’s discharge.

Yesugei raised his staff, and the projectiles exploded in front of him in a shower of spilled force. For a brief moment he was wreathed in a wall of noise and seething fury, then it ripped away.

‘This is foolish,’ he said, his voice as placid, as though he were still alone on the Altak.

The twelve invaders charged toward Yesugei, leaping across railings and swerving around console stations, firing all the while.

He slammed his staff down and spears of lightning burst along its length, outshining the weapons fire and bathing the bridge in gold. He closed his free fist and the enemy’s boltguns shattered. The flamer exploded with a vast, booming roar.

The bridge swelled with the roll and crack of thunder. Gathering stormwind surged over the gantries, tearing mortals from their feet and sending even the power-armoured legionaries staggering.

One of the invaders managed to get within fist-range, fighting through the swirl of gold-laced gusts. Yesugei gestured with a finger and the Space Marine – tonnes of thick ceramite, muscle and dense mechanics – hurtled away and slammed into the far wall, crunching into the bulkhead stonework.

Another fought his way close, gripping a glowing sword and bracing to swing. Yesugei gave him a tolerant look, as if indulging the enthusiasm of a child, then inclined his head by a fraction.

The sword-bearer’s head snapped back. Spikes of gold lightning cracked into him, knocking the Space Marine to the deck and locking him down.

By then only one of the boarding party remained on his feet – a huge figure in ornate artificer armour carrying a crackling thunder hammer. He pushed his way through the maelstrom, leaning against the swathes of coruscation and making progress towards Yesugei by sheer force of will.

He got within three metres. Then Yesugei turned on him and opened his fist.

More lightning, as vivid and earth-breaking as the storms of Chogoris, snaked into the hammer-wielder’s chest. He flew backwards, crashing through a balustrade and collapsing down into a servitor-pit with his entire body enclosed in spitting, spidery energy.

Yesugei rose into the air, gently floating upwards, buoyed by swirling aether-summoned winds. His cloak snapped and rippled around his armour, his totems and bone-tokens clattering against his breastplate. Tongues of elemental fire licked at him from the deck below.

By now the entire bridge was a picture of destruction – White Scars legionary and enemy alike cowered behind whatever cover they could find, their weapons useless.

Yesugei descended smoothly over the hammer-wielder, dipping like some mythical angel of Terran legend towards the prone figure. The howl of the wind died, shimmering away as suddenly as it had been summoned. The twelve Space Marines of the boarding party remained locked in place, tied down by glowing strands of aetheric energy.

Yesugei stood over his victim.

‘Perhaps you explain colours of your armour,’ he said.

Now that the storm had passed, things were a little clearer. The Space Marine at his feet was no son of Horus: his massive battleplate was dark green and trimmed with bronze. Sigils of fire ran around his breastplate, curling up to an artfully-designed gorget of iron and ceramite. His voice, even filtered by a gilded vox-grille, was unusually sonorous.

‘If you wish to kill me, witch,’ the Space Marine growled, ‘then do so. I shall not plead for my life.’

Yesugei frowned under his helm. The words troubled him, though not as much as the manner in which they were spoken.

‘Have no intention of killing you,’ he said. ‘If eyes do not deceive, you are Salamander. I know of no quarrel between your Legion and mine.’

A pain-tight laugh broke from the Salamander’s helm. ‘You know of… Are you serious?’

Yesugei looked out across the bridge. Nine of the aether-shackled Space Marines were Salamanders, all of them wearing heavily battle-damaged war-plate. The others looked like Iron Hands – their night-black armour and obvious augmetics gave them away.

Yesugei fell to one knee, lowering his head closer to the Salamander. The aether-webs dissipated, freeing the captives. Lushan’s White Scars edged into the open, their bolters still functional and trained on the newcomers.

‘There is much you do not know, Salamander,’ said Yesugei softly. ‘I sense it before you attack – if you are certain we are enemy, you would destroy us in the void. You risk boarding action. For some reason, you take your vessel from Warmaster’s Legion, and you try to do same to ours. Perhaps you are mad, but I sense nothing but confusion in your mind.’

Yesugei reached up to his own helm, twisting it free and locking it to his belt. The unfiltered air of the bridge tasted like ashes.

‘I am named Targutai Yesugei,’ he said. ‘That is beginning. Tell me your name, and we make progress.’

A hesitation. The big Salamander breathed noisily through his battered helm, evidently still in pain from the forces that Yesugei had unleashed upon him.

‘Xa’ven,’ he said at last. ‘Captain, Thirty-Fourth Company.’

Yesugei nodded. ‘Good. Listen, Xa’ven – everything I tell you will be truth. Every word. You extend same courtesy to me. We have been blinded, hidden from galaxy. What has happened to you? Why is aether in agony?’

Xa’ven didn’t respond at once. He seemed to be trying to decide just where to start.

‘You know nothing of the Massacre?’ he asked, warily, as if the question were so stupid that he was opening himself to ridicule.

Yesugei extended a hand to him, offering to help him stand.

‘The Massacre?’ he asked. ‘No, we do not. Please, now, tell us everything.’

‘Thoughts, Khagan?’ asked Qin Xa.

The Khan grunted. He had plenty, though few he wished to share.

The Alpha Legion cordon remained intact, its smooth unity broken only by minor adjustments to the twin defensive lines. Every move that the Scars had made had been reflected by Alpha Legion warships in what had become a bizarre game of mirrors.

The Khan stood on the command bridge of the Swordstorm with his keshig around him. His dao felt heavy at his belt.

‘They seem to want us to move first,’ he said.

Qin Xa turned to the viewscreens. Dancing locator-runes reflected in the slanted lenses of his Terminator helm. ‘They are between us and the nearest jump-points, but we can break out if we choose. A zao, enacted at speed, prepared with a limited full-front engagement to draw them in.’

The Khan nodded in agreement. ‘I detect weakness there,’ he said, gesturing to a position two-thirds of the way along the largest Alpha Legion formation. ‘They have attempted to bolster it with bigger ships, but that does not disguise the problem.’

‘It would have to be rapid,’ said Qin Xa. ‘Just as we did on Eilixo.’

The Khan pondered the options. ‘And then what? We break the line, disrupt their patterns, and then what do we do? Destroy them?’

‘Of course.’

‘They have offered no threat.’

‘These are not the actions of a friend, Khagan.’

That could not be denied. Despite that, the Khan still resisted making an order. Mere hours ago, the shape of the reported rebellion within the Imperium had been simple: Russ and his savages defying orders once more. Now it had become complex. Far more complex.

He remembered his last words to Horus on Ullanor. He remembered the Warmaster’s winning smile, the easy manner.

You call, I answer.

Every fibre of him screamed for an alternative. The Warmaster had been wronged, somehow driven to desperate actions that had earned him the censure of jealous brothers. If Horus had indeed been forced to take up arms against Russ, then the Alpha Legion were clearly his allies. Were they waiting, to see if the White Scars would give them some sign? If so, what would that be? Was there a hidden signal, shared by the rest of his brothers but somehow hidden from him? It would not be the first time that such a thing had happened.

His mistress of star-speakers, a bone-thin Chogorian woman named Jian-Tzu, approached.

‘Khagan,’ she said, bowing low.

‘If there is nothing new to report, do not trouble me,’ snapped the Khan, his gaze remaining on the hololiths. ‘I grow weary of rumours.’

The star-speaker did not hesitate; like all her kind, she was used to delivering uncomfortable truths to warrior-kings. ‘I have orders from Lord Dorn.’

The Khan turned to her. ‘And?’

‘I interpreted them myself,’ she replied. ‘The meaning is clear, its origin unambiguous. We are ordered to return to Terra. We are ordered to ignore all other claims to our fealty, in particular those of the Warmaster, who has been declared traitor along with any Legion answering his summons. We are commanded to make the swiftest possible passage to the Throneworld where further instructions and further explanation will be given.’

Qin Xa nodded, satisfied. ‘At last. Something concrete.’

The Khan remained unmoved. ‘When did you get these visions?’

‘Less than an hour ago. More are coming in all the time, and they are of the same nature.’

‘The interference has cleared, then.’

‘It appears so.’

‘Then, my Khagan,’ offered Qin Xa, ‘we have our orders.’

The Khan shook his head. ‘No, we don’t.’

His keshig guard said nothing. They would not have dared.

‘Do you not see what has happened here?’ the Khan said, walking over to the lip of the command balcony and staring coldly up at the real-view blisters, beyond which the XX Legion ships waited. ‘Do you not see why those ships have been hanging there, saying nothing, doing nothing?’

He felt the old stirrings of resentment again, the chill anger of the unregarded son. A price had to be paid for his inclination to freedom, for skirting along the edges of communication. The Scars were always the last to know.

‘They do not want to fight us,’ the Khan said. ‘Nor do they want to join us. They want to cause us doubt. They want to keep us here and to tie us up in questions. And why? Because they know the veil is lifting and that messages are only now getting through the aether.’

He turned back to his lieutenants. Clarity had finally dawned – some welcome certainty in the wake of so much doubt.

‘They are the manipulators,’ he said, his voice growing in strength. ‘They wanted us to hear from Dorn. They kept us here until they could be sure we picked up his message. The Alpha Legion desire us to return to Terra. That is their purpose.’

For a moment, no one responded.

‘Even so,’ said Qin Xa, haltingly. ‘Should we not–’

‘No!’ roared the Khan, long-burning anger suddenly bursting free. ‘I will not take direction from anyone, not even from a Throneworld that only now, now that its Legions are tearing one another to pieces, deigns to remember that it has eighteen warrior-sons at its service.’

He whirled around to face the startled bridge crew, his cloak rippling.

‘You are nobody’s slaves,’ he said, his voice low but firm. ‘You are the ordu of Jaghatai. We take orders from no one. We take no one’s word. We are on our own, just as we have always been, and if there is truth to be found in this, then we will find it for ourselves.’

He turned his gaze on Qin Xa. ‘Give the order,’ he said. ‘Zao, just as we discussed.’

Then he turned back to the void, peaceful for now, but about to be lit up by the unified blaze of starship engines.

‘Take your stations,’ he said grimly. ‘It is time we reminded our brothers just what we are capable of.’

Nine

Not the right time
Drifting
The Chisel

Torghun slipped into the meeting chamber in the bowels of the Starspear, going as quietly as his recently refitted power armour would allow. He had not had time to make the preparations that he would have liked, but the sudden flurry of orders and deployment plans had left no time for anything else.

He activated the lumens, lighting up the only other occupant of the chamber.

‘Torghun Khan,’ said Hibou, bowing.

‘Hibou Khan,’ Torghun replied in the Chogorian manner, closing the door behind him.

‘A strange time to do this, brother,’ said Hibou.

‘Did you know about Russ?’ asked Torghun. ‘Tell me if you did – we should have no secrets.’

‘I did not. We knew it would be something, though, and the Wolf King was as likely as anything else.’

Torghun shook his head. ‘I never would have… I didn’t think it would be them. Something told me it would start with one of the others. Curze, perhaps.’ He drummed his fingers together, trying to still the agitation he felt. ‘We should go after them now. I don’t understand the delay.’

Hibou chuckled, tinny through his helm-vox. ‘Look out of the viewports. We have guests.’

‘That worries me. Are they with the Warmaster? Are they with the Wolves? What the hell are they doing?’

‘The Alpha Legion has engaged the Wolves. I do not think the encounter was friendly.’

‘Then we must leave the system!’ blurted Torghun, whirling to face Hibou. ‘This is the moment. Why else were we meeting, if not to force this?’

Hibou reached out, resting a gauntlet on Torghun’s forearm. ‘Calm yourself. Your agitation is unseemly.’

‘Unseemly! This is a delicate time – you do not seem to appreciate quite how delicate.’

‘I appreciate it more than you, I think.’ Hibou’s voice was firm. ‘When the time has come, we will know it. I will be told of it.’

‘How?’ demanded Torghun. ‘How are you getting this information? We do not discuss it in the lodge. You need to be more open with me.’

‘When this is over,’ said Hibou, ‘when we have negotiated this difficulty, I will show you. I have been meaning to in any case. But listen to me – this is not the time. These are the stone-slips that start the avalanche. If we move too soon, the position will be ruined. Tell me, do you love Terra? Do you love the Imperium?’

Torghun could have struck him. ‘You know I do,’ he said, shaking off Hibou’s hand.

‘Then show some discipline.’ Hibou looked at him levelly. ‘For now, we make no move. We follow orders, we coordinate just as we always have done. In the meantime, you could spend some time with more Chogorians – you stick out like an ogryn in a beauty parlour.’

Torghun fought to control his irritation. ‘I was not meant for this Legion,’ he muttered.

‘Horseshit,’ snapped Hibou. ‘You told me the story before, and I said the same then.’ He drew closer, his voice lowering. ‘There is no fate – you are a White Scars legionary. You can accept that and play your part in what is to come, or you can sulk in the margins and accomplish nothing.’

Involuntarily, Torghun’s mind shot back to Luna, to the transfer hangars, then to his first glimpse of the V Legion troop-lifter that would take him out of the Solar System for good. He remembered catching sight of the lightning-strike sigil, and how juvenile it had looked to him then – gold, white and red. Childish colours.

‘They believe in fate,’ said Torghun. ‘All of them, preached at by the weather-magicians. The pattern of time, the will of heaven. They would walk into damnation happily if one of them commanded it. That is what I will never understand. Do you know we are laughed at by the other Legions? Laughed at.’ He shook his head. ‘It needs to change, brother. It can be changed, but only if the Warmaster–’

‘Hush,’ said Hibou, holding a warning finger up. ‘Not here, not outside the lodge.’ He drew in a deep, weary breath. ‘We will wait for the Khagan’s ruling. He will either go after Russ or play for time here.’

‘And what of the Alpha Legion?’

Hibou snorted. ‘Who knows? They’re up to something, but there’s such a thing as being too obscure.’

Torghun’s helm-display suddenly flashed with a priority order-burst. From Hibou’s silence he could tell that the other khan had also received it.

Zao-pattern fleet movement, enact in T-minus four. Take stations. Go swiftly, go surely, for the Warhawk and the Emperor.

They looked at one another.

‘Seems the Khagan agrees with you,’ said Torghun, moving quickly towards the door.

‘Indeed,’ said Hibou, following him. ‘The Alpha Legion. I wonder if they know what’s about to hit them.’

Torghun laughed hollowly. There were some things that he could appreciate in his Legion brothers – he’d never doubted their ferocity, their velocity, their flamboyance once given their head. He remembered how Shiban had been in the canyons of Chondax. For all his irritation at the Chogorian khan’s constant pulling ahead, he’d been a little envious of his joy in battle.

Laugh when you are killing.

Torghun had told him that. The advice had been out of character but sincere enough. He wondered where Shiban was now, and what part he would play in the coming manoeuvre.

‘Well, if they don’t,’ Torghun said, moving quickly down the corridor and towards his station, ‘they’re about to find out.’

Every starship in the service of the Imperium was different. The secrets hidden within their reactor hearts were jealously guarded by the lords of the Red Planet and shared with no one outside the privileged circles of the elect. Only the Legions’ Techmarines had any profound understanding of the processes that propelled the vessels and kept them from disintegrating into the void, and even they were not made privy to the deepest secrets. Thus was the dominion of Mars over its creations assured.

That did not mean, though, that each Legion became powerless occupants of ships over which they had no control. Every primarch asserted various preferences during construction: Corax had worked obsessively to make his vessels as stealthy as possible, Vulkan to make them durable and Fulgrim to make them beautiful. Primarchs had ways of circumventing standard Imperial command structures – they could bend rules, uncover hidden datacores and suborn Mechanicum magi. So it was, as the Great Crusade progressed, that each Legion fleet slowly took on the character of its master through an endless programme of refits, retrofits and base modifications.

In the case of the White Scars, only one change was ever requested and only one metric was ever improved upon.

Speed.

V Legion Techmarines spent decades boosting reactor power-feeds and finding ways to hone manoeuvrability far beyond the tolerances that each standard ship class had been designed for. The endless pursuit of velocity came with its costs: gunnery captains had been heard to complain of reduced lance range, and it was well known that a White Scars ship would not carry as many troops or drop-ships as the equivalent vessel in a standard fleet, but such factors carried little weight in a Legion drenched in the wild-riding tradition of the Chogorian plains.

Under standing orders from the Khagan, the Legion had never shown off its drives’ modified capabilities outside of active warzones. Since so few of the other Legions had ever fought alongside the White Scars this specialism had not become widely known, except for a few speculative reports here and there of strangely elongated engine-housings, extravagant thruster formations and oversized fuel lines.

It all made for a ferociously fast set of warships, from the largest behemoths to the most slender of system-runners.

The Kaljian was no exception.

The frigate gradually picked up momentum, coasting out towards the screen of waiting Alpha Legion escorts.

‘This is a standard zao,’ Shiban reminded the bridge from the command throne. ‘Full-fleet, enacted on a single command from the Swordstorm. You have your vectors and know your craft – do not disappoint me, brothers.’

He caught the expectant happiness on the faces of those working at their stations. The taut atmosphere of guess and counter-guess had been banished, replaced by a more familiar pleasure in doing what they were good at.

It was infectious, and Shiban found himself smiling. The White Scars had always been a harmonious Legion, free of the mordant temper of some of their counterparts; low spirits did not suit them.

‘And do not outpace the leaders,’ he warned.

All across the vast battlefront, White Scars escort craft moved as one, sweeping towards the encircling Alpha Legion forces in a unified screen. Inter-fleet communications were shut down and incoming bursts blocked – the enemy had had their chance to make themselves understood. Anything that they said now would be disregarded.

Behind the first wave came the cruisers, shining pure-white against the well of the void, their huge engines already burning hot. They pulled together, forming a tight battlesphere in the wake of the more strung-out vanguard. Shiban watched as one by one they raised their forward void shields, making the space around them glisten and blur.

Still far ahead of the Kaljian’s position, the Alpha Legion reacted. They maintained the integrity of the cordon, warding the routes to the nearest suitable jump-points and keeping the White Scars corralled within the vicinity of Chondax. As they had done ever since arriving, each ship of the blockade matched the movements of its White Scars counterpart, maintaining a gigantic mirror-image across space.

Shiban studied the tactical data watchfully. The two fleets were evenly matched – the Alpha Legion had clearly known just how many ships to bring to achieve their purpose. That alone was cause for some suspicion, especially if rumours of them taking on the Wolves were true. Just how many battleships did they possess? Had they been poised all the while for this, waiting for the veil to lift?

He remembered Phemus. The medal. The bodies.

His helm-display suddenly glowed with fresh orders.

‘Begin first phase.’

The Kaljian picked up speed, shunting power to its main lance and withdrawing it from the rear void shields. On either flank of the vanguard, other ships did the same.

Shiban felt his primary heart begin to beat harder, just as it would have done if he were in the saddle, sighting his prey.

‘That’s the target,’ he ordered, isolating a counterpart Alpha Legion destroyer on the forward scopes and marking it with an engagement rune.

The gap between the fleets closed. The Alpha Legion formation reacted just as a blockade ought to react, maintaining a rigid web across the widest area of space, each node backed up by a second rank of warships held in reserve. Their movements remained cagey, as if they wished to do nothing more than hold the impasse for as long as possible.

Shiban admired the discipline of the formation. They were well drilled.

It won’t help you.

The two vanguards closed to within lance-range. For the first time Shiban noticed incoming vox-requests from the enemy on the sensorium array, and ignored them.

It was too late now.

The first stabs of las-beams flickered out, initially along the Chondax-trailing edge, then rapidly spreading down the line.

‘Open fire,’ ordered Shiban calmly.

The Kaljian’s forward lance opened up, spitting a beam of coruscation directly at the target. The enemy void shields splashed with a corona pattern of static, and the ship reacted, ducking out of line, rolling away and returning a volley of broadside las-beams. Spearing bursts peppered the Kaljian’s dorsal void shields as the Alpha Legion ship thrust round to bring its own lance to bear.

‘Fire again, then pull away to four-five-two,’ ordered Shiban, giving it no time to gain a clear shot. He felt a faint tremble of deck-strain as the Kaljian came about.

All along the front, similar battles broke out – White Scars ships probing the line and Alpha Legion ships resisting them. It was a classic containment pattern, designed to hem the V Legion formation in and prevent isolated ships from running the cordon. The standard breakout response was a full-scale assault on the containment net, aiming to drive it back through a massed volume of concentrated ship-to-ship fire. Such an order was not taken lightly – the result would be ruinous for both sides, and only hotheads like Russ or Angron enjoyed taking such risks.

The Alpha Legion clearly judged that the Khan was not so cavalier. In this, of course, they were entirely correct.

Shiban’s helm-display updated again. ‘Second phase.’

The White Scars vanguard began to drift spinwards, pulling clear of their jump-point trajectory and dragging the centre of the engagement back towards Chondax’s gravity well. It looked almost careless, as if aimless commanders had launched a half-hearted breakout without the commitment to see it through.

‘Not too quickly,’ warned Shiban, watching closely as his crew let the Kaljian’s focus drift a little too low of the combat-plane. It had to look lazy, but taking a critical hit now would cause him problems.

The intensity of las-fire picked up. The Xo-Jia took a heavy blow to its shield generators and had to compensate with a ferocious return thicket of las-fire. An Alpha Legion corvette with the marker Beta-Kalaphon misjudged a forward move and blundered into a wall of plasma, shattering half its void shield coverage.

For all that, the engagements were muted, probing, restrained. No torpedoes were launched, no gunship wings were unleashed. The two walls of minor warships grappled in a bizarre half-embrace of limited ferocity.

‘Third phase.’

The drift became more pronounced.

‘I think we can afford to move a little faster,’ observed Shiban, watching with satisfaction as the White Scars line began to crumple inwards. Seven fast-attack frigates withdrew completely, slipping out of contention with their prows charred and their void-cover flickering.

All across the engagement zone, V Legion positions began to collapse, withering in the face of steady, professional pressure from the enemy. White Scars vessels dropped formation, protecting their own flanks and leaving holes in the offensive wall. As if fighting a strong headwind out on the Altak, the vanguard’s momentum faltered.

Shiban stared at the forward scope intently, watching for the Alpha Legion response. They brought their capital ships up in support of the first wave, prudently applying pressure where they saw weakness. The net closed tighter, pulling together a little more. In doing so they brought more guns into range, but their rigidity began to suffer: they were cautious, but not too cautious.

The Kaljian bucked as it took a direct hit, the void shields flexing like drum skins before the energy was absorbed.

‘Return fire?’ came the query from the gunnery station. ‘I have a lock.’

‘I think not,’ said Shiban, holding for the next order phase. ‘Just run us back, and rotate to give them a new face. Maintain las-volleys, but make it look sloppy.’

As the Kaljian rolled backwards, veering away from the bulk of the incoming fire like a poorly crewed smuggler’s rig, Shiban couldn’t help wondering what Torghun was making of it. Back on Chondax, the Terran khan had hated feigned retreats, never adopting them while in command of his own Brotherhood. He had been a strange one, Torghun, uneasy with the things that made being a warrior of the V Legion the finest, most profound joy in the galaxy. Shiban, for all he had tried, had never really understood him – he briefly considered where Torghun might be now, and–

His helm-display suddenly gained another rune, immediately blink-clicked into a time-stamped order activation.

Shiban felt a spike of adrenaline, coupled with a rush of pure pleasure. The zao was under way.

Here we go.

‘Stand by for fleet-wide switch,’ he commanded, priming the bridge for action.

The chrono started to tick.

Ilya could hardly believe what she was seeing. She and Halji had been suffered to remain on the Swordstorm’s command bridge but soon found themselves shunted to the margins as the Khan’s retinue had taken their spaces around the throne.

She looked over to where the primarch sat, surrounded by luminous hololith projections, his austere face locked in concentration. None of those around him – the huge warriors of his keshig, the ship commanders, the strategeos and zadyin arga – gave away the slightest discomfort at the mauling their fleet was taking.

‘What’s going on?’ she hissed to Halji.

Her adjutant turned to look at her, his expression hidden behind a blank ivory facemask. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Has everything I’ve been doing here been wasted?’ she asked, consumed with frustration at the prospect. ‘The supply process was perfect this time. We had everything assembled ahead of schedule – we could have held them off indefinitely, and now… this. You convinced me, Halji, that your people knew void-craft.’

‘We do.’

‘You’ve got a strange way of showing it.’

‘Are you watching carefully, szu? Do you see what he does?’

‘I see him throwing away a tactical position and getting his ships killed.’

‘Have not lost one yet.’

‘Damn you, you will soon.’ Ilya felt like rushing up and hammering her fists on his thick helm to knock some sense into him. ‘Does he not care? Is this just one more game to you all?’

Halji remained good-naturedly unmoving. ‘Everything is game. But no, he cares very much. Keep watching.’

Ilya turned back to the projected tactical image. It looked terrible – the half-hearted engagement was drifting into incoherence as the first wave of V Legion vessels was forced back in upon itself. Any structure to the advance had dissolved, lost in a maze of confused withdrawal lines. The Alpha Legion cordon, represented on the hololith by a bleak front of stolidly spaced blue lights, pushed back remorselessly.

She felt her pulse-rate quickening with anger. She had worked so hard to instil some sense of discipline into them – to make them take their logistic responsibilities seriously, to ensure that every warship they possessed was properly equipped and knew its function.

It was a shambles. She shuddered to think what would have happened if the enemy out there had been something properly terrifying. Like the Wolves.

‘I see noth–’

Before she had finished speaking, the Khan issued a command at last.

‘Now,’ he said simply. Even on a bridge crowded with warriors and busy with a hundred different activities, his low voice somehow carried to all corners. ‘Five second mark.’

Ilya saw the order-burst go out to every warship in the fleet, transmitted directly to the ship commanders’ helm-displays. Above her, suspended on bronze chains, a pict screen switched over to a countdown timer.

5… 4…

‘What was that command?’ asked Ilya.

3… 2…

‘Is important that this is synchronised,’ said Halji. ‘You should hang on to something.’

1.

There was no time. The deck suddenly kicked violently, as if something huge had detonated somewhere deep in the Swordstorm’s immense hull, and a roar filled the bridge’s airspace. Ilya staggered, clattering into Halji’s immobile armour and banging her forehead painfully against the ceramite.

He reached down to steady her, and she pushed him away, embarrassed. ‘We’re… racing,’ she noted, shocked, watching the fleet-spread suddenly contract. ‘Throne of Terra.’

The Swordstorm had kicked into full attack speed. The acceleration was incredible, an almost instant switch from dawdling quarter-power to a thunderous, booming, barnstorming charge. It should have been impossible – it should have taken whole minutes to key the main drives up.

‘As I said, szu,’ said Halji. ‘Keep watching.’

Ilya found her feet clumsily, grabbing hold of the edge of a balustrade railing and forcing herself to look up at the tactical hololiths.

Everything had changed. The fleet’s formation had morphed in an instant, suddenly switching from an aimless drift-pattern into an arrowhead shock assault of astonishing precision.

Every ship had moved. Every one of them, all at the same time. They were now in new trajectories and in perfect concert, suddenly leaping from semi-committed holding patterns into a single attack vector.

Ilya felt her mouth begin to hang open and snapped it closed. She had never seen shipmastery like it. The best Imperial naval officers could not have performed such a manoeuvre in less than five minutes, and it would have required hundreds of course-correction warnings and hours of preparation to bring off.

The White Scars had done it, as one – with no extraneous prompting – in five seconds.

By then, Halji was laughing. ‘We call this zao,’ he told her. ‘The Chisel. It is... invigorating.’

Ilya stared up at the real-view ports, trying to make sense of what she was seeing.

The White Scars deployment was now a single spearhead. Escorts shot out, pulling together into a single mass and punching a hole through the cordon. Their sudden burst of speed and concentrated lance-strikes wrong-footed the Alpha Legion vessels in their path, and three bronze-prowed destroyers were overwhelmed almost immediately, lost amidst a whirlwind of plasma and exploding torpedo trails.

Other enemy ships reacted, swinging about to plug the gap, but all too slowly. It took precious seconds to swing their lances around and push power to their idling engines, by which time the big V Legion bruisers – the Tchin-Zar, the Lance of Heaven, the Qo-Fian – had charged into the fray, thundering up the line forged by the runners and flooding the area with a blistering circlet of destructive las-power.

‘How are you doing this?’ breathed Ilya, watching the burning shells of Alpha Legion warships hurtle past.

More White Scars destroyers screamed through the wreckage, corkscrewing and diving like plunging pods of cetaceans. Everything was aimed at a single point: the flanks were discarded, surrendered to the enemy as every V Legion asset in the battlesphere shot into close formation and boomed up to top velocity.

‘The weakness is there,’ said Halji, motioning to a location two-thirds of the way along the Alpha Legion second rank. ‘A slight one, but enough.’ He nodded in warm appreciation of what was taking place. ‘We race to get there first, and that would be honour worth remembering in verse.’

The bridge of the Swordstorm hummed and rattled as though it might shake apart. Warning lights glowed angrily along diagnostic displays, cheerfully disregarded by the bridge crew. The Alpha Legion’s second rank swam towards them horrifyingly quickly, already glittering with distributed las-fire and hastily loosed torpedo batteries.

The encircling Alpha Legion cordon was now compromised and fractured, its constituents struggling to respond to the lone column of ships that burned its way through their heart. Their capital ships were even slower, unable to take advantage of modified engines or the Scars almost preternaturally skilled crews.

‘A ruse,’ Ilya said, annoyed with herself. ‘You wanted them to relax.’

Halji nodded. ‘There is advantage to being underestimated. And being fast.’

Despite herself, she laughed then. It was the first time she’d done so since the muster orders had come in.

What is happening to me? I am learning to love this stupid Legion.

The Swordstorm pulled up to the forefront of the Chisel formation, propelled by its monstrous, raging engines and surrounded by a swarm of racing escorts. Bulky vessels of the Alpha Legion second rank tried to bar its path, sliding into a hurried defensive formation with what now looked to Ilya like ponderous clumsiness.

‘Those ones are big,’ she said cautiously.

‘They look like battle-barges,’ agreed Halji. ‘But Khagan does not think they are. One Legion cannot engage this many without some improvisation – they do not have the ships. Let us see.’

Ilya found herself gritting her teeth as the Swordstorm barrelled into range. Its gigantic lances flared briefly, filling the void with the thrown light of a bounded supernova. All around it, other White Scars warships launched forward-facing barrages, vomiting las-beams and plasma bolts and torpedo salvoes in a vast, intense column of pure destruction.

The explosions were instant: palls of spiralling immolation crashing out in swathes of igniting promethium, flooding the cold vaults of space ahead. Ilya saw a massive Alpha Legion vessel collapse entirely, falling away sharply as its engines imploded. Another three targets took horrific damage to their forward void shields, sloughing badly amidst sheets of rippling orange and neon-yellow.

Return fire was sporadic and insufficient, clattering and raking down the armoured prows of the racing White Scars vanguard and causing little damage.

‘They’re not battle-barges,’ said Ilya. ‘What are they then? Bulk troop-carriers?’

‘It matters not,’ said Halji. ‘We are out.’

He was right. The Chisel had hammered its way through the cordon, breaking it open at its weakest point. The entire formation – tight-knit, long and slender like a throwing javelin – raced out into open space. The Alpha Legion struggled to regroup in its wake, pulling ships from the far-flung cordon formation like an octopus clutching its many limbs back to itself. They hadn’t lost critical numbers of ships, but the sudden attack run had blown their formation wide open and destroyed the cohesion that they had so painstakingly built.

The White Scars run did not slow. If anything, free of the need to maintain a barrage of las-fire, it accelerated. The orb of Chondax fell rapidly away aft, mediated by the glowing corpses of a dozen burned-out warships.

‘So what now?’ asked Ilya. ‘Do we finish them off? Or go for Russ? Or Terra? What’s the plan?’

Halji looked over her shoulder, up to where the Khan still sat on his throne. The primarch’s expression had not changed – no satisfaction, no elation, just the habitual aquiline fierceness, the solid concentration. His flagship hummed with the release of fearsome energies, powering into the open void like a loosed arrow.

‘I do not know,’ Halji said. ‘My guess, knowing the Warhawk’s mood? None of those things.’

Ten

The price of knowledge
Course set
Just another renegade

Sometimes it was better not to know.

Yesugei had often argued with Ahriman over the point. The Thousand Sons in general had never accepted that knowledge – any knowledge – should remain off-limits.

‘All is good,’ the Chief Librarian had told him once. ‘The more, the better.’

But the old weather-makers of Chogoris had always resisted plumbing the depths of their craft, choosing to remain on the surface of it, honing a set of skills that they knew rested on deeper, more dangerous truths. That had always struck Yesugei as wisdom, not cowardice, for the sages of his home world had made a virtue of restraint.

‘Everything has its perils,’ Yesugei had warned Ahriman.

‘You are too cautious,’ Ahriman had replied. ‘Does anyone even know what gifts you have?’

‘Perhaps not, but why should I care?’

‘Because it matters, how you are perceived.’

‘You are perceived as dangerous. Does that not matter?’

Ahriman had looked rueful. ‘You understand us. Do you think we are dangerous?’

Back then, Yesugei had not wanted to reply. Sometimes I do, he had thought.

Now, in his chambers on the Sickle Moon, he felt sick with knowledge, like he had ingested something poisonous that had got into his blood. The scale of it was hard to process, let alone come to terms with.

Xa’ven had explained it all in careful detail, omitting nothing. There were some details, of course, that even he didn’t know, including the fate of his primarch.

‘We do not know what happened,’ said Xa’ven. ‘I think I would know, somehow, if he had died. But perhaps not.’

The Salamanders legionary spoke slowly, deliberately, inflecting the syllables of Gothic with a rich Nocturnean burr. His words held no self-pity, nor anger – just a deep, calm defiance.

Yesugei’s response to the news had been different: numbness, followed by a desperate sense of failure. He had sensed disturbances in the fabric of the universe for so long; perhaps he ought to have known, or guessed, or moved to investigate sooner.

That mood soon passed. Treachery on such a scale was unimaginable – he could not have known. No one could.

Horus. The Warmaster. The beloved son.

He looked up. He shared his chamber with three others: Lushan, Xa’ven and a dour Iron Hands legionary called Bion Henricos.

‘You were telling me what happens next,’ Yesugei said, forcing himself to keep asking questions.

‘At first, it was only us,’ said Xa’ven. ‘My squad broke back into orbit on a captured Sixteenth Legion lander. Our own ship had been destroyed, so we were forced to dock with one of theirs and take it over.’

Yesugei smiled, despite himself. Xa’ven’s deadpan delivery could be quite amusing. ‘Just like that. You take over Sons of Horus frigate.’

Xa’ven looked at him blankly, his dark features hard to read. He did not smile much and his blank red eyes made following his expressions difficult. ‘It was challenging,’ he said in his rumbling bass voice, ‘but they were not expecting us. Ever seen the sons of Vulkan fight, White Scar?’

‘I have not,’ said Yesugei. ‘Though have heard is formidable.’

‘We took the ship,’ said Xa’ven simply. ‘It was called the Grey Talon. We renamed it the Hesiod. That is a sanctuary-city of our home world.’

‘I have heard of it.’

Xa’ven nodded in satisfaction. ‘Then we became renegades. We tried to make for Nocturne, but the Navigator had been injured. She died soon afterwards. The strain of fighting the warp storms, perhaps, or maybe her mind had turned – I do not think she had expected to see the things she witnessed.’

Henricos, the Iron Hands legionary, let slip a low growl through his dark metal faceplate. Unlike the others, he had not taken his helm off. ‘None of us did.’

‘And what of you?’ asked Yesugei.

‘Survivors fight on, here and there,’ said Henricos. His voice, unlike Xa’ven’s, was acid with bitterness. Yesugei could understand why – he clearly had no doubt over his own primarch’s fate. ‘Scattered. Some of us found each other.’

‘We seek out survivors,’ added Xa’ven. ‘There are only sixteen of us, but we hope to add more. Then we can strike back.’

Yesugei caught a strange look on Xa’ven’s face then, something like hunger.

‘And now you find us,’ the Stormseer said, making the Salamander’s thought explicit. ‘Warp-capable ship with living Navigator.’

Xa’ven nodded. ‘Henricos is a master of ship-systems. He has found a way to track warp wakes at distance, so we knew just where you would be translating.’

‘But why attack?’ Lushan asked. He was still irritated – the Sickle Moon had taken significant damage after an already battering warp passage.

‘We have learned to be careful,’ replied Xa’ven. ‘For all we know, every Legion has turned to the Warmaster. If you had been a Blood Angels ship, or Ultramarines, we would have done the same.’

Yesugei nodded with understanding. ‘And we are White Scars,’ he said. ‘Easy for you to believe we are renegade, yes?’

Xa’ven said nothing, but Henricos grunted mordantly. ‘Since you said it, yes.’

Yesugei smiled. ‘At least, then, we are honest with one another.’

‘You use warp-born powers,’ said Xa’ven, as if by way of explanation. ‘That, we have learned, is a sign of the enemy. They do not follow the Edict, and it cost us on Isstvan.’

Yesugei placed his hands together. Every piece of information he was given from that damned planet was painful to hear; such things were exactly what Ahriman and he had warned would happen if the Librarius was disbanded.

‘I follow commands of my primarch,’ Yesugei said. ‘If he orders me to stop using gifts, I do so, but the Khan is out of contact for a long time.’ He gave Xa’ven a half-apologetic look. ‘In any case, he will take no notice of Edict. None of us will. The gift is part of who we are, has been for long time. Imagine if I tell you to put away your flamers, or you, son of Medusa, your metal hand. Would you do it?’

‘You sound like one of Magnus’s sorcerers,’ spat Henricos.

‘I think,’ replied Yesugei, ‘they speak better Gothic.’

Xa’ven laughed – a rumble that spilled up from his enormous barrel chest. ‘And what are you doing out here, Chogorian? You are a long way from home.’

‘Are we? Our ship lost bearing a long time ago.’

‘We can help with that. What is your course?’

‘Chondax,’ replied Yesugei. ‘My primarch is there, though I do not know if he is aware of Massacre.’

‘He will be by now,’ muttered Henricos. ‘The whole galaxy will be. Soon we will see Horus’s bastards falling on worlds like locusts. Everything is open to them, every defence destroyed.’

Xa’ven raised a warning hand, but Henricos kept going.

‘Do you not see how futile this is? We can fight for a little longer, but Ferrus is gone. Vulkan and Corax are gone. It’s just stalling for time.’

‘We have discussed this many times, brother,’ said Xa’ven tolerantly.

‘And? You think there’s some way to turn this around? You’re a fool. I’ll kill as many of them as I can, and spit in their faces every time, but I’m not stupid enough to think it’ll change anything.’ Henricos swept his metallic deathmask around the chamber, as if daring someone to contradict him. ‘Vengeance, a little satisfaction, a share of pain. That’s all that’s left.’

Xa’ven shot Yesugei an exculpatory look. ‘Bion and I have somewhat different perspectives on the war.’

‘I see,’ said Yesugei. ‘What is yours?’

‘Victory will come,’ Xa’ven replied calmly and without hesitation. ‘I do not know from where, but it will come. We must be patient.’

Yesugei admired the sentiment, though from what he had been told he found it hard to share in it. ‘I hope you are right.’

‘Then are you with us?’ asked Henricos. ‘We could use some of that… What do you call it?’

‘Weather-magic,’ said Yesugei.

‘Stupid name.’ The Iron Hands legionary flexed his damaged shoulders. ‘Hurts when it hits, though.’

‘I have to get back to my primarch,’ said Yesugei, directing his words to Xa’ven. ‘I have dreams. Visions. He is in danger.’

Xa’ven looked back at him equivocally. ‘That will be hard, and we have our own work.’

‘Would you not fight better joined with another Legion? One intact, and dangerous, and full of spell-makers like me?’

‘Would your Khan accept us? I know nothing of him.’

‘Few do, but I speak on your behalf.’ Yesugei smiled then, as warmly as he was able to in the circumstances. ‘If you come with me.’

Xa’ven looked tempted, but cautious. He rested his chin, as black as burned embers, on his steepled gauntlets.

‘It has been a hard road,’ he said. ‘At times, in the deep of the void-night, I was tempted to ask for guidance. You know, in the old way, like we were taught to forget. I never did it, for we long since stopped believing in gods and monsters. Maybe we should not have been so quick to forget them.’

Yesugei nodded. ‘Both are real.’

‘I wonder, though, what I thought might come of such guidance, had I pleaded for it? Would I be shown some sign, some way back? Would I stumble over Vulkan’s trail?’

Henricos shook his head irritably. ‘Foolish.’

‘But something has occurred now. You have fallen into our path, though you know less than we do. What am I to make of this? Was it fated?’

‘I do not believe in fate,’ said Yesugei.

‘Luck, then.’

‘Even less.’

Xa’ven raised a black eyebrow. ‘Then what do you believe in?’

‘The Khan,’ said Yesugei, as unhesitatingly and firmly as Xa’ven had spoken earlier. ‘Help me find him. Something can still be saved.’

Henricos snorted disdainfully, but Xa’ven was no longer paying any attention to him. His ebony head nodded slowly, his thoughtful gaze never leaving Yesugei.

‘We shall see,’ he said. ‘We shall see.’

The Khan rose from his throne, and his retinue stood back to let him pass. He walked slowly to the edge of the command dais, below which the full expanse of the flagship’s bridge stretched away from him in terraced rows.

The galaxy’s starfield glittered on the other side of the armourglass observation dome, a uniform screen of infinite space. He felt the familiar urge stir within him: to power into the unknown, to range across the void as he had once ranged across the grasslands of home, beholden to no one, as free as the hunting raptors that rode the high airs.

And yet, even the berkut are tamed, he thought to himself. They come back eventually, summoned by the bells of their master.

None of his command staff spoke. They remained silent as the entire White Scars fleet powered further from Chondax, leaving the Alpha Legion behind like a bad memory. A pursuit had not materialised yet. Even if it did, the Khan doubted that the enemy had anything fast enough to catch them.

For all that, he could sense his crew’s burning questions. Qin Xa wanted to turn around, to finish what had been started, to board the Alpha Legion ships and demand answers.

It was a tempting proposition. Perhaps Alpharius was on board one of those ships. The Khan smiled grimly. It would be nice to drag that dissembler to his knees and rip the helm from his face.

That would have been a mistake. The Alpha Legion had their combat weaknesses but they were no fools. He would learn nothing from them unless they wanted him to have it, in which case it was useless.

He folded his arms across his chest and stared up at the stars, just as he had once done in the long night-chill of the Altak. The stars were his first memory. He still had fragmented recollections of muffled voices – and not Chogorian voices – shuffling around a casket in which he slept. He had dreams of whisperings in the dark, a rush of sudden indescribable speed, a whirl of dark stars and pearl-white skies, a sense of being momentarily suspended over an abyss of infinite, howling depth while greedy eyes regarded him with both fear and covetousness.

Years later he had come to understand what those visions were: confused recollections of something he had not the faculties to understand at the time, dreams of unearthly powers at once more powerful than imagination and weaker than the sickliest human newborn.

‘The denizens of heaven are nothing without us,’ Yesugei had told him many years later. ‘They may only act through us. That is their great secret, and their great shame. We do not have to listen – we can go our own way.’

The zadyin arga had always understood the relationship between the realm of the senses and the realm of dreams, and the Khan had always trusted what they said of it.

‘There are two great errors,’ a long-dead sage of Kai had written in scrolls still preserved in Khum Karta. ‘First, to pretend that the path of heaven does not exist, second, to follow it.’

Perhaps Russ had tried to snuff out the gifted forever. The Khan could well imagine Horus taking a stand against it; he was a noble soul, the noblest of them all. Sanguinius, too, had always been pure of purpose, and the third member of the triumvirate. From the very start, it had been the four of them – the Khan, Magnus, Sanguinius, with tacit approval from the one who would one day be Warmaster. It was they who had laboured for so long to channel and protect the arts of the psyker within the Legions.

Now, if he was to believe what he was being told, one was dead and one was missing.

And what of Horus?

Which story was the truth? That he was the defender of those wrongly slain by the Wolves, or that he threatened to level the Imperium to its foundations? The Khan had never much cared for the Imperium, but truth – that was important. As was loyalty.

That is the difference between the warrior and the butcher. Which one are you, brother? I know which I am.

‘Khagan.’

He turned to see Jian-Tzu, his Mistress of Astropaths, looking up at him, her sightless eyes like milky orbs of glass in her withered face. ‘More from Dorn?’ he asked.

‘From Russ,’ she replied. ‘Distress calls from the Alaxxes Nebula, demanding immediate assistance. The Wolves are under attack from the Alpha Legion. He asks his brother to remember the bonds of fealty between primarchs and come to his assistance with all the speed you are renowned for. He ends with his thanks.’

The Khan turned to his retinue, smiling coldly. ‘Did you hear that?’ he asked. ‘The Wolf King complimenting us. He must be desperate.’

Qin Xa looked at him steadily. ‘Will we go?’ he asked. ‘And if we do, who shall we fight for?’

Jemulan Noyan-Khan, whose presence was a glittering hololith projection from the Starspear, shook his head. ‘The Space Wolves have always been renegades. Either we leave them alone, or we do what we have been asked and destroy them.’

‘They’re fighting the Alpha Legion,’ said Hasik Noyan-Khan, also a projection. ‘Refresh my memory – were we not just fighting them ourselves?’

The Khan crossed his arms, his hawk-like face still playing with the remnants of wintry amusement. ‘Who knows what the Alpha Legion were up to,’ he said. ‘Perhaps they too have their renegades.’

‘Then what is your order, Khagan?’ pressed Qin Xa, ever eager to be given licence to cut loose. ‘The fleet is armed and ready.’

The Khan rested his chin on the gold-limned magnificence of his gorget. The atmosphere in the bridge seemed to thicken, curdling with anticipation. All faces remained fixed upon him.

‘Send this message to Russ,’ he said finally, lifting his heavy eyes towards the Mistress of Astropaths. ‘Tell him that we have received commands from Dorn to return to the Throneworld. Tell him that we cannot ignore them, much as we might like to.’ He closed his eyes, shaking his head, changing his mind. ‘No, no lies. Tell him that we could ignore Dorn’s order, but we will not. The truth is not obvious to us. We need time to uncover it.’

The Khan uncrossed his arms and rested his right hand on the hilt of his dao. ‘Tell him that we have received disturbing news concerning Prospero, which we hope is false. Finally, tell him that, when the full picture is drawn, we hope we will fight beside one another again as brothers, as we were meant to. Then wish him a safe winter, or whatever it is they wish one another when they have finished speaking.’

Jian-Tzu bowed and hastened away to begin the sending. Once she had gone, Qin Xa was first to speak.

‘Then we are heading to Terra?’ he asked, disappointment evident in his voice.

‘That is the question,’ said the Khan, turning away from the retinue and gazing back up at the starfield. ‘Summon the Navigator. I have course instructions to give him.’

Russ took the news in silence, gripping the thick fur of the two Fenrisian wolves that prowled at his feet. Bjorn watched him, noting how the primarch’s ice-blue eyes glistened with suppressed emotion.

The viewports of the Hrafnkel’s bridge were almost opaque with rust-red dust. The entire fleet hung in the depths of the nebula, sunk amidst the shifting clouds like fish in a reef. The aftermath of Prospero had given them time to learn every nook and shaft of the immense stellar nursery – its gravitic variances, its sensor-defying baffles. Now their warships skulked in its depths again, recovering, re-arming, and waiting.

Somewhere far above them, the Alpha Legion still probed and patrolled, sending void-charges spinning blindly at them, prowling across the cloud margins like circling jackals. They would discover the fleet’s precise location soon enough, but the respite had staved off destruction until then.

It had been a ruinous, terrible retreat. Only Russ’s presence had prevented it from becoming a rout; he had held things together seemingly by sheer force of will, orchestrating lightning counter-thrusts, flanking moves, sudden fall-backs, all with the aim of getting as many ships into the heart of the nebula as possible before devastation overtook them.

Bjorn studied him carefully. Something of the ebullience the primarch normally displayed seemed to have been kicked out of him. He looked bruised, almost resentfully so, as if his faithful duty had been rewarded with nothing more than a face full of ashes.

‘Until next winter?’ Russ asked. ‘He really said that?’

The star-speaker nodded. ‘An attempt at politeness, I think.’

Russ snorted.

Bjorn moved a little closer, ignoring the thrumming growl of the primarch’s wolves. ‘So we’re on our own,’ he ventured.

Russ nodded, not looking at him, his face tight with preoccupation. ‘We are.’

‘They have always been unreliable.’

‘They have.’

Bjorn felt awkward. It was hard to witness a primarch’s self-doubt. Russ seemed to sense it, and stirred himself.

‘You know why I wanted you close to me, One-Hand?’ he asked.

Bjorn shook his head.

‘You’re young. We can all see times are changing.’ Russ fixed him with those penetrating, frosty eyes. ‘Let’s be honest – we knew that something was wrong before Prospero. We’re used to spectres on Fenris. We never believed the myths my Father tried to tell us. Now that it’s come at last, we can’t feign surprise.’

One of the wolves nuzzled against Russ’s thigh, pushing its blunt, fanged head along the ridged ceramite as if to comfort its master.

‘I never asked him what he had in mind for us once the Crusade was over,’ Russ went on. ‘I never asked him if we would be needed. Hardly matters now – if this madness can’t be stopped there will never be a time when we are not needed.’ Russ chortled emptily. ‘The irony of it. Horus has given us the purpose we were beginning to lack. He’s made us useful again.’

Bjorn said nothing.

‘You will inherit this,’ Russ said. ‘Look what a mess we have made of things – me and my beloved brothers. You will have to pick up the pieces.’

‘Horus caused it,’ objected Bjorn.

‘And why did he turn?’ asked Russ sadly. ‘Do we know? Has that story been told?’ He shook his shaggy blond head. ‘Remember how this happened, One-Hand. Remember it all. The Legion will need you to keep the knowledge alive.’

‘You will not leave us,’ said Bjorn, almost as if by asserting it he could be sure it were true.

‘I will one day,’ said Russ bleakly. ‘You, I am not so sure. Your wyrd is unclear to me.’

Then he moved himself, rolling his shoulders as if to throw off a cloak of lethargy. ‘But enough of this. We have work to do.’

He glanced up at the nearest viewscreen. The vast profile of the Fenrysavar crawled across the view-field, its back scorched and half broken. The Hrafnkel itself would not look much better.

‘The Khan be damned,’ said Russ. ‘He’s always gone his own way, and we can manage without his swordplay. We’ve never needed help before – it was a mistake to ask for it.’

He grinned. Something of the old bravado was returning.

‘We’ll be back,’ he said, grabbing the nape of the nuzzling wolf and ruffling it affectionately. ‘This is the lowest point. We’ll sharpen our claws and blades.’

The feral smile intensified.

‘Trust me,’ he growled. ‘They haven’t seen the last of us.’

Eleven

Dregs of Phemus
Bearers of the Word
Old lies

Shiban waited outside Hasik Noyan-Khan’s chamber, absently turning the medal over in his hand. He’d come over to the Tchin-Zar on a fleet transport during one of the brief drops out of the warp. On the trip across he had watched the emblem of the Horde of the Stone – a blunt mountain-outline, ringed by fire – grow steadily larger as he had neared the docking levels.

The Horde was Hasik’s Legion division, comprising over twenty brotherhoods. The Tchin-Zar itself was a fine ship – a long, lithe, spare-jowled predator. One day, if the fates allowed, Shiban could see himself commanding a similar vessel. Rising to the position of khan had been an honour. To ascend to noyan-khan would gild that further.

Maybe in the future. He would need many more kill-marks on his ritual sash first, and the scars that went with them.

A chime sounded on the console and the doors slid open. Hasik was standing on the far side, out of armour, his sun-wrinkled face smiling.

‘Shiban,’ he said. ‘Back with us again. How are you?’

Shiban bowed. ‘Well, noyan-khan. And you?’

‘The better for leaving Chondax.’

Hasik ushered him into a large room with roughly plastered walls. It was decorated with Chogorian hunting talismans, and Qo ceremonial spears hung in racks. Six viewports along the left-hand side of the room were shuttered against the aether.

Hasik strolled across a hide runner towards two low-slung wooden seats, slatted and bound in the old plains manner. He sat in one and gestured to the other.

‘You reached the fleet just in time,’ he said. ‘Any later and you’d have been fighting through them to get to us.’

Shiban sat, the medal still clutched in one hand. ‘Why were they even there?’

Hasik shrugged. ‘We don’t know. This isn’t like the old wars.’

‘Evidently.’

Hasik regarded him. ‘Being khan suits you, Shiban. Yesugei always spoke well of you.’

‘He is generous.’

‘Not always. How was the work on Phemus Four?’

‘Foul.’ There was little point in hiding the truth. ‘For a long time I wondered why it had taken so long to purge. Once I got there, I stopped wondering.’

Hasik chuckled. ‘The task is always completed, though.’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘Why did you wish to see me?’

‘About Phemus. There were things that concerned me.’

‘Oh?’

‘I was told the delay in compliance was down to the hain,’ said Shiban. ‘They did fight hard, but it felt wrong. The whole planet felt wrong.’

‘It was a difficult campaign.’

‘No more so than many others. I asked my brotherhood to look harder.’

‘And what did they find?’

‘Bodies,’ said Shiban. ‘Buried, with legionary blade wounds and no sign of greenskins around them.’

‘Legionary blades? You are sure?’

‘My Apothecary made a careful study. He is sure. I was going to ask you if you had received any similar reports.’

Hasik placed his hands together. ‘None at all.’

Shiban nodded slowly. ‘That is a shame. I had hoped to find some explanation.’

‘Other than the one you have. Tell me what that is.’

‘No, I do not have one. There were no other deployments on Phemus. We were alone with the greenskins.’

Hasik thought for a moment. ‘But you think there were others.’

‘No.’ Shiban shook his head, still caught between several half-worked theories. ‘I do not know. My first thought was strife between brotherhoods. Then the Alpha Legion arrived at Chondax – it crossed my mind that… But why would they?’

‘That Legion’s actions are never obvious,’ Hasik sighed. ‘Perhaps even to them. Have you consulted others?’

‘Outside my brotherhood, no.’

Hasik nodded. ‘I authorised all deployments to Phemus. I can look again at the casualty figures – szu-Ilya keeps complete records these days. But you came here for more than that.’

Shiban opened his fist. ‘It may be nothing. We found this on one of the bodies. I have never seen it before.’

He handed Hasik the medal. The noyan-khan held it up to the light, turning it slowly.

‘This is a Chogorian mark,’ Hasik said, noting the hawk’s head. ‘Silver? Not pure, surely. Did you analyse it?’

‘We did not have time.’

Hasik handled the medal carefully, as if something about it made him uneasy. Shiban understood that – he’d felt the same way.

‘Leave this with me,’ said Hasik. ‘The zadyin arga may wish to see it. And, please, remain on the Tchin-Zar.’

‘What do you think?’

‘A battle-token? Perhaps. In any case, you were right to bring it to me.’

Shiban felt relief. It had been hard to decide whether to raise the issue at all.

‘One thing,’ added Hasik thoughtfully. ‘Do you have Terrans in your brotherhood?’

‘None.’

‘But you fought with them.’

‘On Chondax. The Brotherhood of the Moon, under Torghun Khan.’

Hasik nodded. ‘I see.’

‘If I may ask–’

‘I do not know. It might be helpful, it might not. I will make inquiries.’

Shiban saw that it was time to leave. He rose to his feet and bowed. ‘Thank you, noyan-khan. Please tell me if there is anything more to be done.’

‘There will be, I am sure.’ Hasik didn’t rise. He toyed with the medal, turning it in his hand just as Shiban had done. ‘I will contact you before the next warp translation.’

Shiban hesitated. He was pushing his luck. ‘I do not suppose–’

‘I know where we are going? Of course I do, though the Khagan has kept that knowledge close. You will find out soon enough.’

Shiban nodded. More secrecy.

‘My thanks, noyan-khan,’ he said, bowing.

The Word Bearers deep-void frigate Vorkaudar dropped out of the warp, slipping from the aether as smoothly as a dagger into flesh. The sub-warp engines keyed into a steady pattern, propelling it from the jump-point and towards Miirl’s distant green orb.

Kal Zedej, sergeant of the Yesa Takdar embedded cadre and commander of the Vorkaudar, strolled to the railing of the bridge-balcony, watching the planet grow in size. It had a pleasing hue – cool, he thought, beyond the ragged swathe of tumbling rocks that orbited it.

‘Signal the outpost,’ he ordered, clasping the rail with his gauntlets.

‘They are silent, lord,’ came the reply from one of the serfs in the communications pit.

Kal’s eyes narrowed. ‘All channels?’

‘Nothing yet. I will keep trying.’

The Vorkaudar kept going, powering steadily closer.

‘Raise the void shields,’ commanded Kal. ‘Slow approach. Run a full augur sweep.’

His crew worked silently and swiftly. He watched their bald and tattooed heads bowed low over cogitator stations, strained faces lit green and orange by the glow from the pict-feeds. Long gone were the bridge uniforms they had once worn; now they were in the flowing robes of the faith, lovingly stitched by acolytes in the lower decks, covered in the tiny gold-picked writing that warded them and concentrated their minds.

Kal remembered a time when he would have risked censure for a display like that. It was preferable now – allegiances had been flushed out and the long years of secrecy were coming to an end.

It was good to know who the enemy was, to fight him openly and use his weakness against him. The pantheon smiled upon those who bore the truth with pride.

‘Anything?’ he asked.

‘Silence. Nothing over the augurs.’

‘Bring us in over it. Carefully.’

The Vorkaudar thrust closer, skirting the cartographed belt of drifting asteroids, scanning incessantly. A blip recorded on one of the sensorium feeds, followed by a crackle of static.

‘Relay Nine Eighty-Nine,’ came the voice of an augur-reader.

‘Are they hailing us?’ asked Kal.

‘Standard low-beam transmission. Recorded. No sign of activity.’

Kal blinked the feed from the sensors to his helm display. He saw the asteroid designated ‘78976-764’ rolling slowly in the void, one face riddled with dark metal scaffolds. A communications spire was visible in the centre, spiked and entwined like a minaret of lost Monarchia. There was no sign of damage, but no lights either.

He ran his filed teeth over one another. This would hold things up. It would keep him from greater things. There was no glory in this.

‘Is the station shielded?’

‘Negative.’

‘Then I will investigate. Remain in position. Notify me if anything changes.’

Kal signalled the others. Ledak had been in devotions and was irritated to be disturbed. Rovel had been doing something secretive in the bilges with mortals, one of those things that stained his gauntlets red and made him morose afterwards. It was probably a good thing that he was being called away.

They joined him on the teleportation chamber – an octagonal room clad in iron. The floor was sticky and coppery, and there were scratch-marks on the lower walls.

‘Is this necessary?’ asked Ledak, his voice surly.

‘Essential,’ said Kal. Rovel was muttering to himself and fingering his chainblade’s hilt.

Kal silently sent the command to activate the chamber. He could remember when teleportation had always been a clumsy matter of battleplate locators and pseudo-science. So much easier now that some superstitions had been cast off.

‘By your will,’ he ordered, scanning the outpost floor plans.

The chamber filled with a dense crackle, hot even through his power armour. For a few seconds he felt the familiar rush – the balmy sensation of weightlessness, the roaring in his ears. There were times when he envied those who had delved deeper into the mysteries and stared directly into the abyss.

Then it was over, and the aether ripped away into tattered slivers around him.

‘Dead,’ said Rovel.

Kal looked around warily, and agreed. The outpost’s command chamber was empty – no lumens, no bodies. A few screens still fuzzed with static, throwing a flickering light across the otherwise pitch-dark space.

He drew his bolter. ‘Check for targets,’ he voxed, gently expanding the range of his proximity detectors.

Ledak moved towards the centre of the circular chamber. An empty throne swivelled loosely on a short plinth. Rovel stomped down to the perimeter pits.

‘Abandoned?’ he speculated, sweeping his bolter muzzle lazily from side to side.

‘We’d have been told,’ said Kal, moving down to the dual sliding doors and scanning the other side. ‘Are you getting anything yet?’

‘Nothing,’ growled Ledak, falling in alongside him. ‘How big is this place?’

Kal remembered the floor plans. It was a self-sufficient station designed for long-term relay augmentation. Several dozen levels, a big power plant. Could take a while to sweep it.

‘Not that big. Stay with me.’

The doors hissed open jerkily, jamming halfway across. Ledak grabbed the near edge and yanked it, nearly ripping the metal clear of the frame. They entered the corridor – a long, segmented tube with a metal-mesh floor. It was as empty and echoing as the command chamber.

‘Getting nothing,’ complained Rovel, bringing up the rear. ‘Nothing at all.’

Kal turned on him, ready to reprimand. As his did, something flashed across his vision: a spectre, stark white, death-eyed, furious.

‘What was that?’ he hissed, jerking around with his bolter.

Ledak kept walking. ‘What was what?’ He arrived at another dual set of doors at the end of the corridor.

‘Stay where you are,’ ordered Kal. He suddenly felt like he did during battle. His hearts were pumping, flooding his body with hyper-adrenaline. ‘I got something. Briefly.’

But he hadn’t. The corridor was empty, save for the three of them.

Rovel paused, still standing astride the ruins of the first set of doors. ‘Nothing,’ he said again.

‘Enough of this,’ snarled Ledak, and hit the release on the second set.

‘Do not–’ began Kal.

The doors slammed open, flooding the corridor with light. In the fraction of a second it took for his helm to compensate he saw something standing in the glare. Something immense and blocky.

Then the space filled with bolter fire.

Kal threw himself against the wall, returning fire blindly. He heard a throttled roar from Ledak behind him, quickly quelled. Suddenly his helm was filled with targets – more than ten of them, swarming close.

A bolt hit him hard, sending him crashing onto his back. He kept firing. From somewhere nearby he could hear Rovel roaring. His voice was bestial and strange, using words that Kal had never heard.

Kal pushed to his feet and sprinted back for the command chamber, ducking through the pursuing storm of bolts before leaping over Ledak’s body. As he staggered through the doors he took a shell in the back, smashing him forwards. He hit the floor awkwardly, rolling to his left to keep firing.

He saw the blurry outline of power-armoured warriors charging after him down the corridor, followed by the sharp stink of the aether. He raised his weapon to fire, watching as a target-rune zeroed in on the lead attacker.

‘Away,’ came a voice, seemingly from by his ear.

Kal’s bolter flew from his grip, clanging against the wall and rattling out of reach.

He twisted around to see a white figure standing over him, outlined in flickering lightning. The figure’s head was exposed, showing a pair of eyes blazing with gold.

Kal tried to get back up, to push himself at him, to get his hands around his throat. He was blasted back, smashed against the metal. His helm clanked down as though magnetised, and he felt worm-like strands of aetheric energy snaking across his armour. As he hit the floor, Rovel’s ranting finally gave out.

The white warrior lowered himself over Kal’s outstretched body.

‘I never liked Lorgar’s dogs,’ he said, his accent strange.

Kal stared up blearily at a weathered face dense with tattoos. He wanted to speak – to spit curses at his killer – but his tongue would no longer move.

As the last of the bolter-echoes died down, others came to join the witch; some in Salamanders armour, one in an Iron Hands augmetic shell. Kal raged at his bonds.

The witch glanced coldly at him. ‘Do not struggle. Is pointless.’

The whole place reeked of warp energy. That surprised him. The faithless Legions were meant to have renounced all that.

The Iron Hands legionary stomped up to the witch. His armour had been extended with a bizarre array of flamboyant mech-additions. His shoulder plates bulged massively, each one humming with electrostatic charge.

‘The others are dead,’ he reported in a machine-thin voice. ‘This one?’

‘Not yet,’ said the witch, gazing at Kal like he might look at a rotten slab of meat.

For some reason Kal’s mind felt sluggish, and he found it hard to place the emblems on the witch’s armour. Space Wolves? No, too clean.

He got it. White Scars. Now that – that – was a genuine surprise.

The witch glared at him.

‘I will prise open his mind,’ he said, and Kal felt the first stabs of pain at his temples.

‘Go swiftly,’ came a third voice – rich with the mournful timbre of Vulkan’s sons. ‘We should take the ship now.’

‘We shall do no such thing,’ said the witch. ‘Better to persuade.’ He leaned in close, his golden eyes glowing. ‘Now, you will listen.’

Ilya waited outside, wondering if she had intruded, unwilling to retreat without being given a signal. She felt like a fool, hovering on the margins.

Qin Xa seemed oblivious to her presence. He knelt behind screens of translucent paper, robed in silk, surrounded by coils of incense smoke. His bare head was lowered before a hung scroll, blank save for a single Khorchin character drawn in the ancient Chogorian manner.

Ilya knew that he would have drawn the device himself, dipping a thick aduu-hair brush into soot-bound ink and tracing swiftly over the paper. He might have done it a thousand times, discarding each attempt until it became perfect.

There was no arduous labour involved in such work. It was a sudden movement, dragged straight from the soul. It was either perfect or it was not; once drawn, there was no way to improve or correct it.

Ilya wondered whether Qin Xa knew that she was there. It was hard to imagine that he did not, but Halji had told her once that meditation was an absolute thing. Perhaps even Space Marines let their guard down from time to time.

So she stood in the shadows, breathing as quietly as she could, trying not to do anything to break the spell.

After a long time, Qin Xa’s head rose. He stood in a single movement and bowed before the scroll. The gesture was curiously religious, like something that might have taken place before Unity, though there was no iconography to draw upon – just the scroll, the incense in its brass censers, and the layers of paper hanging in a perfect square from the dark walls of the isolation room.

Ilya swallowed self-consciously as Qin Xa pushed the screen aside and emerged into the open. His craggy face gave no hint of surprise.

‘Szu,’ he said. ‘You are early.’

Ilya could have argued about that – she was not, she was perfectly on time, as ever, and he had no chrono – but chose not to. ‘I can come back.’

‘No need. I am finished.’

She wanted to ask him what he’d been doing, but guessed that would have been impertinent. It might have been part of the warrior rites that had made Qin Xa the most lethal swordsman in the Legion after the Khan himself, or it might have been some hang-over from the old days of Chogoris. Few of those who had been with the Khan from the beginning still lived; most had died before the Emperor arrived, and others had attempted Ascension when too old, disregarding what they had been advised by the Terran Apothecaries.

Qin Xa had made it, as had Yesugei. Perhaps Hasik was another.

‘You have completed the fleet audit,’ he said.

‘I have.’

‘The Khan wished to know the results.’

Ilya took a deep breath. ‘Seventy-three per cent of Legion’s assets were committed to the Chondax campaign. During the fighting, five brotherhoods were sequestered for other duties, though none were able to leave. Of those not committed to Chondax, twelve per cent remained on Chogoris, six on secondment with other Legions, and six were unaccounted for.’

Qin Xa nodded. ‘You are short by three per cent.’

‘No, your records are. I also did not allow for special deployments, such as those on Terra, on Mars or with the Navigator houses.’

‘Tell me then, is this standard?’

‘You mean compared to the others? No. Most Legions were deployed more thinly, led by lord commanders across a variety of fleets. As far as I know, based on the figures I saw two years ago, only the Space Wolves and the Blood Angels were more cohesive.’

Qin Xa nodded thoughtfully. His expression was serene, as it was so often with the Scars. ‘So, if someone wanted us out of the way – all of us, as a Legion – sending us to Chondax would have done the job well for them.’

‘Is that what you think happened?’

‘We are still trying to make sense of the Alpha Legion.’

Ilya smiled wryly. ‘You could have engaged them, back at Chondax.’

‘It would not have given us answers.’

‘But were you not tempted to, just a little?’

Qin Xa shrugged. ‘The Khan was. I could sense it, no matter what he ordered. But we are past that now – he has more pressing concerns. Accompany me, please.’

He moved off, opening the door into a conventionally lit walkway. Ilya trotted alongside, struggling as ever with the oversized stride of Space Marines.

‘There is a saying on Chogoris,’ said Qin Xa. ‘Better to be ignorant than wise. Many of us agree with that. We do not concern ourselves with what the other Legions do. So we were ignorant of what the rest of the Imperium was doing, and happy to be so. This is now the problem.’

Ilya raised an eyebrow. ‘You could not have known what was happening. Chondax was isolated for a long time.’

‘Yes, a strange chance.’

‘Such things happen.’

‘No, not this time. We were complacent. If Yesugei had been here he might have warned us.’

Ilya shook her head. ‘You can’t just isolate a whole subsector. You can’t just orchestrate warp storms.’

Qin Xa didn’t reply immediately. When he did, his voice was pensive. ‘You were taught that humanity has moved beyond superstition. You believe it, just like you were meant to. There are no gods, you were told, and what looks like magic is just the growing power of the human mind.’ He glanced at her almost furtively. ‘We, on the other hand, never stopped believing. On Chogoris it is called the Test of Heaven. We have always known of it. How do you think Stormseers become powerful? Our cousins on Fenris work the same source, though they would never admit it.’

He walked easily, fluidly.

‘You do not know what the warp is. None of you do. The Emperor kept those truths hidden, and for all we know he has tried to stamp out those who still understand them. The Khan never agreed with this. The two of them argued. This is the great question, szu, the one they fell out over – can you rest an empire on a lie?’

Ilya didn’t like hearing this. Much of what the Scars had told her had always sounded strange and uncomfortable, and she had learned to ignore the most esoteric of their views. But this… this sounded close to rebellion.

‘I do not–’ she started.

‘Listen,’ said Qin Xa, halting and turning to her. ‘Just listen. The warp is not what you think. It is alive. It is dangerous. It can be used. We of the Fifth would not be told otherwise, and that is why we were never trusted and why we have never been at the centre of things.’

‘That’s not how it is.’

‘It is why Nikaea happened. The Imperium is wilfully blind. Deliberately so. It has never wished to look at what holds it together.’

‘What does this have to do with Chondax?’ asked Ilya, growing flustered.

‘One can orchestrate warp storms.’

‘Nonsense!’

‘It takes enormous power, or devices of ancient origin, but it can be done.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘You need to know the Khan’s mind,’ said Qin Xa levelly. ‘You need to know what the dilemma is.’

‘So what is it? Tell me now – no riddles.’

Qin Xa looked at her with perfect earnestness. ‘When we are told that Russ has gone after Magnus, we can believe it. When we are told that Horus has become a monster, we can believe it. It is the warp, Ilya. It corrupts the finest – the greater the strength, the greater the corruption. Perhaps the Emperor himself has succumbed, perhaps the Warmaster has. In either case, it means ruin.’

Ilya looked into Qin Xa’s eyes and saw the steady certainty there. Whatever the truth of this, he believed it.

‘Then what are you going to do?’ she demanded. ‘You have a whole fleet here, burning through the void, and no one has told me where it’s heading.’

‘I am trying to tell you. We are headed for the source, to the architect. Only one soul sees the warp as it truly is.’

‘Terra,’ said Ilya, relieved. ‘So we are going to Terra.’

Qin Xa looked at her, disappointed. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Have you not been listening? We cannot go to Terra.’

He rested a hand on her arm. ‘The Khan has only ever trusted one of his brothers. If Magnus lives then all this can be salvaged – if he is dead, then the Imperium is finished for us. We are going to Prospero, szu. The answers are there.’

Twelve

One truth
Surprised to see you
Memories of Ullanor

Kal recovered himself.

‘Ledak?’ he voxed. His tongue was thick, his head hammering. ‘Rovel?’

He blinked heavily, clearing the mist across his eyes. He flexed a gauntlet – it worked. That was something.

‘Anyone?’

He pushed himself to his feet. He must have fallen. He was disorientated. Everything around him seemed to move sluggishly.

He blink-switched to the ship channel. ‘Status,’ he rasped.

The Vorkaudar’s communication operator’s voice, when it came, sounded relieved. ‘We had been concerned, lord. Your signal was lost. Is all well?’

Kal didn’t know. He felt nauseous. The space around him was empty and dark. He felt as if he’d forgotten something important.

‘I don’t have a lock on Ledak or Rovel,’ he said.

‘They were with you on the transition. We no longer have loci for them.’

Kal started to walk. The metal walls around him were scorched and dented. He ran a proximity check, and brought up nothing. He couldn’t even detect the Vorkaudar on the locator matrix. His skin prickled with uneasiness.

‘Did you find anything over there?’ queried the operator.

‘What?’

‘The outpost, lord. Do you require anything further?’

Kal stopped walking. His head throbbed with pain, slowing his thoughts and making him feel sicker. He had definitely forgotten something. Why couldn’t he think?

‘There’s nothing here. Nothing. Here.’

A pause. ‘We await orders, lord,’ said the operator, haltingly.

Kal felt like smashing his head against the wall – anything, to clear it.

‘I’m coming back.’

‘Very good. I have a strong signal for you now. Lowering voids. You may transition when–’

‘Wait.’ As soon as the operator uttered the words ‘lowering voids’, Kal remembered. The White Scar. The Iron Hand. ‘Wait!’

It was too late. The aether surged around him again, raging this time, flaring crimson as he dissolved into it. In the fraction of a heartbeat as his body hurtled between realms he remembered it all.

When he rematerialised in the teleport chamber he was not alone.

Kal’s hands leapt for his bolter, but too slowly. The White Scars witch raised a finger, immobilising him.

In an agony of frustration, Kal could only watch as the witch reached for a curved dagger. He could only watch as the blade pushed against his throat, nestling at the junction between helm and gorget.

‘How long you been corrupted?’ the witch asked.

Kal found that his lips could move again. He stared defiantly back at the White Scars legionary.

‘Since we knew the truth,’ he replied.

The witch looked at him, bewildered. ‘Truth? What truth drive you to this?’

‘The only one.’

‘One truth.’ The White Scar shook his head. ‘How foolish.’

Then Kal’s lips stopped working again. He heard the klaxons of other teleportation chambers and the heavy clump of power-armoured boots landing on metal. He felt the witch’s power withdrawing from his mind like water running from a glass.

He tried to speak again, to lash out, to get to his bolter.

But the witch wasn’t stupid. He pressed the dagger firmly, slicing clean through the armour seals. Kal felt the blade bite, parting his flesh and sinew with a hiss of faint disruptor charge, before his vision faded to black.

Yesugei pushed the body aside and strode out of the chamber. Henricos emerged from another opposite, followed later by Xa’ven and three Salamanders.

‘Disgusting,’ spat Henricos.

Yesugei looked at him quizzically.

‘Sorcery,’ said the Iron Hands legionary by way of explanation, shaking his hands loosely as if trying to shed some contagion. ‘Sorcery was the root of it all.’

‘No,’ said Yesugei, starting to walk. ‘Not at all.’

Xa’ven fell in alongside him. His hammer, held one-handed, crackled with a soft sheen of energy; he clutched a gold-limned bolt pistol in his other gauntlet. Yesugei’s eyes were drawn to the weapons. The sons of Vulkan knew how to make their tools beautiful.

‘He has a point,’ Xa’ven said.

The doors at the end of the corridor slid open, revealing two robed crew members hurrying towards the teleportation chambers. As they saw the Space Marines, their eyes widened and they scrambled to get out of the way.

‘Iron Hands technology conceals our presence on station,’ said Yesugei calmly, bursting the crews’ hearts with a single gesture. ‘My storm-craft gets us here. Even.’

‘Not quite,’ said Henricos, ignoring the mortals as they slid, glassy-eyed, to the floor. ‘Iron Hands technology is not forbidden.’

They entered a wider corridor, lit red at floor level. The space reeked of blood, and daubed sigils ran glossily down the steel panels. More crew emerged – some accidently, some drawn by the noise. Xa’ven dispatched two with shots from his bolt pistol. Yesugei silenced four more.

‘Only because is not fully known,’ the Stormseer replied. ‘Just what really takes place on Medusa?’

They passed an intersection, and Henricos paused to loose a volley of bolter-rounds down a connecting access-way, plastering it with blood and tattered robes.

‘It’s not the same,’ he growled, swivelling around to finish off a couple of stragglers. By now warning clarions had broken out. ‘I hid our signals with machines. Just devices. You tap into proscribed powers.’

‘Not proscribed to me.’

As they worked their way closer to the bridge, mortal troops in heavier armour began to arrive, dropping into defensive formations at corridor junctions and laying down waves of projectile fire.

Xa’ven pressed ahead, his armour deflecting the incoming rounds in a whirl of sparks. ‘Brothers, this isn’t really the time,’ he said, lumbering into hammer-range.

Henricos pushed to join him, taking glancing blows to his battleplate. ‘You might be right,’ he grunted, working his bolter methodically.

Yesugei came along in their wake, covered by the steady presence of the Salamanders around him. The corridors echoed with bolter-fire. The Word Bearers human troops were stubborn and committed, but no match for power-armoured opponents. They died in their dozens, clogging the walkways.

None of them ran. None screamed for mercy. They fought on, hopelessly. They were just like their masters had been.

They truly believe in this, thought Yesugei, watching more of them thrown clear by Xa’ven’s expert blows. This is now their cause.

One of the mortals broke through Henricos’s assault then and ran at the White Scars legionary. He carried a lasgun and his face was fixed rigid with determination.

Yesugei regarded him for a moment before swatting him aside, barely watching as the man’s body slammed into the wall and his weapon clanged to the deck. It was depressing to witness such fervour.

‘Take ship swiftly,’ he voxed to the rest of the makeshift squad. ‘Go fast. No honour in this fight.’

Torghun made his way steadily through the Starspear’s lower reaches. The ambient grind of the warp engines thrummed around him. The ship was travelling fast – wherever the Khagan was taking the Legion, it was with his habitual speed.

Torghun passed a few menials on the way down. They bowed and hurried on, barely looking at him.

He reached the designated location and drew up to the slide-door.

He paused for a moment. As he lifted his finger to the entry-rune, a faint chill passed through him, momentarily, like a fever-shiver.

He depressed the rune with a soft click.

‘State nature of business,’ came Nozan’s voice.

‘I can’t say,’ said Torghun.

He heard the faint whirr of a vox-detector confirming his identity, and the door slid back.

Nozan wore his cowl. Behind him the chamber was dark and flickering, as though lit by candles.

‘It has been a while,’ said Nozan.

‘And always a pleasure,’ said Torghun, pushing past him.

The chamber beyond was fuller than usual. More than forty figures stood in a loose circle, each wearing a cowl and long robes. The light was low, almost theatrically so.

Torghun took his place. Something shimmered at the centre of the circle, like air displaced by a thruster afterburn. He couldn’t focus on it. Every time he tried, his eyes slid away from it. None of the others seemed to be making the attempt, so he gave up.

‘Brothers,’ came a voice from the far side of the circle. Torghun recognised Hibou’s accent. ‘The lodge is expanded. Members from across the fleet have joined us. For those new to this, welcome. The circle will keep expanding, faster now that matters are in motion.’

Torghun listened carefully. He still didn’t know what this was about. Lodge gatherings were normally small affairs, confined to a single ship. Perhaps this demonstrated that things were finally coming to a head.

Secrecy, secrecy. Surely the need for it would dissipate soon.

‘It is difficult to do this while in the warp,’ Hibou went on. ‘Though not as difficult as on Chondax, and we can all be glad to be rid of that world.’

A few gruff chuckles. Torghun had to work not to peek under the shadow of the cowls around him. Why were they all still concealed?

‘Now that the Khagan has taken us into the void, opportunities arise – ones we have been waiting for for a long time. Try to look at the light. For those new to it, trust me, it does become easier.’

Torghun’s eyes flicked back to the circle’s centre. He narrowed his gaze, concentrating hard.

For a moment, all he saw was a faint tremor of movement – trembles, vibrations. Then something clarified: a column, less than a metre tall, hazy at the edges. It was translucent, almost transparent, but definitely there, like a pillar of glass, or maybe water, held rigid before them.

It remained hard to look at. Torghun felt his eyes sting and blinked away tears. A dim sense of nausea stirred in his stomach, accompanied by the awareness, somehow, of tremendous power boiling away close by.

‘What is this, brother?’ came a voice from halfway around the ring of bodies. Torghun didn’t recognise the speaker, but the tone was much as his would have been, had he spoken himself: uneasy, suspicious.

‘Calm yourself,’ said Hibou. ‘The nausea is normal. It fades. This is no different to the art of the zadyin arga.’

Torghun kept watching. Once he had started, it was hard to pull his eyes away.

Slowly, shapes emerged at the heart of the glass pillar. He caught a glimpse of something long and sinuous, curling around an invisible axis like a flame.

Then, more clearly, words emerged: Khorchin script, glowing a dull silver, hanging in the body of the pillar and refracted as though underwater. Torghun traced the meaning as the letters flickered in and out of existence.

Your course is known. Your destination is known. A meeting will be possible. Until then, work as you have been doing. Do not force matters. The Warmaster is aware. He approves.

Torghun felt his hearts beating fast. At the mention of the Warmaster, the pulse picked up a little more.

Hibou stepped into the circle, his face mostly hidden by his cowl. ‘What of the Alpha Legion? We were not warned of that.’

For a while, the pillar remained empty. Then, slowly, more words emerged.

It is difficult. We do not have that information. Alpharius is…

There was a pause.

…unpredictable.

‘Any instructions, then?’

You have them. Your course is known. Your destination is known. The meeting will take place. Until then, stay faithful. The truth will become apparent.

‘Is it not already apparent?’ asked another cowled figure. Torghun didn’t recognise that voice either. It was hard, clipped, heavily Chogorian. ‘Things are finally revealed. We could reveal ourselves too. There is nothing to be ashamed of. I have nothing to be ashamed of.’

Again, a long pause. Then the glass pillar glowed with movement again.

I understand. No, you have everything to be proud of. But the Warmaster arranges this for a reason. Treachery is in all places. No Legion is free of it, not even his. The Imperium’s fate depends on it. Your Legion’s fate depends on it.

What was producing the words? It almost had the character of cogitator spiel, churning out platitudes, though some of the phrases were clearly answers to questions. Torghun watched the lines of text as they spiralled and danced in the pillar, his eyes stinging a little less the more he read.

Trust to this – your Khan is as noble as he is powerful. He will see the cause for what it is. He will be shown the truths of Nikaea and the truths of Davin. We have every confidence. We have every confidence because of you all. Stay true.

The glass pillar began to ripple out of existence. The air around it closed in, swamping the fragile silver script. Torghun narrowed his eyes, trying to make out what remained.

For enlightenment. Freedom from tyranny. Fraternity. The last words were almost illegible. For the Imperium of Man.

Then it flickered out. Torghun breathed in deeply, suddenly aware of how hard he had been concentrating. His skin prickled; a line of sweat ran down the small of his back.

No one spoke for a while. Then the lights rose in intensity. When Torghun blinked, he saw reverse-colour impressions of the pillar on his retinas.

‘What was that?’ asked one of the gathering.

Hibou pushed his cowl back. ‘That is the nature of them, brother. Cryptic. Unfortunate, but necessary.’

Others, following Hibou’s lead, removed their cowls. One of the speakers, the one with the hard Chogorian accent, kept his on.

‘If we were to try less opaque forms of communication, we would be discovered,’ said Hibou. ‘The star-speakers rely on riddles themselves. Why should this be any different?’

‘What is it, then?’ asked one of the brothers. Torghun knew him – Xo Hutan, of the Brotherhood of the Hunter’s Star.

‘A conduit,’ said Hibou. ‘A way of speaking to those we will join.’

‘They are already calling the Warmaster a traitor.’

‘And you know, Hutan, that this cannot be.’ Hibou turned to the others. ‘Horus is the only one who ever treated the Khagan with the respect he is due. If we are forced to choose between a tyrant and a liberator, what would a true son of Chogoris do?’

Low mutters of approval ran around the gathering.

‘The Warhawk will see it,’ Hibou went on. ‘He will see the truth, just as we have done, when the time is right, and we are charged to deliver it.’

Nozan nodded enthusiastically. ‘The time is right.’

‘For what?’ asked Torghun. His growing sense of unease had not abated. He looked around the chamber at forty pairs of eyes. ‘For whispering around weather-magic?’ He glared at Hibou. ‘We do nothing but talk.’

Hibou smiled. ‘For now. The Legion is not yet ready for more, brother.’ He turned to the rest. ‘I know you chafe at this, but believe me, words are more important than you know. Keep speaking to those who can be made to understand. Speak quietly, go carefully, so that our number will spread. Some will never be persuaded – we have been warned of this. If the other khans order their brotherhoods to silence us I wish for a hundred of their warriors to already be our allies. Harmony will prevail. That is the outcome we should aim for. The Legion will be set on its course, and the Khagan will see that we have taken the honourable path.’

Hibou glanced back at Torghun, warning in his eyes. ‘In the end, he must choose. All we are doing is easing his decision.’

‘I did not Ascend in order to talk,’ said Torghun, disliking Hibou’s sanctimony. ‘I joined to fight.’

‘Do you really think you will not?’

For a moment the two of them held one another’s gaze. Eventually, Torghun lowered his. He didn’t even know why he was arguing. Something about the ritual bothered him, and made him irritable. His skin still prickled, as though static rippled across it.

‘So, that is all,’ said Hibou, addressing the rest. ‘We will convene whenever we may before we reach our destination. Until then, stay in communion. Keep the fire burning.’

He bowed, and the assembled lodge bowed in turn. One by one, talking amongst themselves, they broke away from the circle. Platters of food emerged from somewhere – slivers of grilled meats and cha-tazen pickles. The lodge meeting took on its more usual character and a hum of earnest conversation broke out.

Torghun saw Nozan heading towards him and slipped away, hoping to avoid talking to either him or Hibou. As he made his way towards a pitcher of something smelling alcoholic, a figure blocked his path. It was the Chogorian, the one who had kept his cowl up.

‘You don’t have to stay hidden here, brother,’ said Torghun. ‘Not if you don’t wish to.’

‘You are Torghun.’

Torghun raised an eyebrow. ‘And you are direct.’

The Chogorian pulled back the cowl. When he saw who it was, Torghun could not hide the faintest twitch of shock.

‘I am told you know Shiban, of the Brotherhood of the Storm,’ said Hasik Noyan-Khan. His tanned, scarred face looked like weather-hardened leather.

Torghun nodded, swallowing his surprise. ‘We fought together on Chondax.’

‘He gave me this.’ Hasik handed him a lodge medal.

Torghun held it up to the light. It looked very much like the one he had been given, years ago. ‘He’s a member?’

‘Not at all. He found it on Phemus.’

Torghun looked up into Hasik’s steady gaze. ‘Forgive me–’

‘You want to know, what does this have to do with you?’ asked Hasik, placing a hand on Torghun’s shoulder and guiding him to the wine pitchers. ‘I like Shiban, he is one of the best in my ordu. But things are moving fast now and he has already made some noise, and I would like to stop that.’

Torghun eyed him uncertainly. ‘What happened on Phemus?’

‘Nothing of our doing, to my knowledge. The Snakes, perhaps? But here is the important thing.’ Hasik leaned closer, and Torghun saw how deep his scar had been cut. ‘I do not wish to see him harmed. Perhaps he can be talked to. Like Hibou recommends. When the choice is made, I wish to see him on the right side of the argument.’

Torghun thought on that. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘We didn’t see eye to eye on everything. He’s Chogorian, and I’m–’

‘You are a White Scars legionary. You are a warrior of Jaghatai. This is all that matters.’ Hasik fixed him with his penetrating stare. It was hard not to be overawed by his manner. He was one of the few who had been there from the start, who had fought with the Khagan centuries ago. ‘Do this for me, Torghun. I will arrange it. Speak to him. I think he will listen. Those who fight together – they share a bond.’

‘And if he cannot be persuaded?’

‘He will be open to reason. I was.’

Hasik poured a glass of wine from the pitcher and handed it to him. Then he poured one for himself.

‘A long time ago, the Khagan told me the only enemy we had to fear was decadence. Each time he slit an emperor’s throat on Chogoris I saw him whisper the lesson to himself. Never rest. Never grow fat. Never sit on a throne, for it will become your coffin. When he told me that, I saw it was true, and I loved him more than ever, for I saw how ardently he believed it.’

He took a sip, then smiled at Torghun.

‘We do this for our souls,’ he said, and not a shred of doubt existed in his warrior’s face. ‘When the time comes, you will make him understand.’

‘You know what they talk of, all across the Crusade?’ Sanguinius had asked.

Ullanor’s steel-grey atmosphere had hung behind the Angel, making his rubescent armour shine all the more strongly. The primarch lived up to his moniker, and his flawless face had glowed with honest amusement.

It was not long after Horus’s investiture and the parade grounds still swarmed with listless warriors. It would take weeks just to arrange the landers to convey them all to the fleet in orbit above.

In the terrace overlooking the main processional, silken awnings sheltered four primarchs from the worst of the kicked-up engine grime. There you could forget, if you tried, about the billions of soldiers all trying to find their way off-world at the same time. The Khan, sitting with his brothers, wondered idly who had been given the thankless task of orchestrating it.

‘Tell me,’ said Mortarion, though the Khan could see that he was not really interested. The Death Lord had cut an isolated figure during the celebrations, uneasy in all but his own company. In that respect, the Khan had some sympathy with him.

Sanguinius leaned back in his throne, dangling a golden goblet casually in one hand. ‘They place wagers on which one of us would win in single combat. There are odds. I have seen them.’

Mortarion snorted. Fulgrim, the fourth of the gathering, laughed.

‘That has been settled, has it not? Our brother Horus wins them all.’

Fulgrim and the Angel looked similar in some ways. They had the same sculptural faces, the same flamboyant armour. Where Sanguinius looked as though he had been born wearing gold-rimmed pauldrons, though, the Khan had always thought Fulgrim looked to be trying a little too hard. In the end, he guessed that Sanguinius would have been happy to cast off his trappings; Fulgrim gave the impression that he would rather die.

‘That would seem to be our father’s view,’ said Sanguinius. ‘It won’t stop the common man making wagers.’

Mortarion shook his pale head, and the tubes running from his archaic rebreather jangled against one another. ‘Stupid.’

Fulgrim gave him an amused look. ‘Oh? Why is that?’

‘Because we were made for different fights,’ growled the Death Lord. His filtered voice never seemed to shift from a sullen register. ‘Come to Barbarus, peacock, and see how long your feathers last in the smog.’

Fulgrim’s silver eyebrows rose. ‘Perhaps I might, brother.’

‘I would not recommend it,’ said Sanguinius. ‘I have seen those chem-clouds. I suspect he would stand them longer than you, Fulgrim.’

‘Some of us had it easier than others,’ Mortarion muttered.

Fulgrim looked archly at Sanguinius. An awkward silence fell.

‘You should not regret that,’ said the Khan. The other three turned, as if surprised that he had a voice. ‘The hardship.’

Mortarion glared at him sourly. His pallid flesh almost matched Ullanor’s overcast, humid skies. ‘I don’t regret it,’ he said. ‘I could regret that only some of us gained our father’s favour, though. I could regret that.’

Sanguinius took a sip of wine from his glass, serenely unconcerned. ‘Brother, you should be pleased for Horus.’

‘Why?’ Mortarion’s expression was pinched. ‘Because he was found first? Had the longest to work with his Legion? If it had been you on Cthonia, if it had been me, we might have been in his place, now.’

Fulgrim sniffed. ‘Speak for yourself. Being Warmaster is not the only accolade.’

Sanguinius laughed. ‘No more talk of your palatine aquila, brother. You will only make him more jealous.’

‘I’m not jealous – not of Horus, nor of you,’ scowled Mortarion, missing the humour in Sanguinius’s voice. ‘You don’t understand the problem.’

Fulgrim leaned forward, clasping his long hands together. ‘Which is?’

‘While He was leading us,’ said Mortarion, ‘we fought to gain even a glance or gesture from Him. That was acceptable, for none of us are His rival. Nothing in the galaxy is His rival. Now we will fight to gain a glance from Horus, but Horus is not the architect of this. He is just one of us. It will lead to trouble.’

Fulgrim shot a tolerant glance at Sanguinius. ‘He is jealous.’

The Khan shook his head. Fulgrim could be irritatingly stupid. ‘No, he speaks the truth. It should never have happened.’

Sanguinius looked at the Khan thoughtfully. ‘I thought you, of all of us, would feel joy for Horus.’

The Khan shrugged. ‘He is the best of us, I begrudge him nothing, and I have told him so. But it should never have happened.’

‘So should it have been you?’ asked Fulgrim acerbically. Mortarion snorted again, but Sanguinius said nothing.

‘I wouldn’t have taken it,’ said the Khan.

‘Of course you would have,’ said Fulgrim.

The Khan shook his head. ‘I have no use for another title. My people give me enough.’

Sanguinius smiled. ‘My brother, I think you are the most inscrutable of us all. I know what Rogal wants, and I know what Roboute wants, but even after so long I have no idea what you want.’

‘He wants to be left alone,’ said Fulgrim. ‘To shoot off into the stars and hunt down xenos on those delightful jetbikes. They’re devilishly fast. I heard from a contact on Mars, Jaghatai, that you do strange things to your ships.’

The Khan shot him a heavy-lidded stare. ‘I heard you do strange things to your warriors.’

Fulgrim’s slender face briefly flared with anger, but Sanguinius laughed.

‘I wonder which one of you would win in a duel,’ the Angel mused. ‘I would like to see that. You both handle a blade like gods.’

‘Name the place, brother,’ Fulgrim said to the Khan. ‘I’d even travel to Chogoris, if you built a palace to keep the dust from my armour.’

The Khan felt the insult. It stabbed at him, deeply, but his expression never changed. They could never know, none of them, how much their closed fraternity rankled him.

‘You would lose,’ said the Khan.

Fulgrim grinned, but there was something fragile in it. ‘Oh?’

‘You would lose because you would treat it like a game, like you treat everything, and I would not. You would lose because you know nothing of me, and I know everything of you because you shout it from the turrets of your battle cruisers. My prowess remains unknown. You have some reputation as a swordsman, brother, but I make no boast when I tell you I would leave you choking on it.’

Fulgrim’s cheeks flushed. For a moment, he looked like he would go for his blade. As ever, Sanguinius’s calm smile soothed the moment.

‘Now I regret bringing this up,’ he sighed. ‘In the cause of peace, shall we put this stupidity behind us? We are not at war, and never likely to be, and that is truly a blessing.’

‘Who’d have thought it?’ said Mortarion to the Khan, a shrewd glint in his rheumy eyes. ‘You do have your pride.’

‘As do you.’

‘Then what would be the wager on us, brother?’ asked Mortarion. ‘What would you pay, if we fought?’

The Khan sighed. ‘No. I grow tired of–’

‘Tell me,’ Mortarion insisted. ‘Or do you only consider the odds with sword-dancers?’

The Khan stared back at him. As he did so, he realised that, of all his seventeen brothers, Mortarion was the only one who, like him, had remained on the utter margins during the Great Crusade. Even Alpharius had played more of a role at the centre. The Death Lord was as mysterious to him as the warp.

Intriguing.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, truthfully enough. ‘It would be interesting to find out.’

Mortarion laughed then, but what could be seen of his expression was crooked. His whole face seemed arranged for dourness, as if levity risked cracking it.

‘That it would,’ he said. ‘But we have nothing to fight over, you and I, so breathe easy.’

‘No?’ asked Sanguinius, seriously this time. ‘Not even the Librarius?’

The crooked smile faded. ‘That’s different.’

The Angel took another sip of wine. ‘How so?’

‘You’ve not heard the news, then. Our father has taken the matter in hand. I know you take your creation seriously, but you must know it couldn’t be suffered to go on.’

Fulgrim looked intrigued. ‘What do you mean, taken in hand?’

‘There will be a reckoning.’ The Death Lord shot a wry glance at the Khan, as though revelling in some secret knowledge that would become public very soon. ‘I’ll be there, when it happens. I hope you will be there too. Some fights are too important to be left to advocates.’

‘Your mind is not on this, lord.’

The Khan stirred himself. He had no idea where the memory had come from. Ullanor impinged on his thoughts ever more frequently. It was becoming a problem.

He bowed in apology to Ilya, who sat opposite him. The candles were burning low, and the Go board was half-populated with a straggling, inconclusive game.

‘No, it is not,’ he admitted.

Ilya reached for her glass. ‘We can play some other time. I’m getting better, though, don’t you think?’

The Khan rolled his shoulders absently. They were tight, and needed movement to loosen them.

‘You are learning.’

Ilya sat back in her seat. ‘Qin Xa told me where we’re going.’

‘Did he?’

‘He also wanted to know if the White Scars were typical.’

‘In what way?’

‘Legion cohesion. Singular deployment.’

The Khan scratched the back of his neck. ‘Chondax did that to us. I’d rather have let the khans follow their own course.’

‘You could have done.’

‘Not anymore.’ He reached for his own drink and took a swig. Fermented aduu milk. Not a popular choice, even in his own Legion.

Ilya looked at him seriously. ‘Lord, do you remember when I met you?’

The Khan nodded.

‘Horus was there too,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if you were expecting him. If so, it was unkind not to warn me.’ That had been the last time they had spoken before the veil had fallen. ‘I remember how you were, the two of you, so I understand a little of the decision.’

The Khan raised an eyebrow. ‘Do you?’

‘Maybe not. But I did think you were like brothers. I can see how you might not want to believe… Well, that…’

The words dried up. The Khan watched her struggle for a while.

‘This is not about emotion, szu,’ he said. ‘If Horus has committed crimes then I will hunt him, just as I would Russ or Alpharius.’

‘We have orders from Terra,’ said Ilya, getting to the heart of it. ‘If things are unclear, surely we follow those first.’

The Khan took another sip of milk. ‘Do you have family?’

‘None living. I had a brother.’

‘Suppose you received notice of a dispute between your father and your brother. Suppose you could not verify which one was in the right. Suppose you had a… difficult relationship with your father. You had to choose. Would it be right, if nothing else were known, for you to side with one or the other? Do they not both have a claim on your loyalty?’

Ilya’s grey eyes did not flicker. ‘What is difficult about the relationship with the father?’

The Khan paused. ‘You share different beliefs.’

‘Significant ones?’

‘Over the destiny of mankind.’

‘That is fairly significant.’

‘Yes.’

Ilya shrugged. ‘Terra is where my loyalty is. I swore oaths to the Departmento. For you, this is about strife within the family. For me, it is about where the orders come from.’

‘Orders are not important,’ the Khan said. ‘Oaths, on the other hand, are. We shall see who has been keeping theirs.’

‘Why? What do you hope to find on Prospero?’

‘I hope to find my brother.’

‘And if the rumours are true?’

‘Then at least I will know who to believe.’

Ilya hesitated. ‘But what do you think?’

For the moment the Khan said nothing. The outcome of the game on the board before him was still unclear – it could go either way. Some strategies were yet to play out, including the one he had launched at the very beginning.

‘I would know if Magnus had died. It would take a lot to convince me he was gone.’

He finally reached for a token and placed it on the grid. It didn’t change much.

‘But we shall be there soon,’ he said. ‘Then the answers will come.’

Thirteen

What you become
At speed
Laugh when you are killing

The Word Bearers ship took a long time to subdue. None of the crew laid down to be taken prisoner – they just kept fighting until the end. When their lascarbines and autoguns gave out, they reached for curved knives. When those blunted, they clawed with their hands and teeth.

There was something particularly pathetic about watching a mortal try to dent ceramite with fingernails. Their fingers would shred almost instantly, leaving nothing on the armour’s surface but long stains.

For Xa’ven it had been a monotonous task, cleansing that ship. He had none of Henricos’s fury to drive him, just his old dedication to performing his duty diligently. He looked into the faces of those whom he had killed and saw ruined lives behind their eyes. Even as his bolter kicked or his gauntlets ripped, he wondered what must have taken place to fuel such zeal.

Hundreds died before the end. The bridge levels were cleansed first, after which the long purge down to the bilges began. Servitors, who would work on no matter who was in charge, were left alone. Senior mortal officers were taken alive and handed to Henricos, who fitted them with cortical dampeners. After that they were acquiescent enough, though the slack expressions on their faces were unsettling.

After Henricos had taken control of the Vorkaudar’s drive system, they blasted clear of the outpost on Miirl and back out into the void. The rendezvous with the Hesiod and the Sickle Moon passed off smoothly – the three ships made their way into the trackless depths and hung silently, invisible to all but the most powerful long-range augurs.

It would have been good to head back into the warp straight away, but the Stormseer needed answers. That, after all, was why they had waylaid the Vorkaudar in the first place.

So Xa’ven stood with Yesugei and Henricos in the bowels of the Word Bearers vessel. The vast chamber around them was perfectly circular, a vertical shaft that soared far above their heads. Words ran around the walls in unbroken screeds of flowing runes. Xa’ven could not read what they said. He doubted many could.

The light around them was lambent and uncomfortable, and it had no obvious source. Obsidian-black walls flickered as though licked by tongues of flame.

‘What makes this different to the others?’ asked Xa’ven.

‘It’s the biggest,’ said Henricos. ‘That makes it the most powerful.’

Yesugei nodded. His expression was bleak. ‘I can sense it.’

Xa’ven stared at the object of their attention. A giant machine rose up before them, over twenty metres high and more than thirty across. Its surfaces were covered in oily conduits and pipework. Grilles glowed with lurid shades – green, orange, blood-red. It hummed and growled, sending plumes of smoke spiralling up the shaft above, and organic splatters of dark liquid stained every opening. The floor around it was covered in bones. Whenever Xa’ven moved, he crushed another one.

‘Can you access?’ asked Yesugei.

Henricos looked up at the machine. Xa’ven could hear the whirr of his ocular implants running scans.

‘Maybe,’ he grunted. ‘Give me time. I don’t understand a lot of it. They’ve bastardised some of the units with things I don’t recognise. Is that… Sweet soul of iron. That’s blood. They’re cooling it with blood.’

Xa’ven winced. It was hard to comprehend just what had happened to Lorgar’s Legion. ‘How long will you need?’ he asked.

Henricos turned to him and laughed harshly. ‘A few days? A lifetime?’

Yesugei placed a reassuring hand on the legionary’s shoulder. ‘Do what you can, brother. I am grateful.’

Henricos almost recoiled from Yesugei’s touch before relaxing. He was still tightly wound: putting the Iron Hands legionary in charge of a mechanical task was a good idea. It would keep his analytical mind busy, preventing him from brooding on other matters.

Xa’ven turned to Yesugei. ‘Then, must we?’

Yesugei nodded. ‘Lead on.’

The two of them left Henricos alone in the circular shaft and made their way along the bloody, stinking corridors outside.

‘Never suspected… this,’ said Yesugei as they walked, gazing around him at the filth scrawled on the walls. ‘You?’

Xa’ven shook his head. ‘I served with them once. Years ago. Good fighters, but I never liked them.’

‘Thought Salamanders liked everyone.’

Xa’ven chuckled. ‘Too pious for me. And their primarch. I should not be disrespectful, but…’

They started to climb, back up into levels where the lighting worked more reliably. Mortal serfs in rebreathers and wearing White Scars livery saluted as they passed.

‘Perhaps we should have asked more questions,’ said Yesugei.

‘Well, now is the time to start.’

‘I fear so.’

They reached their destination: a pair of heavy blast-doors, riveted and multi-panelled. Twelve guards stood outside them, each in carapace armour and carrying a blunt-muzzled lascarbine. They saluted as the two Space Marines approached, and the doors’ hydraulics wheezed into life.

The chamber on the far side was tiny, just a few metres in diameter. The walls were covered in white ceramic tiles, and a harsh strip-lumen hung from the ceiling. A vertical metal frame stood in the centre, onto which was shackled a Word Bearers legionary. Adamantium bands pinned him at the wrists, ankles, neck and lower torso. He was out of his armour, wearing a harsh smock that reached his knees. Snatches of ritual script had been tattooed into his flesh, running down from his neck to his feet.

He glared poisonously at them as they entered. The doors shut, sealing the three of them inside the chamber. For a few heartbeats they stood looking at one another.

‘Well?’ croaked the legionary, and a line of thick blood ran down from his broken lips.

‘Your name,’ said Yesugei.

‘Take it from my mind.’

‘If I could, do you think I ask you?’

The legionary smiled. ‘Ledak. Two Hundred and Fifty-Sixth Company. Yesa Takdar.’

Xa’ven leaned against the wall. Every chamber on the Vorkaudar smelled disgusting, like long mouldered organs, but these small rooms were the worst.

‘What was your mission?’ he asked.

‘Ledak. Two Hundred and Fifty-Sixth Company. Yesa Takdar.’

Yesugei sighed. ‘We have ship. You are far from help. Talk, and we keep you alive.’

Ledak kept smiling. Xa’ven noticed that his teeth had been filed to points. That must have taken hours.

‘Do you not want to live, Ledak?’ he asked.

Ledak kept smiling.

‘What was your mission? What was your heading?’

‘Ledak. Two Hundred and Fifty-Sixth Company. Yesa Takdar.’

Xa’ven pushed himself from the wall and drew closer. ‘Why not unburden yourself, brother?’ he sighed wearily, looking directly at the legionary’s bloodshot eyes. ‘Ever since Isstvan it has been nothing but running, or fighting. I’d like to know why before I do any more of it.’

Ledak stared back. For a moment it looked like he wanted to speak. His face shone with energy, like a preacher about to explain the secret of salvation to a potential convert.

Then the light went out. Ledak shook his head, bumping up against the metal rods on either side of his temples.

‘Ledak. Two Hundred and Fifty-Sixth Company. Yesa Takdar.’

Yesugei grabbed him by the throat, pushing the slabbed cheeks up and forcing blood vessels to the surface. ‘Speak.’

Xa’ven drew in a long breath. The whole business made him feel soiled. He had just about grown used to killing his erstwhile kinsmen in the heat of battle. To see one so close, wretched and vulnerable – that was different.

‘Can you not do something with his mind?’ Xa’ven asked Yesugei.

Yesugei, still clutching Ledak’s throat, shook his head. ‘Does not work like that.’

‘But the other one, on the station–’

‘He was not prepared. It was deception, and a weak one.’ Yesugei looked at Ledak darkly. ‘Ahzek could do it. I have not his art.’

Ledak managed to leer back, somehow, with his face half crushed by Yesugei’s gauntlet. A glint of victory shone in his eyes.

Yesugei pulled his fist back then, letting Ledak’s head fall forward, and punched him hard, breaking his nose. Blood spotted across the tiles, and Ledak reeled groggily. Yesugei punched him again, and Xa’ven heard the crack of more bone fracturing.

‘Is this necessary?’ Xa’ven asked, glancing uncertainly at Yesugei. Ledak was a traitor and a killer, but still one of the Legiones Astartes. The Salamanders had never stooped to this, even with xenos, and a Word Bearers legionary was far closer to home.

‘We have no time, Xa’ven,’ said Yesugei. The Stormseer’s lined face gave away his own unease, but there was steel in his golden eyes. ‘We come here for information, not for another ship. He will know fleet movements, plans. You have better idea?’

Xa’ven looked back at Ledak. The legionary was smiling still, though his filed teeth were black with blood.

Yesugei withdrew his fist and clasped his gauntlets together. A pearl of electric-blue light kindled between his fingers. He opened his palms and lightning leapt from his hands to Ledak’s face. Crackling spears lodged fast, jutting into Ledak’s eyes and sparking across his exposed skin.

The smell of crisping flesh filled the chamber. Ledak screamed, writhing in his bonds, spasming and jerking. Yesugei kept up the pressure for a few seconds, pouring on more pain, letting the lightning dance across the legionary’s body, before halting abruptly.

Ledak slumped, breathing hard. He looked disorientated. A large chunk of his left cheek had burned away, exposing the sinews beneath. Wisps of smoke rose from his body.

‘Do not do that again,’ said Xa’ven.

‘Fleet movements,’ Yesugei told Ledak. ‘Communications. These things can save you.’

Ledak’s face hung forwards. He looked to be having trouble focusing. He blearily stared at Yesugei, then Xa’ven.

‘Le… dak. Two… Fifty-Sixth… Comp–’

Yesugei unleashed more lightning. The screaming was wet and gargling this time, hampered by a throat that was being burned away. It seemed to go on for longer.

That was enough. Xa’ven drew his bolt pistol and trained it on Yesugei.

‘No more, brother,’ he said quietly.

Yesugei turned, shocked. The lightning died out, and Ledak’s charred face slumped again.

‘You draw your weapon?’ asked Yesugei, incredulous.

‘Do not make me use it.’

The White Scars legionary hesitated, as if wondering how many enemies he truly had in the chamber. ‘We have no time. They know deployments. We need to know.’

Xa’ven nodded. ‘We will discover them. Henricos is working on the machine.’

‘You think they would not do this to us?’

‘That is my point, brother.’ Xa’ven held the pistol steady. ‘You have seen what is on this ship. You have seen what they have become. You were as disgusted as me.’

Yesugei shook his head in frustration. ‘We need to know. Cannot fight without information. Cannot locate Legion.’

‘I agreed to join you,’ said Xa’ven steadily. ‘I will fight with you to find your Khan. I will die to do it, if it takes the war to the enemy. But we both have our primarchs’ example, and when I see him again I will not look Vulkan in the eye and tell him I forgot my vows.’

For a moment, Yesugei looked defiant, as desperate as a cornered animal. The thirst for knowledge, for more speed, burned in his every gesture.

Ledak coughed then, choking up blood and bile. His face was ruined, a mess of muscle and raw fluids. If he had been a mortal such wounds would have undoubtedly killed him.

Yesugei looked at his handiwork, and the fervour left his face. He lowered his gauntlets. His golden eyes betrayed a brief sense of horror, as though he were seeing the contents of the room for the first time.

‘You shame me,’ he said. ‘For a moment–’

Xa’ven holstered his weapon. ‘I have lived with it for longer, that is all. At the start, I too would have done it and not cared.’ He looked at Ledak’s open sores. ‘Become like your enemy, though, and he has your soul.’

‘Something Vulkan said?’

‘It is something he might have done.’

Yesugei drew in a deep breath. He looked tired. Xa’ven guessed that expending his power on the station and during the aetheric teleportation had drained him badly.

‘We need to know,’ Yesugei insisted.

Xa’ven pressed the rune to open the doors. ‘We will, weather-maker.’

‘Time is against us,’ said Yesugei.

‘Trust in Henricos,’ said Xa’ven, ushering him from the chamber. ‘I have learned to. Iron Hands are a strange breed, but, believe me, they never give up.’

He glanced back at the prisoner hanging from the shackles.

‘We all have that in common still, at least.’

The jetbike tore down the tunnel, roaring like a living thing. Shiban drove it hard, tilting over in the saddle to avoid the obstacles as they rushed to meet him. The space around him was tight – just a few metres wide in the sharpest sections – and spiteful with lethal polyps of metalwork.

The machine shuddered beneath him. The drives thundered, the exhausts flamed. A bulkhead swept up out of the dark and he angled hard. A crossways strut followed it and he ducked low.

The proving ring on the Tchin-Zar was five kilometres long: over two kilometres on the straights, sandwiched between a pair of fearsome hairpin corners. It was little more than a void between enginarium zones, left empty by a Legion that valued its fast-attack speeders. Mastering a jetbike required hours in the saddle, and the skill could be forgotten, so the battleships maintained training circuits in their depths.

Shiban leaned forward, adjusting his weight fractionally, tipping the nose to avoid a tangle of piping before gunning the power to pull clear again. Iron-dark engineering elements blurred past. He might have been speeding through the heart of some forgotten metallic world.

The bike responded well. It was the last of those that had borne him on Chondax, and the refitters had done a good job of dragging the dust from its filters and cleaning the blood from the ploughshare fairing.

It took him a while to catch the sound of his pursuer. Down in the proving tunnels it was hard to hear much over the echoing growl of his own steed.

Shiban smiled, and depressed the throttle. Locator runes sped by on his helm display – flickering outlines of red against a blurred backdrop of raw black. He saw the signal trailing him, a few hundred metres back but closing.

Try harder.

The end-course switchback approached at speed. Shiban hurtled into it, refusing to brake until the very last moment. The jetbike chassis quivered, barely containing the enormous power booming from the drives.

Only when the corner-apex surged into visual range did Shiban jab on the air brakes. The inertia threw his body forwards; he felt the blood rush to his head. A heavy metal beam straddled the way ahead and he rolled to one side to slide under it. Beyond that, the tunnel pulled sharply left, twisting hard round under the foundations of immense engine housings. For the first time he heard the hammering of combustion other than his bike’s – the grind of fusion reactors blazing away far above.

In a second he was round, skidding tightly through the confined airspace before kicking the engines into full burn again.

He had nearly taken it too fast. The jetbike’s compensators whined at full pitch; the right flank grazed the tunnel’s inner wall, sparking in the dark.

He laughed out loud, picking up speed. The noise was exhilarating. He could hear nothing but the resounding beat of engines and smell nothing but exhaust-smog.

He glanced at his helm display.

Still being tailed. Impressive.

Shiban boosted under a skeletal gantry before applying another full burst. A long straight yawned away from him, weaving between the vastness of the battleship’s internal structures.

He felt sharp. It had only been a short while since he had been hunting across the lava-plains of Phemus IV. His reactions, honed upon the backs of Chogorian aduun, were as reliable as his glaive.

But he was being caught. The signal behind him grew, looming out of the darkness like a dogged ghost.

He laughed again, and went even faster. The end of the tunnel swept towards him. Even at forty per cent thrust, a jetbike could eat the distance up on a short track with terrifying speed.

I will lose you at the Pincer.

Shiban let the bike slide left a fraction before feeding it more power and skirting a jutting mass of burned-out cargo feeders. He skidded under the pile-driver foundations of a big fuel conduit and lurched wide.

The Pincer shot towards him out of the dark – a narrow aperture formed by two close-knit brace columns. The hole between them was barely three metres wide. That was hard enough to thread under normal conditions. In the dark, hampered by the confinement and extreme speed, it was a pleasingly dangerous test.

Shiban accelerated, concentrating hard as he tore into range. Then his engine kicked, rocked by a stray exhaust discharge, sending him a fraction high.

Shiban jammed on the air brakes, tensing as the Pincer’s top section raced towards him.

There was no time to do anything but duck. Ragged ironwork cracked into the top of his helm, nearly stunning him, but he smashed his way through in a shower of sparks.

The tunnel on the far side spun drunkenly, and Shiban had to work hard to control his mount. Gritting his teeth, he pulled the prow up just as it risked crashing into a solid mass of adamantium deck-bracing.

He recovered position, but his speed had taken a hit. He opened the throttle again, only to see his pursuer shoot past overhead. The rider must have come through the Pincer at insanely high speed.

Shiban laughed for a third time, lost in the glorious foolishness of it. That was riding. It would not have shamed the Khagan himself.

By then the final corner was approaching fast, and Shiban eased off. The rider ahead of him did the same, and the tunnel filled with the thick smoke of thrusters powering down.

A few seconds later, the whole track flooded with light. Hatches split open above them, hissing from banks of angled pistons, exposing jetbike hangars in the vaults overhead. Shiban continued to decelerate, coasting up to the nearest docking berth. He was still smiling.

The rider ahead of him nudged up into a berth further along. Two segmented claws reached down from the roof-space and grasped his jetbike fore and aft. The rider dismounted before the machine could be hauled up and away to the servicing bays, leaping over to a steel gantry to his right.

Beyond the gantry stretched the main body of the hangar – immense, curving and brightly lit, swarming with servitors and speeder maintenance crews. Other Legion riders strode across the capacious floor space towards their prepared mounts, armoured and ready to descend down to the proving ring themselves.

The claws descended for Shiban’s jetbike. He leapt from the saddle as the machine was pulled past the gantry, and strode over to the victor, worried that he would leave before he had the chance to congratulate him.

‘Brother!’ he cried. ‘Fine riding!’

The rider withdrew his helm with a twist and ran a gauntlet over his sweat-glossed forehead. ‘You make it hard to beat you, Shiban Khan.’

Only when he spoke did Shiban recognise him: the Terran from Chondax, the one who had fought through the Grinder at his back. He looked unchanged under the hard lumens of the hangar – stocky, tall, his scar faint on his cheek. Shiban had not expected to see him again. In a Legion of so many thousands, Brotherhoods came and went like summer sparrows.

‘Torghun Khan,’ Shiban said, reaching to clasp him by the hand, surprised but not displeased. ‘How are you here?’

Torghun shrugged. ‘The fortunes of war,’ he said. ‘You will share a drink with me?’

Shiban hesitated. He had no idea why – it was good to see Torghun again.

‘With pleasure,’ he said, smiling. ‘Lead on.’

‘So what happened for you after the White World?’

Torghun looked equivocal. ‘There was work to do in the canyons. We hadn’t cleared them out. Not all of them.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘Or it hadn’t been done properly.’

Shiban smiled. ‘Really?’

They sat at a table in one of the Tchin-Zar’s many refectory chambers. This one was reserved for legionaries, and was empty save for the two of them. Even the White Scars, who were not as slavishly devoted to duty as some Legions, took refreshment only sparsely between the demands of combat conditioning.

Torghun swilled his drink in its metal cup. ‘They recruited a Terran woman after that. She has the ear of the Khagan, I’m told. There was some reorganisation.’

‘Did you see fighting again?’

‘No. Not after the last of the hain were rooted out.’

‘Ah. Sorry.’

‘It’ll come again.’

Shiban tried not to study Torghun too obviously. He looked no different. For some reason, the Grinder campaign remained vivid in his memory even when so many other exercises had faded. It had felt then like the ending of something old and the beginning of something new. Only now was the shape of that novelty becoming more apparent.

‘Did it change things as you hoped it would?’ asked Torghun.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Being there, at the end, with the primarch.’

Shiban thought. ‘I do not know. We were ordered to Phemus. We barely had time for our death rites. Do you remember Hasi?’

‘I do. He died?’

Shiban nodded. ‘And Batu. Only Jochi came with me.’

Torghun cradled his cup in two hands. ‘You took many casualties. That’s the price of speed.’

Shiban smiled ruefully. ‘As you warned me.’

Torghun looked instantly apologetic. ‘I did not mean–’

‘I know.’ Shiban took a sip of his drink. ‘I thought about what you told me on Chondax.’ He caught Torghun’s sceptical expression. ‘Believe me, I did. I have become an exponent of what you said. Your warriors were more flexible than mine. I have tried to teach them these things.’

Torghun raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m surprised.’

‘Do not be. The galaxy is changing.

‘That it is.’ Torghun stared at his drink, still taking none of it. ‘And what do you make of it?’

That was the question. ‘What do you wish me to say?’

‘You’re the poet,’ said Torghun. ‘You have words for everything.’

Shiban’s eyes flickered up for an instant, scanning for mockery. He had never been able to tell, not with Torghun. ‘I trust the Khagan,’ he said. ‘But you knew that already. He will understand more than we do.’

Torghun smiled wryly. ‘He could share the knowledge a little more.’

‘He will, in time. I am content to wait.’

Torghun pushed back in his chair, and the reinforced metal struts flexed under his armoured weight. ‘I admit, it was enjoyable to see the Alpha Legion scatter like that.’ His mouth creased at the corners. ‘Slippery bastards. I wonder what they thought when they saw the Swordstorm coming at them.’

Shiban shared the smile. ‘They would not have had much time to think.’

Torghun laughed. ‘True.’

A silence fell between them. The clink and slam of menials working nearby intruded, echoing in from a capacious serving area. The floor trembled as a flight of jetbikes thundered underneath them, just a few decks down.

Torghun spoke again, finally. ‘Shiban, what is happening?’

‘I do not know.’

‘No one does. You know we’ve been ordered back to Terra?’

‘I do.’

‘And they’re saying Russ has finally gone rogue?’

‘Not only him.’

Torghun pushed his chair back. ‘I wanted to see you, because you always said that it couldn’t last. I remember you did.’

Shiban did not remember saying that. ‘Everything changes.’

‘Lines are being drawn. Every time we consult star-speakers they give us a different riddle, but it’ll come out soon. Someone is lying.’ He looked carefully at Shiban. ‘And it’s in the Legion, too. I begin to suspect…’

Shiban’s brow furrowed. ‘Say it. You came here to do so.’

Torghun leaned forward. ‘Brotherhood. That’s the tie that binds us. I saw it in the Luna Wolves. They had groups. Informal groups. They would meet, renew warrior vows. It was tolerated. The Warmaster, they told me, fostered them.’

Shiban listened. ‘The Warmaster?’

‘So they said. It’s a good system. It breaks down ranks. Information is exchanged. It helps with trust.’

‘You are in one of these?’

Torghun nodded. ‘There’s nothing sinister. It’s a fraternity. You must have had them on Chogoris – warrior lodges.’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘Well, Chogorians are in them. They outnumber us now. That’s the way things are going, right?’

Shiban didn’t smile. He felt like he was being manoeuvred, and that made him tense. ‘You were part of this on Chondax?’

‘I dip in and out. Have done for a few years. Some have been involved for much longer. But, look, it’s nothing serious. I was just reminded of what you’d said, and I thought you might be interested. We’re all warriors. Some of the finest in the Legion are members. You’d be welcome. I could speak for you.’

Shiban took another sip. ‘I have my Brotherhood.’

‘Of course. As do I. It doesn’t replace that.’

‘Then what is the point?’

Torghun looked nonchalant. ‘Like I said, to talk. To share fellowship. Sometimes it’s good to forget about being a khan and just be a…’

‘Brother.’

‘Exactly.’

Shiban nodded slowly. ‘So, this is why you came to find me?’

‘I heard you were on the ship. It seemed like an opportunity.’

Shiban pursed his lips. ‘You ride a bike fast. I do not remember you riding that fast.’

Torghun snorted. ‘I had to, to catch you. You came close to taking your head off.’

‘They are built for speed. It would be a shame to waste it.’

‘It’s not all about speed.’

‘Yes, so you keep telling me.’

Torghun pushed his cup to one side. ‘It’s an offer, that’s all. You know as well as I do that choices are going to have to be made. The Warmaster’s sent his request for assistance.’

‘As has Dorn.’

‘Yes, after being silent for… how long? When did Terra last seek us out?’

Shiban felt incredulous. ‘You’re Terran, brother.’

‘I’m Legiones Astartes,’ said Torghun, firmly. ‘I haven’t set eyes on the Throneworld in a hundred years. This is about what’s right.’

Shiban looked at him steadily. ‘The Khagan will decide. We could wait for that.’

‘Yes. Yes, of course he will. When, though?’ Torghun placed both hands on the table before him, and forced a smile. ‘I should learn patience. I know I should. Consider it a failing.’

Shiban kept watching him. Everything he had told Torghun was true: he had learned from him. He did respect his way of war. The lack of direction from the primarch was disconcerting, almost as much as the inexplicable presence of the Alpha Legion had been.

Torghun reached down and withdrew a casket from his belt. ‘It’s nothing much, but these count as badges of inclusion.’ He opened the casket and tipped a silver medallion out into his hand.

Shiban kept his surprise hidden. Just as before, on Phemus and afterwards, he did not like the look of it. Despite the moon-device and lightning sigil, it did not look Chogorian. Chogorians were not silversmiths; when they worked metal, it was bronze or iron.

‘I have seen one of these before,’ he said quietly.

Torghun toyed with the medal. He seemed unwilling to let it go entirely. ‘I’m surprised. As a general rule, they’re kept hidden.’

‘Yet you show me yours.’

‘Yes, because you’re a candidate.’ Torghun closed his gauntlet over the medal and replaced it in its casket. ‘You’d get one yourself.’ He smiled self-consciously. ‘Just a token, nothing more.’

Shiban watched the way Torghun’s fist closed tight, and somehow doubted that. ‘I have heard of these lodges.’

‘Of course.’

‘I did not stand for any of it in my Brotherhood. I thought the Legion was enough, and I have a token already.’ He gestured to his scar, which, in the Chogorian manner, was deeper and whiter than Torghun’s. ‘That is not hidden.’

Torghun bowed. ‘I take your point.’

Shiban sighed then. Torghun was not a skilled deceiver – perhaps that was something to draw comfort from. ‘Hasik sent you.’

Torghun raised an eyebrow. ‘That obvious?’

‘I went to him about a discovery I made on Phemus. Now you turn up showing me the same thing.’

Torghun spread his hands apart in a gesture of resignation. ‘This isn’t a conspiracy, Shiban. Is it not reassuring, that the noyan-khan is a part of this? He was there at the beginning.’

Shiban thought of Yesugei then. The zadyin arga had been there at the start too. Where was he? Shiban, like many others, missed his quiet presence at the heart of the Legion. It was no coincidence that matters had drifted in his absence.

‘Does the Khagan know?’ Shiban asked.

‘About Hasik? That’s between them, I’d say.’

‘No, I would not say. If the Khagan knows, that changes everything.’

‘I don’t know, Shiban. I’m not really that senior, I’m just one of many.’ Torghun looked evasive. ‘But I would guess he does. Not much gets past him, I’d think.’

Shiban pushed back from the table. He felt fatigued from the ride, and needed to cleanse his mind with meditation. ‘I said it could not last, did I?’

Torghun nodded.

‘Perhaps it cannot. Everything is fluid. For the first time I can remember, we have no direction. We have nothing to hunt that we can see.’

Torghun let him speak. Shiban didn’t really know where the words came from. ‘You have not convinced me,’ he said. ‘I do not trust the lodges, but we fought together. You came back for me at the Grinder – do you remember? – and I do not forget. So I will come. I have tried to open my mind. This may be a part of that.’

Torghun looked genuinely grateful. ‘Good. That’s all I ask. If you don’t approve, it’s just between you and me, and I don’t talk.’

‘Will they not know me?’

‘We wear… hoods,’ said Torghun, looking a little shamefaced. ‘All rather theatrical, but it helps, at the beginning. No one need know you.’

‘I see.’

‘I’m glad, Shiban. Truly I am. This, the whole thing, it is about the warrior spirit. I know you have it. I’ve witnessed it.’

‘You may again,’ said Shiban dryly.

Torghun grinned. He looked relieved. ‘It would be an honour.’

Fourteen

Machine-spirit
When everything changed
Burned world

Henricos reached for the component, stretching down into the machine’s innards. Not for the first time he regretted the intimate connection he had established with his armour. It was hard to remove almost all of it now, and it made him bulkier than he’d have liked. The instruments implanted into his pauldrons and breastplate had been helpful in jamming the augur sweeps on the outpost, but their size made it difficult to delve fully into the heart of the device. He had clambered halfway down a narrow cleft between two massive chunks of whirring metal and now felt as though he had been buried alive.

He blink-activated a sensor-frond and a sliver of metal extended from his right gauntlet. He probed again, inserting the sensor into a silver-sheathed input node and trying to understand what emerged.

The Word Bearers had done something very strange to their machines.

They no longer output binaric derivatives, but seemed to operate on a base-four internal mechanic, the reason for which eluded him completely. Some components had remained relatively standard – others had been replaced with much less efficient counterparts that made use of leather cam belts, iron cogs or even organic parts. Devotional script had been engraved everywhere, overwriting any useful markings that might once have adorned the housings.

Henricos shunted the frond-output to his helm buffers. Numbers scrolled past, glowing softly on the interior curve of his lenses. Not for the first time, he felt like smashing the whole thing.

It is a corruption. They have befouled what they were given.

Slowly, painfully, he began to piece together the principal parts of the internal workings. Some functions would take weeks of work to reconstruct, but he had isolated a cartographic projection capability amidst all the esoterica. Performing stellar mapping was notoriously difficult, so even the Word Bearers had not ripped out that equipment in favour of their own crazed constructions.

Stretching as far as his arm would let him, he pushed a binaric reader into a slot buried near the base of the cleft and activated it from his armour’s own power-source. More data scrolled down his helm-feed, and he smiled grimly.

‘Got you,’ he growled to himself, then pushed back up to his feet, scraping the edges of the machine as he extracted himself.

Even touching the traitors’ equipment made him feel soiled. Henricos remained thankful he had not had to take off his gauntlets and expose his remaining flesh to the sullied material. Then again, it was becoming hard for him to contemplate removing his gauntlets for any reason. The sight of his bionic left hand reminded him of Ferrus’s injunctions, and that reminded him of Isstvan, and that sent him into the black mood that only killing seemed capable of stirring him out of.

It was different for Xa’ven. He at least had the hope of finding his primarch and rebuilding his Legion. Henricos had seen the pict-feeds from the battlefield, routed over a hundred grainy lenses and streamed to every Iron Hands vessel in the system.

Ferrus was gone. The immortal had proved mortal, the eternal had been ended.

After that, there was nothing but rage – a howling, anguished rage that drove out reason. The fighting had remained horrific. The enemy had not stopped coming at them, wave after wave, fuelled by their early victory.

Survival, after that, had been just another curse. It would have been better to die fighting, and it was only blind chance that had kept him alive.

If he had not encountered Xa’ven, that chance would never have come. There were times in the depths of sleepless nights when Henricos hated him for that. There were other times when he admired him more than any other warrior he had ever met. It was Xa’ven who had guided them out into the void, steering the survivors clear with his calm, steady determination. Xa’ven had kept his head when even his fellow Salamanders were screaming for suicidal vengeance. He was a fine example of his gene-father’s idiosyncratic creed.

In another universe, Henricos might have been proud to follow Vulkan. His sons were admirable in almost every respect. But there were no other universes, and his loyalty to Ferrus would never die, not until his own soul was extinguished in combat, even though he knew that this would happen soon enough.

Never forget. Never forgive.

He broke free of the machine, stumbling as he negotiated the heaps of cables that snaked around its base. The circular wall of the shaft loomed up over him, vast and dark.

Henricos knelt down and activated the power units he had placed around the device. Energies snaked and spat down the power lines, rekindling the blooms of colour behind its plasma grilles. A throaty rattle kicked off somewhere in the thing’s interior, sending coughs of smoke through the organ-like exhausts.

For a moment after that, nothing much happened. Blood gurgled through the coolant tubes, energy arcs lashed between bronze electrodes on the upper housing.

Then, slowly, the chamber began to fill with light. Henricos took a step back, carefully checking the rad-levels. Above him, a swirling pattern of luminous plasma began to take shape. He stared at it, unable to read the pattern. The writing on the walls glowed brightly, fed by the power of the machine in their midst.

Then, with a realisation that made him feel thick-headed for not spotting it earlier, he realised what it was doing.

‘Xa’ven,’ he voxed, backing away further and gazing up into the shaft. ‘I think you’d better come and see this.’

Yesugei woke on the Sickle Moon just as he had woken every cycle since leaving Chogoris – with his face lathered in sweat, his hearts pumping.

The last remnants of the dream still lingered. They were identical each time: a planet of embers, the Khan fighting a nameless, faceless shadow. Yesugei always woke at the same instant.

When the Khan fell.

The Khan had never met an enemy that he had not bested. Perhaps Ferrus hadn’t either, before he faced Fulgrim. The rumour had always persisted, fuelled by whispers of past atrocities, that only a primarch could kill another primarch. Perhaps it was even true.

Yesugei uncoiled his hands from his lap. He had been sitting in the position for meditation, hoping that the old ways would ease the trouble in his mind. It had not worked.

The experience with Ledak had shaken him. He knew that he would have kept going with the storm-lightning if Xa’ven hadn’t stopped him. He would have kept going until the flesh had been dripping from the Word Bearer’s face and his screams were choked with raw blood.

Never before had he lost control like that. Killing was one thing – they had been bred to do that – but inflicting pain… That had been consigned to the barbarism before Unity.

The entrance chime sounded softly. Yesugei got to his feet and walked over to the basin set into the walls of the cell. As he did so, the door slid open.

‘A good time?’ asked Xa’ven, standing in the hatchway.

‘As good as any.’

The Salamanders legionary entered, ducking slightly. ‘The same dream?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you see any more?’

‘No. Just same. If you have ideas...’

Xa’ven smiled ruefully. ‘Sounds like Nocturne. Other than that, no.’

Yesugei rubbed water on his face, scouring the sweat from the skin. ‘About Ledak–’

‘I understand, believe me. We need to decide whether he is too dangerous to live.’

‘What do you think?’

‘For now, no. He might still be useful.’

Yesugei reached for a rough towel. ‘But you did not come to talk about Ledak.’

‘Henricos has discovered something.’

‘Ah.’ Yesugei donned his cloak, draping the ivory fabric over his devotional robes. The touch was cool against his flesh. ‘Good news?’

‘You will have to tell me,’ said Xa’ven.

They took a shuttle between the two warships. The Sickle Moon had tech-crews crawling all over it, repairing damage sustained during the warp jump. The Hesiod hung in the distance, a dark grey slab that reflected little light. The Vorkaudar was in the best condition of all of them, though the Word Bearers had done their best to defile its once-proud lines, and its long prow had been covered in glyphs, making it look almost like a xenos craft.

‘So, you were going to speak to me of Nikaea,’ said Xa’ven.

Yesugei looked away from the viewports. ‘I was.’

Xa’ven sat easily in the crew berth, hands resting upon his knees, and waited.

Yesugei drew in a long breath. ‘What you know already?’

‘Only that the Edict came in swiftly. Vulkan enacted it straight away. By the time news of Isstvan III reached us, we had no active Librarians in the Legion.’

Yesugei shook his head in disbelief. ‘What did you do with them?’

Xa’ven shrugged. ‘They took vows. They re-entered the ranks. I don’t know how many survived the massacre. Maybe none did.’

‘And you never think, just once, this is madness? You never think you throw away your strength?’

‘Some of us did. I remember arguments.’ Xa’ven looked down at his gauntlets. ‘But it was an order, direct from the Emperor. We are a loyal Legion.’

‘Hope others were less loyal. Can’t imagine Wolves giving up their priests.’

Xa’ven snorted in agreement. ‘Russ was there, though.’

‘On Nikaea? Don’t know. Not openly. He and Valdor were close, though, and whole place was crawling with Custodians.’ Yesugei leaned back against the crew berth wall, remembering. ‘At the time I thought it was real contest. The arena was full. You would have liked it, Xa’ven – volcano world, air thick with ash. Millions had come. Audience was huge, truly huge. Looked like whole Imperial Palace had travelled to be there.’

Xa’ven listened. Yesugei did not like to remember it too closely, but kept speaking anyway. As his lips moved, the images crowded back into his mind.

‘I was never meant to be there,’ he said. ‘Should have been the Khan. He discussed it with the others.’

‘Others?’

‘Magnus, mainly. Sanguinius as well. They were the three. Magnus was figurehead, most powerful, but he was not only voice. Sanguinius was always subtle. In some ways, I think he is closest to the aether. On this, though, the Khan always argued same way. He drew up most of rules for Librarius, even though his name was never in datacores.’

Xa’ven looked sceptical. ‘This was never known.’

‘No,’ smiled Yesugei. ‘Of course not. It is as I told you – Magnus never wanted Librarius. He wants every psyker to unlock his full potential. Explore it all, he says. No restraint, no guidance. They had tutelaries fluttering in their ears and speaking to them – though we did not see it. It was dangerous. It needed to be curbed, so the Khan and the Angel both created structure. They limit what psykers can do. On Chogoris, we call it the Path of Heaven. Stray from it, we tell them, and the warp will eat your soul.’

‘So you knew it was dangerous.’

‘Of course! What is not dangerous? Your Promethean Creed is dangerous. Being alive in universe is dangerous. We balance on narrow ledge. There were those who thought we are witches, ripe for burning, and those who thought we are gods. Neither could be allowed to win argument.’

‘But they did. The witch-hunters won.’

Yesugei nodded. ‘For days afterward, I thought mistake had been made that would be corrected. By the time we knew it was permanent, Legions were already reforming. So quick! You would think we were always eager to throw away our power.’

‘How did it happen?’

‘I spoke,’ said Yesugei sadly, remembering. ‘Awkward. It was in Gothic, and so I did not do well. Some oppression settled on me from somewhere. Magnus spoke too. He did what we feared – he went too far. He never understands how much fear he caused. If he stood up and said “We know we must reform, we know we must be careful,” then we might have won. But no, he preaches about knowledge and power and gives impression he is prophet. When I hear him speak, that is when I began to worry.’

‘Who spoke against?’

‘A Space Wolf priest. That was strange. I suspect he is there for some other purpose, but maybe not. One that spoke longest was Mortarion. He filled amphitheatre with poison.’

‘Mortarion. I didn’t know he was even there.’

‘Had not expected it to be him. I thought Russ might stand up, or maybe Angron. No, it was Death Lord. He had been on Ullanor too, casting shadow over everything. He has dark soul, and nothing he did on Nikaea changed my view.’

Xa’ven thought on that for a while. ‘I find it strange that his argument prevailed.’

Yesugei nodded. ‘You and I both. I told Ahriman we would weep for this, and so it was. If any ask, if all not lost in days to come, who killed Librarius, the name is Mortarion. He did it.’ Even now, the memory exasperated him. ‘Should never have been left to Thousand Sons – the Khan should have been there, standing with the Angel and Magnus. No one could accuse him of being sorcerer. It would have calmed the others, to see warrior-primarch making case.’

‘So why did he not go?’

‘Horus ordered him away.’ Yesugei stared at the floor, reflecting upon how little he had known. ‘To Chondax, just as Nikaea was preparing. We talked, he and I. He considered rejecting – he could have done – but we both thought Chondax would be over in weeks. Was only greenskins, after all.’ He gave Xa’ven a rueful look. ‘Only greenskins.’

‘So Horus ordered it,’ repeated Xa’ven. ‘Interesting.’

‘I had no idea then,’ said Yesugei bitterly. ‘No clue. Truly do not believe Horus was corrupted while on Ullanor – would have sensed something. If someone wished the Khan not to be on Nikaea, it was not him.’

‘Who, then?’

‘Who knows? Why was Chondax veiled for so long? Why is galaxy still locked in warp storms? Why does Emperor’s light falter and star-speakers’ visions fail? These are questions. A mind has been at work here, and for long time.’

Xa’ven looked up. The shuttle was gliding towards the Vorkaudar’s docking bay. ‘They did not succeed in everything,’ he said. ‘Some of us are still alive.’

‘Does your optimism ever end, just for moment?’

Xa’ven smiled. ‘Optimism? That is not what I would call it.’

The Vorkaudar’s flanks enveloped them, throwing shadows over the viewports. Yesugei felt the soft clunk of docking rods extending. ‘What you call it, then?’

Xa’ven got to his feet, ready to activate the crew berth doors.

‘Faith,’ he said, quite seriously.

The Swordstorm broke free of the warp on the system’s outer limits and immediately powered up the sub-warp drives. As it thrust clear of the jump-point and into real space, more ships of the fleet ripped into existence in its wake. The curve of the void’s edge shook as it was pierced, throwing coronae of multi-hued light spilling out into the dark. Every vessel crashed into the realm of senses at speed, spearing into existence and powering up to full velocity.

The Khan stood upon the Swordstorm’s observation balcony, fists clenched, staring at the forward oculus viewscreens. In the bridge’s tiered levels around and below him, servitors and mortal crew hurried silently to bring the ship’s systems online and run forward augur sweeps.

Qin Xa stood next to the primarch, flanked by armoured members of the keshig. None of them spoke, none of them moved. Data streamed in, glowing in rune-patterns on crystal lenses.

‘Ship signatures,’ said the primarch softly. ‘Quickly.’

From far below, the telltale whine of lances powering up could be heard. The Swordstorm’s decks shuddered as the sub-warp drives reached maximal velocity. Void shields rippled across the forward viewers even as the warp shutters clanged open and the Geller field fell away.

‘Nothing in range, lord,’ came Jian-Tzu’s voice over the bridge-vox.

‘No signals on augur sweep,’ confirmed the sensorium master, a dour and efficient Chogorian called Taban.

‘And the planet?’ demanded the Khan. He was adorned in his full battleplate with its pearl-white ceramite and gold trim. His dao blade hung from his side, the scabbard encrusted with rune-studded leather. He felt battle-tense.

‘Will be in range imminently.’

Tech-priests in the sensorium pits chattered and swayed in their long red robes, slotting mechadendrites in and out of feeder nodes.

Qin Xa’s eyes narrowed as he studied the incoming data. The only signals on the proximity spheres bore White Scars markers, fanning out into a battle spread in the Swordstorm’s wake.

‘Nothing,’ he said softly. ‘No transports. No energy-trails.’

The Khan nodded. A major system like Prospero ought to have had thousands of ship-spores hanging in the void, the chemical residue of void engine release, but the routes inbound from the Mandeville point were sterile. Unease spiked in his stomach, and he quelled it.

I will see it with my own eyes. Until then, no judgements.

The planet swam into extreme forward sensor range. Blurry pict-feeds flickered into life, clarifying rapidly as servitors adjusted the image gain logic engines.

‘It’s black,’ said Qin Xa.

‘I see that,’ said the Khan.

Prospero had once been a jewel of a world, a pale-blue orb the colour of a Terran dawn, banded with lilac and under-lit by glistening ice caps. From space it had been pristine, untouched by the industrial hyper-sprawl that had turned the Throneworld into a grey-tinged ball of rockcrete and iron.

Now it was mottled the colour of burned charcoal.

As the images picked up definition, the Khan saw vast swirls of drifting cloud, as thick and dark as those that had swept across Ullanor.

His fists clenched the balcony railing. ‘Any signals?’

‘None, lord.’

The Khan felt anger swell up within him. He had been right to come.

‘Bring us into orbit,’ he ordered coldly. ‘Instruct the fleet to blockade, then prepare for planetfall. Maintain the sweep and broaden. If you detect anything with a Fenrisian marker…’

Even then, he hesitated for a moment.

‘Kill it,’ he growled.

‘It’s black,’ said Ilya, staring hard at the viewer.

Halji did not reply. He looked grim.

‘Seriously, Halji, the whole world’s black. I’ve seen slate records of Prospero and it was beautiful. What could do that to a planet?’

‘A Legion,’ said Halji. ‘A Legion could do that.’

Ilya felt sick. ‘How many people lived there?’

‘You are our woman for numbers, szu.’

Ilya probably could have dredged the figures up from somewhere, and knew that she did not want to. Prospero had not been a death world like Barbarus, with a few hardship-maddened inhabitants clinging to their hellish lives. It had been civilised, urbane, paradisiacal.

It must have been billions.

Billions.

Her throat tightened with anger. ‘They will be punished. If this was one of ours, they must be punished.’

‘They will be, if it is in his power.’

‘We have to know, Halji.’ Ilya rounded on him. ‘We have to know who did it.’

‘We already do.’

‘I will not believe that. Could... could xenos have penetrated this far?’

Halji shook his head. His usual cheerfulness had gone. ‘What xenos? They’re all dead or dying. Nothing remains that could harm us.’

With a shock of recognition, Ilya remembered saying exactly the same thing, back when she had first met the Khan in orbit over Ullanor.

Nothing remains that could harm us, the Khan had replied. I wonder, Yesugei, how many times, and in how many forgotten empires, those words have been spoken.

It all seemed horribly prescient. She turned back to the viewport, and saw that hateful, chem-scorched orb hanging in space like a grave marker.

‘There’s nothing for us here,’ she said, her voice shaking. ‘We should never have come.’

‘He had to come.’

‘Then we should go soon. Back. Somewhere, anywhere but here.’

Halji rested his immense hand upon her shoulder. ‘Calm yourself. The answers will be on the surface.’

She drew in a shuddering breath, and reached out for the sill of the viewport. ‘I’m not going down there.’

‘You do not have to, but the Khagan will rely on you. Fleet needs ordering. We already receive orders for deployment.’

Ilya did not want to hear that. For once, she wished that they would just get on with it for themselves. For once, she felt as old as the chronos told her she was.

‘Route them to my station,’ she said, absently, unable to tear her eyes from the portal.

‘It will be done.’

‘Ensure, if you can, that the blockade is in ch’ang-pattern.’

‘It will be done.’

‘How will this end, Halji?’

The warrior looked back at her, with no hint of a smile on his hide-brown, white-scarred face.

‘Szu, this is just beginning,’ he said.

By the time the Swordstorm reached geostationary orbit over Tizca, there was no longer room for doubt. Atmospheric readings streamed in, adding to the visual evidence, and Taban’s tally made for grim listening.

‘Substantial tectonic activity, lord,’ Taban said, looking fixedly at his data-slate. ‘Atmospheric pollution levels far in excess of mortal tolerances. A result, we surmise, of heavy bombardment consistent with mass drivers from orbit, followed by secondary trauma.’

‘Secondary trauma?’ asked the Khan. ‘Which is?’

‘Unknown. We are working on it. Background radiation levels are high, but there are other… things. Cloud cover at one hundred per cent, formed largely of particulates from earlier destructive phase. Acidic residue. Toxins across a wide spectrum present in lethal quantities, and extensive volcanism across equatorial zone.’

The Khan flexed his arms. It was hard to know how to feel. For some reason he wasn’t angry – more numb. He kept expecting some grand illusion to be unveiled. Magnus might have been capable of it. If anyone could hide the true state of an entire planet, he could.

‘Life signs?’

Taban shook his head. ‘Impossible to read.’

‘Then we go down.’

‘We cannot, my lord.’

The Khan glared at him. ‘Cannot,’ he repeated, infusing the word with contempt. As if such a thing would ever deter a primarch.

Taban swallowed. ‘There is a barrier. Something in the upper atmosphere – an aetheric field, a truly massive one. We have already run the simulations. Landers will not survive it, nor drop-pods.’

The Khan shook his head. ‘Impossible. There must be a way.’

‘The world is dying, lord. The phenomenon is still growing, perhaps a result of what happened here. One does not kill an entire planet without aftershocks.’

The Khan looked over to Qin Xa, who stood waiting for orders. He had said nothing throughout the exchange. ‘Thoughts, Xa?’

Qin Xa lifted his head. ‘There is an obstacle in the troposphere,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘What of below?’

‘Hard to say,’ replied Taban. ‘We get almost nothing from the surface.’

‘But the field is confined to the upper atmosphere?’

‘It is.’

Qin Xa glanced over at a hexagonal area towards the rear of the bridge. Eighteen pillars of pure adamantium enclosed an obsidian floor, each one carved with a Chogorian rune of warding. The Khan followed his gaze, saw what he proposed and nodded with approval.

‘Excellent, Xa,’ he said.

The sensorium master made a final effort to dissuade them. ‘It will be unstable,’ he protested. ‘We may not be able to extract you, or even make vox-contact.’

‘I have every confidence in you,’ the Khan said calmly, before turning to the keshig. ‘Ready?’

Qin Xa nodded. ‘On your command.’

The Khan reached for his ornate, gold-crested helm. The faceplate was decorated with a Qo-era dragon mask in florid curls. ‘Let us go.’

The twelve Terminators stomped from the observation balcony.

‘What of the fleet?’ Qin Xa asked, his helm already donned.

‘Hasik can handle a blockade. Transmit him the authority signal. And tell him to consult Ilya – we brought her in for these things.’

Qin Xa bowed, and the Khan heard the faint click of his helm-vox switching channels.

Taban hurried after him. ‘The air is toxic, even to one blessed with your particular gifts, lord. Please do not remove your helm.’

The Khan nodded perfunctorily, taking his place at the centre of the translation grid. ‘Thank you for your concern.’

‘The terrain around the city is volatile. At the first sign of activity–’

‘You will wait for my order,’ said the Khan coolly, watching as Qin Xa joined the others.

Taban bowed. ‘Some readings were… anomalous. Would a weather-maker–’

‘Generate a locus for the heart of the city,’ ordered the Khan, ignoring the sensorium master and speaking directly to the teleportation operators.

‘It is done, lord.’

‘Activate translation.’

Taban withdrew, as did the rest of the crew still within a few metres of the teleportation platform. A force field crackled into life across the pillars, hemming in the hexagonal space between them. The bridge disappeared behind a curtain of writhing static.

A second later, it was gone.

A chill raced through the Khan’s body, just as it always did. For a fraction of a heartbeat, he had the half-awareness of being suspended over the chasm of infinity. The sensation had always been oddly reassuring, as if that were where he truly belonged.

Then the lights ripped away. He felt solid earth under his boots and real air filtering through his facemask. Even mediated by his armour, it tasted foul.

His keshig stood about him. Qin Xa stood at his shoulder. They all drew weapons – flamers, disruptor-shrouded blades, combi-bolters.

The Khan kept his sword sheathed.

Ahead of him, a scene of devastation stretched away under a darkened sky. Slivers of lighting licked against the horizon, while thunder cracked and growled in the far distance. A tangle of steel struts and crumbling rockcrete extended off in every direction. Towering frames of inferno-hollowed structures loomed up against the dull skies like skeletons. Dust drifted across what remained, heaping in grey dunes like sand. It all glinted faintly in the gloom.

The Khan knelt down and scooped some dust up in his gauntlet. Tiny shards of glass ran through his fingers. Far above, the boiling clouds scudded in an unbroken layer.

The keshig moved off, going slowly, their boots crunching through the residue. The low grind of their battleplate matched the tenor of the planet.

The Khan looked over to his left. The remnants of a vast pyramid still stood amidst the ruins, its flanks broken open and its carcass thick with grime. An immense battle-engine, a Warhound-class Titan, lay in the rubble, prone upon its back with its armour blistered and blackened. It looked as though it had been thrown down and torched.

Everything smelled of burned metal. The whole city reeked of it. The Khan’s armour sensors told him that the surfaces around him were still warm from the afterglow of whatever apocalypse had overtaken Prospero.

Qin Xa, just a few metres away, turned to face him.

‘Where first, Khagan?’ he asked.

The Khan got back to his feet and let the glass-dust rain to the ground.

It had all gone. All of the libraries, the repositories, the arcana. If the Space Wolves had truly done this, then perhaps their power did match their boasts.

‘There were caves,’ he said. ‘He told me of them. Under the city.’

He drew in a deep, filtered breath, heedless of the ash-taint that remained on the air.

‘We start there.’

Fifteen

Cartography
City of the dead
Yaksha

The first thing Yesugei noticed as he entered the vault chamber was the light. It was everywhere, dancing across the obsidian and reflecting from the antennae of the machine. Lines of brilliant electric force snaked and snapped before spiralling up into the huge empty space above.

Henricos spread his arms wide as Yesugei and Xa’ven entered. ‘Impressive, no?’

The three of them stood in the shadow of the device and gazed up at the projected illumination. An immense galactic swirl shimmered above them, thirty metres across, picked out in gold points. The collection rippled and flickered as the machine’s power units thundered away.

‘A stellar hololith,’ said Xa’ven, sounding disappointed.

‘A damned big one,’ replied Henricos, affronted. ‘You know how much power this is drawing?’

Yesugei wandered to the machine’s edge. A series of brass spheres hung from a spiked iron frame, all crackling with black lightning. ‘What are these?’

‘No idea.’ Henricos stomped over to join him. ‘Thought you might be able to tell me.’

‘I am not tech-smith.’

‘No, I know, but it’s not machinery. Not any that I recognise, at any rate.’ Henricos held his gauntlet up to the lightning, and it passed through the ceramite effortlessly. ‘This stuff is not here. Not physically. It doesn’t register on any of my instruments. Still, it’s doing something.’

As soon as the Iron Hands legionary spoke, Yesugei saw the truth of it. The lightning was an overspill from something taking place on the far side of the veil. Somewhere, deep inside the machine, warp energy was being channelled.

‘Is impossible,’ Yesugei said, though the evidence of his inner senses told him otherwise. ‘Cannot shackle to a machine.’

Henricos snorted. ‘Well, they did. You can see it, I can see it. I was hoping you could unlock it – it’s clearly designed to be used.’

Xa’ven joined them. Waves of light played across his green armour, glistening over ink-black helm lenses. ‘I would not recommend it.’

Yesugei paused. He could feel the aether boiling away within the machine. The barrier between the worlds was thin, dissipated somehow by the apparatus in front of him. He watched the coolant tubes gurgle, saw the runes glow on the housing and wondered how they had done it.

‘All we have is a galactic map,’ said Henricos, stalking back across the floor. ‘It can do more.’

Xa’ven followed him. ‘It is a sorcerous device.’

‘I guess it is.’

‘I thought you hated those.’

Henricos turned. ‘I do. I hate everything about this ship, but you asked me to find out what it was, so I did.’

Yesugei looked up at the shimmering hololith as it gently rotated. The scale of it was impressive enough, but Henricos was right – that was not why it had been made.

‘I can reach into it,’ he said quietly.

Both Xa’ven and Henricos turned to face him.

‘Safely?’ asked the Salamanders legionary.

‘I do not know.’ Yesugei pressed his palms against the machine, angling his head as though the sounds he sought were physical ones. ‘I can hear… voices. Languages. Just like in warp. What Navigators hear.’ He pressed his gauntlets harder against the metal. ‘Something is alive.’

‘What is it for?’ asked Xa’ven. ‘Can you tell that?’

Yesugei could almost hear what the thing was thinking. Fragments of thoughts brushed against his consciousness, as fleeting as sunlight on water.

‘Is communications device,’ he said slowly. ‘I think. Long range, aether-borne.’ He removed his hand, which tingled as it was withdrawn. ‘Like star-speakers, more powerful. Uses warp directly. I think is very old.’

Henricos nodded. ‘It was built before this ship was.’

‘Can it help us?’ Xa’ven sounded doubtful.

‘Yes,’ said Yesugei. ‘It recognises me. I can unfold it.’

Xa’ven moved pensively towards the near wall of the device. Bloody scrawls covered its surface. A rust-brown handprint stood out among the streaks.

‘I do not like the way this feels.’

‘Damn you, then!’ spat Henricos. ‘Why did we take this ship? You want a way through the warp, they’re giving us one. But if you want to throw it–’

‘I understand, Bion,’ said Xa’ven, calmly. ‘I know what we are doing. But is there any other way?’

The Iron Hands legionary shook his head. ‘Nothing else I’ve found. If you don’t want to activate it, then we should leave, scuttle the ship and take our chances in the others. That’s it.’

Xa’ven looked up at the projection again, and stared at it for a long time. Yesugei could tell what he was thinking.

The Word Bearer. That is the other way.

‘Do what you must,’ Xa’ven said eventually, his voice heavy.

Henricos stood back, satisfied. Yesugei examined the brass spheres more closely. Moving slowly, he extended his hand to touch the surface. As he did so, a static tingle ran down his arm.

He closed his eyes. Immediately, the chatter on the edge of his inner hearing grew louder. He heard a cacophony of semi-human voices whispering in his mind. Nothing of what they said made any sense; they were like half-words used by infants or animals. In his mind’s eye, he saw a smoky, congealing miasma boiling at the core of the structure.

Then, swimming up out of the confusion, he saw two runes clarify before him. Both glowed a furious red and their outlines seemed out of focus. Looking directly at them was hard.

He selected the one on the left, reaching out to it with his thoughts. As he did so, the babble hushed a little, and something like a hiss ran through the machine’s innards.

‘Ah,’ Henricos said. ‘Yes, that is more useful.’

Yesugei opened his eyes. The galactic map was overlaid with a hugely complex web of moving streams. It looked organic, like the lattice of blood vessels in a body. Worlds were picked out in various luminescent shades, each one marked by runes in a language Yesugei could not understand. The starfield underneath was mottled and rumpled in some areas, but clear in others.

‘Those are warp routes,’ said Henricos enthusiastically. ‘Navigator channels. They must be – that’s the core network.’

Yesugei’s gaze followed the translucent swirls. ‘I agree. And the worlds – that is Terra. That is Colchis.’

The warp conduits meandered and diverged like a silted up river delta. Few led straight, and most terminated in stormy wells.

‘What is growing over Ultramar?’ asked Xa’ven, pointing to a truly massive pattern of storms running in a single swathe across the galactic south-east.

‘They’re cut off,’ said Henricos.

‘If not now, then soon,’ agreed Yesugei. ‘And not just them. See the barriers around Terra, and Chondax.’

As his gaze rested on the system where the Khan had been sent, he noted how far the interference was clearing. The barriers in the warp there looked strange, almost geometric, as if caused by some algorithm rather than the fluctuations of the aether. Whatever its origin, the system looked to have been completely severed, though now a host of passages were opening up around it.

‘So they can see the shape of the warp storms,’ said Xa’ven. ‘Useful.’

‘How many of these machines can there be?’ asked Henricos. ‘The Hesiod doesn’t have anything like it. What else can it do?’

Yesugei smiled. Henricos’s passion for the mechanical was his most appealing attribute. ‘More,’ he said, channelling his mind back within the device. He directed his thoughts towards the second rune, and a second mesh of overlays rippled across the galactic hololith. By the time he looked up again, the shapes had solidified into recognisable sigils.

‘By the forge…’ whispered Xa’ven.

For a moment Yesugei couldn’t see what he meant. Then, slowly, the shapes made sense to him. ‘Legion icons,’ he said.

Henricos nodded. ‘Battlegroups. Expeditions. War fleets. Static formations.’ He shook his head. ‘They know too much.’

They didn’t know everything. There were no movements recorded close to Terra, and some Legions, like the Raven Guard and the Night Lords, were completely missing. However, the extent of what they did know was chilling. The Blood Angels trajectory was marked in red – they appeared to have been heading directly for a single system on the extreme eastern edge of the galaxy. The Ultramarines looked to be hemmed in around the margins of their great star empire, and massive formations of Word Bearers and World Eaters were heading through the warp storms directly for them.

‘Does Guilliman know this?’ breathed Xa’ven, horrified.

Henricos shook his head grimly. ‘Doubt it. He’ll be as blind as the rest of us.’

The detail was not complete. Some of the sigils glowed only softly, as if the machine were working on incomplete or unreliable information. The display had the look of an ancient manuscript rather than a data-slate ledger – the icons were florid, the symbols mystical. Some were completely indecipherable, others flickered in and out of existence altogether.

Still, it was far more complete than any galactic survey Yesugei had ever seen.

‘How are they doing it?’ asked Xa’ven.

‘No augur-station has the range,’ said Henricos.

‘Agreed,’ said Yesugei. ‘They are tapping the warp. Those fleets are deep in the aether, their presence is known to those that dwell there.’

Yesugei looked up at the Chondax sector. It was empty. Warp storms raged in broken fragments around it, the last embers of a long inferno.

‘That is not enough,’ said Xa’ven quietly. He turned to Yesugei. ‘It cannot be. They cannot just know these things – if they did, the war would already be over.’

Yesugei nodded, his eyes following a trail out of Chondax. Just on the edge of vision, he thought he caught fragmentary echoes of Chogorian symbolism and focused his mind on it. ‘Something else is needed,’ he said, distracted.

Henricos snorted. ‘Prayers and petitions?’

‘Do not mock,’ said Yesugei, his eyes following an indirect spinward route. Back towards Chogoris? Surely not.

Xa’ven moved carefully towards the brass spheres. ‘Weather-maker,’ the Salamanders legionary said, cautiously. ‘Is it wise to keep this active?’

Yesugei heard the hissing again, and immediately snapped his thoughts back into focus. He whirled around and saw the spheres blazing hard with dark energy.

‘No, perhaps not,’ he said, extending his mind back into the heart of the machine. ‘We have seen enough.’

His mind reached back within the device, down to where the symbolic runes glowed in their fog of semi-reality. He moved to shut down the process, and the first of the two sigils sunk into darkness.

The hissing grew. He saw what looked like a pair of eyes swimming up from the miasma. He had seen such eyes before, but only in visions. His hearts began to beat harder.

He reached for the second rune, closing it with his mind, sealing it off as if he were clasping a hand over a candle flame.

It would not disappear. It kept burning away, furious and intense, before rotating slowly and staring back at him.

‘Shut it down,’ he heard Xa’ven say, though the voice sounded far off.

Yesugei tightened the focus of his mind. The rune remained stubbornly in place. The coils of smoke around it grew in solidity, forming shapes in the half-present murk. A voice emerged from the babble – a single voice, bestial and maddened, raging with the anger of something lashing through layers of inertia to get at its prey.

‘Shut it down!’ Xa’ven shouted.

Yesugei could not see what was happening in the chamber. His mind sank further into the warp-interface within the machine. A face swooped up out of the morass before him – a long face, high-crowned, bone-ridged, blood-fleshed, a distillation of human nightmares.

It locked eyes with him, and in those eyes were reflected all the pains, all the agonies, all the terrors of a million worlds. Yesugei tried to pull away, and couldn’t. The creature had seen him.

Its malevolent eyes narrowed. Its glistening flesh solidified.

And then, with a twitch of cat-like sadism, it smiled.

Death had never held any terror for a son of Chogoris. In the days before the Master of Mankind had come, it had been everywhere – in blood-feuds, honour-killings, on the hunt, from want or exposure or disease. The plains-people took it in their stride, neither complaining of it nor celebrating it. They did not raise mausoleums to the slain, but left the bodies to be eaten away by the winds and carrion-birds.

In that, as in everything else, the Khan had become one with his adoptive home. He had seen a hundred deaths before leaving his unnaturally short youth behind. Adulthood brought more bloodshed, much of it at his hands, and he met it in the same detached fashion. He had never mourned – death was the way of things, the immutable pattern of the universe. It was to be welcomed, for it curtailed sickness, it cut off the vigorous soul before it could become slack, it cleared the ground for new growth.

Even primarchs had died, so it was whispered. Even gods.

For all that, it was difficult to witness what had become of Magnus’s iridescent city of glass and crystal. The Khan crunched through layers of grey-silver dust, watching heavy skies scud across the blackened shells of old structures. The lightning never stopped, flickering away on the far northern horizon like dancing cracks into another, stranger reality. Every so often a deep peal of thunder would boom out, the irregular heartbeat of a world in the final throes of its death-agony.

The Khan’s keshig fanned out around him. They went as warily as he, and their bone-white armour made them look like ghosts in the dark. Already the dust of Prospero was clinging to them, tainting them, blotching and marring the white and gold of their battleplate.

The Terminators bore their energy-shrouded blades, glinting pale blue. As they moved, their combi-bolters swept the terrain ahead, whining faintly as targeting reticules half-locked on to half-targets. Everything that remained in Tizca – the place that Magnus had once proudly called the City of Light – was a phantasm.

The Khan stalked at the head of the group, his dao blade held lightly in his right hand. His long fur-lined cloak hung stiffly, stained black where the dust cleaved to it. The way ahead was picked out in the false colours of his helm display, though even that failed to leaven the oppressive sense of utter dark. The cloud cover was so complete that they might have been creeping through the bowels of some colossal hive-spire.

‘Something up ahead,’ reported one of the keshig Terminators over the squad-vox.

Qin Xa held up a gauntlet to halt the squad. ‘Detail.’

The Terminator paused. ‘No, nothing,’ he reported. ‘False positive.’

It had happened many times. The sensors were scrambled, crazed by the heavy rads and static that buzzed through the atmosphere.

The Khan pressed on. He half recognised some of the buildings. They soared up around the creeping armoured figures at their feet – just husks now, coal-black walls with nothing but smouldering rubble within. He had caught sight of old emblems amidst the debris: Imperial iconography, Prosperine eye-devices, stylised homages to ancient knowledge and the esoteric.

‘More corpses,’ voxed Qin Xa as they passed down the long boulevard leading towards the heart of the ruins.

The Khan had already seen them. Most were mortal skeletons, stripped of skin and muscle by some terrible weaponry. A few items of armour had survived in the dust: domed helms, shoulder guards and boots.

Some of the corpses were much larger. Ceramite lasted longer than carapace-plate, and many crimson armour-pieces remained wholly intact. Most had the XV Legion’s sunburst icon picked out in gold or sapphire, slowly eroding as the toxic dust wore at it.

‘And this,’ said Qin Xa, walking over to a long staff weapon, half-buried in a heap of drifting ash. He pulled it free and shook the detritus from it. ‘I have seen these before.’

The Khan had, too. The weapon was golden, heavily encrusted with star-and-moon engravings, and far too large for a mortal to lift, let alone wield. A long, black blade slung under the main shaft had once spat with disruptor-energy; a bolter fixed further back had once cracked from shell-recoil.

‘Custodians,’ the Khan voxed, stating what the others already knew.

‘But whose side were they on?’ asked Qin Xa, hopefully.

‘You know that, Xa,’ said the Khan, pressing on.

He had not wanted to believe it, not truly. His feelings about Russ had always been mixed – respect for the warrior; exasperation at the boasts, the self-appointed exceptionalism. It was another thing, though, to witness what he had done, to see the truth of the star-speakers’ testimony. The Khan found that the truth, now that it was before him, was a bitter draught indeed.

His boots kicked against a steel-grey pauldron and it rolled, rattling, away from him. Like everything else it was desiccated, scoured down by the wind. He saw runes on the curve of it, still visible, angular and Fenrisian.

‘Nothing,’ muttered Qin Xa, following closely. ‘Nothing alive.’

His tone made it clear that he saw no purpose in staying. No doubt he was already thinking through the implications of what they had seen, where they would have to go, and whom they would have to fight.

The Khan slowed, listening hard. He blink-clicked his armour’s aural filters off and let his enhanced hearing do its work.

For a moment, over the dull hum of the Terminator power units and the faint spit of disruptor-fields, he thought he caught something out of place.

It had been like… buzzing.

‘I know where we are,’ he said, looking out beyond the shattered sawtooth edges of nearby edifices. Over to the left rose the jagged remains of a pyramid, still hundreds of metres high even in its ruin. A few panes of dust-opaque glass clung to the substructure. Through a gap in the surrounding walls, he saw another highway running almost parallel to the one they now walked. ‘Eighty-one radial streets. Ridiculous.’

‘Leading where?’ asked Qin Xa, a blade in each hand, his helm underlit blue from the field-discharge.

‘The cult temples,’ said the Khan, pressing on. ‘The great pyramids. The Occullum. Everything.’

They passed more of the same – twisted corpses, dried out and decaying. Thunder growled over them all, the lightning bleaching the colour from their livery and rendering them all as grey phantoms in the glass. Ahead of them, the street widened, revealing three Rhino transport chassis slumped amidst the remains of some kind of barricade.

‘A stand,’ remarked Qin Xa as he pushed coils of razor-wire aside. ‘Did them little good.’

A few hundred metres ahead, the street opened up further as other thoroughfares intersected. Like a river reaching its delta, the radial highways converged, merging into a wide square. As they reached its margins, the scale of it became steadily apparent.

The space before them was vast, yawning away under the fulgurate skies like some fire-blackened imitation of the plains of home. Once it must have been paved and well-lit, surrounded by elegant architecture and thronged with crowds. Now only debris remained – armour-shells, the chewed remains of vehicles. Fissures had opened up among the marble flagstones, some wide enough to swallow a man, all as tar-black as the void. A lone pillar stood at the very centre, broken off about fifty metres up. The stone plinth at its base still carried recognisable figures – a robed woman being lifted aloft by a one-eyed, armoured figure.

The Khan walked out across the square, heading for the pillar. The keshig spread out silently in his wake, Qin Xa with them.

As he walked, the ground under his feet felt increasingly fragile, as if it were just a thin skin over nothing. Cracks were everywhere, cobwebbing out from the lips of the fissures like probing fingers. This had been the epicentre of the inferno. Perhaps the crust of the world itself had been compromised.

Then he heard it again – a buzzing, like the drone of massed insect wings.

‘Are you getting that?’ he asked, halting beneath the long, faint shadow of the pillar.

The keshig was by now dispersed widely, picking their way steadily through the residue.

‘No life signs,’ voxed Qin Xa carefully. ‘No proximity markers.’

His voice gave away his uncertainty. They could all feel it, whatever the armour-readings told them.

The Khan turned back to the cratered and pock-marked pillar. It reared up into Prospero’s eternal night, and the mottled sky above raced and boiled.

Then it came again – distinct this time, like the whine of an insect swarm.

The Khan whirled, blade in hand, and he felt the stone flags shifting under him. His armour still registered nothing – no targets, no bodies.

By then the keshig were moving too. They circled, blades and bolters ready, searching for an unseen enemy. One of them opened fire, and the sound of it crashed jarringly.

‘Eyes!’ voxed Qin Xa, suddenly running across the square towards – seemingly – nothing. ‘Disable auto-senses – use your eyes!’

The Khan blink-dismissed the lattice of targeting reticules and environment compensators, and the square sank into the dreary fog of unenhanced vision.

Only then did he see them: shimmering in spectral blue-white, arthropodic, winged and massive. There were dozens, sliding up out of the ground like unquiet shades rising from the grave. They disturbed nothing, not even a fleck of ash. Their rigid outlines glowed with the ghosting phosphorescence of witch-light, though their hearts were as transparent as glass.

They were ruined things, twisted and hunched, though still twice the size of the Terminators before them. They had bulbous roach-like thoraxes and abdomens, tattered gossamer wings and segmented limbs that trailed against the ground. Grotesquely swollen brains, throbbing with an eerie light amid tight cranial folds, burst out from low-slung tangles of mandibles. Once free of the broken earth they swayed through the air jerkily, lurching as though blind and famished.

The Khan gazed at them stonily.

‘Psychneuein,’ he said, taking up his blade. ‘So something survived after all.’

Aetheric energy sparked across Yesugei’s armour. ‘Go back,’ he commanded, raising a fist.

Deep in the Vorkaudar’s warp-interface, the nightmare face rose up, still grinning widely. Yesugei saw rows of needle-teeth, pupil-less eyes of molten iron, an extended claw.

The creature snarled and writhed, rocking back and forth. The miasma around it thinned. The rune remained activated, driving the machine, thinning the barrier between worlds. The power it controlled seemed to be accelerating, ramping up like an overloading drive engine.

Yesugei fixed his mind upon the rune. It spun before his mind’s eye, throbbing like a wound in the fabric of the universe.

‘Close,’ he commanded, then again, lapsing into Khorchin. ‘Yake’en.’

With a grind like rusty iron being dragged over steel, the rune winked out.

Yesugei opened his eyes, relieved. He turned to look back up at the galactic map.

It had changed. The stars pulled together, dragging into a single clump like a swarm of glowflies. The golden luminescence intensified, burning painfully. The machine’s engines gave out in a series of smoky clangs, but the shimmer kept growing.

Xa’ven drew his hammer, Henricos his bolter.

‘Can you halt it?’ the Salamanders legionary asked, standing his ground while staring at the swirling fog above.

Yesugei took his staff in both hands. The aduu skull at the tip rippled with fingertips of lightning. The whole chamber felt suddenly tight and humid, as if too much air were pressed into too little space.

‘Machine is closed,’ he said.

Henricos backed away. ‘Well, something’s still working.’

The stars drew closer, accelerating into conglomeration and melding hard. A clap like thunder echoed around the vault, cracking the machine’s containment shell and resounding up the shaft above them.

‘Get back!’ warned Yesugei, suddenly realising what was happening.

The lights shuddered out. A sound like a fractured scream echoed from the air around them. What remained of the projected starfield coalesced into an inky clot and fell fast, ripping into corporeality and cracking to the floor. It burst, shattering like an eggshell.

Bursting free of it came a skeletal, long-limbed creature with blood-red skin and long, curving horns. It had the same molten eyes, the same needle teeth. It was bigger than all of them and moved with a jerky, unreal speed. It pounced across the deck, squatting like some vast and grotesque insect, before leaping right at Xa’ven.

Henricos fired first, hitting it with bolts that seemed to glance and whine from its hide. Xa’ven rushed forward, hauling his hammer round to meet it.

‘No!’ roared Yesugei, too late to drag him back.

The Salamanders legionary sent the hammerhead cracking into the creature’s torso. The blow was perfect – it should have ploughed into its ribs, breaking them open and sending the creature sailing, broken-backed, through the air. Instead, Xa’ven was thrown clear of the impact with a sharp crack of displaced energy, his weapon ripped from his grasp. His massive armoured body crunched into the vault wall, denting the stone and showering him with dust.

The creature sprang after him. Its every movement was blurred and splintered, as though recorded on some broken picter-lens. It landed, tearing at his throat, its claws pinning him, its jaws slavering in close and worrying at him like a dog upon its quarry.

Yesugei levelled his staff.

‘Ta qarija!’ he shouted.

Silver lightning, sharp as charged neon, leapt from the staff and smashed into the creature, showering it in a coruscating burst of aether-light and ripping it from Xa’ven’s prostrate body.

It shrieked as it flew clear, crashing to the deck again in a tangle of spines and hooves before twisting around to scream at him. For a moment, Yesugei found himself staring directly into its face, and the malice of it chilled his hearts.

He summoned more lightning, hitting the thing again and sending it skidding further across the floor of the vault. Warp energy was the only thing that seemed to hurt it: Henricos kept firing all the while, emptying his magazine into its flesh, but the bolts had no effect.

Xa’ven stayed down, out on his back and gasping wetly for breath. Yesugei went after the creature, and the aether surged through him like a flood, hot and painful.

‘Banish!’ he roared in Gothic. ‘Go back!’

More bolts cracked into the creature’s smouldering hide. It raged, skittering on the deck, screaming in pain. Lightning sparked and lashed from its horned and spiked back. Yesugei ramped the intensity up, pouring everything into the attack.

Amidst it all, the creature tensed for another pounce, shouldering up against the deluge of incorporeal spears of light. Its long limbs drew inwards, its spiked shoulders rose, its whip-like tail coiled.

Then it blew apart.

A deafening bang ran around the chamber, followed by an enormous rush of forge-hot air. Fragments of bone and sinew splattered and clinked from the walls, and thick laces of bile slapped across Yesugei’s armour. Echoes of the creature’s animalistic screeches rebounded for a moment, long, shrill and hateful, before the last slops of otherworldly flesh dropped to the floor.

Henricos stood motionless, his weapon empty, staring at the epicentre of the explosion. For once, he had nothing to say.

Yesugei looked around him warily, half-expecting to see more horrors pouring out of thin air, but the chamber remained empty, marked only by the ticking-down of the great machine and the stink of burning.

‘And what,’ said Henricos eventually, ‘was that?’

Yesugei didn’t know. He had heard legends of things that swam in the deeps of the warp – sentient dreams of ancient presences – but never guessed that he would live to witness one. They should not have been able to live and breathe in the material world, any more than he could live in the seething mass of the aether.

Have you ever travelled with Navigator? Seen the things they do?

‘We should never have used machine,’ Yesugei said, breathing heavily. ‘Knew they had fallen. Did not know how far.’

Screaming. Clawing at ship.

Henricos grunted caustically, though the sound was interrupted by Xa’ven’s hacking cough. He had not gotten to his feet.

Suddenly anxious, Yesugei hurried over and crouched beside him. ‘How bad, brother?’

The Salamander’s breastplate was glossy with blood. It pumped out freely from a deep neck wound, fountaining from the seal-gap between helm and gorget. The ceramite was rent, the fine gilt detailing marred by tooth-marks.

Xa’ven’s breath came in thick heaves. The blood wasn’t clotting. It rushed out of him, splashing across his plate and dripping on the floor.

Yesugei reached for the broken helm seal and prised it open. Henricos came to help, taking the helm and gently pulling it free. Mechadendrites whirled from his gauntlets – tiny saws and needles.

As soon as he saw Xa’ven’s face, Yesugei knew that they would not be needed.

The Salamander’s ebony features had already turned grey. His lips were pale, his eyes glassy. Yesugei pressed his gauntlet against the ragged wound at his neck, but the blood welled up unstaunched between his fingers.

‘Hold on, brother,’ he urged.

Xa’ven grabbed Yesugei’s arm by the wrist. His face creased in pain.

‘Use what you saw,’ Xa’ven rasped, blood running between his teeth.

‘We should never have done it.’

Xa’ven held on, clutching his arm tight. ‘You see what they are, now. Use it.’

His head lolled back. His eyes lost focus.

Yesugei felt sick. ‘Brother, I am sorry.’

‘Just use it.’ Xa’ven worked hard to spit out the words. ‘Storm-witch.’ He grinned painfully. ‘Find your Khan.’

Then Xa’ven coughed up a thick gout of blood. His back arched, his hands gripped tighter, before finally falling limp. The blood-slick expanded under him, as dark as oil.

For a moment, Yesugei remained motionless, stunned by the speed of it. He extracted himself from Xa’ven’s bloody grasp. His body was still combat-primed, flooded with hyperadrenaline, but for a moment he had no idea what to do. Nausea slowly took over from aggression.

‘Nightmares,’ he said, numbly. ‘They release nightmares.’ He pulled himself to his feet, hearing the dull clunk as Xa’ven’s gauntlet fell back. ‘You never see one before, not on Isstvan?’

Henricos shook his head. ‘I heard… stories.’

‘Stories no longer. This ship should be destroyed. We must leave.’

Henricos stayed crouched over Xa’ven, holding the bloody helm in one hand.

‘Then what?’ he asked.

‘Back to warp. I saw where they are going.’

‘Chogoris?’

‘No. Prospero.’

Henricos looked up at the smoking silhouette of the machine. ‘If we know that, they do too. How are they doing it? How are they locating Legions as they move?’

‘I do not know,’ said Yesugei, feeling the bitter price of the little knowledge they had bought. ‘I do not know.’

‘Why do you call them lodges?’ asked Shiban.

‘It’s a tradition,’ said Torghun, drawing his cowl up over his head.

‘I have to wear this?’

‘To begin with.’

Shiban hesitated. He felt awkward, foolish. More than that, though, it was clandestine, and for reasons he still did not understand.

‘I know,’ said Torghun. ‘It’s tedious. But here’s the thing – we’re all equal in there, at least once the oaths are taken. Show your face before then, and you’d be taking your rank in with you.’

Shiban looked at Torghun. With his face hidden in shadow he looked like a thief. Not even his scar was visible – the mark of the Legion, the one thing that set them apart from all others. ‘This will be a small gathering?’

Torghun nodded. ‘Nothing grand. They’ll be pleased to see another member.’

‘How many lodges are there?’

‘Across the whole Legion? I don’t know. A lot, I think. It fits with the warrior ethos. Someone told me a quarter of Sons of Horus are lodge members. I’ve no idea whether it’s true.’

‘How could you have?’

‘Well, quite. Ready?’

Shiban pulled the cowl over his head, feeling faintly ridiculous. Torghun moved to the door and depressed the entry rune. It slid back to reveal a darkened chamber. Five or six others stood in the flickering gloom.

Shiban followed Torghun in, and the others parted to give them room. The doors hissed closed.

‘Well met, brother,’ said the first of the gathered lodge members. ‘You bring new blood.’

Torghun bowed. ‘One who has proved worthy.’

Shiban took his place in the circle. The faces of the others were only partly hidden – if he had wanted to, he could possibly have guessed the identities of some. The air smelled oddly sweet, as if incense might be burning somewhere close by. All of the assembled White Scars wore their armour under their robes – standard procedure now that the blockade had been established – and it made them look bulky and out of proportion.

‘Well met, stranger,’ said the speaker. ‘You wish to join.’

‘To observe,’ said Shiban.

‘That is acceptable. There is nothing to hide.’

You are wearing a cowl!

‘The time for decision is drawing closer,’ the speaker went on, addressing the others. ‘Questions have been answered, some matters have been clarified. We can speak more plainly now than before – you have all seen the images from the planet below. Can anyone doubt now what we heard from the Warmaster’s star-speakers? The schism has come, brothers, just as the Khagan always warned us it would. Now we have to take sides. Our task is to ensure the Fifth Legion remains pure of purpose.’

Shiban listened carefully. So that was it – not a neutral brotherhood, but a faction for Horus. Part of him was surprised at the overtness of it, but perhaps that was naïve.

He could feel Torghun tensing up next to him, as if anxious about Shiban’s reaction to what he was being told. Everything about the Terran khan’s desire to see him inducted into the lodge felt genuine, almost touchingly so.

They believe in this.

‘The link remains established,’ the speaker went on. ‘The loyal fraternities have already responded, and our window for action shrinks. Preparations are being made across the fleet. We need to be ready.’

The speaker’s mouth, visible under the shadow of his cowl, spread into a benign smile.

‘They are coming, brothers. They are coming here, to Prospero.’

Sixteen

Caves
Rebirth
Still hanging around

Psychneuein.

Magnus had told him of them, but he had spoken of solid, flesh-and-blood things. Products of Prospero’s bizarre warp-drenched history, they had been a blight on the otherwise benign world, consuming the minds of mortals. The Thousand Sons had hunted them, driving them into the wilds and far from their glittering spires.

Now, like everything else, they had been reduced to ghosts – remnants of the living horrors they had been. Only, unlike all the other destroyed fauna, they had retained some vestige of their old wills. Their grotesque insectoid bodies still hovered, their sickeningly enlarged craniums still pulsed with the ravenous energies of the immaterium. Their mandibles clacked, just as they always had. Their huge wings still blurred, their twitching stings still arced under their bulging abdomen-sacs – only now they were translucent and shimmering, just psychic echoes of once vital neuro-predators.

They emerged from all over the square, slipping eerily from the stone and sweeping compound eye-bundles around them.

The keshig opened fire with their combi-bolters, sending rounds punching straight through them. That seemed to do nothing but attract them, and they began to home in on the source of the noise.

The Khan charged at the nearest of them, leaping and twisting in the air to plunge his dao through the creature’s head, aiming to slice it clean from the thorax.

It connected with nothing. His momentum carried him bodily into the psychneuein’s ghostly body, and a sensation of utter frigidity shuddered through him. His hearts burst into overdrive. He felt a sucking at his chest and a rushing boom in his ears.

He stumbled through on the far side of it, falling to one knee, panting heavily. Spots swam before his eyes.

The Khan twisted around, just managing to hold his blade in guard. The thing came at him again, still swaying erratically. It lurched at him, misjudging the direction and ploughing frictionlessly into the ground to his left.

It cannot see.

The Khan withdrew, panting, still feeling the horrific drag on his soul.

‘Do not let them touch you,’ he voxed. ‘They are blind – remain at distance.’

More psychneuein were rising by then, floating over the ash and ruins. One of them seemed to sense the presence of a Terminator close by and swooped straight at him. The warrior – named Maji, a veteran who had carved a bloody trail across a hundred worlds – loosed a perfectly targeted volley from his combi-bolter. The shells did nothing but shred the ruins beyond.

The psychneuein struck, clutching on to Maji with its trailing limbs and angling its swollen abdomen for a sting. Maji lashed out, plunging his blade deep into the creature’s body – but nothing connected. The psychneuein latched a long proboscis on to his helm and its glowing tip sunk beneath the ceramite.

Maji screamed. In a century of warfare, Maji had never screamed. The noise was appalling – a howl of pure agony wrenched from his helm’s augmitters and dragged into the night. Lumpy matter sucked up the translucent proboscis, which bulged and flexed obscenely. Maji went rigid, embraced by the psychneuein’s spectral limbs, dropping his blade and twitching violently. Blood spurted fitfully from his gorget-seal as he was lifted off the ground.

By then another of the keshig had raced to his side, thudding into him and hauling him back. Three more took on the creature itself, pumping bolt-rounds into its incorporeal outline with no visible effect.

The Khan, dao in hand, was almost there himself when he heard fresh buzzing diving low over his head. He skidded to a halt to stare up at the huge outline of a psychneuein dropping down upon him. He felt the same chill as before – like an icy fist closing over his lungs.

He thrust upwards instinctively, punching his blade into the brain-swollen head of the monster. For a terrible moment it felt as if his flesh were being ripped from the bone, flensed out of the armour and dispersed into nothing – then the metal connected with something spongy, piercing it.

The psychneuein recoiled, snapping its mandibles in pain but making no sound. It jolted, flickering in and out of focus. Seeing it could be hurt, the Khan pressed the attack, ripping his blade clear and swiping back at the creature’s thorax.

This time, the sword edge struck home. The wounded psychneuein exploded, dissolving into a cloud of lurid brilliance. Shreds of blazing matter radiated out, shrieking through the night in a whirlwind of released energy. The dust howled around him, stirred by the shockwave. A sound like shattering glass rang out across the courtyard, ripping the flagstones apart for metres in every direction.

Damaged by the detonation, the ground gave way further under the Khan’s feet, undulating like water before splintering into fragments. With a run of hard, sharp cracks, a fresh fissure yawned wide beneath him, dragging him down amidst an avalanche of tumbling stone and sliding scree.

He tried to grab hold of something, to seize the edge of the hole that was forming and pull himself out. He almost made it – his fingers caught onto a narrow ledge of stone, and for a second he thought that it might hold.

Then the flag cracked and he fell.

A shower of rubble sheered across his helm lenses. Over the thunder of collapsing masonry, he heard the shouts of his warriors, and the maddening buzz of more psychneuein.

Then it was all gone, lost in the roar of breaking stone. He fell fast, hurtling through a blurred underworld of collapsing earth. For a terrible moment he thought it might never stop – that some portal into the warp had been opened up under Prospero’s burned surface and that he had been sucked into its maw – but then he hit something solid.

More debris crashed and thudded, burying him even as he slid down further, scrabbling against the slope of whatever he had landed on. In the pitch-darkness his helm struggled to compensate, giving him only blurred and swivelling impressions of where he was.

Slowly, grindingly, he came to a halt. The rock fall continued for a few moments before that too gave out.

He was buried up to his chest. The rock wall at his back felt solid, but everything else remained fragile. He braced himself as best he could.

He had fallen a long way. His helm-display ran with static and gave him no figures, but the crevasse mouth was not visible above him. He felt wedged between shoulders of solidity.

‘Qin Xa,’ he voxed.

Nothing.

Gingerly, he moved his arm. Somehow he had managed to keep hold of his blade on the way down, and the dao emerged from a cascade of loose scree.

His helm lenses stabilised. His surroundings were revealed in a series of blurry grey outlines, and he turned his head carefully, scoping.

Tunnels ran away from him, twisting organically in the gloom. Some were choked with rubble, others half-clear. He saw faint shafts of light up ahead, no doubt from where other crevasses led back up to the surface.

The earth around him was honeycombed into chambers and arteries. A void ran away to his right, just over head height but narrow. He could hear more stone-falls in the distance, echoing through the underworld.

‘Xa,’ he voxed again, carefully pulling himself clear of the debris. The rubble shifted heavily, lodging into the cracks around him, and he sloughed it off.

Again, nothing. The vox-signal hissed with interference.

The space around him was hot and claustrophobic. He could barely move his arms without scraping them, and he had to stoop to move.

He looked up. The path of his descent disappeared after a few metres, lost in the twists and turns of the subterranean warren. He judged how possible it would be to claw his way back up, and reached for a handhold.

The rock crumbled under his touch. More debris tumbled down from the gap, skittering from his armour.

Not possible.

He checked the vox again – no signal. He checked for proximity markers, targets, threat-indicators, and found nothing.

The Khan kicked the last of the rubble from his boots. He could follow the fissure to his right for a while. It was a lead, at least. In this strange underground world of sink-holes and chasms it might open up into something bigger.

He had come looking for caves. He had found them.

Qin Xa tried to run, but the ripple-wave of breaking rockcrete nearly upended him.

‘The Khagan!’ he roared over the squad-vox, bracing himself against the buck and snap of the earth beneath his feet.

Rifts were opening across the whole expanse of the square. A jetting geyser of methane stabbed up a few metres away, ignited into blue-tinged flame as it thundered. The pillar’s plinth fractured.

The warriors of the keshig all moved at the same time, scrambling towards the chasm even as the stone around them buckled. The psychneuein kept up the attack throughout – they seemed to have been maddened by the explosion that had annihilated one of their number.

Maji was dead. He had no visible wounds but the psychneuein kept at him, mobbing his body and extending their proboscises into his prone body. The two warriors who had come to his aid were forced to withdraw, no longer wasting shells on creatures that could not be hit.

Just as Qin Xa neared the chasm that had swallowed the Khan, more psychneuein hove into range, swaying towards him with strangely unerring intent.

Qin Xa leapt up at the nearest, powered by his armour’s servos. Following the Khan’s example, he sliced it at the junction between wing-bulge and thorax. His blade – perfectly aimed – passed straight through, just as before, freezing him as his arm was absorbed by the ghostly flesh.

The psychneuein locked on to him, sinking tendrils into his still-moving body. Qin Xa dropped away, stricken with preternatural chill and feeling his hearts race out of control. His mind seemed to slacken, as if his very being were being leeched from its frame.

The psychneuein dipped in closer, slavering and chittering. Qin Xa scrambled away, slashing his blades ineffectively. Somehow the Khan had managed to hurt them, but whatever he had done was not easily replicated.

The ground bucked again, and a spear of lightning whipped against the broken pillar. A massive rumble ran up from the ground, breaking open more fissures. Another of the keshig screamed as he was caught, just as Maji had.

We cannot fight this.

‘Fall back!’ Qin Xa roared, staggering away from the creature in front of him. It came after him, just as erratically as before, guided by some imperfect psychic sense.

The other warriors did not respond to the order immediately. Despite their fearsome levels of discipline, leaving the site of the Khagan’s fall was anathema. They surged back across the heaving terrain, lumbering away from the psychneuein attacks as best they could, trying to reach the crumbling maw of the fissure that had swallowed their primarch.

It was a doomed attempt. Another of the creatures struck, clamping on to the foremost warrior and eliciting the now-familiar scream of mental agony. Other psychneuein latched on to the victim’s paralysed body, threading their phantasm-tentacles through the heavy battleplate like fingers through water.

‘Fall back!’ ordered Qin Xa for a second time, retreating steadily across the square. This time the surviving members of the keshig came with him, crunching across the debris, harassed and pursued by swarms of shimmering predators.

They pulled together, faces turned to the oncoming ghosts, and retreated towards the gaping jaws of a bombed-out terrace on the near edge of the square. The psychneuein came after them, still making no sound beyond the endless buzzing, and still swaying blindly.

Qin Xa swept his gaze around the terrain. There was plenty of cover, but that would do little good if the creatures were not hampered by it. Their vision was obviously defective or absent – if they could somehow shake them off, it might be possible to outflank them and get back to the ravine edge. Qin Xa’s proximity sensor had lost the Khan’s signal, and the vox-channel was silent.

The nine surviving Terminators cleared the perimeter of the ruins. Another warrior – Juma, by the kill-markers on his pauldron – was caught just before crossing the boundary. His battle-brothers immediately made to support him.

‘No!’ shouted Qin Xa, though it wrenched at him to give the order. ‘Stay together. ‘Keep moving.’

They obeyed, and pulled back further into the shadow of window-less walls. Behind them, Juma’s agony echoed from the stone. They pushed deeper inside, shouldering aside the broken outline of old door-frames and kicking through tottering wall sections.

Qin Xa’s mind raced as he went. Nothing hurt them, nothing deterred them. For a terrible moment, he began to wonder if the stories of Space Wolves had been mistaken – perhaps these things were what had devastated the planet, sweeping aside whatever defenders stood up to them.

They broke into what had once been a huge, domed chamber. Spars from the roof still extended upwards, broken halfway like snapped bones. A huge banner, tattered and stiff with ash, hung from a listing flagpole, sporting the eye-motif of Magnus. On the far side stood a largely intact wall, still bearing a marble façade in places. Huge chunks of masonry and steel littered the floor, forming natural barricades. Dust-encased bodies slumped everywhere, mortal and Space Marine alike.

Qin Xa stopped retreating. The remaining keshig fell in beside him, forming up a broken line among the barricades. He heard the clink and shunt of combi-bolters being reloaded.

The psychneuein followed them in. They surged straight through walls and pillars, glistening like warp-trails. Their unholy light fell across the shadowy wreckage.

Qin Xa kept his blades raised. For some reason, it seemed more likely that a sword would hurt them than a ranged weapon. The Khagan had managed it; perhaps it was a matter of technique.

The psychneuein glided closer, dozens of them now, each as insubstantial as jellyfish.

‘For the Khagan,’ murmured Qin Xa, preparing his soul for the trial.

Then, suddenly, he felt the build-up of enormous power. A second later and the entire chamber filled with light. Flames leapt up from underneath the psychneuein, seemingly bursting from the ground itself.

The creatures wailed and thrashed, caught up in a maelstrom of blazing, purple-tinged fire. One by one they burst apart, exploding with sharp bangs that cracked the earth beneath them. More flames rushed down the line, rearing up and licking along the shafts of the pillars.

The heat was incredible, the sound of it deafening, though the barrage only lasted for a few seconds. The last of the psychneuein vanished, leaving behind only echoing wails and flickers of ghostly after-images.

The chamber-shell fell silent again. Qin Xa scanned around and above, searching for the source. Just as he did so, he felt a fresh surge of power just behind him. He turned, but too late.

His arms went rigid, locked by spidery lines of energy that ran from the gauntlets to the shoulder-joint. He felt a huge weight pressing against his hearts, slowing him down and deadening his movements.

A bolter was pressed against his chest, angled up from a figure before him in crimson armour. His faceplate was gold-crested Mark III, archaic and festooned with Thousand Sons iconography.

‘Move and I kill him,’ said the legionary, speaking out loud to the entire keshig. The muzzles of half a dozen combi-bolters swivelled in his direction.

Qin Xa blink-transmitted a desist order to his brothers. ‘And you are?’ he asked.

‘Revuel Arvida. Last of my kind. You?’

‘Qin Xa, Master of the keshig, Fifth Legion.’ He looked down at the bolter. Even at point-blank range it probably wouldn’t penetrate his Terminator plate – his would-be killer was taking a fearsome risk. ‘What happened here?’

The legionary didn’t answer for a moment. He stared up at the ivory giants that surrounded him, as though weighing up his options. ‘You really don’t know?’

Qin Xa felt the grip on his arms slacken. ‘My primarch is down there.’

‘You can’t go back.’

‘How do we get to him?’

‘You can’t. They infest that place.’

Qin Xa felt his heart sink. There had to be a way. ‘But you can hurt them.’

Arvida shook his head. ‘Not for long. They used to die, now they just come back. Why are you even here? This world is cracking apart.’

The Thousand Sons legionary had an aura about him like Yesugei did, rippling with pent-up energy. He was damaged, though. Qin Xa could hear the strained breathing through his vox-grille.

‘We came to find the truth,’ he said.

Arvida laughed then, a sour, grating rattle. ‘Ah, the truth.’

As he spoke, the sound of more psychneuein gathering echoed from back the way they had come. Arvida lowered his bolter and holstered it.

‘They’ll be back soon, and I won’t be able to stop them again.’

‘I will not leave him.’

‘You can’t do any good, not right now. Trust me, this is – or was – my world.’ The buzzing drew nearer. ‘I can sense him. He’s alive. All you’ll do if you stay here is have your mind consumed, which will not help anyone.’

Qin Xa glanced over his shoulder. Through the empty frames of old windows he could see the glow of more swarms. It would not be long before they came again, seeking out souls.

‘Lead, then,’ he growled, feeling the burn of failure. ‘Get us out of here.’

Yesugei headed back to Ledak’s holding cell, his mood dark. Henricos’s extraction of Xa’ven’s gene-seed had been a messy business – he was no Apothecary. It had felt like a further insult to the Salamander’s memory.

The death had been unnecessary. It had been reckless, driven by pride and desire for knowledge, all the things he had warned Ahriman against.

Mortals scurried out of his path as he strode along. The ship was being emptied. A few cogitators had been taken over to the Hesiod, but almost everything else, including the Word Bearers mortal crew, was staying. The longer Yesugei stayed aboard, the more the place made his flesh crawl.

Daemon. That was the word, the old Gothic title he had not been able to drag to mind until afterwards. Yaomo or yaksha were the Khorchin equivalents, fragments of old stories that had somehow survived the coming of Unity and the banishment of the old fears.

They had never gone away, not really – just been hidden under a veneer of technological hyperpower.

Xa’ven had deserved better. Yesugei would have liked to have stood beside him when he found Vulkan and had his faith rewarded. He knew how it would have gone: a stoical bow, a brief word of recognition, then back to the task, shoulder to the wheel.

If the entire Imperium had been Promethean, corruption would never have gained so much as a foothold.

He reached the cell doors, and the guards looked at him warily.

‘Go now,’ he told them.

They stared at one another, then up at him again.

‘Lord, I–’ one began.

‘Go now.’

Yesugei waited until they were gone before opening the doors again. The lumen flickered on as he entered, casting its bleak, antiseptic light over the hanging prisoner.

Ledak opened his eyes and smiled again. ‘Back for more, witch?’ he asked. ‘Where’s the other one?’

‘Will not be joining us,’ said Yesugei, sealing the doors behind him.

The Word Bearers legionary looked at him steadily. ‘So what do you want to know?’ he asked.

‘Nothing.’ Yesugei placed his hands together, feeling the first pricks of aetheric power against the inside of his gauntlets.

Ledak nodded resignedly. ‘Wondered how long it would take.’

Yesugei looked at him contemptuously. ‘Xa’ven was fine warrior. I liked him. I do not think he understood how things change.’ He stood before Ledak and raised his hands. ‘Everything changes. This ship will soon be atoms. You, too, Ledak.’

The Word Bearers legionary stared back at him, eyeball to eyeball, never flinching. His cheek was still only semi-healed, caked with a pus-streaked crust of scabs.

‘Really, no questions?’ he asked.

Yesugei shook his head.

‘Not any more,’ he said, and the chamber filled with fire.

The Khan clambered over a waist-high blockage in the tunnel, squeezing through the gap beyond. His armour grazed the rock, dragging dust down with him. He could hear his breathing echo in his helm, heavy and dragging.

It was horrifically hot. The walls of the tunnels pressed against him, forcing him to bend double. He had only been able to go down, despite several attempts to find a route back to the surface.

The space under the square was bizarre – a honeycomb of capillaries and chambers, all cramped and fissured, all showing signs of recent movement. The ash that coated the surface was down there, too. There was no water, nor any sign of it. Once or twice he had caught glimpses of a sullen red glow creeping out of the mouths of particular chasms, and had skirted wide around them.

Always down. Some tunnels sloped gently, others plunged along steep gradients of broken stone.

He had stopped often, listening to the beating of his hearts, trying to detect anything but stillness around him. The psychneuein had not followed him down – that was something – but the absence of any movement beyond his own was chilling.

He dragged himself across the blockage, righting himself on the far side. The air felt a little clearer ahead, and the tunnel roof rose by half a metre.

He managed to stand upright, and edged forwards. The dark around him was now complete, picked out in false contours by his helm’s night vision. The tunnel widened with every pace. The heat increased.

The Khan travelled another fifty metres or so before it opened up fully. A jagged jawline of stalagmites framed the final obstacle, and he was through into the chamber beyond.

The space was immense. The upper reaches soared away into the darkness, vast and vaulted like some buried cathedral. Gigantic stalactites hung, glossy with the mineral residue of old moisture. Other tunnel entrances opened up along the walls, some high up, others at floor level. The walls curved upwards steeply, terraced like an auditorium and striated with bands of metallic ore. If there had been any light, the whole place might have glinted and refracted it like an immense geode. As it was, his auto-senses picked out the same dreary layer of ash carpeting everything.

He strode out into the centre of the chamber. His footfalls barely echoed in the dust. Ahead of him, huge shapes emerged in the gloom. It took a while for him to see what they were.

A viewing lens lay shattered on the floor, six metres in diameter. Brass instruments lay about it, each one smashed or warped. A huge cylinder the length of a Thunderhawk reared up in the distance, its angled profile disfigured by a long, jagged crack.

The Khan stooped. There were bodies buried beneath the ash and metal: human bodies, mortal in stature. They were naked, or their robes had burned away, leaving nothing but withered flesh and exposed bone. He saw an eyeless, husk-dry face peering up at him from the filth. With a start, he thought that it was moving, but it was nothing but a trick of the dark. Everything, everyone, was dead.

Qin Xa had been right – there was nothing left on Prospero. He had been a fool to come, and a greater fool to come down to the surface in person. Perhaps it could have been scanned from orbit if they had worked harder, and found some way to do it remotely.

He rested his hands upon his knees, and gazed about him. It was only then that he felt it.

A stirring. A restless, gentle movement in the dust.

He leapt to his feet, and whirled around.

The figure before him glowed emptily, just like the psychneuein had done. Witch-light flickered around his ghostly outline, burning coldly.

He stood a little taller than the Khan, just as he had done in life. His face was the same, though the expression was infinitely weary, and a little distracted. His lone eye did not focus – in the past, its focus had been remorseless.

The Khan held his ground, speechless, still gripping his blade. He could feel his hearts pumping, his body flooding with combat readiness.

None of that was necessary. When the figure spoke, the voice dispelled any trace of doubt.

‘Jaghatai,’ said Magnus, his tired voice echoing strangely. ‘My friend. How good to see you again.’

Seventeen

Push back
Into the warp
Dead end

Shiban hurried down the Kaljian’s corridors towards his private chambers. The ship rang with activity and the mortal crew scurried out of his path. He didn’t acknowledge any of them.

He reached his chamber and went inside. His glaive hung on brackets on the wall, surrounded by devotional flags. He glanced at it for a moment, noting as if for the first time the balance in the weapon. Parchment scrolls suspended under the brackets recorded its significant kills, listed in sequence like one of his old poems.

Looking at the blade, one of the signature weapons of the Legion, Shiban felt a mixture of emotions. Once it would have been nothing but pride. Now, given what he had seen and heard, it was impossible to feel quite the same way.

He turned away and activated the console over his meditation altar. An access hololith spun into life – Shiban synched his armour’s systems with the altar and called up summary fleet data.

‘Khan?’

He turned to see Jochi in the doorway.

‘We have not sparred for a while. I thought it might–’

Shiban pushed past him and closed the slide-door.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Jochi.

‘I cannot say,’ said Shiban, locking the door.

Jochi looked nonplussed. ‘Cannot say what?’

Shiban looked hard at him. ‘I cannot say.’

A puzzled frown creased Jochi’s brow. ‘Khan, are you all right?’

Shiban relaxed. There was no deception there. Jochi was a straight-forward soul – a cheerful hunter in the best tradition of the Legion.

‘Tell me what you know of warrior lodges,’ said Shiban, walking back to the altar.

‘Warrior lodges? Nothing, I do not think.’

‘You are aware they exist.’

Jochi shrugged. ‘I heard stories, from other Legions. They are not present in the White Scars.’

Shiban snorted. ‘They are. They very much are.’ The hololith danced in front of him. It showed the ship markers of the fleet over Prospero. They were deployed in a standard blockade pattern, spread out widely across orbital intervals. The Swordstorm held position over the site of Tizca, once the planet’s most heavily urbanised zone.

Jochi drew alongside him. ‘What has happened?’

‘One of the dead on Phemus was a lodge member. It has been going on for years. Among the Terrans, to begin with, but it has spread. They meet in secret. They plan in secret.’

‘How do you know this?’

‘They invited me to join.’ Shiban smiled dryly. ‘They thought it would appeal to me. A true warrior, they said.’

‘Who did?’

‘You remember the Terran from Chondax? The Brotherhood of the Moon?’

Jochi nodded. ‘I never liked him.’

‘I did, in the end.’

‘You must report it. To Hasik.’

‘Hasik is a member,’ Shiban sighed.

Jochi let slip a low whistle. ‘Who is not, then?’

‘That is the problem.’

Jochi thought for a moment. ‘Is this something to be concerned about? What is their purpose?’

‘We have been too slow,’ said Shiban. ‘The Khagan has been too slow. They have already made their choice. When the moment comes, they will move, as one, as silently as they do now.’

‘I do not understand.’

‘They are readying the Legion. They have been running some form of communication with the Warmaster – at least since Chondax, possibly even while we were still fighting. By the time the Khagan returns, it may already be over.’

‘We do not know Horus is a traitor.’

‘Yes, that is the point. We know nothing.’ Shiban looked back over to the glaive, and wondered whether to take it with him. It would draw attention, but might be useful. ‘It is not our decision to make. Why do you think the Khagan brought us to this place?’

‘He has been on the surface for a long time.’

‘That is his prerogative. We need to move.’

‘They invited you,’ said Jochi warily. ‘Will they not be watching? If they have kept the secret for this long…’

‘The time for secrecy is over. They showed their hand, they knew the risks.’

‘Khan.’ Jochi rested a gauntlet on his arm, halting him. ‘Hasik is noyan-khan. You cannot go against him.’

‘No, I know.’

‘Then what will you do?’

Shiban gave him a bleak smile. ‘Find someone who can.’

The Vorkaudar burned in the void, its engines ignited and its structure leaking atmosphere. The ship-carcass turned slowly in the dark, rocked by secondary explosions.

It was a strangely eerie sight. Yesugei watched the fires from the Sickle Moon’s observation deck and thought of old cleansing rites. The banishment of a yaksha was always accompanied by flame-ceremonies, and had been for as long as humans had dwelt on Chogoris.

‘We are ready, lord,’ said Lushan.

Yesugei turned away from the viewports. Lushan stood before him, quietly attentive as ever.

‘What is the status of the ship?’ he asked.

‘Heavy damage. The Navigator–’

‘Warns against it. Yes, that is understood. How about the Hesiod?’

‘It has fared better.’

‘I am sure it enjoyed some protection, at least until it fell into our hands.’

Yesugei still could not shake off what he had seen. The Word Bearers had gone from a proud Legion at the forefront of the Great Crusade to a degenerate horde of zealots, and in such a short time. Their ship had been a casket of horrors. He could still see Ledak’s confident leer as he died. They revelled in what they had become.

Xa’ven had deserved a better death.

‘Then will you give the order?’ asked Lushan.

‘You may translate when ready,’ said Yesugei. ‘Ensure the Hesiod remains in tandem during the voyage.’

Lushan bowed, and withdrew to the command throne to begin the process. Alone again on the observation deck, Yesugei watched silent secondary detonations rock the Vorkaudar.

At least they knew where they were going, now. The daemonic device had shown them just how vast the warp storms were, just how powerful. It would be difficult to get anywhere through them quickly, as it had been before.

Horus had not only suborned Legions to his cause – he had somehow fractured the skin between realities and made the galaxy erupt in pain.

What power can do that? What power can rupture the arc of the heavens?

Even the Emperor, surely, did not possess such command. Magnus did not, nor did any psyker, witch or xenos that Yesugei had ever met. Some questions had yet to be answered.

Henricos’s outline flickered into being beside him. The Iron Hands legionary stood life-size in hololithic projection. His augmented armour made him look hunched and crab-like.

‘A final check,’ he rasped. ‘You’re sure about this?’

‘Not sure about anything, son of Medusa, but will not stay here and wait for war to come to me.’

Henricos grunted in approval. ‘You know the enemy will have seen those projections too.’

‘Of course.’

‘They’ll be heading for Prospero, just as we will.’

‘I am aware. We must be quicker.’

Henricos laughed in his brazen, cynical way. ‘And break our ships apart in the process.’

‘That will not happen.’

‘So you say.’

Yesugei smiled tolerantly. ‘We have you, my friend. Have confidence in your abilities, like Xa’ven did.’ He turned back to the viewer as the wreckage of the Vorkaudar slewed out of range. ‘And you have me. Has always been ambition of mine, to guide starship through aether. Navigators are worthy souls, but even they can learn few new tricks.’

Henricos looked at him sidelong, his helm-outline flickering green. ‘I don’t doubt you, weather-maker, but when we found you, you had no idea what had happened on Isstvan. I have to ask. This thing has already tested loyalties. What makes you think that, if we get there, your Khan will have made the same choice as us?’

Yesugei started. It was something he had not even considered.

‘He would never–’

‘Yes, I know – never become like them. But it’s not that simple. We all loved Horus. Ferrus loved Horus. Sometimes all the data just isn’t there, and by the time you find them, your path has already been set.’

‘He will know the truth.’

‘You dreamed about him dying.’

Yesugei raised an eyebrow. He did not remember telling Henricos about those dreams.

‘Xa’ven told me,’ said Henricos. ‘He was worried. You have to prepare yourself, brother. It was the primarchs who brought this thing down on us. They’re the flawed gods. Here’s the crux of it – how well do you know the Khan?’

Yesugei could have laughed out loud then. He could have told him of the decades they had spent with one another, hunting under the unbroken blue sky, storming the crumbling walls of palaces. Then, later, taking to the void in the first V Legion starships, charging out to the margins of the galaxy where the light of the core grew dim and the void itself shimmered with alien energies.

He could have also remembered the restlessness, the frustration with Terra, the closeness to his Warmaster brother.

You call, I answer.

‘You do not anger me, Bion,’ said Yesugei. ‘You are right to ask. Let me ask question of my own – if you ever doubted Ferrus, deep down, even to point of thinking him traitor, would you not still seek him out, if you could?’

‘Of course. That’s not the issue. Here’s the issue – when we get there, if he’s declared for the Warmaster, what will you do?’

Yesugei did not have an answer. The possibility was so unconscionable, so utterly beyond expectation, that he truthfully had no idea.

‘I ask Xa’ven, once,’ Yesugei said, ‘what justify optimism. You know what he tell me? Faith.’

Henricos snorted. ‘We left all that behind.’

‘We did.’

Yesugei watched as the warp shutters rolled down across the viewports. In his last glimpse of real space before the warp drives geared up, he saw the flickering death of the Vorkaudar, a tomb to those who had believed too much.

‘Perhaps, though, we have to relearn it.’

‘Why are the shields down?’ Ilya demanded, striding angrily across the Swordstorm’s command bridge.

Halji followed tolerantly in her wake. ‘We lost teleport locus for the Khagan. We are keeping shields down in case he requires immediate translation.’

‘What about the rest? Where’s Qin Xa?’

All around her, in the many terraces and mezzanine decks of the capacious bridge, serfs and menials worked frantically at their stations. Signals continued to stream in from the planetary augurs, most of them red-lined.

‘We are working on it, szu.’

Ilya turned on him. ‘This isn’t good enough. I didn’t choose to take this work on, I was chosen. You may not like it, but he gave me the mandate.’

Halji spread his hands in apology. ‘As I say, we are working.’

Ilya cursed under her breath. The whole thing had been stupid – the Khan must have seen the tectonic readings, known about the aether-burn swirling around Prospero’s ravaged troposphere, and yet he had translated anyway. From what she could see, the planet looked liable to break apart at any time, and yet the fleet still hung in low orbit, shields down and in a loose spread.

It was all so arbitrary – exactly the failing she had worked so hard to eradicate from the Legion.

She looked up, over half a dozen marble platforms and balustrades, to where Hasik Noyan-Khan stood, surrounded by his retinue, tech-priests and bridge crew. In the absence of the Khagan he was in command of the battleship and, by extension, the fleet. She could not remember seeing the order given to teleport him onto the bridge.

‘It’s as if they’re waiting for something,’ she murmured.

‘What was that?’ asked Halji, standing over her shoulder.

‘Are we expecting a rendezvous?’ she asked, moving over to a pict-feed and adjusting the feeder dials. ‘Why has the Guang-zho moved out of position?’

Halji shook his head. ‘You have all data, szu.’

She did. It was all at her fingertips. More importantly, though, it was stored in her eidetic memory. She had seen and signed off the deployment plans, and knew exactly where every ship was meant to be, how long it was meant to be there and which vessels would come to relieve it when the rotations were programmed.

‘Things are changing,’ she muttered, calling up a series of ledgers. ‘Personnel are moving between ships.’

‘That is normal.’

‘Not in these numbers.’ Ilya frowned. ‘Halji, have orders been given to recombine brotherhoods, like we did on Chondax?’

‘Not that I am aware.’

‘Look at this.’ She pulled the viewing lens across on its brass support and showed it to him. ‘Khans are moving all over the place. Not just khans – the Starspear’s shuttle-bays are unusually active.’

Halji took it all in. ‘It has been long journey,’ he said. ‘We are not required to monitor every shuttle movement.’

‘But I am.’ She pushed her hair back and called up more data. ‘Hasik should be told. Where the hell is the Khagan? We should authorise a retrieval party, get someone down to the surface.’

‘We are–’

‘Working on it, yes. You’re taking this remarkably calmly.’ Ilya glanced up at Halji. The White Scars legionary wore his helm, just as all the other White Scars on the bridge did. That in itself was unusual – they normally only donned them on the absolute brink of combat. ‘Is there something going on that I haven’t been told about, Halji?’

Halji looked down at her. He did not respond immediately, which in itself was out of character.

‘Szu, I cannot say,’ he replied.

Jemulan Noyan-Khan’s chambers were decorated with a mix of Terran and Chogorian iconography. Straight swords mingled with tulwars, literal expeditionary fleet emblems with Khorchin calligraphic versions beside them. Though Chogorian himself, he had never made as much of the heritage as Hasik. His skin was darker than the norm, the legacy of his roots in the Palatine’s old domains of the Empty Quarter, though the long scar on his cheek was as stark as any of his brothers’.

‘You are not of my horde,’ he said, looking at Shiban doubtfully.

The two of them were alone in the chamber. Amber light from Prospero’s old sun filtered through onto the Qo rugs and Khitan altars.

‘I know,’ replied Shiban, bowing in apology. ‘I would not have come if I could think of another way.’

‘Hasik is your ordu lord.’

‘I cannot raise this with him.’

‘Really? I cannot think of a reason why not.’

‘Noyan-khan, there are warrior lodges active in the Legion.’

Jemulan raised an eyebrow. ‘What of it?’

‘They have made communication with the Warmaster. They have made him aware of our movements. They wish to force the Khagan’s hand in his favour.’

Jemulan frowned. ‘Nothing forces the Khagan’s hand in anything.’

‘Many khans are involved. They are moving between ships, readying for his arrival. Hasik is a member. Others of the command group are members. For all I know, lord, you are one too, but my options were limited.’

Jemulan smiled thinly. ‘I am a member of nothing but my horde and my Legion.’

‘They are well organised,’ said Shiban. ‘They have been planning for a long time. When the Khagan returns, he will find a Legion ready to answer the Warmaster’s call.’

‘How do you know this?’

‘Because they inducted me. They are moving fast now, knowing that time is running out.’

‘Then they made a mistake, bringing you into their confidence.’

Shiban paused. ‘Perhaps they did.’

Jemulan waved his hand impatiently. ‘Fanciful.’ He walked over to the observation ports. In the far distance he could see the immense silhouette of the Swordstorm, just visible over the dark curve of Prospero’s turbulent atmosphere. ‘You think I would not know of this, if it were happening?’

‘They have been careful.’

‘Not really.’ He turned back to look at Shiban. ‘Not with you.’

‘The preparations have all been made. They do not think anything can stop them now.’

‘All the more reason to be cautious.’ Jemulan shook his head. ‘A Legion is an incubator for gossip and conspiracies. I once heard of a plot to exterminate the Terran aspirants in order to make the Legion Chogorian-pure. Many of my officers believed it enough to come to me with their concerns. It was nonsense, just as this is.’

‘I have been to a session, lord. I saw what they were doing.’

‘Let me guess. Sitting around, talking about revolution, complaining about the inertia of their leaders, hankering for more fighting. Warriors have done that since there have been swords for them to take up.’ Jemulan turned back towards him. ‘This is a difficult time. There is much we do not understand. It is natural to be impatient, but trust in the Khagan. He came here for a reason. He will choose the right course.’

‘I have no doubt in him,’ said Shiban. ‘It is the Legion. There is a cancer at its heart.’

Jemulan raised an eyebrow. ‘Cancer? A little florid, don’t you think?’

‘Could you not investigate?’

Jemulan’s face remained stony. ‘No, I could not. The fleet is on a war-footing. The Khagan will soon return, and I must be ready for orders. Khan, this is the wrong time. Go back to your ship. Prepare your warriors. There is enough uncertainty here without introducing more.’

Shiban hesitated. Jemulan’s tone was final. Part of him, conditioned by years of training, moved to comply.

‘Will you at least take this?’ he said, handing Jemulan the medal he had retrieved from Phemus IV.

Jemulan held it up, turning it in the light. ‘What is it?’

‘A marker. Please, if you do nothing else, keep it.’

Jemulan glared at him. A noyan-khan was not used to being petitioned. For a moment Shiban thought that he would hurl the medal back at him, but he stood his ground. Eventually, Jemulan’s gauntlet closed over the silver.

‘You should go now, khan,’ he said coldly. ‘I have heard enough.’

Shiban bowed. ‘Thank you for–’

Jemulan had already turned his back.

Jochi was waiting outside. ‘What did he say?’

Shiban kept walking, and the two of them strode back through the decks towards the shuttle bays.

‘He did not see the problem.’

‘I did not think he would.’

Shiban said nothing. It had been a slim hope – Jemulan did not have quite the same reputation as Hasik. He had not been there from the start. He was not as close to the Khagan. Perhaps it had always been too much to expect.

‘So what now? Do we wait for the Khagan to return?’

Shiban shook his head. ‘No. We are not children.’ He stopped walking. ‘We are reacting. We are waiting for others to move. When did that become our way? This thing needs to be seized.’

‘What do you have in mind?’

‘The Swordstorm,’ said Shiban firmly. ‘We cannot influence anything on the Kaljian.’

‘Hasik is already there.’

‘Then we need to be there too.’

‘That means disobeying orders.’

‘It does.’

Jochi smiled. ‘As long as I know.’

‘We will gather the brotherhood. All of them. They will be opposed to this madness, at least.’

‘How far will this go, khan?’

‘You mean, what am I prepared to do to halt it?’

Shiban thought of his guan dao glaive – the one that Hasik had given him upon his Ascension – hanging silently in his chambers, waiting. It would be in his hands again soon enough.

He thought of the last battle on Chondax, when he had witnessed the Khan fighting with such poise and perfection – the art of combat given physical form – that he had thought nothing could ever come close in imagination or reality.

He thought of his first meeting with Yesugei on the plains of home, the wind pulling at his hair.

These were the things that had made him. These were the things that made the Legion.

‘Anything, Jochi,’ he said, starting walking again. ‘I will do anything.’

Eighteen

The Crimson King
Corvidae
The muster

The Khan did not believe the evidence of his senses for a long time. He kept his dao raised, poised to strike, as it had done against the psychneuein.

The spectre before him was just as they had been – translucent, glowing with faint light, flickering and broken as if filtered by a faulty hololith projector.

‘What are you?’ the Khan asked warily.

The shade looked thoughtful. ‘A remnant,’ he said slowly. ‘A dream of something destroyed.’ He raised an insubstantial hand and held it up before an insubstantial face. ‘Matter. Thought. Energy. We have learned that there is not much difference, in the end, between them all.’

The Khan held his ground. Magnus’s voice was the same, exactly the same – sonorous, a little mournful, rich with the accumulated cadences of a hundred dialects. His baroque armour was cracked open, hanging from his frame in slivers. His cloak was ripped, and his robes were stained with old blood.

‘You are not Magnus,’ said the Khan.

‘Maybe not entirely,’ mused the shade. ‘Maybe not. But we share a soul. That is the important thing – the soul. I see yours before me, much as it ever was. Impatient. Burning with resentment. I did not think to see it again.’

The Khan’s eyes narrowed. The likeness was uncanny – almost seductively so. The way the shade moved, the aura it projected, they were all the same. The phantasm picked its way through the dust before sitting heavily upon the shell of the great bronze Occullum scope. The metal flexed beneath his weight. In some sense, then, the spectre influenced the world of matter.

‘Put your sword down,’ said Magnus. ‘You couldn’t hurt me with it, and I have no intention of hurting you.’

The Khan lowered the point but did not sheathe it. ‘What happened here?’

Magnus smiled wearily. ‘The Wolves happened. Our father’s vengeance, sent from Fenris. They brought the Sisters with them too, and Valdor. Such violence. Valdor is a machine. Russ, for all his theatricality, is little different. It happened rather quickly in the end.’

The Khan felt hollow. Despite all that he had seen, to hear confirmation of it was still hard.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘Why did they do it?’

Magnus drew in a long breath. As he did so, the dust around him stirred. ‘Don’t blame them. They were doing what they were bred to do, like dogs trained on a scent. And they were right to bring me to heel, in a way. I made mistakes. You warned me of some of them, back before I went to Nikaea. You remember when we spoke on Ullanor? I should have listened then. But I never did listen well. Happier to be listened to, more’s the pity.’

The Khan watched Magnus carefully as he spoke. The old flamboyance had gone, replaced by a kind of grim resignation. Every so often his outline would flicker out almost completely, then restore itself weakly. The ghostly presence looked on the verge of guttering out, as if sustained by some damaged power source.

‘Magnus,’ said the Khan, controlling his impatience badly. ‘Tell me plainly.’

‘You were right,’ said Magnus. ‘You were right, and that is all there is to say. I should have restrained my sons. You never made the bargains I had to, so your Legion was never compromised. But here’s the truth – we were all deceived. All of us. The Ocean was never benign, and it was conspiring against us even as we stepped into its shallows. The greater the soul, the greater the jeopardy. Horus was the greatest soul of them all, and so his was the furthest fall. Tell you plainly? Very well. Horus has been eaten by the warp. His body is bursting with it, corroding him, gnawing at him from the inside. There were others – Erebus, Lorgar – but it was his decision in the end. He can’t hide behind them, for they were only shadows compared to him.’

The Khan drew closer, never taking his eyes from Magnus’s face. It was hard to follow his train of thought – the Crimson King’s mind had always worked in strange, roundabout ways.

‘I tried to warn our father,’ said Magnus. ‘That was my crime, and this is the punishment.’ He looked around the dust-caked caves. ‘It was pride, that was all. Pride that swallowed Horus, too. You see, Jaghatai, here’s the problem – we were made too well. Nothing in the galaxy could stand against us. We learned that we, and only we, held the destiny of a billion worlds in our own hands. So the gods waited and they watched, and they realised what we did not – that only the primarchs could destroy the primarchs. Only we could bring down the eternal Imperium, because everything else had been annihilated. That’s what Lorgar called it. The Primordial Annihilator.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Save me, but Lorgar can be tedious. He might grasp the deeper truths, but he’s as much of a slave to his gene-coding as the rest of us.’

The Khan squatted down, bringing his eyes into line with Magnus’s. He rested his dao tip-down on the rock floor.

‘Russ did this?’ he asked.

Magnus nodded. ‘As completely as he does everything.’

‘And Horus?’

‘No, brother. No.’ Magnus shook his head a little impatiently. ‘Do you not see yet? We are all just two sides of the same coin. Most of us have cast our lots, and only a few remain. Then the game begins. I have come to see it like this – the gods demand entertainment. They demand contest and trial. We could not be allowed to defeat our own daemons, for that would be boring, and boredom is the only thing the eternals fear. We are being lined up, one by one, to tear at one another’s throats. I do not think they wish to see a victor. I think they wish us to fight forever, locked in madness until the universe’s end.’

Magnus smiled again at the Khan. It used to be a warmer smile; now it was condescending, self-aware, cynical.

‘I see much, from my new home,’ he said. ‘I see how things are lining up. You’re one of the last, Jaghatai. They don’t know which way you will go. None of them do, and that’s why you have the eyes of the galaxy on you at last.’

‘Do not talk like this,’ said the Khan, coldly. ‘I have never taken sides.’

‘You’d take them all on?’ laughed Magnus. ‘I believe you would at that. But come, there are only two paths here – you can hunker down in what remains of our father’s Imperium and try to keep the moon-wolf from beating down the door, or you can remember how Horus used to be, and stand at his side as he brings terror to the complacent. The first would be the more loyal course, but the other has its merits.’

‘What of you?’

Magnus paused then, as if the question had only just occurred to him. ‘Me? What of me?’ His one eye creased under a lone eyebrow. ‘My choices are constrained. I know more than anyone what awaits us on the other side. Do you think I welcome that? It is the ruin I worked for centuries to avoid, but our father is not the forgiving sort. My bridges are burned with him. They were burned when I broke the wards over his little project.’

Magnus looked sidelong at the Khan.

‘He’s been up to all sorts of things, our beloved father. Consorting with xenos, resurrecting ancient technology. Don’t believe that he is blameless in this, nor that old conspirator Malcador. Every choice is tainted now, and we’re all dancing down the same path of decay. The only question is which herd to follow, and which doom is less disagreeable.’

‘No.’ The Khan stood up again. ‘Whatever you are, you are not Magnus. You don’t even sound like him.’

Magnus shrugged. ‘Believe what you want. Perhaps I am not Magnus. I used to be, that is certain, but maybe what counts as my self is not what it was. Part of me dwells elsewhere, on a barren rock halfway across the cosmos. Part of me is here, lingering like a stench over carrion. I can’t quite leave, not yet. I think something has to happen first. Maybe you are it, or maybe you were never meant to be here. I favour the latter – you were always unpredictable.’

‘I came to find a friend,’ said the Khan distastefully. ‘Whatever else had happened, I thought, I could come to you for counsel.’

Magnus looked hurt. ‘Do not be harsh, Khagan. Only a part of me resides here, slinking in the shadows. The better part is elsewhere, pondering loftier things. Soon he – or I, or we – will come to a judgement.’

‘What will that be?’

‘I don’t know. I really don’t. Lorgar sends me pleas almost daily, reminding me what Russ did here. He thinks we are kindred spirits. Touching, really.’ Magnus paused, and stared down at his flickering hands. ‘Sometimes, though, I still think there might be some way back. I see it as a maze, one in which all I have to do is find the route through. Perhaps the Emperor will forgive. If He survives what I have unleashed, perhaps He will.’ Then Magnus’s spectral eye flicked up at the Khan again. ‘But you, Jaghatai? What is your choice?’

The Khan shook his head. ‘We are who we are – no one’s slaves.’

Magnus laughed. ‘That’s not good enough. You have to choose.’

‘If what you say is true, then the dream is over. It will be each Legion alone.’

‘It doesn’t work like that.’

‘Horus is corrupted, the Emperor is a tyrant.’

‘True enough.’

‘Then I choose neither.’

Magnus laughed again, though the sound was bitter. ‘This thing is a like a great dark star, ringed by fire. It will draw you in, bit by bit, until you are orbiting it with the rest of us. Even you do not have ships fast enough to escape it, Jaghatai. Even your White Scars will not get out.’

The Khan felt sick from the stink of death and ashes. His blade glittered coldly in the near-perfect dark. ‘We can outrun anything that lives.’

‘But they do not live, not like we do. I do not lie, brother. Choose. We will meet again, either as allies or foes, so you may as well decide now.’

The Khan stared down at Magnus, his mind in turmoil.

‘What have you become?’ he asked, no longer able to keep the horror from his voice.

‘What I was always destined to be,’ said Magnus, looking at him sadly. ‘But you still have a choice, brother. Make the right one.’

The chamber, like all those that they had marched through, must once have been magnificent. Qin Xa had stopped noticing the shattered finery – after a while, it became depressing to think on it.

Arvida had led them far through the empty city. As they went, the ground had shaken more frequently; cracks opened before their eyes, shooting up the sides of already broken walls. They had passed shafts that went down a long, long way, their hearts glowing red like molten iron. Some whole districts seemed to have slumped into the earth, lost in smoke-choked sinkholes.

They ended up in the ruins of a grand audience chamber. Ionic pillars soared up above them, holding aloft a half-collapsed dome. Marble bookcases lined the immense walls, though the contents had been burned away. The floor was strewn with debris, and each of the three doorways were blocked with makeshift barricades.

‘I can’t offer you much,’ said the legionary dryly, limping over to an old stone throne at the centre of the space. He sounded exhausted.

Qin Xa and the others remained standing. ‘How long have you been here?’ he asked.

Arvida shook his head. ‘No idea.’ He tapped the side of his helm. ‘Chrono’s blown. Every day’s the same. You lose track.’

Qin Xa looked around the chamber. An old library, perhaps. He tried to imagine it as it had once been.

‘There are no others?’ Qin Xa asked.

‘Not that I’ve found.’ The legionary looked up at him. ‘I was of the Fourth Fellowship. I was a sergeant.’

‘Your squad?’

‘Dead.’

‘What happened?’

‘I ask myself the same thing.’ Arvida drew in a long, filtered breath. ‘If you wish to know why this planet was burned, I can’t tell you. I arrived after the fighting was over. That’s why I am still alive. I’d rather have fought the Wolves, though. I’d rather have died and drawn some blood, rather than skulk in the remains, ignorant and useless.’

‘Avoiding those… things?’

‘The psychneuein, aye. Or rather, what became of them. There are other things, too. Fragments, ghosts. Prospero was soaked in the aether – it’s to be expected. There’s an aura, burning away up there. An aftershock. Sometimes I hear the voices of those who died. In the beginning I went after them, hoping. I stopped that. They’re just voices now. I don’t think they’re even really here.’

Qin Xa regarded Arvida watchfully. The sorcerer’s power was prodigious, even for one of his hexed kind, but his voice was barely more than a whisper. ‘When did you last eat?’

‘Like I say, the chronos have blown. A long time.’

Qin Xa gestured to one of the keshig, who opened a compartment in his armour plate and produced a nutri-pack. He lumbered over to Arvida and offered it.

The legionary took it, snapping open the receptacle under his breastplate and slotting it in. The armour’s mechanisms would do the rest – feeding sustenance slowly into his bloodstream, restoring what needed to be restored. Physically, at least.

‘You know we need to go back,’ said Qin Xa.

‘For your primarch? I wouldn’t worry. He can fight them. Throne, he was made to fight them.’ Arvida rolled his shoulders slowly, as if feeling sensation come back into long-starved muscles. ‘I was trying to get there myself. There’s something down there. The only source of power left. They beat me back every time.’

‘What is it?’

Arvida shrugged. ‘The Reflecting Caves are under the square. Perhaps something Magnus made still survives in the caverns. He made a lot of things, including enemies.’

Qin Xa checked his helm display. Contact with the fleet was still broken, but he might be able to get a data-burst through. ‘We have ships in orbit. Whole brotherhoods. If we need to break down–’

‘He’ll be back. Don’t waste lives on it. Get away from this world – that’s the only thing.’ He looked up at Qin Xa, and something about the look gave away his desperation. ‘And take me with you.’

Qin Xa checked the vox-link again.

‘If I get a lock, I will call in more support,’ he said. ‘But when you are restored, we are going back to the square. I will not leave him.’

Arvida nodded, as if he had known what Qin Xa was going to say before he said it. ‘Fine. Whatever you wish. Give me some time, though. I’ll need it, if you want any kind of chance. I’m no pyrae – it’s not my discipline.’

‘What is, then?’

Arvida snorted a dry, bitter laugh. ‘Seeing the future,’ he said. ‘That turned out well, didn’t it?’

Torghun marched down the Starspear’s embarkation deck, over to where the Stormbirds waited on their launch rails. He was in full armour, his face hidden behind his angular helm. Hibou Khan marched beside him, similarly decked out. Behind them came warriors of their brotherhoods – hundreds of them, their boots clanking on the rough floor.

‘It failed, brother,’ said Hibou.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Torghun.

‘Your project. The Brotherhood of the Storm. Their khan’s been to see Jemulan. Hasik is not pleased.’

Torghun felt a spike of irritation. ‘It was at his request.’

Hibou chuckled, though the sound was tinny behind the vox-grille. ‘It does not matter much. The word is out now – there are disputes on a dozen frigates. Shiban is just one of the hold-outs, but there will be many more.’

‘What did Jemulan tell him?’

‘Who knows? Things are moving too quickly. Hasik has the Swordstorm, and I will take the Tchin-Zar. As long as we hold the capital ships the others will fall into line.’

Torghun turned to him. ‘And what of the Khagan?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘If he doesn’t see the truth of it?’

Hibou snorted. ‘You heard the speaker’s testimony – Horus and the Khagan have always seen things the same way. What could he do, if his fleet is of one mind? He will recognise what we have done. He will see the justice in it.’ Hibou turned to him. ‘You made your choice. Do not doubt it, brother. It was the right one.’

Torghun knew that. He had made his choice a long time ago, years back when the first stirrings of the lodges had come to his ears. It was the chance to mould the Legion into what it should have been – a shock-attack force to rival the vaunted Speartip of the Sons of Horus, only shackled to a greater, more generous mind than that of the flighty Khan.

Only now, as the final stages of the long game drew to their conclusion, had his resolve cracked a little. The way Shiban had looked at him after the final session – disappointed, even disbelieving. It should not have mattered, but somehow it did.

‘This is the destiny of the Legion,’ Hibou went on. ‘The Khagan knows it, deep down. All we are doing is helping the process along.’

Ahead of them yawned the hangar’s vast void-entrance, glowing with marker lights and open to the starfield beyond. Warriors dispersed to their Stormbirds, breaking into squads and marching up the ramps.

‘You know your orders,’ said Hibou, turning to Torghun before making his way to his own gunship.

Torghun nodded. Before a mission he had always felt good, his body responding quickly to the stimms and battle-hormones. But it was difficult to feel the same euphoria now, no matter how hard he worked to summon it.

‘For the Imperium, brother,’ said Torghun, making the sign of the aquila.

Hibou returned the gesture. ‘For the–’

He broke off. Torghun’s helm-system suddenly fed him a relayed augur-reading from the Swordstorm. Every lodge member, he knew, would be seeing the same thing. Watching the runes glow against his retinal feed gave him an odd sensation – a twist in the stomach, like anticipation.

Hibou looked at him and laughed. He clapped his gauntlet against Torghun’s shoulder guard.

‘Rejoice, brother,’ he said, his voice resonant with excitement. ‘We have called, and he has answered.’

Torghun looked at the signals, still on the edge of the system but already moving in close – three of them, then four. He could sense Hibou’s elation, and wondered why he struggled to match it with his own.

‘I see it,’ Torghun said, working to keep his voice light. He remembered the wolf-moon icon, streaked with rain, a lifetime ago and a galaxy’s-span away. ‘He’s here, then. He’s here at last.’

Shiban strode to the balcony overlooking the Kaljian’s main crew assembly chamber. His armour shone from the overhead lumens. The tech-priests and armoury servitors had restored it to perfection after Phemus, and it no longer bore any of the marks of that cursed world. His glaive felt light in his hand.

‘Brothers!’ he said, addressing the near-five hundred warriors arranged before him. They stood in their squads, each one arrayed in ivory battleplate, each one silently expectant. ‘You have all heard the rumours running around the Legion. You have all heard that we are now adrift, that the Emperor has turned tyrant, that Horus is a traitor and that all allegiances are now suspect. Some of you will have made your own minds up. You may have fought over it, or you may have kept your counsel to yourself.’

Shiban scanned the ranks of warriors. As he did so, he felt a quiet surge of pride. Chogorian runes, engraved starkly upon the bone-white plate, gazed back at him, each one a masterpiece of calligraphy. Above them hung the battle standards of the brotherhood – the lightning sigil of the khans, the storm-motif, the long lists of past engagements.

‘Everything we thought we knew has been shown to be false. Brother now fights against brother. You can see through the viewports where this has taken us – Prospero is a burned wasteland, and there can be no going back from that.’

Jochi stood at his shoulder, dependable as granite. Shiban was glad of his presence – Jochi had never queried anything, never questioned an order. He was the epitome of loyalty.

‘There will be vengeance for this,’ he said, ‘and we will be a part of it. But until the Khagan rules, there can be no fresh hunt. All of you, when you ascended, when you gave yourself the scar that marks you, accepted this. We are not fighters, ripe to murder when the whim take us – we are legionaries. We are warriors of the ordu of Jaghatai.’

The assembly chamber rang with his vox-amplified words. Polished walls of marble and jet glimmered dully, reflecting the armour within. From far below came the clunk and whine of hangar lifters preparing the brotherhood’s speeders.

‘Not all of our battle-brothers feel this way,’ Shiban went on. ‘Some are seeking to pre-empt the order. They have been working for a long time, fed by information from beyond the Legion, encouraged to believe the word of outsiders who have no understanding of our ways or our culture.’

He remembered Torghun’s enthusiasm, his trust. Not for the first time, Shiban wondered why the Terran had taken the risk of inviting him in – he must have known the likelihood of rejection. Was it arrogance? Or had he been searching, somehow, for confirmation?

‘They may be right, brothers. They may be right when they claim that the Warmaster has been betrayed and now demands our fealty. They may speak the truth when they proclaim the Emperor’s hand in the holocaust on the world below us. I do not know. And that is the core of it – none of us do. Only one in this Legion has the authority to order us to war. He remains silent, and so we must wait.’

Shiban felt his pulse pick up. He was coming to the turning point.

‘Time has now run out. The lodges have called the Warmaster, and he has answered. The fleet is already half pledged to his cause. Many others are ignorant, knowledge is guarded by the few.’

Shiban’s voice remained quiet as he spoke – the soft, subtle tones he had learned as an aspirant in Khum Karta – but he infused them with solidity. They would need to believe in him. They would need to follow him, just as they had on Chondax, on Phemus, on Ullanor, and this time it would not be easy.

‘It is left to us, brothers. The time for arguments has passed – they have made their move, so we are compelled to make ours. We are hemmed in, and our space is diminishing. We must act. We must defy our orders to ensure that the Legion remains free.’

He took a long breath. Now it came.

‘Brothers, Hasik Noyan-Khan has control of the Swordstorm. From there he controls the Legion in the Khagan’s absence. He must not be allowed to make the decision for us. That is why I have called you here. It means assuming the mantle of renegades, at least in the eyes of those who now seek to subvert us. It means taking up arms against our own brothers. You do not need me to tell you that no such rebellion has ever occurred inside the White Scars. We risk our honour, and may pay for it with our lives.’

Shiban clutched the hilt of his glaive tightly.

‘I cannot demand this of you. We will not be fighting xenos – these are our own people. All I can do is ask you to trust me. I have led you across the arc of the galaxy in the cause of the Great Crusade. We have brought compliance to hundreds of worlds and given honour to the name “White Scar”. You followed me then. Brothers, you have heard what I judge to be true.’

He paused for a heartbeat.

‘Will you follow me now?’

There was no hesitation. There were no sidelong glances or mutterings of discontent. As one, the Brotherhood of the Storm raised their blades. Five hundred glaives, tulwars and power mauls rose into the air. With a crackle, disruptor fields snapped into blue-edged life.

‘Khagan!’ they roared in unison, and the sound of it resounded from the high, vaulted ceiling of the chamber.

Shiban raised his own weapon in salute, his hearts beating hard. The moment had come, the choice had been made. There could be no going back now.

‘Khagan!’ the warriors roared again, brandishing their weapons in ritual tribute. Shiban stood before them, his glaive angled over them, relishing their unshakeable loyalty.

‘So there you have it, khan,’ said Jochi over the vox, sounding both impressed and wary. ‘You have started your war.’

‘We did not start it,’ replied Shiban grimly. ‘But we will make it ours yet.’

Nineteen

Restoration
Brotherhood of the Storm
The cloud breaks

The earth rumbled under the Khan’s feet. Ever since he had arrived in the Reflecting Caves the tremors had been getting worse. Cracks snaked up the vast walls of the cavern, showering more dust onto an already choked floor. Tunnel mouths dotted the perimeter; some of them still adorned with their old ceremonial archways, some dissolved into rubble.

So there are ways back up, he thought.

He paced, first away from the seated Magnus, then back towards him. A blend of emotions battled away within him – anger, mostly, but also guilt.

‘I should have gone with you to Nikaea,’ he said.

Magnus looked equivocal. ‘Perhaps. That was the beginning of our censure. But I don’t know if you’d have helped, Jaghatai. How many of our brothers trust you more than me?’

‘Horus ordered me away,’ said the Khan.

‘Did he?’

‘There are no accidents here. I was kept away. I am sure of it.’ He felt like breaking something. ‘It should have been the three of us – the Angel, you and me.’

Magnus sighed. ‘It’s done, brother. Leave it. All that matters now is the future.’

‘There is no future!’ the Khan snapped, half raising his blade.

Magnus looked at the dao’s edge with a strange expression. ‘We were working for something better than... this.’

‘Were we? Guilliman, perhaps. Lorgar too, in his own warped way. But you weren’t – you were there for the hunt.’

‘It kept us pure.’

‘It kept you away.’ Magnus smiled. ‘You were so easy to keep out of the conversation. I was there the whole time – I just didn’t hear the words being whispered.’

The Khan stared hard at him, feeling an edge of sickness in the pit of his stomach. ‘Where are you, Magnus?’ he asked. ‘This isn’t you.’

Just as he had done before, Magnus paused. He looked around him, as if seeing something different to what the Khan was seeing.

‘I am not whole,’ Magnus breathed. ‘I am no longer bound in place. I am… distributed.’

‘We used to talk of daemons. Yaksha. You told me they were just dreams, and not to worry, for human ingenuity was the cure for all ills.’

Magnus shook his head, looking troubled. ‘Did I say that?’

‘Are you become a yaksha, brother?’

Magnus’s eye snapped up to his. ‘Maybe I have. Or something like one. There is a price, you see, for bargains. They do not let you forget.’ His forehead wrinkled as he concentrated. ‘I see a mirror world to this one. I see coal-black rock. I see a sky lit with sorcerous fire. I am there, I think. That is where my self resides. All that remains here, on the world that raised me, is an echo.’ His countenance hollowed in distress. ‘How many echoes are there, on other worlds, in other places?’

The Khan started to move, to circle slowly, keeping the blade’s tip between him and the apparition. ‘Yesugei told me you were too enamoured of the warp,’ he said, trying not to let his sense of revulsion get the better of him. ‘You let it make you sick. It was a tool, Magnus. It can be used, but only carefully. Limit yourself, I said.’

Magnus nodded miserably. ‘I remember.’

‘Take the modest amount. Sip at the cup but leave the dregs – this is the lore of Chogoris. You, even you, laughed at that.’

Magnus’s mouth curled in a half-sneer. ‘Chogoris,’ he muttered. ‘So proud of your home world. Nothing on Mundus Planus but emptiness.’

‘It made us, just as Prospero made you. Cthonia made Horus, and Caliban made the Lion. We are not just the sons of the Emperor – we were the sons of twenty worlds, each as different as jewels.’

‘You know, of course, that Nostramo is already ashes. Olympia lies in ruins, and the Lion’s home world is headed the same way. You can see what happened to mine. What, do you suppose, will stop Chogoris being consumed in the fire?’

‘All things pass.’

Magnus looked scornful. His face seemed to be distorting, as if locked underwater. ‘Change. That is the only constant. Change, change, change.’

He got to his feet, shakily, reaching to the carcass of his great telescope to steady himself.

‘I’m glad you came to see me, Jaghatai. We always saw eye-to-eye, you and me. You were brittle, but at least you spoke the truth. Unlike that bastard Russ. Do you know what he is, underneath? Do you have any idea what Leman Russ really hides inside those furs and totems? Here’s a clue – his Space Wolves have to cover their every axe blade with runes, lest they scream their nightmares into the void. Is that natural?’

The Khan held his ground, tensing. ‘Enough, brother.’

Magnus laughed. ‘You don’t want to know? That’s always been your weakness. I know it all, now. I could tell you the Emperor’s name, and it would surprise you. I could tell you that the fates decreed Fulgrim to be sent to Chogoris and you to Chemos, and I could tell you which arcane force in the universe prevented it.’ He took a step, then another, towards the Khan. ‘Do you wish to know where you will die, Khagan? Do you wish to know on what world, and in which dimension, your soul will find its ending?’

‘These things are not known.’

‘All is known.’

The Khan looked at him warily. ‘You told me I had a choice. My fate – all fate – is still to be written.’

Magnus grinned. His eye seemed to be weeping, though it was hard to tell whether it was with tears or blood. ‘Stories may meander, but the endings never change. Believe me, I have witnessed the authors.’ He shuddered. ‘They are terrible,’ he whispered.

By now he was only inches away from the sword.

‘I have what I came for, brother,’ said the Khan. ‘You can only give me one piece of knowledge that I truly desire.’

Magnus inclined his head. ‘And what is that?’

‘How to restore you.’

Magnus started. For a moment he looked truly bewildered, as if he had expected mockery and received sincerity, or perhaps the other way around. He looked down at his hands, then around at the devastation of his kingdom. Misery mingled with confusion.

‘I am corrupted,’ he whispered, as if realising it all over again. ‘Restore me, and I shall become a lord again. I shall be the Crimson King, free to rule over a world of spells and vengeance. The galaxy may live to rue that.’

‘You were my friend,’ said the Khan, quietly.

Magnus looked at him, and for a moment, just a moment, the old dignity was there, etched upon a ravaged face and glimmering in the dark.

‘Then,’ he said, ‘I judge you know what to do.’

The Khan nodded, and pulled his sword round for the strike. Slivers of witch-light skittered along the rune-wound steel.

‘Until we meet under starlight,’ he promised.

‘Sooner than you might think,’ said Magnus, making no effort to evade the blow.

The Khan swung, and the dao glittered through the air, whispering as it came. When it hit Magnus’s outline, the ghostly shell shattered, spilling into a thousand pieces like broken glass. A wild crack rang out, a steely snap, followed by a shriek like a child’s cry. The dust around him billowed up in a cloud, swirling and writhing. The Khan was momentarily blinded, and staggered back.

The ground trembled, a low rumbling broke out from deep within the earth. What remained of the brass instruments danced and shivered, and the broken lens-pieces skittered across the bare rock.

Then, slowly, the tumult subsided. The phantasmal light faded away, followed by the howl of unnatural wind. After that, all that remained were the broken things of Magnus’s creation, now sunk into real-shadow, forlorn and battered by the maelstrom.

The Khan stayed where he was for a moment, breathing heavily. The hollowness still plagued him – the numb feeling of having discovered the full extent of treachery.

There is only one unforgivable lie.

His hearts beat sluggishly. His blade felt leaden in his fist.

That is the lie that says, this is the end, you are the conqueror, you have achieved it and now all that remains is to build walls higher and shelter behind them. Now, the lie says, the world is safe.

The Khan bowed his head.

All emperors are liars.

He remained still, as gaunt and lean as a hunting hound, his cloak hanging stiffly about him. He did not move. He felt as though moving, even by a fraction, might break what remained. Around him, the Reflecting Caves sighed with emptiness, their majesty in tatters.

At least, amidst all the numbness, the truth was now known. The choice could be made, for the traitor had been unmasked.

Duty could now be done, the call to war could be given.

But, for all that, still he did not stir.

The dream had died.

Ilya glanced up towards Hasik’s position, and nothing she saw gave her any reassurance.

She looked around at the bridge, as if for the first time, watching the multitudes at work, trying to see if any of them were as unnerved as she was. The Swordstorm’s command nexus was a truly colossal space, big enough to accommodate the hundreds of crew responsible for monitoring and guiding the battleship into combat. Its ridged walls soared away on either side of a cavernous interior, each one studded with terraces glowing brightly from the light of picter-screens. Lumen-banded pillars five metres in diameter thrust up from the marble floor, terminating in the far distance of the vaulted ceiling. A whole series of platforms ran away from her vantage, each one housing a different cluster of White Scars officer-serfs or Mechanicum tech-priests.

The entire space was dominated by the enormous arch over the far observation deck. Prospero’s horizon-curve was visible through the armourglass, dark as smoke and angry with snarled cloud cover. Lightning ran across the upper atmosphere, like dancing tongues of silver.

Ilya swept her gaze back to Hasik. He was busy at a sensor-pillar under the arch, surrounded by glimmering hololiths and gesturing incessantly. Servitors and mortal crew scurried to comply with whatever orders he was giving them – dozens came and went, bowing and proffering data-slates.

Halji stood beside her, saying nothing, sunken into an expectant silence.

Ilya turned to her own screens. Ships were still moving out of the deployment pattern. The Qo-Fian had withdrawn to the far side of the planet. Two smaller frigates had broken off contact entirely after a series of strange vox-bursts.

She ran an augur sweep, and it was then that she first saw them: four large ships, heading in-system fast. They looked to be just minutes out of maximum resolution, and their auspex profiles still scattered the feed with interference. It was possible that they would be accompanied by smaller vessels, too, as yet invisible to the fleet’s sensors.

‘Have you seen this, Halji?’ she asked, pointing to the rune-glyphs.

Halji nodded. ‘Incoming ships.’

‘They have no identifiers,’ said Ilya, frowning. ‘They’re big. Throne, they’re battleships.’

‘It is under control.’

‘It’s not bloody well under control!’ Ilya felt like hammering her fists on Halji’s armour. He was so calm, so unconcerned. ‘You’re sitting around like you’ve…’

She did not say ‘arranged it yourself’.

She glanced up at Hasik again. He was surrounded by two dozen White Scars in heavy battleplate, stationed around the edge of the observation deck like an honour guard. The noyan-khan showed no signs of surprise, nor did anyone around him.

‘We have to raise shields,’ she said firmly.

‘That is the noyan-khan’s decision.’

‘It’s procedure.’

Halji avoided looking at her.

Ilya thumped her fist into the pict-feed and felt it flex. ‘Damn you, Halji! What’s going on?’

Halji shook his head. ‘Calm yourself, szu. All will become apparent.’

He was like a rockcrete wall. With a sudden lurch of realisation, she realised that Halji was not her ally and her guide; he was her chaperone. She could no more have escaped his attention than she could outrun a jetbike.

She whirled back to the nearest screen, her cheeks burning with anger. Runes swam across the console before her, each one indicating a ship shifting out of position.

‘Where is the Khan?’ she muttered, her fingers dancing across the controls.

The four ship-signals kept tracking across the void, heading with remorseless efficiency towards the White Scars formations. Just as at Chondax, the entire fleet seemed incapable of responding to them.

She ran an augmented sweep on the signals, pulling them to a different monitor. Grainy images resolved. It was hard to tell from the distorted profiles, but the ships looked grey. Pale grey, like the images of Luna she had seen so many times on propaganda picts.

She killed the feed, despairing of making sense of it. Then, just as she was about to look away, she detected a familiar signature edging towards the Swordstorm. The Kaljian, one of the smaller attack-frigates, one of the last she had pulled into muster before the Alpha Legion had attacked. It was not so much drifting into range as… sidling.

Ilya glanced up at Halji, whose attention had shifted to Hasik again. He didn’t notice her, and was not checking the pict-feeds.

She almost said something, then changed her mind. The Khan was still out of contact and matters were clearly being run by others – it was up to her to decide who was acting in whose best interests.

She kept her head down. She said nothing. Carefully, trying to remain as calm as possible, she started to work. One by one, the Swordstorm’s defensive schematics began to scroll down the console.

Qin Xa hunkered down in the rubble. His targeting system still gave him nothing. The rest of the squad crept through the darkness, hugging close to the twisted heaps of debris. Above them, Prospero’s unquiet skies cracked and grumbled.

He could already see the column, standing like a sliver of bone amidst the swirling dust. Just one more barricade to clear, and they would be back in the square.

‘In position?’ he voxed to Arvida.

‘Whenever you’re ready,’ replied the Thousand Sons legionary.

Qin Xa checked the location of his battle-brothers. Eight runes blinked on his retinal display, each within five metres. Bolters were no use, he had decided, so his warriors went into battle with tulwars or glaives or lightning claws, all of them wreathed in the crackling discharge of electric-blue energy fields.

‘Stay close,’ he warned, slowly turning his two curved blades. ‘Secure the pillar, then I will try to get a location reading.’

He broke from cover, loping over the broken terrain and skirting the worst of the wreckage. His squad did the same, streaking out into Prospero’s eternal night. They went low, silent, like wolves on the scent.

Arvida took up position in the midst of them. He travelled more stealthily than the Terminators, knowing the terrain perfectly and not hindered by their massive armour-shells. His gauntlets were already glowing with slivers of warp-fire, lighting up his battered crimson plate.

Qin Xa was the first into the square. Its surface was more pitted and treacherous than it had been before, with ravines running across the pockmarked rockcrete and huge areas slumped down into smoking craters. He ghosted across the remains, keeping his blades raised the whole time.

As he went, his blood pumped hard around his system. There was nothing but silence surrounding him. It could have been the underworld itself.

Then, just as the central column drew into range, he heard the first trace of buzzing. He whirled around to see a psychneuein materialise over him, coalescing instantly as if sucked from the atmosphere itself. He saw the trailing limbs, the mandibles clicking, the swollen brain-parts. Just as before, the creature was translucent and glowing like corpse-gas. It swooped at him, plunging fast, wings blurring.

Qin Xa braced, waiting for the impact. At the last moment he struck upwards, aiming for the narrow waist between thorax and abdomen. The psychneuein blundered blindly into the path of his swords – both blades hit their target, sinking without resistance into aetheric matter. Qin Xa immediately felt the awful draining cold that made his muscles seize and his mind lock.

Then he heard Arvida cry out, and a bolt of something like lightning slammed into the insectoid body. The glowing exoskeleton instantly hardened, solidifying like ice freezing. Chitinous membranes clustered into being, membranes toughened, fluids pumped.

Qin Xa’s blades now bit, and he sliced them both crossways. The psychneuein screamed, and its body severed. Sticky residue slapped across Qin Xa’s helm. The buzzing became a strangled flail.

By then he was moving again, leaping away from the disintegrating creature’s carcass. Other psychneuein had spun into the square and were lurching towards the Terminators with the same eerie blindness as before. This time, when they latched on, Arvida was ready. Positioned in the centre of the squad, he opened his gauntlet and sent bolts of warp-fire crashing into them. When the bolts hit, the half-corporeal creatures crystallised into physicality. Once in that state, the White Scars could take them on.

Qin Xa ran quickly, spinning out of contact with a reeling psychneuein and charging towards another. Just as he crashed into contact, its shell hardened, ready to receive the cut of his energy field. The creature reeled, its abdomen slit open and leaking. Qin Xa pressed the attack, making his blades whirr. He eviscerated it in three savage cuts, snickering the swords in tight switchbacks, slashing the warp beast apart and leaving it in chunks.

He felt a cold rush of satisfaction. This was fighting he could undertake. He was faster than them. He was sharper.

More materialised; first a few, then dozens. The cluster above them became a swarm, all drawn by the presence of live souls encroaching upon their domain. Ever stranger creatures emerged among them: giant scarabs with glossy, outsize shells; towering mantids that scuttled across the rock; vespid-like beasts with engorged twin stings. Prospero’s bizarre menagerie of psychic fauna resurrected jerkily around them, shimmering with spectral evanescence. Bloated cranial mounds glowed, multi-faceted eyes glinted sightlessly.

Arvida worked hard, throwing bolt after bolt at the emerging horrors. The White Scars kept fighting, hacking their way towards the pillar, their blades dripping with luminescent ichor. Qin Xa saw Garul plough straight through a newly-solidified psychneuein, his glaive whirring with incredible speed. Ro-Xian ripped a scarab apart with his claws, drenching himself in glistening liquids as the hard shell blew apart.

But the numbers began to tell. As Qin Xa reached the faint shadow of the column one of the wasp-like insectoids came right at him. Arvida was slow to respond, and Qin Xa’s blades whipped through nothing. He felt his soul tug agonisingly, and tried to withdraw. The thing pressed into him, sweeping its grotesque stingers around for the kill.

Qin Xa lunged, aiming at the closest curved spike. At the last moment, Arvida cracked a bolt into the wasp’s body – one of Qin Xa’s blades severed the solidified stinger, the other jutted deep into its thorax. He wrenched both blades outwards, ripping the creature open.

By then more were coming in. Kaghun was gripped by one of the mantids, his soul wrenched from his body before Arvida could react. The warrior’s unearthly screams lingered as the diminished squad fought on towards the centre of the square.

The spectres kept on materialising, bursting into ghoulish life from all directions, spilling out of the air. Arvida worked frantically, lighting up the skies with his sorcery, but it was not quick enough. Still there was no signal – no location reading for the Khan.

Qin Xa moved with all the speed of his heritage, driving the Terminator plate hard and making the servos whine. His blades plunged and darted, evading the glowing forms of the ethereal and stabbing unerringly into the solidified flesh of the corporeal. His mind fixed into a tight vice of concentration – all he saw was the movement, the strikes and the angles, bleeding out of the night like iridescent nightmares.

The warriors of the keshig withdrew into a tight huddle, protecting Arvida even as his witchery allowed them to fight. The broken column reared up at their backs, severed and implacable.

‘We cannot hold for much longer,’ Arvida voxed coolly.

‘Stay where you are,’ grunted Qin Xa, scything his blades into the path of a scuttling mantid, slicing its limbs open and sending it crashing to the ground. ‘He must be close.’

He heard a buzz and spun to his right, decapitating a psychneuein streaking in just above waist height. The blow was judged expertly, but Arvida’s warp-craft had not completed properly, and before Qin Xa could pull the swords away he felt the icy pull of the aether.

He jerked away, but too slowly. Another psychneuein came out of the dark, as translucent as smoked glass. It swerved in on Qin Xa.

He had no time. Arvida was now occupied with his own fight, his warriors could not help. With a sudden lurch, Qin Xa knew that he could do nothing to protect himself.

‘Khagan!’ he roared defiantly, bracing for impact.

The creature blasted apart, spinning into a thousand fragments that sailed high across the ruins. Wing fragments and body parts burned like stars before blazing out, sending a shockwave screaming across the square and making the dust dance. The air itself seemed to rip apart, scattering psychneuein and sending them tumbling.

A tall figure stood on the far side of the annihilated phantasms, silhouetted against the dull burn of Prospero’s long death-agony. His sword glowed with aetheric residue, as though dipped in molten iron. His fine armour was crusted with dirt and dust, much of it smouldering red-hot.

The spectres hung back then, their will suddenly wavering. The swarm fell away, rising clear of the new blade in their midst.

For a second, lost in shock, Qin Xa just stared at the newcomer, breathing heavily. Then the armoured figure spoke, and all became clear.

‘Leave them, Xa,’ growled the Khan, striding after the retreating horrors, his long dao blade shimmering, his armour’s trim glinting like newly-mined gold. ‘You can’t hurt them. I can.’

The Kaljian pulled into strike range, and the shadow of the Swordstorm rippled over it. Waiting just inside the open hangar doors, Shiban looked up at the vastness of the hull as it slid through the void, blotting out the stars beyond. He observed the engine housings, the ventral shield generators, the flank lances, all embellished with ornate las-emplacements and close-range cannons.

His brotherhood were mounted and ready. They lined up in ranks on the hangar deck. Five hundred bikes growled and spat as their engines revved to their full pitch.

Sojutsu-pattern voidbikes were larger and more brutal than the Scimitar-class machines, with enclosed thrusters and a far more potent power source. They were more like one-man fighters than speeders, and an armour-sealed White Scars legionary could use them for short bursts in the void just as other Legions used their speeders for atmospheric work.

Shiban leaned back in his saddle, running final checks on the bike’s system. Its centre-mounted heavy bolter keyed up and the bracing clamps slid back. He rose above the rockcrete, buoyed by a thrumming layer of grav-repulsion. All around him his brothers did the same, and the hangar filled with the oily stink of thrusters belching smoke.

‘Think they will fire on us?’ voxed Jochi, bobbing alongside him.

‘We find out now,’ replied Shiban, before pressing the throttle down.

His bike leapt forward like a living thing, growling down the long hangar exit ramp, streaking out through the atmospheric shield and into the silent void beyond.

His brotherhood followed close behind. Five hundred bikes shot clear of the Kaljian’s hull and dispersed into the vacuum, each one trailing a line of sooty backwash.

Shiban increased speed, and the looming shape of the Swordstorm wheeled above him. The bike swayed as he pulled it round, aiming for a run along the near hull-edge and towards the ventral shuttle bays. Huge sensor towers, hanging from the battleship’s underside like stalactites, raced by as he reached full velocity.

The brotherhood tore towards the ingress points, spread out wide, just as if they were horsemen tearing across open grassland. Shiban saw the first set of bay doors race noiselessly towards him, and ran a sensor sweep on the entrance-zone.

‘Blast-shielded,’ he voxed, drawing closer to the hull.

He hurtled further down towards the battleship’s stern, veering between communication nodes and jutting weapon housings. The brotherhood swept past the first docking bay and powered on to the next.

‘They will all be protected, khan,’ remarked Jochi calmly. ‘Are we going to have to fight our way in?’

Shiban tilted to avoid a massive lance-barrel. ‘If we have to.’

He shot downwards, aiming for the Swordstorm’s keel. A thicket of sensor-vanes hung vertically, barring his path, and he picked up speed to clear them.

They did not have long – the sensorium officers on the flagship would already be tracking them, frantically voxing the Kaljian to demand why so many flyers had been launched. The window of operation between them taking off and Hasik taking precautions would be measured in seconds.

He pulled under the keel-point, missing the tip of a sensor-vane by a helm’s width and hauling the bike around hard. The far side of the Swordstorm yawned away above him, vast and precipitous.

‘Seven hundred metres,’ he voxed, locking on to the next docking bay. ‘Full throttle.’

The brotherhood streaked towards it, hugging the battleship’s hull-plating and swerving between the hundreds of protuberances and snaking trenches.

The first flickers of las-fire blazed past them like shooting stars – barely visible at such extreme velocities. Cannons further up the battleship’s cyclopean flank opened up first, swung back tight against the ship’s side to target the hurtling speeders.

Several found their mark, sending bikes careering into the hull-plating or spinning, thrusters blazing, into the void.

‘They dare!’ voxed Jochi, outraged.

Shiban poured on more power, cleaving to the underside of the Swordstorm as close as possible. He had hoped, deep down, that his Legion-brothers would not have used their weapons to prevent them from boarding. If they were truly serious, it would take them just a few minutes to obliterate the entire brotherhood.

They cannot mean to do that. Even now, with all that has happened, they cannot mean to do more than warn us off.

The next bank of docking bays was shielded and closed, all of them too heavily buttressed to be blasted through quickly.

‘Spread out,’ he voxed, scanning ahead for a way in. Only seconds remained until the situation would become irretrievable. ‘Use full hull-width, maintain speed.’

He pushed his bike even closer to the ship, grazing the underside of an exhaust vent and nearly clipping a power conduit. The las-fire picked up, finding its range and growing in density. The gunners were good, and well used to tracking objects at high velocity. More bikes exploded, tumbling through the void before crashing in silent streaks of igniting promethium. His helm-display flashed red, stabbing at him with the call-signs of the dead.

‘Faster,’ he snarled, unwilling to pull away. There would be no second chance.

His brothers knew it, and followed his lead tightly. Their engines flared in the dark, burning almost beyond their tolerances.

‘Khan,’ voxed Jochi through gritted teeth. For the first time, he sounded unsure. ‘When do we–’

Then Shiban saw it on his helm-display – a single docking port, un-shielded, un-barred.

‘That’s it – follow me in,’ Shiban ordered, swinging his bike upwards and kicking on towards the signal. He tore through the oncoming hail of las-fire, jerking and ducking to avoid the beams, sweeping past a whole row of angled torpedo launchers and streaking towards the signalled port.

He had no idea why it was unprotected, but it saved them the ruinous task of trying to blast an entrance. Its marker lights were on, strobing into the open jaws of the docking chamber, beckoning them in – as though someone on the flagship actively wanted them to break the cordon.

Shiban kicked the retros at the last moment, skidding around in zero-gravity then powering into the Swordstorm’s inertia bubble. His bike’s grav-plates whined instantly, adjusting to the rapidly moving environment, before locking on to the docking bay floor and righting him.

Shiban slewed into the chamber beyond, swinging his bike about and decelerating hard. The hangar stretched off around him, almost empty save for a few Arvus landers and a bulk shuttle held in place by docking clamps. He could already hear warning klaxons sounding.

The brotherhood followed him in, dropping to the deck as they swooped under the docking bay roof. The riders killed their engines, leaping from the saddle before the last of the roaring had died down, and their mounts coasted to a steaming standstill.

Shiban kicked his bike away and sped for the doors at the far end, drawing his glaive from his back as he ran. The energy field spat into life.

‘To me!’ he roared, noting how many life sign runes were streaming through the hangar. More than two hundred had already broken through; many more were coming in.

Jochi reached him, sprinting hard, bolt pistol in one hand and tulwar in the other. ‘Command bridge lock,’ he voxed to the rest of his brethren. ‘Nineteen levels up.’

Shiban nodded, reaching the exit ramp and powering up it towards a huge pair of half-open blast-doors.

‘We’ll be there in no time,’ he grinned.

The last of the psychneuein disappeared into the ruins, leaving nothing but ghostly trails of witch-light over burned-out buildings. The Khan watched them go. His blade ran with luminous ichor, dripping in teardrop clumps to the dust. Dozens of carcasses littered the earth around him, some still twitching in jerky displays of insect agony.

Killing them had been straightforward enough. It was a matter of belief, as much as anything: attuning himself to the potential that existed within him, just as it did in all of his brothers. They were, every one of them, creatures of the warp, whatever Malcador told the masses and whatever Russ or Angron might like to believe about themselves.

It runs in our minds like blood in a vein.

Qin Xa and the surviving keshig warriors gathered around him. As he turned to acknowledge them, the Khan noticed more silver flashes running along the horizon. The rumble of thunder had grown louder during his absence. The clouds were racing now, jostling like herds of aduun on the stampede.

Qin Xa bowed. ‘Khagan, are you–’

‘Do you have a fix on the Swordstorm?’ the Khan asked, glancing back up at the unquiet skies. He could sense the static in them, laced with strands of vivid aether-essence.

‘Not yet.’

The Khan turned back, and caught sight of the Thousand Sons legionary among the others. For a terrible moment he thought that it was Ahriman – he wore the same crimson armour and bore the same arcane sigils.

‘You,’ he said. ‘Who are you?’

The sorcerer bowed. ‘Revuel Arvida, lord. Fourth Fellowship.’

The Khan regarded him. He could see the vigour of the psychic soul glowing inside him like a candle-flame – weakened by privation, but still vivid.

‘You are the last?’

‘As far as I know,’ said Arvida. ‘Unless–’

‘There is nothing down there,’ the Khan said. ‘Not any more.’

‘Did you find what you were looking for?’ asked Qin Xa.

The Khan thought on that. It was hard to know what to say. He had never known what he was looking for, in truth. He had hoped, as had always happened in the past, that the quarry would fall into view before him, leaping away on the edge of sight, poised for him to run down. Now that he had ended the chase, though, it was hard to decide what kind of thing had been encountered.

‘I know more than I did,’ he said.

‘Then who is the traitor?’

The Khan smiled bleakly. ‘Everything we were told was the truth. This world bears the kill-mark of Russ, just as we were told, but Magnus had already fallen, just as we were told. Behind them all stands Horus, the Lord of Primarchs.’ He looked up into the skies. ‘They were all to blame. There is no one traitor – there is only a web, stretching back in time, clutching at us all. And now it comes for us.’

Above the column, the clouds began to glow. A vibrant shard of light speared down from the smog, crackling as it hit the stone below.

The Terminators turned to face it, powering up their weapons. Qin Xa stepped in front of the Khan. Only Arvida remained unmoved.

‘I have felt him following us for a long time,’ murmured the Khan, watching the energy lash and snake. Plumes of dust blew up, snarling in electric arcs and making the air hum with static. ‘He has been on my heels since Ullanor. He has finally caught up.’

The keshig moved into a loose semicircle, poised to strike. None of them would move before the order was given, though; they were the extension of the Khan’s will.

‘Do not try to prevent him,’ said the Khan calmly, watching dark shapes solidify within the raging wall of light. ‘He is beyond all of you. How could he not be? He is my brother.’

Twenty

Blindsided
All the time in the universe
Running out of friends

Hasik watched the augur readings with a growing sense of unease.

‘Are you sure?’ he demanded, swinging around to face Taban. ‘Can there be no mistake?’

‘I do not think so, noyan-khan,’ replied the sensorium master, peering intently at the lenses clustered around him. ‘I am as surprised as you. But I will check, to eliminate the possibility of error.’

Hasik turned to Goghal, commander of his keshig.

‘What of the fleet?’

‘The Qo-Fian is moving to engage them. I cannot make contact with the bridge. Hibou is not responding from the Tchin-Zar. I have reports of disorder on many vessels now.’

Hasik exhaled irritably. ‘We do not have time for this.’

Goghal looked over his shoulder briefly. Far away, back down in the depths of the lower bridge, the Terran woman was still working hard at her station.

‘The Kaljian has landed boarders. Even here, my lord, we are not–’

‘Shiban’s ship?’

‘I believe so.’

‘Open a vox-link to the incoming flotilla,’ ordered Hasik. ‘Prevent any of our vessels from opening fire on them. This is the moment – we hold here, we wait here.’

He turned to the dozens of White Scars around him. They were khans, captains, senior ship-officers and mortal commanders – just a few of those who had been persuaded and who were now working to free the Legion from the hand of tyranny. Some, like Taban, were members of the flagship’s crew; others had come with him from the Tchin-Zar. They remained resolute. They had no choice.

‘Incoming vessels are not responding,’ replied Goghal quietly.

Hasik cursed. ‘Why not?’

‘I have run repeat scans,’ interjected Taban. ‘There was no mistake. Teleportation was detected. Locus fixed on Tizca.’ He looked up at Hasik. ‘They appear to have gone direct to the source.’

Hasik felt his frustration rising. This was not what had been arranged. ‘Can we get a fix? Can we send down–’

Klaxons suddenly burst out across the bridge, echoing in the high vaults. White Scars warriors all around the key stations locked their bolters and began to move towards the many entrances.

‘Boarding party approaching, noyan-khan,’ reported Goghal, drawing his own weapon from its holster. His voice was almost reproachful. ‘Orders to repel?’

Hasik cast his eye over the command bridge. For all its size, it was stuffed with throngs of bodies – menials, station operators, Space Marine squads, tech-priests. Hundreds of them, all at his command. At the heart of it was his own keshig, the unbreakable retinue of Terminator-clad veterans. Just like the Khagan.

A lone brotherhood posed no real risk – they had run the calculations. But still, he had hoped to avoid full-scale combat in persuading others to the honourable course. Perhaps that had always been a foolish hope.

‘We are secure here,’ said Hasik coldly. ‘Tell them to hold the enemy at the entry points.’

Goghal bowed. ‘And what of… them?’

Hasik turned back to the arch of the massive observation portal. He could see them with his own eyes now – four grand warships, each clustered with escorts, burning towards them out of the glare of Prospero’s sun. They were moving slowly but purposefully, a far cry from the disruption sweeping across the White Scars fleet.

‘They are not Sixteenth Legion, noyan-khan,’ said Goghal.

‘I can see that.’

Why did they not make contact? Why the silence?

‘This is the test, brothers,’ Hasik announced, turning back to the warriors around him. Even as he did so, he heard the first hard bangs of bolter-fire echoing in the levels below. ‘This is what we have been working towards.’

He drew his own blade, the Chogorian tulwar that he had borne into battle since the first days of the Crusade.

‘It cannot be halted now,’ he said. ‘For the sake of the Imperium, no backward step.’

Shiban burst into the corridor, running hard. A dozen of his warriors flanked him, and they raced along together, followed closely by the rest of the brotherhood.

Menials pressed against the walls to let them pass, wide-eyed with shock. Warning klaxons rang tinnily, followed by ship-wide emergency warnings. Many of the ship’s crew were armed with las-weapons, but had nothing that could stop several hundred primed and armoured White Scars on the rampage. The brotherhood pushed up, deck after deck, not encountering any resistance that they could not sweep aside with unconscious ease.

Near the end, Shiban broke into one of the halls below the bridge level: a vast space with curving marble walls and banks of glowing sensor lenses. Hundreds of tech-priests and mortal officers scattered ahead of him, breaking like herds of prey before a hunters’ arrowhead formation. He did not even see their faces – they passed him in a blur. Ranks of cogitator logic engines swept by, as tall as Warhounds and steaming from superheated valves and transistor-columns.

As he sprinted clear of the last of them, the first hammering salvo of bolter-fire cracked into the walls around him.

He skidded to a halt, dropping low and scanning for the source of the incoming shots. A wide staircase ran away from him, less than twenty metres ahead, ascending steeply to the far end of the hall. Terraces radiated along the walls on either side of it, all stuffed with servitor-stations.

Halfway up the staircase, on a colonnaded landing area, a line of White Scars waited. They were well-established, already crouched in fire-positions and able to shelter behind the curve of the pillars around them. Beyond them lay the approaches to the strategium and bridge.

Their commander did not make any attempt to stay in cover. He strode to the forefront, bolter in one hand, power sword in the other.

‘Go no further, brothers!’ he shouted, and his vox-amplified voice echoed around the hall. ‘That is enough. We will fire if you force us.’

Shiban looked up at him, and his heart sank.

It was Torghun.

The Terran had come with at least the majority of his brotherhood – two hundred detectable, surely many more remaining out of sight.

‘This cannot go on,’ replied Shiban, holding position. Behind him, his forces advanced slowly under the cover of the logic engines. ‘You are not the master of this Legion, Torghun.’

‘Nor are you, brother,’ Torghun replied, gazing down at him from his vantage. ‘The bridge is sealed.’

‘What of the Khagan?’

‘Hasik speaks for the Khagan.’

Shiban felt his blood run hot. No one, not even the Emperor himself, spoke for the Great Khan.

‘It is not just me,’ Shiban voxed. ‘Others will resist, all across the fleet. The Legion will not take Hasik’s lead.’

‘They will come around,’ said Torghun, though he sounded almost as if he were working to convince himself. ‘They will see it, just as the Khagan will when he returns.’

Shiban examined the stairway approach. It would be difficult – the defenders had the height advantage, and the cover advantage.

But did they truly believe in this? Would they hold the line for Hasik in the way that they would for the Khagan?

‘You can still withdraw,’ voxed Shiban. ‘I know you, brother – this is not why you joined them. You never intended it. Lower your blades. This is no longer about loyalty. It is over.’

Torghun only hesitated for a fraction of a second, just a mere fragment of a chrono-slice, hardly detectable. Still, he hesitated.

‘I have my orders, Shiban,’ he said defiantly. ‘Come no further. We will fire on you.’

Shiban nodded grimly. He transmitted a silent command to his brotherhood, over the comm.

Go swiftly. Go surely. We do this for the Khagan.

‘Then I am sorry, brother,’ Shiban voxed, clutching his glaive two-handed and tensing for the charge. ‘Believe me, I am.’

Now.

With a deafening roar, the Brotherhood of the Storm burst out of cover and surged up the stairway, charging into the incoming torrent of bolter-shells as the hall exploded with light, sound and fury.

The Khan watched the last of the warp energies tear away. He watched the ash settle and the residual snags of aether-burn ripple into nothing. Then he watched seven figures within the maelstrom emerge.

Six of them were legionaries. They were clad in pale, thick-slabbed Terminator armour and carried huge reaper-scythes. Their pauldrons were olive-green and the links between the plates were cold iron. They were massive, heavier-set than Qin Xa’s retinue, hunched at the shoulder and leaking pale green vapour from the last of the teleportation beams.

The seventh occupied a different order of power. He towered over them, clad in plate of bare brass and corpse-white ceramite. A long cloak of dark green hung down from high-rimmed shoulder guards. Skulls dangled from chains about his belt, some human, some xenos. A long pistol nestled among them – drum-barrelled and studded with bronze kill-markers.

His eyes were amber, glinting from under the deep shadow of a tattered cowl. An ornate rebreather covered the lower half of his face. Coils of oily gas spilled from the lining of his battleplate, dribbling down the skull-painted surfaces and hissing on contact with Prospero’s death-dry soil.

Tubes running from the rebreather mask gurgled with fluids. His breath came in clogged wheezes.

‘Jaghatai,’ said the primarch Mortarion, planting the heel of his enormous scythe into the dust.

The Khan looked up at the blade. It was known as Silence, the greatest of the XIV Legion’s infamous manreapers.

‘Mortarion,’ the Khan replied, nodding in acknowledgement. ‘This is not your world.’

‘Nor yours. And yet here we both are.’

Mortarion’s honour guard – the Deathshroud – spread out silently across the ash. Qin Xa’s warriors fell into a mirror formation. The two forces faced one another, just a few metres apart. Above them, the lightning rippled and the thunder growled.

The Khan felt his muscles tense. ‘If you came for Magnus, he is no longer here.’

‘I came to find you, brother. Things have changed.’

‘You noticed.’

Mortarion smiled behind his mask, making his mottled cheeks crease. ‘I have plenty to tell you, Jaghatai. There are opportunities here. The cost of error has never been higher – the rewards, beyond imagination.’

The Khan observed him guardedly. Mortarion had always been hard to read.

‘You are here to persuade me, then?’ he asked. ‘You think, after all this, there are any more arguments to be made?’

Mortarion reached up with his left hand and pushed his cowl back. A pallid grey scalp was revealed, though it still bore the noble countenance of the gene-brotherhood. Deep bags nested under his sharp eyes, and wisps of gas rose up from the collar about his neck.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Just listen. You might learn something. Even you, my proud brother, can still be tutored.’

The Khan left his blade unsheathed, holding it loosely by his side.

Mortarion’s power seemed to have grown. Something burned in him, dark like old embers. His flesh was somehow bleaker, his stance a little more crabbed, and yet the aura of intimidation around him had been augmented. Back on Ullanor, even at the height of triumph, he had not had quite the same heft.

The Khan recalled his brother’s words.

Then what would be the wager on us, brother? What would you pay, if we fought?

‘Say what you came to say,’ said the Khan.

Mortarion bowed, half mockingly.

‘I have travelled a long way to find you,’ he rasped. ‘And now, look around – we have all the time in the universe. All we have left to disturb us are the dead, and they do not stir.’

He smiled again, as mirthless and dry as before.

‘Yet.’

Shiban shouldered into a brother-legionary, sending him staggering back up the wide marble steps. He spun his glaive, sweeping it through the air crossways and cracking the bolter free of the stricken defender’s gauntlets. Then he plunged it down, punching the blade-tip through his victim’s armour cabling and severing the oxygen feed.

Torghun’s warrior gagged, tearing at his throat, and rolled across the steps into the path of Shiban’s charging brotherhood.

The volume of fire was horrific: even running at speed, darting and ducking as they came, dozens had been cut down. The bolt-shells cracked hard into ceramite plate, ripping it apart and sending legionaries flying backwards.

Right up until the order to charge had been given, Shiban had not been sure they would really open fire. Torghun had been as good as his threat, though, and his warriors had done their duty.

The Brotherhood of the Storm surged up against the hammering deluge, sprinting in loose formation. For every one of them knocked back, ten more gained ground. Soon they were up amidst the colonnades and the fighting switched to close range. Brother locked blades with brother, and the echoing din of bolter-fire was joined by the acrid snarl of energy weapons.

Shiban turned to face another defender, given away by the moon icon upon his pauldron but otherwise almost indistinguishable from any other warrior in the melee. They locked blades in a flurry of vicious strokes – Shiban whirled his guan dao, blurring the disruptor trail, before jabbing it straight ahead, impaling the warrior under the breastplate. He wrenched the blade deep, twisting it into the flesh beneath before yanking it clear.

If the enemy had been a greenskin, he would have kept going – carving into the organs, making sure – but these were his brothers. He had no wish to kill if it could be avoided – he immobilised, shattered bones, throttled and bludgeoned, then moved on, sprinting further up through the throng of warriors towards the summit.

The fighting was bizarre – close-packed, frenzied, confused and brutal, but strangely detached. No fighter whooped or cried out in battle-cant. They fought with a cold discipline, going through the movements with consummate skill but taking no joy in it.

We have become wretched, thought Shiban as he powered up through the press of bodies, twisting, punching, lashing out. We have become what we once hated.

He thrust upwards, smashing a defender out of his path with a haymaker from his gauntlet.

‘You always went too fast, brother,’ came a familiar voice from above.

Shiban ducked, feeling the blade-swipe lash across him. He dropped to one knee before driving upwards again, glaive extended.

Torghun was too quick, evading the disruptor point and parrying with his power sword. The blades crackled together in a storm of energy-auras before leaping apart.

‘What did they promise you?’ snarled Shiban, coiling for another strike.

Torghun thrust first, handling his tulwar with suitably impressive dexterity. They clashed again, exchanging a flurry of heavy blows before springing back apart.

‘Nothing,’ he grunted. ‘It’s about loyalty.’

Shiban pressed the assault, using his glaive’s reach to batter Torghun onto the back foot. ‘Loyalty?’

Torghun countered at speed. Sparks showered across his armour as the energy fields snarled and burned. ‘Horus is the Warmaster. Why do you resist it?’

Then he broke free of the sequence of blows and launched his own strike, ducking around the glaive and angling in low.

‘That is not enough,’ gasped Shiban, only just blocking the strike and nearly losing his footing. All around them, warriors grappled and cut, blasted and blocked, gripped in a hundred duels of their own. Shattered masonry flew from the architraves above them, smashed loose by bolter-fire. ‘You know it. You’ve been used.’

Torghun fell back, retreating a pace up the stairs to give himself room, and Shiban went after him.

‘Used?’ Torghun scoffed, incredulous. ‘Where is the Emperor, brother? Where are the Legions at his side? Look at the world below – look at it!’

Shiban crashed into contact again, swinging the glaive in a tight arc and hammering against Torghun’s defence. Together, they rocked and swayed, climbing steadily, surrounded by the tumult of combat. The summit of the stairway drew closer. With a burst of exhilaration, Shiban saw that they were forcing the defenders back.

‘Give this up,’ urged Shiban. ‘You can still call it off.’

Torghun fell back again, reaching the landing beyond and letting Shiban come to him. Bolter-fire hammered out again, launched from positions further up, hidden against the pillars and terraces of the bridge’s main antechamber.

As always, Torghun had organised his defences well – there were layers after layers, each harder to breach than the last.

‘I have my orders,’ Torghun said again, repeating the words with the same growl of defiance. By then he stood at the entrance to the antechamber, covered by bolter fire-arcs and flanked by his steadily retreating brotherhood, sword held in guard, stance resolute.

It was hard not to admire his conviction. Shiban had always noted the way that the Terrans fought in defence – steadfast, gritty, bloody-minded.

There were things to learn, even in the heart of the madness.

‘Damn your orders!’ Shiban roared, rousing his warriors for the final push. ‘For the Khagan!’

With an answering wave of aggression, they surged up the final incline, sweeping over the lip of the stairs and into the new storm. Torghun held position, and the two of them slammed back into the duel, blades whirling in a storm of flaring disruptors.

Mortarion took a few steps towards the Khan. Qin Xa moved to intervene, but the Khan gave him a wordless battle-sign, and he retreated with the others. The two primarchs stood alone, shadowed by their respective bodyguards.

Mortarion was a little broader, the Khan a little taller. Mortarion’s armour was heavy, almost crude, where the Khan’s was fine-wrought. Silence was a gigantic weapon forged from a chunk of adamantium and glittering with archeotech fixings; the Khan’s dao was a slender, perfectly curved piece of flawless metal, deriving its strength from its form rather than its size. It could be made to move faster than any blade in the Imperium.

Speed against implacability. An interesting contest.

‘You were not meant to be here,’ said Mortarion. ‘You were meant to join the Alpha Legion at Alaxxes.’

The Khan nodded. ‘Or return to Terra.’

‘We did not wish that. Why would we?’

‘The Alpha Legion held us at Chondax. They wanted us to hear from Dorn.’

Mortarion raised a hairless eyebrow. ‘Indeed? You surprise me, but perhaps you shouldn’t. It seems that Alpharius is never wholly of one mind.’ He chuckled darkly. ‘He plays a dangerous game. His own intrigues will throttle him.’

‘So why you?’ asked the Khan.

‘Why not me, brother?’

‘I assumed it would be Horus.’

‘Vanity. He has many things to keep him busy.’

The Khan’s eyes narrowed. Mortarion did not seem too sure of himself. For all the show, all the projected force, he was on shaky ground. ‘Horus didn’t send you, did he?’

‘That means nothing.’

‘It means everything,’ said the Khan, studying his brother’s reaction. ‘Magnus told me how the war stands – some souls are still to be decided on. There were always those of us on the edge. I was one, you were another.’

Mortarion snorted. ‘My Legion was at Isstvan, so put aside any thoughts that we are not committed. The outcome is already determined, and your choice is simple – preservation or destruction. Come, Jaghatai, you’ve never even believed in Unity. You saw through it even when Guilliman was lecturing us all to tears, back when there were still xenos standing between our father and the galaxy’s edge.’

‘Then tell me the alternative.’

‘A galaxy of warriors,’ said Mortarion. ‘A galaxy of hunters, where the strong are given their freedom. A galaxy in which there is no dead hand at the tiller, constraining us, lying to us.’

‘And all this led by Horus.’

Mortarion shrugged. ‘He’s the start. He is the champion, the sacrificial king. He may burn himself out to get to Terra, he may not. Either way, there will be room for others to rise.’ Mortarion drew closer, and the Khan smelled the chemical tang of his armour. ‘You should never have thrown your lot in with the Angel, brother, let alone Magnus. I hated to see it, the three of you, getting dragged in deeper. I always thought you’d break away, see through it, get tired of the hypocrisy.’

‘They were never hypocrites.’

‘No?’ Mortarion exhaled a parched laugh. ‘I hoped you’d have understood them sooner. It’s the warp, Jaghatai. Our father tried to pretend it wasn’t there, as if he weren’t already up to his elbows in its soul-sucking filth. It should have been cordoned off, put away, forgotten about. It’s not for us. It’s a sickness, a blight.’

Mortarion became agitated. He calmed down slowly, wheezing through his gas-shrouded mask. The Khan heard a faint hiss, and guessed at what kind of suppressants had been shunted into his bloodstream.

‘I see what has happened,’ he said, quietly.

Mortarion cocked his head. ‘Oh?’

‘You were always sincere, I will give you that,’ said the Khan. ‘You never hid what you wanted. I can guess how you thought it would go. First, hobble the sorcerers. Silence the witches. Drive them out, and rule passes to the uncorrupted. The healthy. That was your great project. You even told me of it, that day on Ullanor. I thought back then that they were empty threats, but I should have known. You do not make empty threats.’

As the Khan spoke, Mortarion’s mask-locked expression remained inscrutable. Every so often his eyes would go filmy, or his finger would twitch. There was a kind of febrile energy about him, spilling out of the cracks just as the noxious fumes did.

‘But it has gone wrong, hasn’t it?’ the Khan went on. ‘You have completed your great mission, but there are more sorcerers than ever. Horus has sponsored them, Lorgar has shown them new tricks. If Magnus has not already made up his mind then he soon will, and then you will be surrounded. You’ve destroyed the Librarius only to find the witches are now untrammelled. They played you well. You have done their work for them, and soon you will be dragged into it yourself, as warp-sick as they are.’

‘You think that–’

‘I see it perfectly. Magnus showed me. Your Legion may be free of it for now, but the change will come. You made your pacts, and now they will come to collect. You fool.’

Mortarion stiffened. His eyes blazed with anger for a second, quickly quelled. ‘You do not–’

‘And that is why you came to find me,’ said the Khan. ‘You’ve run out of friends. Who will stand with you against the aether-weavers now? Angron? What an ally. Curze? Good luck.’ The Khan gazed at Mortarion disdainfully. ‘You’ve tasted the fruits of treachery and found them bitter. Don’t drag me into your ruin. You’re on your own, brother.’

Mortarion’s expression fractured behind the mask – shifting into an enraged snarl, disfiguring rapidly. Silence quivered, and he took half a step forward, his free fist clenching.

‘I came to give you a choice,’ Mortarion said, keeping his voice under control with some difficulty. ‘Half your Legion are already declared for Horus, the others will follow wherever you order them. Our father’s time is over – you can be a part of the order that replaces him.’

The Khan smiled – a cold smile, imperious in its contempt. ‘A new emperor.’

Mortarion glared back at him, though he could not hide the doubt. ‘Why not? Why should it not be you?’

The Khan nodded, finally understanding. ‘Or you. Why not indeed?’ He drew closer, noticing for the first time the discolouration of the skin around the edge of his brother’s rebreather. How long had he worn it? ‘I’ll tell you why. Because we were never the empire-builders. We were the outriders. You chafed at it, I embraced it.’

Mortarion began to back away. As he did so, Silence crackled into life, sparking with green-tinged energy. The Deathshroud lowered their scythes in a combat posture.

‘Then you will not be persuaded,’ said Mortarion, his filtered voice sunken into a surly growl. ‘A shame. I invested much energy to save you, brother. I shall take no pleasure in your destruction.’

Behind the Khan, the keshig readied their blades.

‘And there is the difference between you and me,’ said the Khan, moving his dao into guard. ‘By the time I make my kills, I am always laughing.’

Twenty-One

To the bridge
The tyrants
Getting your attention

It was poor fighting, cramped and bitter. None of them let loose with the flamboyance that they were used to. Shiban urged his brothers onwards, trying to instil the virtues of greater speed, greater power. Torghun did the same – exhorting those about him into a typically dogged defence.

Neither side relished the carnage. Blood began to splatter across the marble, trodden in and smeared by hundreds of tramping armoured boots. Blades found their mark, cutting between breastplate and pauldron, punching into leather-brown skin and lacerating transhuman organs. The enclosed spaces rang with the peculiar noises of Space Marine combat: amplified roars of aggression, the judder and crash of bolters, the snarl of power weapons clashing.

Shiban and Torghun fought at the heart of it all, feinting and thrusting as they circled one another, each going for the opening just as the other closed it down. Neither had made a mistake – they fought perfectly, each adopting the style of their home world. Torghun was methodical, solid, organised; Shiban was creative, dynamic, persistent.

The Brotherhood of the Moon fought as competently as their khan, but it steadily became apparent they had taken heavier casualties during the initial engagement than the attackers. Despite the early advantage of high ground, they were driven back further into the chambers beyond, step by bloody step, forced up into the bridge’s lower antechamber and on across the long hallway beyond.

Shiban fought on, feeling the first spikes of fatigue in his arms and ignoring them. Torghun was not giving up.

‘I will never understand it,’ Shiban snarled, spinning into contact, pivoting on his left foot to slam the glaive into Torghun’s midriff. ‘I will never understand why.’

‘No, you will not,’ grunted Torghun, parrying the blow but staggering back. A bolt-round whistled past his shoulder, grazing the pauldron and scarring the half-moon icon.

‘You had everything,’ pressed Shiban. Anger was driving him now, not exuberance. It was a wretched feeling.

Torghun held his ground, working his blade expertly in a figure-of-eight before going back onto the offensive. ‘It wasn’t mine.’ The snatched words carried a taste of resentment. ‘None of it was mine.’

His blows became more vicious, and Shiban had to work hard to meet them. Torghun’s fury eroded his discipline, though, and Shiban countered hard, nearly stabbing the glaive-point clean into his chest.

‘You had whatever you wanted,’ said Shiban scornfully, driving him back another few metres. All around him, his brothers were doing the same, fuelled by the greater fervour – they knew exactly where their allegiance lay.

‘You know nothing of what I wanted,’ said Torghun. ‘You could never see beyond Chogoris.’

Shiban laughed – a sour, joyless snort. ‘Chogoris is everything, brother.’

Torghun ceded more ground, following the path of his steadily retreating brothers through rows of gothic arches. ‘Exactly.’

The fighting surged up a shallow incline, overlooked by vast
chandelier-lumens of gold and glass. Shiban’s forces pushed up through the narrowing space, gaining ground with every surge. Many fell to the concentrated volleys of covering fire, their armour pulverised in the withering barrage, but their momentum was not halted. Torghun’s forces had lost too many warriors to hold the ground, and now struggled to keep them back.

Shiban drove onwards, beyond the ramp’s summit and through the previously sealed doors into the lower reaches of the command hall. The ceiling soared away from them, impossibly high up, studded with glassaic and lit by a thousand suspensor globes. The bridge’s hubbub of activity was drowned by the thunder of combat; hundreds of servitors and crew lit up the proximity detectors in Shiban’s helm-display. The space opened up before them, packed with bodies that milled like the crowds on a hive-world.

‘Secure the tactical stations,’ he voxed to his brothers, still fighting hard. ‘Keep together. Watch for strikes from the sensor-pits.’

The brotherhood tore out into the main hall, driving the defenders before them in ragged, battered squads. Just as the arch of the observation deck soared away ahead of them, Torghun’s forces fell back en masse. Torghun himself broke from combat, the last of the defenders to do so, following his retreating warriors. They all went quickly, decisively, as if the move had been long planned.

Shiban’s instinct was to charge after them, cutting them down as they broke. All around him his brothers did the same, sprinting ahead to run the enemy down.

Withdraw, then return.

‘No!’ Shiban roared, suddenly seeing the danger.

He skidded to a halt, crouching down, just as the hurricane hit. From high up on the terraces on either side of the bridge, lodged many metres up between the pillars and suspended platforms, massed bolter-fire tore up the floor in a cloud of debris. Many of Shiban’s warriors, having pursued Torghun’s retreating forces too closely, were caught up in the wave of impacts, their armour shredded.

The rest of them retreated to what cover they could – cogitator banks, sensor stations, observation gantries. Shiban made for the shadow of a huge raised platform crowned with brass-framed viewscreens. Just as he did so, the wave of bolter-fire ceased.

Moving carefully, he shifted around the foot of the platform and scanned the area ahead. Torghun’s warriors had hunkered down in a long line across the servitor pits bisecting the hall. Dozens of sharp-shooters were stationed above them on the terraces, holding fire for now but still primed. Beyond that, he saw more heavy infantry holding position around the epicentre of the bridge itself – the command throne. Hasik’s own keshig were amongst them, hulking in Terminator plate. Other defending White Scars occupied strategic points on the observation deck beyond.

There must have been hundreds in total. The bridge was covered, locked down, utterly secure.

‘This is enough, khan,’ came Hasik’s voice from the throne.

Ilya cowered behind her auspex station, hunched low with her hands over her ears. The noise when they had broken in was incredible – a hammering, drumming wall of sound, punctured by vox-augmented roars of belligerence. Space Marines in everyday life were intimidating enough; in combat, they were astonishing.

Halji had broken away from her position as soon as it had happened, rushing up the steps to a vantage point closer to the command dais. He had drawn his bolter and held it two-handed in front of him. Disorientated, thrown by the horrific storm of damage around her, Ilya had hardly noticed him fire, but he had not hesitated for a moment. As though it were the most natural thing in the world, he had opened up on his comrades, joining in the barrage that had sent them reeling backwards and scrambling for cover. It had clearly been arranged – Halji had known that they were coming.

She glanced up, through the damaged remains of her cogitator units and towards the command throne. Hasik looked as stoic as ever, addressing the crouching intruders, trying to get them to stand down.

Ilya’s gaze travelled up to the roof-lines. Marksmen had been placed high up the walls. There seemed to be armoured warriors everywhere. The rest of the mortal crew were doing what she was – cowering out of the gunlines, lost in shock.

Ilya crawled over to what remained of her console and stared at the auspex readings. The four incoming warships were drifting closer, utterly incautious, prowling through local space as though they owned it. Now up close, she could see the fleet-markings – XIV Legion, the Death Guard. That seemed as incongruous to her as anything that had happened since the encounters at Chondax.

Had Hasik arranged the rendezvous? If so, why?

Ilya scrabbled to pull up more data from the cracked screens. With Halji out of the way, she could work more quickly.

More ships entered augur range – two of them, burning through the outer system at high speed. No markers, no idents, just sub-warp signatures and the telltale flicker of void shield activation. Ilya stared at the signals for a while, unable to gauge where they had emerged from or what they were doing.

The White Scars fleet was paralysed. Their ships were not moving to counter either threat closing in on them. If what was happening on the Swordstorm was taking place on the other warships, then Ilya could see why – the Legion had turned upon itself, as if hidden divisions had suddenly been exposed everywhere at once.

Of course, she had played a part in it. The Kaljian’s warriors would have had a harder time getting on board the ship if she had not deactivated the defences over docking bay 567. That had been Halji’s fault – she had never liked to resort to deception, whatever the cause.

‘Where is the Khagan?’ came a shout from the far end of the bridge hall – a Space Marine’s voice, filtered through a helm-vox.

It was a good voice – hard, with Chogorian depth to it, but untainted by rancour. Ilya was instantly glad of the choice she had made.

‘He will return, Shiban,’ Hasik replied. ‘This is pointless. We are not traitors – it will all be resolved.’

Traitors. The word chilled her. She remembered what Qin Xa had told her, and the snippets of information she had gleaned from talking to the Khagan.

With a twist in her stomach, she knew what would happen next. The stakes were too high to leave things hanging unresolved – the invaders were going to charge again. This time it would not stop, not until only one faction remained on the bridge, traitor or loyalist, whichever was which.

She couldn’t just watch. It would almost certainly be futile, possibly suicidal, but standing idly by had never been her way.

With her palms slick with nervous sweat, Ilya prepared to move.

Hold position, Shiban signalled to his surviving warriors, all pinned down close to where they had burst in at the near end of the hall. Stay in cover.

‘I have no wish to kill you,’ cried Hasik. ‘You are out-gunned. Heavily. Let this be an end to it.’

Shiban turned to see Jochi, who was crouched down in the shadow of a pillar a few metres to his right. It looked like he had taken a hit, and was breathing heavily.

‘What do you think?’ Shiban voxed.

Jochi shook his head. Shiban knew what expression he would be wearing under his helm – a rueful smile. ‘Too many,’ he replied.

Shiban nodded. ‘Far too many.’

‘But you will order it anyway.’

Shiban ran another sweep of the chamber. They were outnumbered three-to-one, and the defenders were better armed and better placed. It would be a massacre, with no guarantee of getting even halfway to where they needed to be.

But he might at least make it to Hasik. That would be worth something.

‘On my mark,’ he voxed to what remained of his warriors. ‘The throne is the target.’ He heard the slam and click of bolters being reloaded. All around him, his brothers made their final preparations.

‘If we are to die here,’ he added, taking up the glaive again and preparing to burst from cover, ‘then we will die fighting. For the Khan, brothers. For the Khan.’

Ilya jumped to her feet, her heart pounding, and ran into the open.

‘No!’ she shouted, ludicrously, as if any of them would pay attention to the sudden intervention of an old woman with no combat training. She stood up, shaking with fear, determined to do something. ‘Why are you doing this?’

Her words were never heard, not by the assembled White Scars, not even by her.

A deafening roar boomed through the entire bridge, like a starship engine keying up to burn. An eye-burning light blazed, followed by the lash of energy coiling. The iridescence blew out almost as quickly as it had come, leaving clanging echoes in its wake.

Ilya blinked hard, her eyes watering madly. By the time her vision had cleared, the bridge looked like a very different place.

Hundreds more White Scars legionaries stood arrayed in ranks across the outer circle of the bridge, all aiming their bolters at the command throne. The acrid residue of teleportation hung in the air, making the hairs on her neck stand up.

For a moment longer she remained entirely bewildered. Then she recognised the master-crafted Terminator plate of Jemulan Noyan-Khan, with his retinue of veterans at his back, and carrying a hissing power sword.

‘Stand down, Hasik,’ Jemulan said firmly. ‘The attempt to alter our path has failed.’

Hasik made no move to comply. To Ilya’s eyes the forces now looked evenly matched, which made her heart sink further. Combat between them would rip the bridge to pieces.

‘Not at all, brother,’ Hasik replied. ‘It is just incomplete. Do not stand in the way of progress – you do not have the whole picture.’

‘No doubt, but this is not your choice to make.’

‘It is the only choice.’

‘Then it is no choice at all,’ Jemulan replied. All around him, his troops picked out their targets. Ilya felt like shrinking back behind her sensor console – the tension hung heavily, like a thunderhead about to break.

She started to move, ducking down below the line of cogitator housings and crawling back into something like cover. As she did so, she noticed the teleportation platform, still operative but a long way away. With her heart in her mouth, she began to move towards it.

As she did so, she heard the command that she had dreaded, issued from the vox-grille of one of the commanders – she did not even recognise which one.

‘So there is nothing more to say. Open fire.’

The Khan struck first, moving faster than thought, his cloak swirling about him. Mortarion met the blow with his scythe, and a radial wave shot out from Silence, throwing up the ash in swirling clouds.

The Deathshroud lumbered into range, swinging their own scythes. Qin Xa’s warriors engaged them, charging across the cracked stone and bringing their blades to bear. Neon-blue claws clashed with heavy iron, sending dull clangs resounding across the empty square. Amidst the ruins of Tizca, the two forces slammed together, moving like choreographed dancers as the eyeless faces of old statues gazed down at them.

‘I see your mind, brother,’ hissed the Khan, hammering home the attack. ‘You would turn me, or end me.’

Mortarion grunted as he blocked the incoming dao. He moved far more slowly than the Khan, but everything he did was solid, dense, and indomitable. ‘If you’re stubborn enough not to see the chance here, then, yes – your time is over.’

The Khan laughed. Wielding his blade again freely felt good. The psychneuein had been a trivial challenge – going up against a fellow primarch was the kind of test he had missed for too long.

He darted in close, spinning on one boot before thrusting his sword at Mortarion’s midriff. The strike was blocked, but the Death Lord stumbled.

‘So slow,’ taunted the Khan. His blade danced, flashing like the lightning above. Every strike was weighted heavily, slicing chunks from Mortarion’s thick plate as if it were corroded scrap. ‘You got everything wrong. Why exchange one master for another? And do not take me for a fool – only one soul may rule from the Throneworld.’

He heard the clash of blades around him, the soft rush of bolter-discharge and the heavy bang of the shells detonating. More cracks opened up underfoot, glowing red like molten steel. Muzzle-flashes lit up ruined, carven images on ancient stonework, starkly revealing the Prosperine occult devices engraved upon every facet.

Mortarion rallied, breathing hard. Though his reflexes were slow, his strength was impressive. He had already taken blows that would have felled a lesser warrior and yet seemed barely troubled.

‘Your Legion called out,’ he snarled, wielding Silence in deadening sweeps. ‘You have cells operating in every brotherhood, desperate to serve. All we did was answer them.’

The Khan laughed again. He felt alive, unfettered, free for the first time in months to act. ‘The lodges, eh? Secret societies? You think that’ll be enough to drag us behind the Warmaster?’

Mortarion dug in, and his heavy boots sank into the ash. The Khan launched a series of blistering dao-blows, glancing off the Death Lord’s thick pauldrons and sending him reeling.

‘I let them meet,’ the Khan said. His blade was moving brutally, smearing with speed and clanging from the scythe. ‘I have always let them. I am not a tyrant, brother.’

Mortarion started to rally, meeting the Khan’s fury with resolute efficiency. He took a stride back in close, planting his feet widely to close down another incoming stroke. The two weapons twisted and rebounded, sending sparks flying through the gloom. The intensity of it was vicious. Every perfect movement was vindication of the Emperor’s gene-majesty, albeit exemplified in two totally different aspects. The troops battling around them, themselves titans of combat, were reduced to irrelevance, like mortal warriors straying into the quarrels of gods.

‘We are all tyrants,’ Mortarion rasped, picking up the pace of his scythe-blows. ‘Do not fool yourself. We were bred for nothing else.’

‘Not I,’ said the Khan, whirling around him, moving with an almost unconscious balance. ‘I care nothing for dominion. Never have. You, on the other hand... You. You yearn for it.’

The Khan drove Mortarion back further, pounding and pummelling him across the square’s margins and towards the edge of the broken pyramid. They reeled together under the shadow of Photep’s Arch, the old entrance to the immense vaults within, now roofless and gaping.

The Khan felt brief flashes of warp-fire, and guessed that it was Arvida. He heard Qin Xa’s battle-cry, and gloried in it. The keshig-master was a superlative warrior, and he had no fear for him, nor any of the others.

They could fight now. They knew the enemy. They could see him, and that was enough.

‘I deserve it,’ Mortarion wheezed, gasping into his rebreather as he laboured under the assault. ‘I always deserved it. You could have joined me.’

The Khan did not relent. His blade was like a shard of starlight, fierce and irresistible. ‘Your time will come. You tell me the warp should be forgotten, shut away. How little you know. It will come for you now. Killing you here will be a mercy. I can already see your future darkening, dragging at your very soul.’

The two of them thundered across the base level of the pyramid, followed at every step by the echoing clash of arms around them. The edifice’s open carcass rose up high above, its broken spars jutting upwards in perfect geometry towards a non-existent apex. The old internal walls, half slumped into rubble and riddled with yawning gaps, twisted away from them in a labyrinth of complexity.

‘All futures are dark, now,’ Mortarion replied, swiping savagely and backhanding his scythe into the edge of an exposed archway. The keystone smashed to rubble around him. ‘You have no idea what Horus has become, nor the Emperor. They are both monsters, but you have chosen the wrong one. Horus is a fighter. He is one of us, not some immortal… aberration.’

The Khan laughed as he pursued him, this time from genuine pleasure. ‘Immortal aberration?’ he mused, dragging his blade down at a sharp angle and nearly severing a thicket of Mortarion’s feeder cables. ‘We all share his blood. What does that make us?’

More powdered stonework, destroyed by Mortarion’s wild scythe-blows, bloomed in a cloud around them. Bolt-trails whined and punched through the haze before cracking into what remained of the architecture. Uncaring of anything but their own contest, the two primarchs hacked their way towards the pyramid’s core, overshadowed by immense pillars and gaping roof-curves, trading blows of such heft that the earth shuddered beneath them.

‘Just what do you think will happen here?’ spat Mortarion, digging in again and halting his backward course. His armour had been hacked into a tattered parody of its former solidity. ‘Think you can behead me, like Fulgrim did Ferrus?’

The Khan missed his aim then for the first time.

Was that true? Was Ferrus gone?

Mortarion surged back at him, kicking the hilt of Silence hard into the Khan’s leading leg. The ivory greave-plate cracked, fizzing with energy as the ceramite fractured.

The Khan veered away from the follow-up strike, nearly losing his footing entirely. He staggered backwards as Mortarion went onto the offensive.

‘Oh yes, he’s dead,’ Mortarion rasped. ‘The numbers are against you already. They will only get worse.’

The Khan glanced upwards, up into the immense voids of the pyramid’s heights. Tiny flecks of glass rained down from the smashed apex, sparkling bloodily from the fires kindling in the fissures below. Prospero’s landscape growled its sullen anger, as though the world itself were outraged at a second duel of primarchs upon its soil. The carbon-dark sky, starless and empty, roiled above the jagged maw of the summit.

Mortarion’s cloak spread wide, buoyed by hot updraughts from the cobweb of glowing crevasses. For a moment, he looked like some vision of the underworld, a phantom of old Chogoris – consumed by yaksha, eternal and devilish.

The Khan fell back further, holding his dao two-handed. Mortarion was strong, as strong as the roots of the Ulaav mountains, but he was slow. The two of them were perfectly matched, like two sides of a medal.

If we fought on the same side, he and I, countering our weaknesses, could anything stand before us? he thought. Even Horus? Even the Emperor?

He gazed into Mortarion’s pallid face and saw the resentment burning there, just as it did in him.

He is lost. We have all been betrayed.

The Death Lord strode closer, sweeping Silence low and hard, his expression curdling into hatred, his sclerotic breath low and rapid.

‘Come then, brother,’ said the Khan, bracing for the impact once more, holding position amidst the glass tears of Magnus’s lost city. ‘Let us decide this, you and I. For eternity.’

Yesugei stood upon the Sickle Moon’s command bridge watching Prospero grow rapidly in the forward view. Lushan, armoured for the coming combat, bellowed orders to the crew, no doubt still convinced that the ship was going to break up around him at any minute.

The last stage had been the most punishing of all, tearing at the Geller field and ravaging the warp drives. Yesugei had heard the screams of yaksha even in his waking hours. When he went to assist the Navigators, the beasts had been clearly visible in the seething hell beyond the real-view blisters, ramming up against the ship’s warp-wake and scrabbling at the hull as it tore through their domain.

They had almost lost the Hesiod, but a combination of Henricos’s tech-mastery and the combined efforts of Yesugei and the Navigators had somehow got them through. They had broken into real space at the closest vector possible, after which the engines had burned like miniature suns to bring them into orbit around the dying world. Even from far out, Yesugei felt the psychic terror still resonant on the planet, like a blackened scab over an old and deep wound.

‘What of the fleet?’ he asked again, unable to make sense of the data that his sensors were giving him.

‘Out of position,’ replied Lushan, disbelievingly. ‘Scattered. No defensive lines, nothing.’

Yesugei felt deep unease. Some of the White Scars warships were visibly drifting, others moving to intercept one another. None of them were responding to the Death Guard vessels coming in to engage them.

‘Bring lances online,’ he ordered. ‘Take us at the Death Guard formation and open fire. Hit them with everything we have.’

Lushan nodded, and barked orders down the chain of command. Almost instantly, the Sickle Moon’s course switched, taking the ship hard away two points to starboard and thundering towards the closest XIV Legion battleship. The bridge filled with the growl and judder of weapon systems powering up, and void shields rippled across the forward viewports.

They had moved efficiently, but they were still slower than the Hesiod – Henricos’s thirst for vengeance drove him harder than all of them. His machine-spare voice hissed over the bridge-comm.

‘We don’t have the guns to take them all on,’ he observed.

‘Do not need to,’ replied Yesugei in Gothic, watching as the enemy hurtled into range. The Death Guard looked complacent, concentrated on drawing close to the embattled White Scars fleet. ‘Something very wrong. Need only to clarify thoughts of my brothers.’

‘What are they doing? It’s like they’re fighting–’

‘They will come around.’

‘And the Khan? Do you sense him?’

Yesugei glanced at the dark orb on the screen, now filling half the scopes. He sensed nothing but the residue of some enormous warp-agony, as if the entire population had been wrenched out of their bodies and shriven. The planet was still wrapped in aetheric energies.

‘No,’ he said grimly. ‘Not yet.’

Henricos sent a low grunt over the comm-link, as if that confirmed something he had long suspected. ‘Changes nothing,’ he said. ‘We can still hurt those bastards.’

Yesugei nodded, gauging the rapidly closing space between their vessels and the enemy. Both the Hesiod and the Sickle Moon were far smaller than the four main enemy ships, and they had escorts already racing to intercept.

‘That we can, my brother,’ he said quietly.

Twenty-Two

Under the apex
Gauntlet run
Swordstorm

Mortarion’s raw strength was renewed. Facing it full-on, the Khan doubted that any of his brothers, save perhaps Ferrus, could have matched it. The Death Lord absorbed every strike that connected, sucking the power out of the blows like a leech, taking the hits and coming back for more.

The tenacity of the Death Guard was legendary, as was their ability to absorb punishment and just keep coming. Now, witnessing them in combat for the first time, he appreciated just how true it was. The silent Deathshroud were as implacable as their master, still fighting with the keshig amidst the wreckage. Warriors of both sides had already fallen, their bodies caked in the drifting dust, but the fighting continued around them, bitter and unyielding.

The pyramid’s vast interior rose up around the combatants, terrace upon terrace, blotting out what little light remained under its blackened shell. The two primarchs had torn through what must once have been the antechambers and audience halls, kicking aside fire-crisped books, old instruments and carbonised artefacts from a thousand worlds. Now the heart of it loomed before them – a circular floor of obsidian, ivory-traced with mystic swirls of silver and clogged with the atrophied cadavers of the long-fallen. Banded columns as wide as Rhino transports towered all around, rearing up into the gloom like sentinels. At the very centre, inlaid into the dust-streaked floor in gold, was the Eye of Magnus, still glistening faintly even beneath the filth that caked it. Directly above them, hundreds of metres up, was the apex itself, open to the fury of the skies.

As they broke into the circle, the Khan felt himself tiring at last. Never in uncounted years of combat had he felt more than trivial stirrings of fatigue. He had fought the greatest champions of xenos races, had brought down creatures that stood as tall as Warhound Titans, had carved his way through fields of greenskins as violent and unending as the tides of the sea, and still he had never felt the bone-deep drag that Mortarion inspired.

Only the primarchs could destroy the primarchs.

Mortarion began to laugh in his coarse way.

‘Never had it this hard, eh?’ he grunted, still wielding Silence heavily. He was suffering too – blood flecked his cheeks and forehead, and his rebreather rattled as he hauled in thick breaths.

The Khan launched another attack, flourishing the dao before searching for a way through Mortarion’s stony defence. He was still faster, still more accomplished with the blade, but it was like duelling with entropy itself.

‘You neither,’ the Khan observed, gesturing to the lines of reddened sweat trickling down Mortarion’s ash-grey temples.

‘True enough.’

Mortarion’s voice gave away his regret. Even amidst the slow-burn resentments, the long bitterness, the Death Lord was still sane enough to see the irony of the situation. The primarchs had been bred to fight as part of one army, each brother making up for the deficiencies of the other. For all the jealousies and rivalries, in terms of raw conquest that army had been perfect. The Emperor’s vision – the Great Crusade for Unity, sweeping across the stars, governed by twenty immortal avatars of his own unmatched psyche – had been impeccable.

Now, though, here they were: brawling amidst the embers of Russ’s vandalism. The fall was already severe, and they both knew that it would plummet deeper before the end.

‘You could recant,’ the Khan said, falling away from a whistling sweep of the scythe just as it angled at his helm. ‘Horus does not own you.’

Mortarion snorted. ‘No, and he never will.’

‘You have seen our father’s glory unleashed – none of us could stand against him.’

Mortarion surged back on the offensive. Around them, the columns flickered and leapt with the reflection of fiery disruptor energies. ‘He is hobbled by his own mistakes. The Throneroom is a den of nightmares, one that he cannot leave. The field is open – it is ours to claim.’

The Khan beat away a scythe-strike and went for Mortarion’s gorget. At the last minute he jutted the blade down, slipped below the defence and cut a long gash in the primarch’s breastplate. This time the blade cut deep, paring already fractured armour and delving into the ribcage below.

Mortarion grimaced and jerked clear, cracking the Khan’s sword away with his scythe-shaft and staggering backwards.

‘There is nothing to seize,’ growled the Khan, going after him. ‘Nothing but burned earth. Look around you – you will make this the whole galaxy.’

Mortarion snarled defiantly and barrelled back at him, using the scythe like a halberd and smashing the hilt into the Khan’s midriff. The Khan lurched away, stumbling across the uneven floor, and Mortarion lumbered after him. More blows came in – hard, heavy, earth-shaking blows. The Khan was driven further, only barely able to weather the explosion of fury directed at him.

When they slammed together again the impact was bone-jarring. They tore into one another, each strike powered by raw defiance. Fragments of armour flew like shrapnel. Gas exploded from Mortarion’s store of vials as the glass was shattered, nearly blinding them both. Blood flew in straggling splatters, trailing across both combatants and staining their armour. As they hacked and countered, neither giving up so much as a centimetre of ground, it mingled upon the blades’ edges, as rich and dark as wine.

As the Khan fought on, the taste of copper in his mouth and the burn of acid in his muscles, he felt the lore of the plains nag at him. He needed space – room to use his speed. He had to break free, to turn the fight to his strengths, to rip clear of Mortarion’s cloying grasp.

Summoning up one last burst of energy, the Khan bludgeoned aside the scythe and pulled away, beckoning his adversary to come after him. The Death Lord held Silence high, casting a sickle-shadow over the eye-device upon the floor. His ripped cloak billowed out in an almost parodic vision of old legends – the reaper-myth of a thousand human worlds, summoned into life on a world of extinguished souls.

The Khan held position, panting hard, trying to drag up energy for the final clash. His hearts thudded, his lungs burned. He held the dao poised, waiting for his enemy to move.

Come to me. You can see my weakness.

One thrust. One perfect thrust, angled precisely – he had the strength for that. It would have to be flawless; if it were not, no defence remained. Nothing else would suffice for this enemy. No lesser move would accomplish the kill.

But Mortarion did not move. He stood, rigid, as though suddenly listening for something. His scythe fell into guard. A thin coughing broke from his mask, which the Khan soon realised was an exhausted kind of chortle.

‘So the choice has been made.’

The Khan held his ground, unsure what he meant. Mortarion gestured to the Deathshroud, and they began to pull back towards his position.

‘Our ships are at war, brother,’ wheezed Mortarion acidly, limping into retreat. ‘This was not what we were promised, but I will not lose a fleet for this fight.’ The words blurred from all the blood bubbling in his mouth, spilling out from the edges of his mask. ‘Mark it, though – this thing is eternal between us, now. You and I, our fates bonded in this place. Remember that. It was here that it started.’

The Khan felt the dust stir around his feet. Coils of marsh-green energy rippled down from the pyramid’s open apex.

‘And when we next do this,’ rasped Mortarion, ‘the lines will already be drawn.’

He saluted mockingly, and spears of hard-edged light suddenly lanced down from above, bursting through the cloud cover and crashing through the heart of the pyramid-carcass.

The Khan sprang forward, seeing too late what was happening. The dao moved quickly – blisteringly fast, as fast as he had ever moved it. If it had connected then it would have stabbed straight through Mortarion’s neck, darting over his guard and severing the coils that kept him breathing.

But in an instant, the Death Lord and his retinue were snatched away, sucked into the vortex of the warp. The world’s wind howled in their empty wake, the ash stirred, the lightning forked.

The Khan, carried by his momentum, staggered through the empty space where his enemy had been. He whirled around, wrong-footed, still poised to strike.

Qin Xa faced him, unblooded but for his blades. The Thousand Sons legionary was still there, as were five of the keshig.

‘Get me back to him!’ the Khan roared, still pumping with aggression. The hunt had not been concluded – the kill had been ripped away.

Qin Xa lowered his weapons. For a moment he said nothing, but faint clicks from his helm gave away the attempts he was making to contact the ships in orbit.

Then he shook his head. Whatever means the Death Guard were using to penetrate Prospero’s aether-barrier, it could not be replicated.

The Khan turned to Arvida. ‘This is your world,’ he hissed. ‘Get me off it.’

The sorcerer looked unsteady on his feet.

‘Your ships are still in orbit?’ Arvida glanced at Qin Xa. ‘The barrier is the problem?’

‘I believe so.’

‘It will be difficult,’ Arvida murmured, looking back at the Khan. ‘I can only manage a short while. Let us hope someone is watching carefully.’

The Khan nodded. ‘Do it.’

Arvida backed away, the others giving him plenty of space. He collected himself, clasping his hands together. Witch-light coalesced around him, drawing to his armour like spinning stars. Flickers of silver kindled upon his gauntlets, picking up strength; in a few moments, both his hands were blazing with light so intense that it was hard to look at.

Then he extended both hands heavenwards, and released a column of coruscating luminescence, electric-white and searing hot. It shot out vertically, leaping up the central shaft of the pyramid and bursting into the skies above.

He staggered, only just keeping his feet, but the line of aether-force kept thundering out of him. The sky ignited into a chain reaction of silver. Answering peals snapped out from above, as hard as thunderclaps. A lattice of iridescence cobwebbed across the underside of the cloud cover. For the first time, the unbroken wall of occlusion broke, revealing a rainbow-spectrum of lurid shades beyond it that burned and danced like aurorae.

Arvida himself began to shimmer, his crimson armour blazing. The incandescence intensified until it became blinding. For a moment, the Khan thought that he might be staring straight into the Astronomican itself, and had to turn away.

He looked upwards, over to where Arvida’s released energy still shot into the turbulent skies.

‘Now we hope,’ he muttered, darkly.

Shiban’s elation at Jemulan’s entrance had been short-lived. The forces were now even, each carrying devastating amounts of firepower. Every stage of the escalation had brought the ruin of the Legion closer – weapons that had been made to turn upon enemies were now opening up at one another.

He stayed crouched, his guan dao activated and ready, gauging where to strike. Hasik and his forces still had control of the command throne area at the far end of the bridge hall, plus the high observation deck and the wall terraces. Jemulan’s troops had teleported in two groups along the flanks, and the bulk of them were at the near end, clustered amidst the sensorium stations. There was plenty of cover for both sides, though the presence of hundreds of mortal crew members, locked down at their consoles and stricken with uncertainty, made the prospect of a clean confrontation less likely than that of a collateral bloodbath.

The prospect filled him with a sensation close to nausea.

How have we come to this? How has this madness taken hold?

Putting aside such thoughts, Shiban leapt from cover. ‘To me, brothers!’ he roared, beckoning them back into the fray.

His brotherhood surged into the open again, keeping low and sprinting towards the enemy. The fighting was just as tight and claustrophobic and horrifying as it had been before. Space Marine crunched into Space Marine, full-blooded and committed. Jemulan’s Terminator retinue crashed through balustrade railings to get at their counterparts, already laying down a blistering curtain of combi-bolter shells. Ornate pillars and buttresses took damage, quickly becoming pocked and cratered.

The mortal crew, unable to do anything in the face of such unleashed fury, cowered behind what defences they could find.

All but one. A grey-haired woman, her Army general’s uniform rumpled and torn, ran straight towards Shiban as he charged the servitor pits, waving her arms frantically.

Shiban’s first reaction was to shove her aside and get to the enemy. Jochi and the others streaked ahead of him, leaping over stairways and around obstacles to charge at Torghun’s warriors.

Something in her eyes stopped him.

She was desperate – not to survive, but to get his attention.

Her face was familiar. He had seen her before, somewhere.

‘Stop!’ she shouted, bawling her lungs out over the roar of battle. ‘The Khagan! I have a locus!’

Shiban scraped to a halt. She looked incredibly frail, out in the open with no blast-armour – not even a lasgun – and he towered over her.

‘The teleport platform,’ she panted. ‘Get me to it.’

The chamber was two hundred metres away across an open stretch of marble flooring, criss-crossed with bolter-trails. Already the columns were taking hits, caught in the concentration of fire between the rival factions.

She would never make it. Even he might struggle.

‘Who are you?’ he demanded, moving around to shelter her with his armoured form.

‘Damn you!’ she screamed, looking like she might punch him. ‘Who do you think opened the docking bay doors? I’ve got a lock! You understand? Get me there or watch your Legion destroy itself!’

Shiban glanced again at the teleportation platform, looked back at her pleading expression, and made up his mind.

‘Don’t struggle,’ he said, scooping her up under his left arm. She weighed hardly anything. ‘Just hang on.’

Then he took off, head low, sprinting as fast as he could.

The first shell hit him only a few metres out, colliding with his right pauldron and nearly knocking him onto his chest. He staggered away from the impact and kept going. He made it halfway across the chamber before being struck on the leg – a direct hit. The ceramite of his knee-guard shattered, driving shrapnel through the armoured layers beneath.

He fell, crashing to his knees, arching his body to protect the mortal who still clung on. If she screamed, he did not hear her; the thunder of battle roared all around him, growing in volume as the two sides locked in earnest.

He got to his feet again, ignoring the blaze of agony in his leg. He dragged himself towards the chamber, still keeping the woman sheltered. More hits came in – a bolt-round to the back that exploded against his armour’s power pack, and another hit to the same leg that made his vision go black with pain. A plasma bolt smashed into his damaged pauldron, glancing from the curve but showering the wound with molten metal.

He kept going, gritting his teeth against the agony. As the platform’s columns rose above him, he pushed the mortal clear before his falling body could crush her.

She crawled free, darting into the relative safety of the chamber’s inner mechanisms. Shiban looked up, bleeding heavily, and saw her reach a control point. As more bolts exploded against the circlet of columns, she frantically punched in a series of codes, and the apparatus began to hum with building power.

A second later, and the space between them exploded with light. A hard bang shot out, radiating across the entire bridge like a series of krak grenades going off. Electric spears forked out, lashing and snapping at the columns before shuddering out again.

Shiban watched the woman recoil from the roiling sunburst, shading her eyes with her hands. For a moment he could not see anything within the seething mass of energy.

Then figures clarified within it – White Scars in Terminator plate, and a Space Marine in red armour on his knees from exhaustion.

Before them stood a greater silhouette, massive in ornate armour, his cloak shredded to ribbons, his face an armoured mask of burns and heavy cuts.

He strode out of the failing storm of light and cast a baleful gaze across the bridge. The hall was still in torment, with brothers at each other’s throats, lost in a maddened world of battle-cries and muzzle-flares.

Shiban coughed up blood, unable to move. The Khan walked clear of the teleportation platform, twisting his helm off as he came. He gazed out across the bridge, his severe face twisted in horror. For a moment he did nothing but watch the carnage, shock etched on his features.

Shiban’s mind raced back to Chondax, to the last time he had been so close to the primarch. Back then he might have been content to die to achieve such an honour, for that had been in glorious battle against the xenos. This, though, was different, for so much still remained in the balance and there was precious little glory in what any of them had done. He tried to rise.

But the pain rushed back in, blinding him, filling his head with the throbbing swell of agony. He tried to drag himself closer, to speak, but could not. He felt his organs giving out, followed by a cold wave of numbness across his chest.

His helm clanged to the deck, and all went dark.

The Khan strode down from the platform, his keshig following him closely. Ahead of him, the command hall remained swamped in combat. Many of those close enough to the teleportation flare to hear it over the clamour of the fighting broke off in sudden confusion, but others remained committed, locked in the storm of bolt-shells that crisscrossed the entire space.

For a terrible moment, the Khan witnessed the warriors of his Legion at each other’s throats. Mortarion’s words rang in his head, as mocking as that final salute.

Half your Legion are already declared for Horus.

He scanned over to the command throne. The fighting was heaviest there. With a lurch of recognition, he saw Hasik occupying the dais, fighting hard to repel a surge from Jemulan’s warriors.

‘Qin Xa, with me,’ he snarled, striding out. The Khan’s battered body carried him into the heart of the storm. His dao felt heavy in his grasp, still slick with Mortarion’s blood. The keshig came with him, forming a protective cordon around their primarch.

As he swept through the heart of it, some of the fighting broke down. Warriors looked up from their duels, seeing the ravaged armour of their primarch again as he strode up to the throne, as if realising only then the depths to which they had sunk in his absence. The echoing cacophony of bolter-fire abated.

Hasik was waiting for him. The bridge fell silent. Warriors remained in position, their weapons still poised. Every eye was fixed upon the command dais.

‘Noyan-khan,’ said the Khan coldly, climbing the steps and looking down at Hasik. ‘What madness is unleashed here?’

Hasik kept his blade in hand. His expression was inscrutable behind the lenses of his Terminator helm.

‘It was for all of us,’ Hasik said, but even behind the rasp of the vox-grille his voice betrayed his uncertainty. ‘For the Legion.’

‘You knew I would come back,’ said the Khan. ‘Or did you also plan to keep me away until the fleet was secure in your hands? Was that your hope?’

Hasik’s weapon-hand twitched. ‘I wished to see you and the Warmaster united once more. That was my only hope. The whispers of the faithless could not be allowed to prevail.’

‘Faithless?’ The Khan swept his gaze back across the bridge. ‘You cause this, and call others faithless?’

Hasik bristled. ‘It can still be achieved!’ he cried. ‘We made mistakes, but nonetheless we see the truth. He has called, we must follow. That has always been the way.’

‘You have been lied to.’

‘But, lord, you gave no command.’

‘You were told to wait.’

‘Do not end this now,’ urged Hasik, taking a step closer. ‘Give me time, let me explain.’

‘There is no more time.’

‘Lord, I beg–’

‘Enough!’ roared the Khan, raising his blade.

Perhaps unconsciously, perhaps without meaning to, or perhaps through some misguided belief that his cause lent him the power to do so, Hasik lifted his own in response.

The Khan pounced, sweeping his dao hard and locking edges with Hasik’s tulwar. With a twist, he wrenched the sword from the noyan-khan’s gauntlet, then switched back and plunged the dao’s point deep into Hasik’s midriff. The strike was aimed with perfect precision, lancing through the Terminator plate with a hard crack of disruptor discharge.

Hasik went rigid, impaled just below his hearts, unable to respond as searing energies rippled across his body and locked him in paralysis.

Slowly, grindingly, the Khan hefted Hasik off the ground one-handed, pulling him upwards until their faces were level. His blade kept Hasik in position, bearing his full weight and preventing him from responding.

With every ounce of his post-human strength, the Khan reached for Hasik’s helm with his free hand and wrenched it from his head, casting it to the ground in contempt. For a moment they stared into one another’s eyes – one face white with shock, the other rigid with anger.

‘You say you see the truth,’ snarled the Khan. ‘You know nothing of the truth. If you had done as I had commanded, I would be telling you of it now. Instead I will only tell you this – the Legion is the ordu of Jaghatai, and none bear their blades in it save by my word. Thus it has been since we first fought together on the Altak, and no power of the universe, be it Horus or the Emperor or the gods themselves, will ever change that.’

Hasik’s eyes stared wildly, and blood foamed up at the corner of his mouth. His empty gauntlets flexed impotently.

‘You were given freedom that no other lord would countenance,’ said the Khan, his voice heavy with bitterness. ‘Thus do you repay me, and thus do I strike you down.’

The Khan flung Hasik’s body aside. It flew free of the blade and crashed into the throne, cracking it lengthways, before rolling down the steps of the dais. Qin Xa strode over to him, his own weapons drawn, but Hasik did not get up.

The Khan turned away. Rage still pulsed through his veins, laced with the heavy grief of betrayal. For an instant his mind was filled with visions of lashing out further, of bringing punishment down on the entirety of his errant gene-progeny like some vengeful god of the forgotten past.

In the end, though, his eyes were drawn up to the observation arch, out through the enormous real-view portals towards Prospero’s orbital space. Far out into the void, silent bursts of light flashed out. Mortarion had spoken the truth about that, at least – ships had engaged, lances were being fired, shields were buckling.

There was no time left. He drew in a long breath.

‘A reckoning will come!’ the Khan cried, addressing the hundreds who waited for guidance. ‘But for now, battle calls. Vox the rest of the fleet. We engage the Death Guard, guang-cha formation, full burn.’

He swept his dark gaze back across his warriors, and the weight of his disappointment in them was crushing.

‘The enemy is known. We hunt again.’

The Sickle Moon powered in close, shields buckling, lances overheating, engines thundering. The Death Guard battleship yawed away above it, burning from the strafing run and hurling back heavy las-fire in return.

Somewhere close by, the Hesiod was careening into the heart of the enemy formation, weapons blazing and void shields on fire. They had both shot into the XIV Legion flotilla at full tilt, knowing that only speed could keep them alive for long. The enemy, advancing slowly to engage a divided and leaderless fleet, had initially been unprepared for the savagery of it. However, their shock had not taken long to wear off.

‘Hard about!’ thundered Lushan, working hard to keep the worst of the incoming fire from tearing them into void debris. ‘Watch that gunship wing – re-target the lateral arrays.’

Yesugei stood silently as the deck tilted. Voidwar was an uncomfortable experience for him – there was nothing he could do to control the process. Lushan was a formidable commander, though, and that put his mind at some ease. He had already kept the ship together during a ferocious counter-barrage and was now driving it hard towards the Death Guard vessel’s dorsal hull plating.

‘Power to the lances,’ Lushan ordered, gripping the arms of his command throne tightly.

Even as the words left his mouth, a vicious spike of las-fire impacted across the Sickle Moon’s starboard flank, sending the stressed void shields wild with splash-pattern distortion. The whole ship kicked, as though the engines had briefly coughed out, before it slewed down towards the engagement sphere’s nadir.

The bridge lumens briefly flickered out, followed by an echoing grind from many decks down.

Lushan looked up at Yesugei and smiled wryly. ‘This might be our last pass, zadyin arga.’

Yesugei nodded. ‘Then make it count, brother.’

The Sickle Moon righted, and the thrusters powered it back into position. Ahead of them, just a few hundred kilometres distant, reared the immense outline of the Death Guard battleship Lord of Hyrus. It was more than five times the size of the White Scars ship and built for protracted assault. Its void shields had been strafed badly on the first attack run, but the damage had not been enough to knock them out.

Lushan drove the Sickle Moon right at it, and Yesugei felt the deck shudder as the engines roared again.

‘Lances,’ Lushan ordered. ‘Now.’

The armoury answered, and ice-white beams of energy shot out at the Lord of Hyrus. They hit hard amidships, cracking the void shields around them and carving into the hull.

The White Scars crew cheered, watching the damage spread rapidly. Explosions blossomed out across the battleship, ripping up hull plating and exposing the deck-lattice beneath.

‘Hard about!’ ordered Lushan. ‘They will respond with–’

The Sickle Moon was hit by a blinding volley of counter-measures almost instantly. Torpedoes scythed through the clouds of venting plasma, catching the ship as it angled tightly away from the Death Guard vessel. Las-fire followed – well-aimed and dense.

Yesugei glanced at the scopes. The rearmost of the bigger warships was coming around for the kill, its weapons powering. The Hesiod was in bigger trouble – it had recklessly charged straight into the maw of the monstrous flagship, the Endurance. Henricos had caused havoc but had taken a horrific amount of return fire. He would be lucky to last more than a few more minutes.

‘Can we cover the Hesiod?’ asked Yesugei calmly.

Lushan laughed. ‘We will do well to survive our own attack run.’

The Sickle Moon was still travelling fast, burning at three-quarters full thrust. Heavier las-fire followed it like crows mobbing a raptor. Another torpedo hit somewhere to aft, sending fresh judders radiating through the structure. They hurtled away from the Lord of Hyrus, sweeping clear of its hard-edged turrets before powering into the void beyond.

Just as Yesugei thought that Lushan had somehow angled them clear of danger, another battleship loomed down over them from hard to port-zenith, its weapons already throbbing hot, its void shields evidently intact. Yesugei saw the stylised skull on the prow and knew they could never hope to hurt it, not quickly enough.

‘Pull away!’ roared Lushan.

Yesugei clutched his staff a little tighter. No doubt the enemy gunners had already targeted them. ‘No,’ he said calmly. ‘Maintain position.’

‘That will carry us into their teeth,’ warned Lushan.

Yesugei nodded. ‘We were never going to come out of this, brother.’

Lushan drew in a breath, then bowed. ‘Belay move. Master gunner, give me everything we have left.’ He smiled at Yesugei grimly. ‘We can at least dent their pride.’

The Sickle Moon aborted its hard turn and fed more power to the engines. The vast shadow of the Death Guard vessel filled the forward scopes, bristling with banks of swollen weaponry. Two massive lances jutted from under the bladed prow, each one decorated with screaming death’s heads. Their muzzles glowed as the immense power lines lit up.

The Sickle Moon fired first. A spread of las-beams and a final torpedo volley screamed out into the void. The aim was good – the enemy took a flurry of hits, exploding out across the prow in an inferno of fiery light. When the flames guttered out, they revealed a blackened and distorted mess of metal. Sparks spiralled out into the void from the twisted remains of bulkheads and sensor shrouds.

‘Did we eliminate the lances?’ asked Yesugei, daring to hope.

Lushan shook his head, still smiling. ‘Too much to wish for, I fear.’

The Sickle Moon was still on an intercept course, and too committed to pull out of range in time. Lushan ordered it into a steep dive, but even Yesugei could see that it would take effect too late. The lances on the Death Guard vessel surged with pre-firing light. The weapons seemed oddly beautiful in the endless night, like Qo hanging lanterns glowing under a sunset.

Yesugei stood tall, determined to face it with his eyes open.

Let it be that we did some good, he thought as the lances fired. Let it be that the example was enough.

The Death Guard ship loosed its payload and the anterior viewscreens went dark. Static crackled across the pict-feeds. Yesugei tensed for the roar and rush of the vacuum, for the bridge to spin apart around him.

The destruction never arrived. With a sudden lurch of recognition, he realised what had made the scopes go black.

A ship. An immense, proud, vast and powerful ship had interposed itself between them, casting a shadow across the Sickle Moon’s scopes and blotting out the light of Prospero’s sun.

Swordstorm.

He’d forgotten just how majestic the flagship was. It had been a manoeuvre of phenomenal shipmastery to bring such a monster between the Death Guard and its prey. Now it coursed smoothly above them, row upon row of cannons nestled along dagger-length flanks. Its thrusters swelled red into the void, burning like a cluster of angry stars.

‘The Khagan!’ cried Lushan, rising up from the throne.

Just as he spoke, the Swordstorm opened up with a full broadside. The void disappeared in a raging storm of light, flaring like dawn over the Altak. The XIV Legion vessel was caught up in it, subsumed and deluged in a curtain of fire. Explosions blazed along its hull, feeding on one another, racing out from the impact-centres and blistering the adamantium plating.

Yesugei stared up at the locator-scopes. More ships were coming in, pulling out of their lethargy and burning towards the Death Guard flotilla. He could see the signature of the Lance of Heaven at the forefront. Even the laggards, the ones that had seemed lifeless and drifting, were coming about. More beams of energy lanced through the void, lighting up the well of space with new fire.

He bowed his head, allowing himself, for just an instant, to feel relief.

‘Zadyin arga.’

The voice that came over the comm somehow did not degrade like the others. It had been six years since last he heard it. It retained its old richness, though spiked with something else – disillusionment, perhaps.

Yesugei turned to the hololith forming over the column at his shoulder. The Khan’s face materialised into a flickering shroud.

‘Was that a feint, then?’ Yesugei asked, trying not to let his delight at the image break out too evidently.

‘The fleet? No, sadly not. We suffered division in your absence. What kept you?’

Yesugei smiled. ‘The universe,’ he said.

Lushan pulled the Sickle Moon clear of the worst of the fighting. The crew struggled to keep the shields in any kind of shape, and the weapons array was in ruins, but it would survive. More White Scars vessels surged past them, racing into combat and covering their withdrawal.

‘That Sons of Horus vessel,’ said the Khan. ‘An ally? It will be destroyed if it keeps fighting.’

‘Do your best to protect it, please,’ said Yesugei. ‘It contains an Iron Hand who deserves to live, much as that will irritate him, and Salamanders, all of whom will fight again.’

As they spoke, the Death Guard formation began to fall back. Outnumbered and outpaced, the escorts started to fall into a defensive cordon, preparing the way for the larger vessels to break for their jump-points. The White Scars went after them, harrying, strafing, hurling all their pent-up fury in a maelstrom of lance-energy.

The Khan’s image distorted briefly as the Swordstorm issued another truly ferocious broadside. ‘You have been missed, weather-maker,’ he said, then flickered out.

Yesugei bowed again, watching the sphere of combat fall away as the Sickle Moon pulled further back. The Swordstorm ploughed onwards, wreathed in the fire of its own weapons, hurled like a spear into the heart of the fighting.

And then, at last, the pride of the Legion came after it, streaking across the void like raptors over an open sky.

Twenty-Three

Reckoning
Recovery
The hunt

The Second Battle of Prospero did not match the horror of the first, for the Death Guard had come to oversee the incorporation of an ally, not embark upon a protracted void conflict. The two fleets grappled together as they pulled away from Prospero, locked in a web of broadsides and attack runs. Under Mortarion’s leadership, the smaller XIV Legion forces rallied enough to withdraw from the system intact, but they could match neither the speed nor the firepower of the renewed White Scars. The battle moved steadily out of the system until Mortarion finally gave the order to disengage and make for the jump-points. Leaving a trail of fire and plasma in their wake, the Death Guard entered the warp, abandoning local space to the control of the Khan.

With the enemy driven from Prospero, the V Legion halted pursuit. The fleet mustered once more, holding position in loose formation, just as it had done at Chondax. Some ships still ran with dissension, and the process of restoring order was neither quick nor without violence. The Khan visited every battleship in person, stamping out the last traces of rebellion where he found them. Blood had been shed on many vessels, and some had been commandeered entirely by lodge members still hoping to sway the Legion to the cause. Some took their own lives rather than endure the shame of surrender, though most recognised the authority of the Khagan and offered up their blades in contrition.

A few smaller vessels never made it to the muster, either destroyed by the Death Guard during the engagement or disappearing quietly, presumed unwilling to accept the rejection of their planned accord with the Warmaster. The seeds planted by the lodges were set deep, and not all of their growths were capable of being uprooted.

The wounded Hasik Noyan-Khan remained on the Swordstorm throughout the engagement. Only when Mortarion had been banished did Qin Xa come for him, removing his weapons and armour and escorting him to the confinement chambers. Hasik did not resist. His face gave away the soul of a man destroyed. Others went with him into confinement, among them Goghal, Hibou and Torghun Khan. There they awaited judgement, guarded by the Khagan’s own retinue. No precedent existed in the V Legion for their actions, though under the old law of the Altak, the crime of treachery had only one punishment.

The Hesiod remained with the fleet. Henricos had nearly driven it to destruction, but its final collapse had been prevented by the Tchin-Zar, which had shielded it just as the final torpedo volleys came in. The Khan honoured the Iron Hands legionary, as well as the others of the shattered Legions, and they were offered the chance to fight alongside the White Scars as part of whatever brotherhood they chose. Henricos considered the offer but made no commitment. When the Hesiod was restored, he said, he would make up his mind. Most observers predicted that he would choose to take the fight to the enemy himself. He claimed to have seen evidence of Sons of Horus splinter-fleet movements, and itched to run them down.

Arvida too remained with the Legion, and was given quarters on board the Swordstorm. His health had been ravaged by the long sojourn on a dying world, and it took days for him to recover enough to speak of what he had seen.

Yesugei and he spent many hours together after that, though what they discussed was not revealed to any but the Khan. It was known that Yesugei asked after the fate of Ahzek Ahriman, whom he had hoped to see again, but Arvida could give him no guidance. The Stormseer was forced to conclude that Ahriman had either been killed by the Wolves or had escaped along with his master. In either case it seemed most likely that they would never meet again, something that grieved Yesugei more than all of what had taken place since Ullanor. Of the many links that had once existed between the White Scars and the Thousand Sons, only Arvida remained.

As for the Khan himself, once the violence of restoration had ebbed, he retreated to his chambers on the flagship and took counsel on the Legion’s next move. Only Qin Xa and Yesugei stayed with him during that time, though it was known that a kurultai – a summit of the khans – would be convened to purge any remaining bad blood. It became quickly evident that the lodge faction had not truly understood what they had been working towards, for the Horus they venerated no longer existed. The knowledge gleaned from Magnus needed to be propagated swiftly, ending the long period of uncertainty that had blighted the Legion.

Such was the way of the old plains: grievances would be heard, penance would be meted, bonds restored.

No chrono-mark was set for the gathering, but all the khans knew it would be soon. Now that the shape of the treachery was known it would not be long before the brotherhoods were ordered to war, unified once more and thirsting for vengeance.

Until then, there was nothing to do but prepare, restore, and hope that the wounds would heal.

Shiban woke in the apothecarion. His body blazed with pain. Gingerly, he lifted his head. Tubes ran from his torso, gurgling with fluids. Blood-cycling machinery hummed in clusters around him. He saw vital-sign readouts scrolling across a dark screen, and noted how weak they were.

He felt nauseous. His head was hammering, throbbing as if filled with too much blood.

‘You’re awake, then,’ came a voice at his side.

Shiban turned his head to see the woman he had saved. She looked much as she had done on the bridge – a slight frame, clad in an old Army uniform. Her grey hair was tied back, her lined face scrubbed clean of the grime that had streaked it before.

He tried to bow, and failed. Spikes of pain ran up his neck.

‘I do not... I do not know your name,’ he croaked.

The woman bowed. ‘Ilya Ravallion. Counsellor to the Great Khan. Organiser. Observer. Hanger-on.’

Shiban swallowed dryly. He could feel nutrients entering his body from the tubes. It was an uncomfortable sensation.

‘In another Legion,’ said Ilya, ‘if things had gone worse, they tell me you might have been placed in a Dreadnought. But of course this Legion does not hold with them, so you are lucky to be so tough.’

Shiban grimaced. He did not feel lucky.

Ilya moved around the bed, so that he could face her without having to angle his head awkwardly. ‘Why did you help me?’ she asked.

‘I saw you before. On Chondax.’

‘You have a memory for faces.’

‘You stood out.’

‘As a woman?’

‘As a Terran.’

Ilya nodded. ‘We are getting rarer. The process will quicken now, I suppose.’

Shiban drew in a sharp breath. The pain was getting worse. If he could have lifted his head, he might have been able to see what had been done to the rest of his body. ‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘Afterwards?’

‘The Legion is restored,’ said Ilya. ‘You fought as well as I have ever seen. Things will be simpler from now on – allegiances have been cemented.’

Shiban’s brow creased. It was hard to remember anything with precision. ‘It was like… a madness.’

‘They tell me Prospero made it worse. The warp runs through the whole place, and we were reckless to remain there for so long. Then again, that is the mark of this Legion, is it not? I do not think you will change.’

‘What of Torghun?’

Ilya looked blank.

‘The Brotherhood of the Moon. We fought.’

‘In confinement, then. Judgement will come when the Khan makes his determination.’

Shiban felt a mix of emotions. Torghun was too fine a warrior to wish death upon, though the crime had been severe and many of his own battle-brothers had fallen. Shiban dreaded recovering sufficiently to read the death-tally. He wondered if the list would carry Jochi’s name. Or Sangjai’s, or Chel’s.

‘You let us onto the Swordstorm,’ he said. ‘So I could ask you the same question – why did you help me?’

Ilya shook her head, as if she didn’t quite know herself. ‘All those around me were behaving like madmen. They wouldn’t tell me anything, and the Khan was not there. I don’t like deception. Keeping secrets is what got us into this mess.’ She looked directly at him then, almost defiantly. ‘It was a feeling. Nothing more.’

Shiban did his best to nod. It was as good an explanation as he had for helping her. ‘What next, then?’ he asked.

‘We don’t know. Not yet.’ Then she smiled. She had an honest, sensible face, one that Shiban liked. ‘But we will not be waiting long – the uncertainty has gone from him now. He is anxious to move, to put all this behind us and join the war.’

Shiban let his head fall back onto the metal of the apothecarion cot. He had never been unhappy to hear of a new campaign; since Phemus, it had been the only thing he had wished for. Now, though, it was all different. They would be fighting old allies, brothers they had once marched out into the stars with as the vanguard of an assertive, united species.

‘I thought you’d be happy to hear that,’ Ilya said.

Shiban closed his eyes. ‘Happy?’ he said, dryly. ‘Not quite. This is not the war I was bred to fight.’

He could feel consciousness slipping away again, dragged by the powerful sedatives coursing around his system. He flexed his fingers, unused to feeling them out of their gauntlets.

‘You will remember joy, Shiban,’ said Ilya. ‘That is the difference between you and them, the Scars and the others – you laugh when taking up your blades.’

‘We did,’ murmured Shiban, drifting into drugged sleep, thinking of Torghun, thinking of Hasik, and wondering what fate awaited them all. ‘Once, we really did.’

The Khan and Yesugei stood alone on the Swordstorm, locked away in the primarch’s personal chambers. The field of stars showed in the main viewer, glittering and infinite. Neither of them wore armour. Yesugei was in his Stormseer’s ceremonial robes, the Khan in the old garb of a Khitan hunter – furs, long boots, dun-red cloak.

The primarch’s wounds had taken a long time to heal, by his standards. Mortarion’s scythe, it was postulated, had been envenomed with some kind of toxin, hampering the restorative process. For the first time in his life, Jaghatai bore scars not of his own making.

‘We were richly deceived,’ the Khan said slowly, the words dragged from his proud lips unwillingly.

‘Not only us,’ said Yesugei calmly.

‘We were the last to find out.’

‘There is no shame in that.’ Yesugei looked down at his hands. The skin was blistered from the fires he had unleashed upon Ledak. That had been a shameful lapse, though cathartic. ‘Magnus knew more than any of us, and for longer. That did not stop him making poor choices. Perhaps we were preserved.’

The Khan smiled wryly. ‘Preserved by ignorance.’

‘Those who know the truth are not equal to those who love the truth.’

The Khan raised an eyebrow. ‘One of your Qo sages?’

‘Terran, as it happens.’

‘Ah.’

They stood in silence for a while. Behind them, the fire crackled in the grate.

‘So what now, lord?’ asked Yesugei.

The Khan’s nostrils flared a little. He continued staring out at the starfield. His gaze had always been hard; now it seemed harder.

‘The Legion is intact. We are clear to hunt again.’

‘And those who declared for Horus?’

‘They did not know what they were doing. We all loved Horus.’ The Khan turned to Yesugei. ‘I loved Horus. The Horus who was. None of them knew what you had discovered, and if they had then they would have recoiled, just as you did.’ The Khan looked pensive. ‘I gave them freedom, and they used it. Who should be punished for that?’

‘Discipline must be maintained.’

The Khan nodded. ‘It will be. Hasik knows his fate. Others, too – the khans, the ones who should have exercised restraint.’

Yesugei thought for a moment. ‘And now I am reminded of a legend. An old one, from the Talskar heartland.’

The Khan smiled tolerantly. ‘Oh?’

‘A khan marches on the territory of his enemy,’ said Yesugei. ‘He takes his three brothers with him, all of whom are trusted men. On the eve of combat, he finds the brothers have been exchanging messages with the enemy, hopeful of reaching accommodation rather than fighting. The khan is furious, and summons them to his ger. He hears their confessions, but his rage does not abate. The brothers tell him they were deceived and repent of their actions. Each of them, however, knows the law of the Altak, and prepares for death.

‘The khan consults his zadyin arga, as is customary. Five counsel death by beheading, but the sixth, the last, demurs. The khan demands to know why they should be spared. The weather-maker replies thus: “Khan, our enemies are cunning. If they succeed with their lies, we are divided. If they fail, they know these men will be executed. In either case, your horde is weakened, and they stand to prevail in battle.”

‘The khan listens to this counsel and sees the wisdom of it. He asks what he should do. The weather-maker replies thus: “Across the Altak there is no greater prize than honour, no heavier bond than shame. These men are shamed, and will perform any deed to expunge it. Send them ahead of your army. The enemy will see them coming and think them friends, but instead they will fight until death takes them, knowing only this way to recover their honour. When your army follows them, they will find an enemy weakened, just as they hoped to weaken you. Do this, and the victory will be yours.”’

The Khan nodded, amused. ‘Did he win?’

Yesugei looked back out, noncommittally, at the viewscreen. ‘I find legends are generally written by the victors.’

The Khan clasped his hands behind his back. ‘Warbands,’ he said, thoughtfully. ‘Infiltrators. You took this tactic from the Iron Hand.’

‘Henricos has become a master of such warfare. Our brothers could learn much, fighting with him.’

‘Then I will think on it. Perhaps some will serve in this way.’

‘It would be a penance. It would cleanse their souls.’

‘Theirs are not the only souls that need cleansing.’

Yesugei paused before speaking again, looking preoccupied. The Khan waited for him.

‘I had... dreams,’ Yesugei said, haltingly.

‘Dreams of what?’

‘I saw you fighting. A spectre of the underworld, on a world of ruins.’

‘You saw Mortarion.’

Yesugei looked uneasy. ‘I do not know. In my dreams, you were slain.’

The Khan smiled. ‘Then, it seems, you did not have a true vision.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Yesugei. ‘Or maybe it was of something else. Something yet to come.’

‘Do you still have these dreams?’

‘Not since we arrived at Prospero.’

‘Then your answer is there.’

‘I have not slept since we arrived at Prospero.’

The Khan sighed. ‘My friend, not everything is fated,’ he said, though as the words left his lips he remembered what Magnus had told him.

All is known.

‘Not everything,’ admitted Yesugei, ‘but you were always bound up with the warp. All your brothers were. There is a pattern emerging. You have made an enemy of Mortarion, and he will not forget it.’

The Khan grinned rakishly. ‘Others, too. Russ must still be foaming at the mouth. Dorn as well. We are out on our own, distrusted by all, just as always. I find I cannot be truly upset about this.’

Yesugei looked at him. ‘So what is next?’

‘For now? The Legion is wounded. Tribunals will be held at the kurultai. Pride will be punished, loyalty rewarded. When we next hunt, we will be united again. That is the first step.’

‘And after that?’

The Khan remained staring at the stars. His scarred face felt tighter than it had done. Primarchs did not age, not like mortals, but neither were they wholly free of the wearing powers of time.

‘Horus must be stopped,’ he said quietly. ‘If it ends us all, he must be stopped. We will take the fight to the void, playing to our strengths.’

‘That will not be enough.’

‘It will slow him.’

‘Then where will it end?’

The Khan did not reply.

‘Henricos asked me a question before we set course for Prospero,’ said Yesugei. ‘He asked me whether I trusted that you would make the same decision we did.’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘That I had faith you would.’

‘Did you mean that?’

‘I had no idea what you would do. There were some nights I feared you might have remembered the old loyalties. Let us be honest, you have never seen eye to eye with your father, nor those around him.’

The Khan nodded. ‘I won’t pretend otherwise. If you had asked me on Chondax what I wanted to believe, it was that Horus had been wronged. I almost gave the order for Alaxxes. Had the Alpha Legion not intervened, I might have done it.’

‘But it was not them that held you back.’

‘No, not them.’ The Khan remembered how it had been then, with contradictory missives spilling from the lips of the star-speakers every hour. He remembered the anguish of his indecision, hidden from all but Qin Xa.

‘What, then?’

The Khan looked at him. ‘Because it was what I wished for. Because I wanted it to be true. It was the easier course, the one my hearts leapt at.’ He smiled grimly. ‘And if we learned anything from our home world, it is to distrust the path of ease. Comfort leads to decadence. Every worthy thing is difficult.’

Yesugei pondered that. ‘You sound like a zadyin arga.’

The Khan laughed. It was a clear sound – harder, perhaps, than before, but free of doubt.

‘I am no such thing,’ he said, turning back to the stars. The void gazed back at him, as if beckoning him into its war-torn embrace. ‘I am the Warhawk, the berkut, the wide-ranger. I am the spirit of wildfire, the uncatchable, the master of the ice-blue heavens. I have travelled further than any of my brothers, and none of them know my mind.’

He felt a stirring of savagery as he spoke, the kindling of an old joy, one that Chondax had ravaged but not quite extinguished.

‘What they say of hawks is also true,’ he said, his eyes glinting. ‘You have said it yourself, many times – we never forget the shape of the hunt. In the end we always come back to the hand that loosed us.’

It was just as Magnus had told him.

But you still have a choice, brother.

‘So when the hour comes,’ he said, ‘whatever the fates demand, the White Scars will be on Terra.’

~ DRAMATIS PERSONAE ~

The Primarchs

Horus Lupercal, The Warmaster, Primarch of the XVI Legion

Mortarion, The Death Lord, Primarch of the XIV Legion

Fulgrim, The Phoenician, Primarch of the III Legion

Leman Russ, The Wolf King, Primarch of the VI Legion

Rogal Dorn, The Emperor’s Praetorian, Primarch of the VII Legion

The XVI Legion ‘Sons of Horus’

Ezekyle Abaddon, First Captain

Falkus Kibre, ‘Widowmaker’, captain, Justaerin Terminator Squad

Kalus Ekaddon, Captain, Catulan Reaver Squad

‘Little’ Horus Aximand, Captain, Fifth Company

Yade Durso, Line captain, Fifth Company

Serghar Targost, Captain, Seventh Company, lodge master

Lev Goshen, Captain, 25th Company

Grael Noctua, ‘The Warlocked’, sergeant, 25th Company

Maloghurst, ‘The Twisted’, equerry to the primarch

Ger Gerradon, Luperci

The XIV Legion ‘Death Guard’

Caipha Morarg, 24th Breacher Squad, Second Company

Ignatius Grulgor, The Eater of Lives

The XIII Legion ‘Ultramarines’, Battle Group II (25th Chapter)

Castor Alcade, Legate

Didacus Theron, Centurion, Fourth Division

Proximo Tarchon, Centurion, Ninth Division

Arcadon Kyro, Techmarine

The IX Legion ‘Blood Angels’

Vitus Salicar, Captain, 16th Company

Alix Vastern, Apothecary

Drazen Acorah, Appointed lieutenant, formerly of the Librarius

Agana Serkan, Warden

Legio Crucius

Etana Kalonice, Princeps, Paragon of Terra

Carthal Ashur, Calator Martialis

Legio Fortidus

Uta-Dagon, Princeps, Red Vengeance

Utu-Lerna, Princeps, Bloodgeld

Ur-Nammu, Warmonger

Legio Gryphonicus

Opinicus, Invocatio

The Mechanicum

Bellona Modwen, High Magos, Ordo Reductor

House Devine

Cyprian Devine, ‘The Hellblade’, Knight Seneschal

Cebella Devine, Adoratrice Drakaina

Raeven Devine, First Knight

Albard Devine, Firstborn scion

Lyx Devine, Adoratrice Sybaris

House of Donar

Balmorn Donar, Lord-Knight

Robard Donar, Scion

Imperial Personae

Malcador the Sigillite, Imperial Regent, First Lord of Terra

Brython Semper, Lord Admiral of Battlefleet Molech

Tyana Kourion, Lord General of the Grand Army of Molech

Edoraki Hakon, Marshal of the Northern Oceanic

Abdi Kheda, Commander of the Kushite Eastings

Oskur van Valkenberg, Colonel of the Western Marches

Corwen Malbek, Khan of the Southern Steppe

Noama Calver, Medicae corps

Alivia Sureka, Larsa harbour pilot

Jeph Parsons, Dock worker

Miska

Vivyen

The Chosen of Malcador

Garviel Loken, Knight Errant

Iacton Qruze, ‘The Half-heard’, Knight Errant

Severian, Knight Errant

Tylos Rubio, Knight Errant

Macer Varren, Knight Errant

Bror Tyrfingr, Knight Errant

Rama Karayan, Knight Errant

Ares Voitek, Knight Errant

Altan Nohai, Knight Errant

Callion Zaven, Knight Errant

Tubal Cayne, Knight Errant

Banu Rassuah, Pilot of the Tarnhelm

Non-Imperial Personae

The Red Angel

‘And therefore is the glorious planet Sol
In noble eminence enthroned and sphered
Amidst the other; whose medicinable Eye
Corrects the ill-aspects of planets evil,
And posts, like the commandment of a king,
Sans check to good and bad: but when the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents! what mutiny!
What raging of the sea! shaking of earth!
Commotion in the winds! frights, changes, horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixtures!’

– attributed to the dramaturge Shakespire (fl. M2),
cited in The Prophecy of Amon of the Thousand Sons
(Chapter III, Verse 13)

‘Horus had called the dark and savage furies latent in the most ruthless, contradictory and ill-starred power of the Immaterium. He had conjured up the fearful idol of an all-devouring Molech of which he was the priest and incarnation. All his powers, hitherto dissipated and scattered, were now concentrated and directed with terrible energy to one terrible aim.’

– from The Age of Revolution: Suppressed Monographs
of Choirmaster Nemo Zhi Meng

‘The line separating good from evil runs not between species, not between ranks and not between competing faiths. It runs through the heart of each and every mortal soul. This line is not stationary, but shifts and moves with the passage of time. Even souls ensnared by evil maintain a small bridgehead of good.’

– The Keeler Amanuensis
(Volume II, Chapter XXXIV, Verse VII)

Where are the tombs of dead gods? What wailing mourner pours wine over their grave-mounds? There was a time when a being known as Zeus was the king of all the gods, and any man who doubted his might and majesty was a heathen and an enemy. But where in all the Imperium is there the man who worships Zeus?

And what of Huitzilopochtli? Forty thousand maidens were slain in sacrifice to him, their dripping hearts burned in vast pyramid temples. When he frowned, the sun stood still, when he raged earthquakes destroyed entire cities, when he thirsted he was watered with oceans of blood.

But today Huitzilopochtli is magnificently forgotten.

And what of his brother, Tezcatilpoca?

The ancients believed that Tezcatilpoca was almost as powerful as his brother. He consumed the hearts of almost thirty thousand virgins a year, but does anyone guard his tomb or know where it is to be found? Does anyone weep or hang mourning wreaths upon his graven image?

And what of Balor of the Eye, or the Lady of Cythera? Or of Dis, whom the Romanii Qaysar found to be the chief god of the Keltos? Or the dreaming serpent, Kajura? Of Taranis, only dimly recalled by a dead order of Knights and early historians of Unity? Or the flesh-hungry King Nzambi? Or the serpentine hosts of Cromm Crúaich, driven from their island lair by the Priest of Ravenglass?

Where are their bones? Where is the tree of woe upon which to hang memorial garlands? In what forgotten abode of oblivion do they await their hour of resurrection?

They are not alone in eternity, for the tombs of dead gods are crowded. Urusix is there, and Esus, and Baldur, and Silvana, and Mithras, and Phoenicia, and Deva, and Kratus, and Uxellimus, and Borvo, and Grannos, and Mogons. All mighty gods in their day, worshipped by billions, replete with demands and commandments, ascribed the power to bind the elements and shake the foundations of the world.

Civilisations laboured for generations to build vast temples to them; towering structures of stone and steel, fashioned by technologies now lost in the unknowing of Old Night. Interpreting their divine desires fell to thousands of holy men; lunatic priests, dung-smeared shamans and opium-ravaged oracles. To doubt their pronouncements was to die in agony. Great armies took to the field to defend the gods against infidels and carry their will to heathen peoples in far off lands. Continents were burned, innocents butchered and worlds laid waste in their name. Yet in the end they all withered and died, cast down and justly unremembered. Today there are few so deranged as to do them reverence.

All were gods of the highest eminence, many of them mentioned with fear and trembling awe in the ancient texts of the White God. They ranked with the Highest Power; yet time has trampled them all underfoot and mocks the ashes of their bones.

They were gods of the highest dignity – gods of civilised peoples – worshipped by entire worlds. All were omnipotent, omniscient and immortal.

And all are dead.

If any of them ever really existed, they were but aspects of the true Pantheon, masks behind which hide the first gods of the universe in all their terrible beauty.

Lorgar has been vociferous in his proselytising of this fact, wearily so.

But he does not know as much as he believes.

Imperial Truth? Primordial Truth?

Both are irrelevant.

There is a god who has raised Himself higher than all the others, mightier than any imagined deity or hell-spawned monster dreamed into being.

He is the Emperor.

My father.

And I have to kill Him.

That is the only Truth that matters.

ONE

The Mausolytica
Confraternity
Brothers

The dead of Dwell were screaming. The Mausolytic Precinct was a place of terror for them now, where the cessation of mortal functions offered no respite from continual torment. A thousand tech-adepts died by the sword before enough had finally been compelled to repair the damage done in the wake of the Sons of Horus’s assault, but repair it they had.

The dead of the Mausolytic screamed from dawn till dusk, through the night and across every day since Aximand had captured it in the name of the Warmaster. They screamed in fear, in horror and revulsion.

But most of all they screamed in anger.

Only the Warmaster heard them, and he cared nothing for their anger. His only interest was in what they could tell him of the past; as they had experienced it and as they had learned it.

A vaulted sprawl of colonnaded stone structures that possessed the same scale as the palace of a mighty Terran patrician, was here a repository of the dead and librarium in one. Plain facades of ochre granite shone like burnished copper in the dying sunlight, and the cries of circling seabirds almost made Horus Aximand forget a war had been fought here.

Could almost make him forget that he nearly died here.

The battle for the Mausolytic Precinct had been won by bloody, shoulder-charging bodywork, blade to blade, muscle to muscle. There had been collateral damage of course; machinery destroyed, stasis capsules smashed open and preserved flesh turned to hard leather upon exposure to the unforgiving atmospherics.

Blood still stained its walls in the catastrophic spray patterns of bodies detonated within ruptured personal shields. The ruined corpses of the Compulsories were gone, but no one cared enough to wash away their blood.

Aximand stood at a knee-high wall of sun-blushed stone, one foot on the parapet, forearms resting on his raised knee. The sound of waves far below was peaceful and when the wind blew in from the ocean, the burned metal smell of the port was replaced with the tang of salt and wildflowers. From his vantage point upon the high plateau, the tumbled city of Tyjun was much as it had been when the Sons of Horus made their first landings.

His first impression was that a vast tidal surge had swept along the rift valley and deposited the forgotten detritus of an ocean upon its retreat. There appeared to be no order to the city, but Aximand had long since come to appreciate the organic subtleties of the city’s ancient designers.

‘It is protean,’ he would say, when he found a willing ear, ‘a city that thrives on its disregard for clean lines and imposed clarity. The ostensive lack of cohesion is deceptive, for order exists within the chaos, which only becomes apparent when you walk its twisting paths and find that your destination has been set from the very beginning.’

Every building was unique in its own way, as though an army of architects had come to Tyjun and each designed a wealth of structures from the salvaged steel and glass and stone.

The only exception was the Dwellan Palace, a recent addition to the city that bore the utilitarian hallmarks of classical Macraggian architecture. Taller than anything else in Tyjun, it was a domed palace of Imperial governance, a monument to the Great Crusade and an expression of Primarch Guilliman’s vanity all in one. It had mathematically precise proportions and though Lupercal thought it austere, Aximand liked the restraint he saw in its elegantly crisp design.

Exquisite statuary of Imperial heroes stood proud around the circumference of the main azure dome and in recessed alcoves running the full height of the central arch. Aximand had learned the identity of every one before they were smashed; Chapter Masters and captains of the Ultramarines and Iron Hands, Army generals, Titan princeps, Munitorum pontiffs and even a few aexactor tithe-takers.

Evening sunlight honeyed the city’s rooftops and the Sea of Enna was glassy and still. The water became a golden mirror streaked with phosphor-bright reflections of orbiting warships, the occasional moon and void-war debris falling far out to sea.

The prow of a sunken cargo tanker jutted from the water at the quayside, petrochemical gels frothing its surface with oily scum.

Far to the north, a glowing star clung stubbornly to the horizon, the twin of the sun setting in the south. This, Aximand knew, was no star, but the still burning remains of the Budayan ship school, its orbit degrading with each planetary revolution.

‘Won’t be long until that impacts,’ said a voice behind him.

‘True,’ agreed Aximand without turning.

‘It’s not going to be pretty,’ said another. ‘Best we’re gone before then.’

‘We should have left here long ago,’ added a fourth.

Aximand finally turned from the bucolic vision of Tyjun and nodded to his battle-brothers.

‘Mournival,’ he said. ‘The Warmaster calls for us.’

The Mournival. Restored. But then, it had never been lost, just broken awhile.

Aximand marched with Ezekyle Abaddon. In his spiked warrior-plate, the First Captain of the Sons of Horus was more than a head taller than Aximand. His body language was savagely aggressive, cruelly planed features pulled hard over jutting bones. His skull was hairless, save for a glossy black topknot jutting from his crown like a tribal fetish.

He and Abaddon were old hands, Mournival from the time before the galaxy had slipped a gear and turned to a very different hand at the crank. They had spilled blood on a hundred worlds in the name of the Emperor; hundreds more for the Warmaster.

And they had once laughed as they fought.

The two newest members of the Mournival marched alongside their proposers, lunar marks graven upon their helms by the reflected light of Dwell’s moon. One was a warrior with a reputation, the other a sergeant who’d earned his during the disaster of Dwell’s fall.

Widowmaker Kibre commanded the Justaerin Terminators. One of Abaddon’s men and a true son. Where Kibre was seasoned and war-known, Grael Noctua of the Warlocked was new to the men of the Legion. A warrior possessed of a mind like a steel trap, his intellect was likened by Abaddon to a slow blade.

With Kibre’s investiture, a potent weight of choler lay to one side of the Mournival. Aximand hoped Noctua’s phlegmatic presence would counterbalance it. There had been rumblings at the favour Aximand showed Noctua, but Dwell silenced them all.

With their two newest brothers, Aximand and Abaddon led the way to the central Mausolytic Hall in answer to the Warmaster’s summons.

‘Do you think it will be a mobilisation order?’ asked Noctua.

Like all of them, he was eager to be unleashed. The war here was long-ended, and but for a handful of forays beyond the system, the bulk of the Legion had remained in place while their primarch sequestered himself with the dead.

‘Perhaps,’ said Aximand, unwilling to speculate on the Warmaster’s motives for remaining on Dwell. ‘We will know soon enough.’

‘We should be on the move,’ said Kibre. ‘The war gathers momentum while we stagnate with inaction.’

Abaddon halted their march and placed a hand in the centre of the Widowmaker’s breastplate. ‘You think you know the course of war better than your primarch?’

Kibre shook his head. ‘Of course not, I just–’

‘First lesson of the Mournival,’ said Aximand. ‘Never second guess Lupercal.’

‘I wasn’t second guessing him,’ snapped Kibre.

‘Good,’ said Aximand. ‘Then you’ve learned something useful today. Perhaps the Warmaster has found what he needed, perhaps not. Maybe we will have mobilisation orders, maybe we won’t.’

Kibre nodded and Aximand saw him force his volatile humours into balance. ‘As you say, Little Horus. The molten Cthonian core that burns in us all waxes stronger in me than most.’

Aximand chuckled, though the sound was not as he once knew it, the muscles beneath the skin moving in subtly different ways.

‘You say that like it’s a bad thing,’ he said. ‘Just remember that fire needs to be controlled to be useful.’

‘Most of the time,’ added Abaddon, and they moved off again.

They traversed high-vaulted antechambers of fallen pillars and halls of bolt-cratered frescos that had once been battlefields. The air thrummed with the vibration of buried generators and tasted like an embalming workshop. Between murals of cobalt-blue Legion warriors being welcomed with garlands, tens of thousands of names were inlaid on coffered panels with gold leaf.

The interred dead of the Mausolytica.

‘Like the Avenue of Glory and Lament on the Spirit,’ said Aximand, pointing out the fine scriptwork.

Abaddon snorted, not even glancing at the names. ‘It hasn’t been called that since Isstvan.’

‘The necrologists may be gone,’ sighed Aximand, ‘but it is as it has always been, a place to remember the dead.’

They climbed a wide set of marbled steps, crunching over the powdered remains of toppled statues and emerging into a transverse hallway Aximand had fought the length and breadth of; shield raised, Mourn-it-all’s blade high, shoulders squared. Soaked in blood to the elbow.

‘Dreaming again?’ asked Abaddon, noting his fractional pause.

‘I don’t dream,’ snapped Aximand. ‘I’m just thinking how ridiculous it was that an army of men were able to trouble us here. When have we ever faced mortals and found them bothersome?’

Abaddon nodded. ‘The Chainveil fought in the City of Elders. They delayed me.’

No more needed to be said. That any army, mortal or transhuman, could delay Ezekyle Abaddon spoke volumes to their competency and courage.

‘But they all died in the end,’ said Kibre as they passed beneath a great, funerary arch and moved deeper into the tomb complex. ‘Chainveil or ordinary soldiers, they stood against us in the line and we killed them all.’

‘That they stood at all should have told us there were was something else waiting for us,’ said Grael Noctua.

‘How so?’ said Aximand, knowing the answer, but wanting to hear it articulated.

‘The men who fought us here, they believed they could win.’

‘Their defence was orchestrated by Meduson of the Iron Tenth,’ said Aximand. ‘It’s understandable they believed him.’

‘Only Legion presence gives mortals that kind of backbone,’ continued Noctua. ‘With the Tenth Legion’s war-leader and the kill teams of the Fifth Legion in place, they thought they had a chance. They thought they could kill the Warmaster.’

Kibre shook his head. ‘Even if Lupercal had fallen for their transparent ploy and come himself, he would have easily slain them.’

More than likely Kibre was right. It was inconceivable that a mere five legionaries could have ended the Warmaster. Even with surprise in their corner, the idea that Horus could be brought low by a rush team of blade killers seemed ludicrous.

‘He outwitted a sniper’s bullet on Dagonet, and he evaded the assassins’ swords on Dwell,’ said Abaddon, kicking over an engraved urn emblazoned with a splintered Ultima. ‘Meduson must have been desperate to think the Scars stood a chance.’

‘Desperate is exactly what he was,’ said Aximand, feeling the itch where his face had been reattached. ‘Just imagine if they had succeeded.’

No one answered, no one could conceive of the Legion without Lupercal at its head. Without one, the other did not exist.

But Shadrak Meduson had failed to lure the Warmaster into his trap, and Dwell had fallen hard.

Against Horus Lupercal’s armies, everything fell eventually.

‘Why defend the dead at all?’ said Kibre. ‘Aside from commanding the high ground over an open city, holding the Mausolytica offers no tangible strategic merit. We could have simply shelled it flat, and sent Lithonan’s Army auxiliaries in to kill any survivors.’

‘They knew the Warmaster would want so precious a resource captured intact,’ said Noctua.

‘It’s a house of the dead,’ pressed Kibre. ‘What kind of resource is that?’

‘Now you’re Mournival, why don’t you ask him yourself?’ answered Noctua. Kibre’s head snapped around, unused to being addressed with such informality by a junior officer. Mournival equality was going to take time to bed in with the Widowmaker.

‘Tread lightly, Noctua,’ warned Abaddon. ‘You might be one of us now, but don’t think that exempts you from respect.’

Aximand grinned at Abaddon’s ire. Ezekyle was a warhound on a fraying leash, and Aximand wondered if he knew that was his role.

Of course Ezekyle knew. A warrior did not become First Captain of the Sons of Horus by being too stupid to know his place.

‘Apologies,’ said Noctua, turning to address Kibre directly. ‘No disrespect was intended.’

‘Good,’ said Aximand. ‘Now give Falkus a proper answer.’

‘The Mausolytica occupies the best defensive terrain in the rift valley, but it’s barely fortified,’ said Noctua. ‘Which suggests the Dwellers valued it highly, but didn’t think of it as a military target until Meduson told them it was.’

Aximand nodded and slapped a gauntleted hand on the polished plates of Noctua’s shoulder guard.

‘So why did the Iron Hands think this place was valuable?’ asked Kibre.

‘I have no idea,’ said Aximand.

Only later would he come to understand that the Dwellers would have been far better demolishing the Mausolytic Halls and smashing its machinery to shards than allowing it to fall to the Sons of Horus.

Only much later, when the last violent spasms of galactic war were stilled for a heartbeat, would Aximand learn the colossal mistake they had made in allowing the Mausolytic to endure.

They found the primarch in Pilgrim’s Hall, where ancient machinery allowed the Mausolytic’s custodians to access and consult the memories of the dead. The custodians had joined their charges in death, and Horus Lupercal commanded the machines alone.

A colossal cryo-generator throbbed with power in the centre of the echoing chamber, like a templum organ with a multitude of frost-limmed ducts emerging from its misting condensers. Smeared charnel dust patterned its base where the White Scars kill team had thrown off their disguises.

Radiating outward from the generator like the spokes of an illuminated wheel were row upon row of supine bodies in stacked glass cylinders. Aximand had logged twenty-five thousand bodies in this hall alone, and there were fifty similar sized spaces above ground. He hadn’t yet catalogued how many chambers were carved into the plateau’s bedrock.

The Warmaster was easy to see.

His back was to them as he bent over a cylindrical tube hinged out from its gravimetric support field. Twenty Justaerin Terminators stood between them and the Warmaster, armed with photonic-edged falchions and twin-barrelled bolters. Nominally the Warmaster’s bodyguard, the Justaerin were a throwback to a time when war-leaders actually required protection. Horus no more needed their strength of arms to defend him than he needed that of the Mournival, but after Hibou Khan’s ambush, no one was taking any chances.

As ever, the primarch was a lodestone to the eyes, a towering presence to which it was right and proper to offer devotion. An easy smile suggested Horus had only just noticed them, but Aximand didn’t doubt he had been aware of them long before they entered the hall.

Titanic plates of brass-edged jet encased him, the plastron emblazoned with a slitted amber eye flanked by golden wolves. Horus’s right hand was a killing talon, and his left rested upon an enormous mace. Its name was Worldbreaker, and its adamantium haft was featureless save for an eagle pommel-stone, its murder head bronze and black.

The Warmaster had the face of a conquerer, a warrior, a diplomat and a statesman. It could be a kindly face of paternal concern or the last face you ever saw.

Aximand could not yet tell which it was at this moment, but on a day like this such ambiguity was good. To have Lupercal’s humours unknown to those who stood with him would vex those who might yet stand against him.

‘Little Horus,’ said the Warmaster as the Justaerin parted before them like the gates of a ceramite fortress.

The uncanny resemblance Aximand shared with his gene-father had earned him that name, but Hibou Khan had cut that from him with a blade of hard Medusan steel. Legion Apothecaries had done what they could, but the damage was too severe, the edge too sharp and his wounded flesh too melancholic.

Yet for all that his face was raw with disfigurement, the resemblance between Aximand and his primarch had, by some strange physiological alchemy, become even more pronounced.

‘Warmaster,’ said Aximand. ‘Your Mournival.’

Horus nodded and studied each of them in turn, as though assessing the alloyed composition of the restored confraternity.

‘I approve,’ he said. ‘The blend looks to be a good one.’

‘Time will tell,’ said Aximand.

‘As it does in all things,’ answered Horus, coming forward to stand before the sergeant of the Warlocked.

‘Aximand’s protégé, a true son indeed,’ said Horus with a hint of pride. ‘I hear good things about you, Grael. Are they true?’

To his credit, Noctua retained his senses in the face of the Warmaster’s appraisal, but he could not meet his gaze for long.

‘Yes, my lord,’ he managed. ‘Maybe… I do not know what you have heard.’

‘Good things,’ said Horus, nodding and moving on to take the Widowmaker’s gauntlet in his taloned grip.

‘You’re tense, Falkus,’ he said. ‘Inaction doesn’t suit you.’

‘What can I say? I was built for war,’ said Kibre, with more tact than Aximand expected.

‘More than most,’ agreed Horus. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll not have you and the Justaerin idle for much longer.’

The Warmaster came to Abaddon and said, ‘And you, Ezekyle, you hide it better than the Widowmaker, but I see you also chafe at our enforced stay on Dwell.’

‘There is a war to be won, my lord,’ said Abaddon, his tone barely on the right side of rebuke. ‘And I won’t have it said that the Sons of Horus let other Legions do their fighting for them.’

‘Nor would I, my son,’ said Horus, placing his talon upon Abaddon’s shoulders. ‘We have been distracted by the schemes and petty vengeances of others, but that time is over.’

Horus turned and accepted a blood-red war-cloak from one of the Justaerin. He snapped it around his shoulders, fixing it in place with a pair of wolf-claw pins at each pauldron.

‘Aximand, are they here?’ asked Horus.

‘They are,’ said Aximand. ‘But you already know that.’

‘True,’ agreed Horus. ‘Even when we were without form, I always knew if they were close.’

Aximand saw a rogue glint in Horus’s eye, and decided he was joking. Rare were the moments when Horus spoke of his years with the Emperor. Rarer still were insights to the time before that.

‘In my more arrogant moments, I used to think that was why the Emperor came to me first,’ continued Horus, and Aximand saw he’d been mistaken. Horus was, most assuredly, not joking. ‘I thought He needed my help to find the rest of his lost sons. Then sometimes I think it was a cruel punishment, to feel so deep a connection to my gene-kin, only to be set apart from them.’

Horus fell silent and Aximand said, ‘They wait for you in the Dome of Revivification.’

‘Good, I am eager to join them.’

Abaddon’s fists clenched. ‘Then we are to rejoin the war?’

‘Ezekyle, my son, we never left it,’ said Horus.

The Dome of Revivification was a vast hemisphere of glass and transparisteel atop the largest of the Mausolytic’s stone structures. It was a place of reverence and solemn purpose, a place where the preserved memories of the dead could be returned to life.

Access was gained via a latticework elevator that rose into the centre of the dome. Horus and the Mournival stood at the centre of the platform as it made its stately ascent. Over Kibre’s protests, the Justaerin had been left below, leaving the five of them alone. Aximand looked up to the wide opening in the floor high above them. He saw the cracked structure of the crystalline dome beyond, sunset darkening to nightfall.

Slanted columns of moonlight slid over the elevator as it emerged into the dome. A rogue shell had damaged its hemispherical structure, and shards of hardened glass lay strewn across the polished metal floor like diamond-bladed knives. Spaced at equidistant intervals around the outer circumference of the elevator were berths for dozens of cryo-cylinders. None were currently occupied.

Aximand took a shocked breath of frosted air as he saw the demigods awaiting within. He had known, of course, who the Warmaster had summoned, but to see two such numinous beings before him was still a moment of revelation.

One was a being of immaterial flesh, the other stolidly physical.

Horus spread his arms in greeting.

‘My brothers,’ said Horus, his voice filling the dome. ‘Welcome to Dwell.’

Rumours had reached the Sons of Horus of the changes wrought in some of the Warmaster’s brothers, but nothing could have prepared Aximand for just how profound those changes were.

The last time he had seen the primarch of the Emperor’s Children, Fulgrim had been the perfect warrior, a snow-maned hero in purple and gold plate. Now the Phoenician was the physical embodiment of an ancient, many-armed destroyer god. Serpentine of body and clad in exquisite fragments of his once-magnificent armour, Fulgrim was a beautiful monster. A being to be mourned for the splendour he had lost, and admired for the power he had gained.

Mortarion of the Death Guard stood apart from Fulgrim’s sinuous form and, at first glance, appeared unchanged. A closer look into his sunken eyes revealed the pain of recent hurts worn like a ragged mourning shroud. Silence, the Death Lord’s towering battle-reaper was serrated with battle-notches, and a long looping chain affixed to its pommel was wrapped around his waist like a belt. Jangling censers hung from the chains, each one venting tiny puffs of hot vapour.

His baroquely-fashioned Barbaran plate bore numerous marks of the artificer, ceramite infill, fresh paint and lapping powder. From the amount of repair work, whatever battle he had recently fought must have been ferocious.

As Horus had dismissed the Justaerin, so too had his brother primarchs come unescorted; Fulgrim absent the Phoenix Guard, Mortarion without his Deathshroud, though Aximand didn’t doubt both were close. Being in the presence of the Warmaster was an honour, but to be present at a moment where three primarchs came together was intoxicating.

Fulgrim and Mortarion had travelled to Dwell to see Horus Lupercal, but the Warmaster had not come to be seen.

He had come to be heard.

Fulgrim’s body coiled beneath him with a hiss of rasping scales, raising him up higher than Mortarion and the Warmaster.

‘Horus,’ said Fulgrim, each syllable veiled with subtle meaning. ‘We live in the greatest tumult the galaxy has known and you haven’t changed at all. How disappointing.’

‘Whereas you have changed beyond all recognition,’ said Horus.

A pair of slick, draconic wings unfolded from Fulgrim’s back, and dark pigmentation rippled through his body.

‘More than you know,’ whispered Fulgrim.

‘Less than you think,’ answered Horus. ‘But tell me, does Perturabo yet live? I’m going to need his Legion when the walls of Terra are brought down.’

‘I left him alive,’ said Fulgrim. ‘Though what has become of him since my elevation is a mystery to me. The… what did he name it? Ah, yes, the Eye of Terror is no place for one so firmly rooted in material concerns.’

‘What did you do to the Lord of Iron?’ demanded Mortarion, his voice rasping from behind the bronze breather apparatus covering the lower half of his face.

‘I freed him from foolish notions of permanence,’ said Fulgrim. ‘I honoured him by allowing his strength to fuel my ascension to this higher state of being. But in the end he would not sacrifice all for his beloved brother.’

Fulgrim sniggered. ‘I think I broke him a little bit.’

‘You used him?’ said Mortarion. ‘To become… this?’

‘We are all using one another, didn’t you know that?’ laughed Fulgrim, sliding over the floor of the chamber and admiring himself in broken glass reflections. ‘To achieve greatness, we must accept the blessing of new things and new forms of power. I have taken that teaching to heart, and embrace such change willingly. You would do well to follow my example, Horus.’

‘The spear aimed at the Emperor’s heart must not be pliant, but unyielding iron,’ said Horus. ‘I am that unyielding iron.’

Horus turned to Mortarion, who didn’t even bother to hide his revulsion at what had become of the Phoenician.

‘As are you, my brother,’ said Horus, coming forward to grip the Death Lord’s wrist, warrior to warrior. ‘You are a wonder to me, my indomitable friend. If not even the Khan’s strength could lay you low, what hope have any others?’

‘His fleetness of war is a thing of wonder,’ admitted Mortarion. ‘But rob him of it and he is nothing. I will reap him yet.’

‘And I would see it so,’ promised Horus, releasing his grip. ‘On the soil of Terra we shall hobble the Khan and see how well he fights.’

‘I am your servant,’ said Mortarion.

Horus shook his head. ‘No, never that. Never a servant. We fight this war so we need be no man’s slave. I would not have you exchange one master for another. I need you at my side as an equal, not a vassal.’

Mortarion nodded, and Aximand saw the Death Guard primarch stand taller at Lupercal’s words.

‘And your sons?’ said Horus. ‘Does Typhon still bait the Lion’s hunters?’

‘Since Perditus he has been leading the monks of Caliban a merry dance through the stars, leaving death and misery in his wake,’ replied Mortarion with a grunt of amusement that puffed toxic emanations from his gorget. ‘By your leave I will soon join him and turn the hunters into the hunted.’

‘Soon enough, Mortarion, soon enough,’ said Horus. ‘With your Legion mustered for war, I almost feel sorry for the Lion.’

Fulgrim bristled that he had received no words of praise, but Horus wasn’t done.

‘Now more than ever I need you both at my side, not as allies and not as subordinates, but as equals. I hold to the name Warmaster, not because of what it represented when it was bestowed, but because of what it means now.’

‘And what it that?’ asked Fulgrim.

Horus looked into the Phoenician’s aquiline features, alabaster in their cold perfection. Aximand felt the power of connection that flowed between them, a struggle for dominance that could have only one victor.

Fulgrim looked away and Horus said, ‘It means that only I have the strength to do what must be done. Only I can bring my brothers together under one banner and remake the Imperium.’

‘You always were prideful,’ said Fulgrim, and Aximand felt the urge to grip Mourn-it-all’s hilt at the Phoenician’s tone, but the sword was no longer belted at his side, its blade badly notched and still in need of repair.

Horus ignored the barb and said, ‘If I am prideful, it is pride in my brothers. Pride in what you have accomplished since last we stood together. It is why I have summoned you and no others to my side now.’

Fulgrim grinned and said, ‘Then what would you have of me, Warmaster?’

‘The thing I spoke to in the wake of Isstvan, is it gone from you now? You are Fulgrim once again?’

‘I have scoured my flesh of the creature’s presence.’

‘Good,’ said Horus. ‘What I say here is Legion business, and does not concern the things that dwell beyond our world.’

‘I cast the warp-thing out, but I learned a great many things from it while our souls were entwined.’

‘What things?’ asked Mortarion.

‘We have bargained with their masters, made pacts,’ hissed Fulgrim, pointing a sickle blade talon at Horus. ‘You have made blood pacts with gods, and oaths to gods should not lightly be broken.’

‘It sickens me to my bones to hear you speak of keeping faith with oaths,’ said Mortarion.

The Warmaster raised a hand to ward off Fulgrim’s venomous response, and said, ‘You are both here because I have need of your unique talents. The wrath of the Sons of Horus is to be unleashed once more, and I would not see it so without my brothers at my side.’

Horus walked a slow circle, weaving his words around Mortarion and Fulgrim like a web.

‘Erebus raised his great Ruinstorm on Calth and split the galaxy asunder. Beyond its tempests, the Five Hundred Worlds burned in Lorgar and Angron’s “shadow crusade”, but their wanton slaughters are of no consequence for now. What happens here, with us, with you, is what will make the difference between victory or defeat.’

The Warmaster’s words were lure and balm all in one, obvious even to Aximand, but they were having the desired effect.

‘Are we to march on Terra at last?’ asked Mortarion.

Horus laughed. ‘Not yet, but soon. It is in preparation for that day that I have called you here.’

Horus stepped back and lifted his arms as ancient machinery rose from the floor like rapid outgrowths of coral, unfolding and expanding with mechanised precision. A hundred or more glass cylinders rose with them, each containing a body lying forever on the threshold of existence and oblivion.

From previously unseen entrances, a host of weeping tech-adepts and black-robed Mechanicum entered, taking up positions alongside the gently glowing cylinders.

‘By any mortal reckoning, our father is a god,’ said Horus. ‘And for all that He has allowed His dominion to fall to rebellion, He is still too powerful to face.’

‘Even for you?’ said Fulgrim with a grin.

‘Even for me,’ agreed Horus. ‘To slay a god, a warrior must first become a god himself.’

Horus paused. ‘At least, that’s what the dead tell me.’

TWO

Solid roots
Molech
Medusa’s fire

A kilometre-high dome enclosed the Hegemon, a feat of civic engineering that perfectly encapsulated the vision at the heart of the Palace’s construction. Situated within the Kath Mandau Precinct of Old Himalazia, the Hegemon was the seat of Imperial governance, a metropolis of activity that never stopped nor paused for breath in its unceasing labours.

Lord Dorn had, of course, wanted to fortify it, to layer its golden walls in adamantium and stone, but that order had been quietly rescinded at the highest level. If the Warmaster’s armies reached this far into the Palace then the war was already lost.

A million rooms and corridors veined its bones, from soulless scrivener cubicles of bare brick to soaring chambers of ouslite, marble and gold that were filled with the greatest artistic treasures of the ages. Tens of thousands of robed scribes and clerks hurried along raised concourses, escorted by document-laden servitors and trotting menials. Ambassadors and nobility from across the globe gathered to petition the lords of Terra while ministers guided the affairs of innumerable departments.

The Hegemon had long ceased to be a building as defined by the term. Rather, it had sprawled beyond the dome to become a vast city unto itself, a knotted mass of plunging archive-chasms, towers of office, petitioner’s domes, palaces of bureaucracy and stepped terraces of hanging gardens. Over the centuries it had become a barely-understood organ within the Imperial body that functioned despite – or perhaps because of – its very complexity. This was the slow beating heart of the Emperor’s domain, where decisions affecting billions were dispatched across the galaxy by functionaries who had never lived a day beyond the winding circuits of the Palace.

And the Kath Mandau Precinct was just one of many hundreds of such regions enclosed by the iron-cased walls of the mightiest fortress on Terra.

Beneath the cloud-hung apex of the Hegemon’s central dome was a secluded rift valley, where the last remaining examples of natural foliage on Terra could be found. So enormous was the dome that varying microclimates held sway at different elevations, creating miniature weather patterns that belied any notions of enclosure.

Glittering white cliffs were shawled with mountain evergreens and brocaded by cascading ice-waterfalls that fed a crystal lake of shimmerskin koi. Clinging to a spur of rock partway up the cliffs was the ruin of an ancient citadel. Its outer wall had long since toppled, and the remains of an inner keep were demarcated by a series of concentric rings of glassily volcanic stone.

The valley had existed prior to the construction of the Palace, and rumour told that it held special significance to the Master of Mankind himself.

One man knew the truth of this, but he would never tell.

Malcador the Sigillite sat at the rippling shore of the lake, deliberating whether to advance steadily on the right or throw caution to the wind in an all-out assault. He had the superior force, but his opponent was much larger than him, a towering giant encased in battleplate the colour of moonlit ice and draped in a furred cloak. Long braids of russet hair, woven with polished gems and yellowed fangs, were pulled back from his face, that of a noble savage rendered marble white in the dome’s artificial daylight.

‘Are you going to make a move?’ asked the Wolf King.

‘Patience, Leman,’ said Malcador. ‘The subtleties of hnefatafl are manifold, and each move requires careful thought. Especially when one is the attacker.’

‘I’m aware of the game’s subtleties,’ replied Leman Russ, his voice the throaty threat-rasp of a predator. ‘I invented this variant.’

‘Then you should know not to rush me.’

Mighty beyond all sense of the word, Leman Russ was a tsunami that begins life far out to sea and builds its power over thousands of kilometres as it draws near the shore. His physical form was the instant before impact, and all who looked upon him knew it. Even when apparently at peace, it felt as though Leman Russ was only holding back some explosive violence with great effort.

A bone-handled hunting blade was belted at his waist; a dagger to one of his post-human scale, a sword to everyone else.

Next to Leman Russ, Malcador was a frail, hunch-shouldered old man. Which was, as time went by, less a carefully cultivated image, more a true reflection of his soul-deep weariness. White hair spilled from his crown and lay across his shoulders like the snow on the towering flanks of Chomolungma.

He might bind his hair up when in the company of Sanguinius or Rogal Dorn, but with Russ the observation of physical niceties were secondary to the matters at hand.

Malcador studied the board, a hexagon divided into irregular segments with a raised octagon at its centre. Each segment was pierced with slots into which were placed the playing pieces carved from yellowed hrosshvalur teeth; a mix of warriors, kings, monsters and elemental forces. Portions of the board were movable, able to slide over one another and occlude or reveal fresh segments, and rods set in each side could be rotated to block or open slots. All of which enabled a canny player to radically alter the character of the game at a stroke.

One player had a king and a small band of retainers, the other an army, and as in most such games, the object was to kill the enemy king. Or keep him alive, depending on which colour you chose. Russ always chose to play the outnumbered king.

Malcador removed a hearth-jarl and pushed it towards the octagon where the Wolf King’s pieces had gathered, then twisted one of the side rods. Clicking mechanisms rotated within the board, though it was impossible to know for certain which slots had opened up and which had closed until a player had committed to a move.

‘Bold,’ noted Russ. ‘Nemo would say you hadn’t given that move enough thought.’

‘You were pressing me.’

‘And you let yourself be goaded?’ mused Russ. ‘I’m surprised.’

‘There is not the time for deep reflection now.’

‘You’ve made that point before.’

‘It’s an important point to make.’

‘Nor yet is it a time for recklessness,’ said Russ, moving his Warhawk and twisting a side rod. Malcador’s hearth-jarl fell onto its side as the slot it had occupied was sealed.

‘Foolish,’ said Malcador, foregoing the opportunity to alter the board to advance an extra piece. ‘You are exposed now.’

Russ shook his head and pressed the segment of board before him, rotating it by ninety degrees. As it clicked back into place, Malcador saw the king’s retainers were now poised to flank his army and execute its cardinal piece.

‘You say exposed,’ said Russ. ‘I say berkutra.’

‘The hunter’s cut,’ translated Malcador. ‘That’s Chogorian.’

‘The Khan taught me his name for it,’ said Russ, never one to take another’s virtue for his own. ‘We call it almáttigrbíta, but I like his word better.’

Malcador graciously tipped his cardinal piece onto its side, knowing there would be no escape from the Wolf King’s trap, only a slow attrition that would see his leaderless army scattered to the corners of the board.

‘Well played, Leman,’ said Malcador.

Russ nodded and bent to lift a wide-necked ewer of wine from beside the table. He held a pair of pewter goblets in his other hand and kept one for himself before handing the second to Malcador. The Sigillite took note of the wine’s provenance and raised a curious eyebrow.

Russ shrugged. ‘Not everything of the Sons was bitter with sorcery.’

The wine was poured, and Malcador was forced to agree.

‘How long until your fleet is battle ready?’ asked Malcador, though he had already digested the work schedules of the Fenrisian vessels from Fabricator Kane at the Novopangean orbital yards.

‘Alpharius’s whelps tried to tear the Hrafnkel’s heart out, but her bones are strong and she’ll sail again,’ said Russ with a phlegmatic grunt. ‘The shipwrights tell me it’ll be another three months at least before she’s void-worthy, and not even Bear’s threats are getting them to move faster.’

‘Bear?’

‘A misnomer that’s stuck,’ was all Russ would say.

‘And the rest of the fleet?’

‘Probably longer,’ said Russ. ‘The delay chafes, but if Caliban’s angels hadn’t arrived when they did, there wouldn’t be a fleet left to rebuild at all. We fill our time though. We train, we fight and prepare for what’s ahead.’

‘Have you given any thought to the alternative I broached?’

‘I have,’ said Russ.

‘And?’

‘My answer is no,’ answered Russ. ‘It stinks of revenge and last resort.’

‘It’s strategy,’ said Malcador. ‘Pre-emption, if you will.’

‘Semantics,’ said Russ, a warning burr in his voice. ‘Don’t think to weave linguistic knots around me, Sigillite. I know why you want that planet burned, but I’m a warrior, not a destroyer.’

‘A slender distinction, my friend, but if any world’s death would turn the Warmaster from his course it would be that one.’

‘Perhaps, but that is a murder for another day,’ said Russ. ‘My fleet’s guns will be better directed against Horus himself.’

‘So you are set on this course?’

‘As the cursed ice-rigger of bróðirgráta is doomed to follow the bad star.’

‘Dorn would have you stay,’ said Malcador, passing the red pieces to Russ. ‘You know Terra would be mightier with the Great Wolf lying in wait, fangs bared and claws sharp.’

‘If Rogal wants me so much, he should ask himself.’

‘He is in absentia just now.’

‘I know where he is,’ said Russ. ‘You think I fought my way back from Alaxxes and didn’t leave silent hunters in the shadows to see who follows my wake? I know of the intruder ship and I saw Rogal’s men take it.’

‘Rogal is proud,’ said Malcador. ‘But I am not. Stay, Leman. Range your wolves on Terra’s walls.’

The Wolf King shook his head. ‘I’m not built for waiting, Sigillite. I don’t fight well from behind stone, waiting for the enemy to try and dig me out. I’m the executioner, and the executioner lands the first blow, a killing strike that ends dispute before it begins.’

Malcador nodded. He’d suspected this would be Russ’s answer, but had to present an alternative nonetheless. He looked up at the highest reaches of the dome, where distant anabatic winds tugged at the clouds. A soothsayer or astromancer might read omens and signs of the future in their form, but Malcador just saw clouds.

‘Has the exiled cub been summoned?’ said Russ, sitting back and draining his wine as though it were water.

Malcador returned his gaze to Russ. ‘You should not call him that, my friend. He faced the Warmaster’s decision to betray the Emperor and refused to follow it. Do not underestimate the strength of character that took, strength a great many others singularly failed to show.’

Russ nodded, conceding the point, as Malcador continued. ‘The Somnus Citadel’s shuttle arrived at Yasu’s villa this morning. He approaches the Hegemon as we speak.’

‘And you still believe him to be the best?’

‘The best?’ said Malcador. ‘A hard thing to quantify. He is uniquely capable, no doubt, but is he the best? The best what? The best fighter, the best shot, the best heart? I don’t know if he is the best of them, but he won’t fail you.’

Russ let out a heavy, animal breath and said, ‘I’ve read the one-time slates you gave me, and they don’t make for comforting reading. When Nathaniel Garro found him he was a maddened killer, a slayer of innocents.’

‘That he survived the massacre at all was a miracle.’

‘Aye, maybe so,’ said Russ.

‘Trust me, Leman, this one stands with us, as straight up and down as any I have known.’

‘What if you’re wrong?’ asked Russ, leaning over the board and toppling his own king. ‘What if he goes back to the Warmaster? The things he’s seen and done. The things he knows. Even if he is as loyal as you believe, you can’t know what will happen when he enters the belly of the beast. You know how much rests upon this.’

‘Only too well, old friend,’ said Malcador. ‘Your life, the Emperor’s. Perhaps all of our lives. The Emperor wrought you for a terrible purpose, but a necessary one. If anyone can stop Horus before he gets to Terra, it is you.’

Russ’s head snapped up and his top lip curled back over his teeth, like an animal sensing danger. ‘He’s here.’

Malcador looked down the valley and saw a lone figure cresting the Sigillite’s bridge far below. At this distance, he was little more than a speck of steeldust grey against the white of the cliffs, but his poise was unmistakable.

Russ rose to his feet and watched the distant figure approach, regarding him as though he were a wounded hound that might turn on its master at any moment.

‘So that’s Garviel Loken,’ said Russ.

Shimmering fluorescent light filled the Dome of Revivification with the arrival of the cryo-cylinders, and Aximand felt the not unreasonable discomfort at seeing those who were alive and yet ought to be dead. The thought triggered a memory of a dream, a half-heard echo of something best forgotten.

‘Who are they?’ asked Mortarion, his deathly pallor made even more corpse-like by the glow of the life-sustaining mechanisms of the Mausolytic.

‘They are Dwell’s greatest resource,’ said Horus, as Fulgrim moved through the suspended cylinders with the leathery scrape of unnatural flesh over broken glass. ‘A thousand generations of its most brilliant minds, held forever at death’s threshold in the final instant of their life.’

Horus waved Aximand forward and he took his place at the Warmaster’s right hand. Horus placed the taloned gauntlet on his shoulder guard.

‘Aximand here led the assault to take the Mausolytic Precincts,’ said Horus with pride. ‘At no small personal cost.’

Fulgrim turned to him, and Aximand saw the change in the Phoenician went far deeper than his physical transformation. The narcissism Aximand always suspected lay at the heart of the Emperor’s Children’s obsessive drive for perfection was rampant in Fulgrim. Nothing he said could be taken at face value, and Aximand wondered if trusting Fulgrim had been Perturabo’s downfall. Surely Horus would not make the same mistake?

‘Your face,’ said the Phoenician. ‘What happened to it?’

‘I got careless in the vicinity of a Medusan blade.’

Fulgrim reached out with one of his upper arms and took hold of Aximand’s chin, turning his head to either side. The touch was repellent and exhilarating.

‘Your whole face removed in one cut,’ said Fulgrim with grudging admiration. ‘How did it feel?’

‘Painful.’

‘Lucius would approve,’ said Fulgrim. ‘But you shouldn’t have re-attached it. Imagine the bliss of that pain each time you were helmed. And one less of you looking like my brother is no bad thing.’

The Phoenician moved on and Aximand felt a curious mix of relief and regret that the primarch’s touch was no longer upon him.

‘So you can talk to them?’ asked Mortarion, examining the controls of a cryo-cylinder. The tech-adept next to him dropped to his knees, soiled and weeping in terror.

The Warmaster nodded. ‘Everything these people knew is preserved and blended with the hundreds of remembrancers and iterators who came to this world after Guilliman restored it to the Imperium.’

‘And what do they say?’

Horus made his way to a gently glowing cylinder in which lay the recumbent form of an elderly man. The Mournival followed him and Aximand saw the body within was draped in a red-gold aquila flag, the planes and contours of his features suggesting he was not a native Dweller.

‘They try to say nothing,’ grinned Horus. ‘How the galaxy has changed isn’t to their taste. They scream and rage, trying to keep me from hearing what I want, but they can’t scream all the time.’

Fulgrim coiled his serpentine lower body around the mechanisms of the cylinder, rearing up and peering through the frosted glass.

‘I know this man,’ he said, and Aximand saw that he also recognised him, picturing the preserved face as it had been nearly two centuries ago when its owner had boarded the Vengeful Spirit.

‘Arthis Varfell,’ said Horus. ‘His iterations during the latter days of Unity were instrumental in the pacification of the Sol system. And his monographs on the long-term benefits of pre-introducing advocatus agents into indigenous cultures prior to compliance overtures became required reading.’

‘What’s he doing here?’ asked Mortarion.

‘Varfell was part of the Thirteenth’s expeditionary forces when they reached this world,’ said Horus. ‘Roboute gave him much credit for making Dwell’s reintegration to the Imperium bloodless. But soon after compliance the old man’s heart finally started rejecting the juvenat treatments, and he chose to be implanted within the Mausolytic rather than continue onwards. He rather liked the idea of becoming part a whole world’s shared memory.’

‘He told you this?’

‘Eventually,’ said Horus. ‘The dead don’t easily give up their secrets, but I didn’t ask gently.’

‘What do the dead of this world know of gods and their doom?’ demanded Fulgrim.

‘More than you or I,’ said Horus.

‘What does that mean?’

Horus strolled through the rows of cryo-cylinders, touching some and pausing momentarily to peer at their glowing occupants. He spoke as he walked, as though recounting nothing of consequence, though Aximand saw the studied nonchalance veiled great import.

‘I came to Dwell because I recently become aware of several lacunae in my memories, voids where there ought to be perfect recall.’

‘What couldn’t you remember?’ said Fulgrim.

‘If that isn’t a stupid question, I don’t know what is,’ grunted Mortarion with a sound that might have been laughter.

Fulgrim hissed in anger, but the Death Lord took no notice.

‘I’d read the Great Crusade log concerning Dwell decades ago, of course,’ continued Horus, ‘though I’d put it from my mind since there hadn’t been any conflict. But when I sent the Seventeenth to Calth, Roboute spoke of the great library his highest epistolary had constructed. He said it was a treasure-house of knowledge to rival the Mausolytic of Dwell and its great repository of the dead.’

‘So you came to Dwell to see if you could fill the void in your memory?’ said Fulgrim.

‘After a fashion,’ agreed Horus, circling back to where he had begun his circuit of the cylinders. ‘Every man and woman interred here over the millennia has become part of a shared consciousness, a world memory containing everything each individual had learned, from the first great diaspora to the present day.’

‘Impressive,’ agreed Mortarion.

‘Hardly,’ said Fulgrim. ‘We all have eidetic memories. What is there here of value I do not already know?’

‘Do you remember all your battles, Fulgrim?’ asked Horus.

‘Of course. Every sword swing, every manoeuvre, every shot. Every kill.’

‘Squad names, warriors? Places, people?’

‘All of it,’ insisted Fulgrim.

‘Then tell me of Molech,’ said Horus. ‘Tell me what you remember of that compliance.’

Fulgrim opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. His expression was that of a blank-faced novitiate as he sought the answer to a drill sergeant’s rhetorical question.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Fulgrim. ‘I remember Molech, I do, its wilds and its high castles and its Knights, but…’

His words trailed off, putting Aximand in the mind of a warrior suffering severe head trauma. ‘We were both there, you and I, before the Third Legion had numbers to operate alone. And the Lion? Wait, was Jaghatai there too?’

Horus nodded. ‘So the logs say,’ he said. ‘We four and the Emperor travelled to Molech. It complied, of course. What planet would offer resistance to Legion forces led by the Emperor?’

‘An overwhelming force,’ said Mortarion. ‘Was heavy resistance expected?’

‘Far from it,’ said Horus. ‘Molech’s rulers were inveterate record keepers, and they remembered Terra. Its people had weathered Old Night, and when the Emperor descended to the surface it was inevitable they would accept compliance.’

‘We remained there for some months, did we not?’ asked Fulgrim.

Aximand glanced at Abaddon and saw the same look on the First Captain’s face he felt he wore. He too remembered Molech, but like the primarchs was having difficulty in recalling specific details. Aximand had almost certainly visited the planet’s surface, but found it hard to form a coherent picture of its environs.

‘According to the Vengeful Spirit’s horologs, we were there for a hundred and eleven standard Terran days, one hundred and nine local. After we left nearly a hundred regiments of Army, three Titanicus cohorts and garrison detachments from two Legions were left in place.’

‘For a planet that embraced compliance?’ said Mortarion. ‘A waste of resources if ever I heard it. What need did the Emperor have to fortify Molech with such strength?’

Horus snapped his fingers and said, ‘Exactly.’

‘I’m guessing you have an answer for that question,’ said Fulgrim. ‘Otherwise why summon us here?’

‘I have an answer of sorts,’ said Horus, tapping the cryo-cylinder containing Arthis Varfell. ‘A specialty of this particular iterator was the early history of the Emperor, the wars of Unity and the various myths and legends surrounding His assumption of Old Earth’s throne. The memories of Dwell are untainted, and many of its earliest settlers were driven here by the raging tides of Old Night. What they remember goes back a very long way, and Varfell assimilated it all.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Fulgrim.

‘I mean that some of the oldest Dwellers came from Molech, and they remember the Emperor’s first appearance on their world.’

‘First?’ said Fulgrim.

Mortarion gripped Silence tightly. ‘He had been there before? When?’

‘If I’m interpreting the dreams of the dead right, then our father first set foot on Molech many centuries, or even millennia before the wars of Unity. He came in a starship that never returned to Earth, a starship I believe now forms the heart of the Dawn Citadel.’

‘The Dawn Citadel… I remember that,’ said Fulgrim. ‘Yes, there was an ugly, cannibalised structure of ship parts at the end of a mountain valley! The Lion built one of his sombre castles around it did he not?’

‘He did indeed,’ said Horus. ‘The Emperor needed a starship to reach Molech, but didn’t need it to get back. Whatever He found there made Him into a god, or as near as makes no difference.’

‘And you think whatever that was is still there?’ said Fulgrim with heady anticipation. ‘Even after all this time?’

‘Why else leave the planet so heavily defended?’ said Mortarion. ‘It’s the only explanation.’

Horus nodded. ‘Through Arthis Varfell, I learned a great deal of Molech’s early years, together with what the four of us did there. Some of it I even remembered.’

‘The Emperor erased your memories of Molech?’ said Abaddon, forgetting himself for a moment.

‘Ezekyle!’ hissed Aximand.

Abaddon’s outrage eclipsed his decorum, his choler roused as he sought to vent his anger. Beyond him, the stars were out, casting a glittering light over Tyjun. Stablights from patrolling aircraft swept the city. Some close, some far away, but none came near the skeletal structure of the dome.

‘No, not erased,’ said Horus, overlooking his First Captain’s outburst. ‘Something so drastic would quickly result in a form of cognitive dissonance that would draw attention to its very existence. This was more a… manipulation, the lessening of some memories and the strengthening others to overshadow the gaps.’

‘But to alter the memories of three entire Legions,’ breathed Fulgrim. ‘The power that would require…’

‘So, it’s to Molech then?’ said Mortarion.

‘Yes, brothers,’ said Horus, spreading his arms. ‘We are to follow in the footsteps of a god and become gods ourselves.’

‘Our Legions stand ready,’ said Fulgrim, febrile anticipation making his body shimmer with corposant.

‘No, brother, I require only Mortarion’s Legion for this war-making,’ said Horus.

‘Then why summon me at all?’ snapped Fulgrim. ‘Why insult my warriors by excluding them from your designs?’

‘Because it’s not your Legion I need, it’s you,’ said Horus, spearing to the heart of Fulgrim’s vanity. ‘My Phoenician brother, I need you most of all.’

Aximand’s ocular filters dimmed as a stablight swept through the buckled struts of the dome. Stark shadows bowed and twisted.

Everyone looked up.

The dark outline of an aircraft rose up beyond the dome, its engines bellowing with downdraft. A blizzard of broken glass took to the air. Glittering reflections dazzled like snow.

‘Who the hell’s flying so close?’ said Abaddon, shielding his eyes from the blinding glare. More noise, fresh stablights from the other side of the dome.

Another two aircraft.

Fire Raptors. Horde killers that had made their name at Ullanor. Coated in non-reflective black. Hovering, circling the dome. Icons on their glacis shone proudly after months of being obscured.

Silver gauntlets on a black field.

‘It’s Meduson!’ shouted Aximand. ‘It’s Shadrak bloody Meduson!’

Three centreline Avenger cannons roared in unison. Braying quad guns on waist turrets followed an instant later.

And the Dome of Revivification vanished in a sheeting inferno of orange flame.

The game was called hnefatafl, and Loken found himself in the presence of a Titan he’d never expected to see again, much less be sat opposite. He’d met primarchs before, had even talked to some of them without making a fool of himself, but the Wolf King was another entity altogether. Primal force bound to immortal form, elemental fury woven around a frame of invincible meat and bone.

And yet, of all the post-human demigods he had met, Russ gave the impression of being the most human.

Until ten hours ago, Loken been ensconced within a lunar biodome on the edge of the Mare Tranquillitatis. Since returning from the mission to Caliban, he’d spent most of his time tending to the gardens within the dome, seeking a peace that remained forever out of reach.

Iacton Qruze had brought Malcador’s summons, together with his bare, steeldust grey armour, but his fellow Knight Errant had not joined him on the Stormbird to Terra, claiming he had heavy duty elsewhere. The Half-heard had changed markedly since their time together aboard the Vengeful Spirit, becoming a sadder, but wiser man. Loken was not sure if that was a good thing or not.

The Stormbird set down by a villa in the mountains beyond the palace, and a young girl with skin like burnished coal who had introduced herself as Ekata had offered him refreshments. He’d declined, finding her appearance unsettling, like a reminder of someone he’d once known. She led him to a black-armoured skimmer emblazoned with a serpentine dragon. It flew into the heart of the Palace Precincts, beneath the shadow of one of the great orbital plates moored to a mountainside, until coming to land within sight of the vast dome of the Hegemon. He’d climbed the valley alone, pausing only as he reached the Sigillite’s bridge as he saw the two figures at the side of the lake.

Malcador sat on a stool at the side of the board and Loken favoured him with a puzzled look.

‘You summoned me to Terra just to play a game?’

‘No,’ answered Russ, ‘but play it anyway.’

‘A good game is like a mirror that allows you to look into yourself,’ said Malcador. ‘And you can learn a lot about a man by watching how he plays a game.’

Loken looked down at the board, with its movable segments, rotating rods and one outnumbered force.

‘I don’t know how to play,’ he said.

‘It’s simple,’ said Russ, moving a piece forward and rotating a slot. ‘It’s like war. You learn the rules fast and then you have to play better than everyone else.’

Loken nodded and moved a piece forward in the centre. His was the larger army, but he had no doubt that would be of little advantage against the man he suspected had devised the game. He spent the opening moves in what he hoped was an all-out assault, provoking responses from the Wolf King, who didn’t even deign to look at the board or appear to give his strategy any consideration whatsoever.

Within six moves, it was clear that Loken had lost, but he had a better idea of how the game was played. In ten moves, his army had been split and its cardinal piece eliminated.

‘Again,’ said Russ, and Malcador reset the pieces.

They played another two games, with Loken defeated both times, but like any warrior of the Legiones Astartes, Loken was a quick study. With every move, his appreciation of the game was growing until, by the midpoint of the third game, he felt he had a good grasp of its rules and their applications.

This latest game ended as the three before it, with Loken’s army scattered and lost. He sat back and grinned.

‘Another game, my lord?’ he said. ‘I almost had you until you changed the board.’

‘It’s a favourite endgame of Leman’s to finish with a bold reshaping of the landscape,’ said Malcador. ‘But I think we’ve played enough, don’t you?’

Russ leaned over the board and said, ‘You don’t learn quick enough. He doesn’t learn quick enough.’

This last part was addressed to Malcador.

‘He already plays better than I,’ said the Sigillite.

‘Even the Balt play better than you,’ said Russ. ‘And they have minds like clubbed vatnkýr. He didn’t listen to what I told him, he didn’t learn the rules fast and didn’t play better than everyone else.’

‘Another game then,’ snapped Loken. ‘I’ll show you how quick I learn. Or are you afraid I’ll beat you at your own game?’

Russ stared at him from beneath hooded brows and Loken saw death in those eyes, the sure and certain knowledge of his own doom. He’d goaded a primarch of notorious unpredictability and saw his earlier impression of Russ being the most human of primarchs had been so very wide of the mark.

He was now about to pay for that mistake.

And he didn’t care.

Russ nodded and his killing mood lifted with a wide grin that exposed teeth that looked too large for his mouth to contain.

‘He’s a lousy player, but I like him,’ said the Wolf King. ‘Maybe you were right about him, Sigillite. There’s solid roots to him after all. He’ll do.’

Loken said nothing, wondering what manner of test he had just passed and what had been said of him before his arrival.

‘I’ll do for what?’ he asked.

‘You’ll do to find me a way to kill Horus,’ said the Wolf King.

Horus knew the capabilities of the Fire Raptor intimately. Its range, weapon mounts, rate of fire. Ullanor had shown just how savage a gunship it was. It had been integral to the victory.

I should be dead.

He breathed in sulphur-hot fumes. Fyceline, scorched metal, burning flesh. Horus rolled onto his side. Hearing damaged. A deadening numbness filled his head with dull echoes. The rasping of a saw. Thudding detonations.

He didn’t need his visor display to know how badly he’d been hurt. His armour was battered, but unbreached, though his skin was burned to the bone, his scalp scorched bare. Temperature warnings, oxygen deficiencies, organ damage. He shut them out with a thought.

Clarity. He needed clarity.

Shadrak Meduson!

Autonomic reactions took over. Time and motion became gel-like as Horus pushed himself to his feet. He swayed, concussive shock waves making him dizzy. How bad did it have to get for a primarch to feel dizzy?

Flames surrounded him. The Dome of Revivification was gone, its structure torn away in scything arcs of explosive mass-reactive bolts. Cryo-cylinders lay in shattered ruin. Wet-leather bodies smoked like trail rations.

Horus saw Noctua and Aximand pinned beneath a fallen structural member. The plates of their armour were buckled and split, their helms splintered into pieces. No sign of the Widowmaker or Ezekyle.

‘Mortarion!’ he shouted ‘Fulgrim!’

His brothers? Where were his brothers?

A figure rose from the centre of the dome, painfully bright. Too bright, giving off a radiance that sent a twist of nausea through his gut. Sinuous, winged, many armed.

Beautiful, so very beautiful. Even bleeding sick light from fractures in his essence. He rose like a snow-maned phoenix, rising from the ashes of its immortal rebirth. Horus saw sinews like hawsers in Fulgrim’s neck, his black, murderer’s eyes now filled with light that was not light.

A howling Fire Raptor swung around, the gimbals of its waist cannons swivelling to track the Phoenician.

Before it could fire, the rear wings peeled back from its body, like the wings of a dragonfly plucked by a spiteful child. Its tail section crumpled, buckling inwards under invisible force.

Fulgrim roared and brought his hands together.

The gunship imploded, crushed to a mangled ball of twisted flesh and metal. Compressed ammunition detonated and the flaming wreckage dropped like a stone.

Despite the flames, Horus felt the icy wind of warp-craft fill the dome. He’d known his brother’s transformation had empowered him enormously, but this was staggering. He saw movement in the wreckage beneath the Phoenician.

Mortarion’s Barbaran plate was black as char, his pallid face seared the same colour. He leaked blood like a pierced bladder.

Ezekyle and Aximand appeared at their primarch’s side. The First Captain’s face was a mask of crimson, his topknot burned down to the skull. Strands of it hung over his face, making him look like the victim of a wasting disease. Aximand was shouting, dragging him, but all Horus heard were explosions.

The cloying torpor of near death fell from him.

Noise and fury returned as his senses caught up with the world. The two remaining Fire Raptors were circling, methodically and systematically destroying the dome. Horus saw interlocking trails of high-calibre shells streaking from the prows of the Legion’s Fire Raptors. Streams of fire raced downward as the gunships strafed in concert around the dome’s circumference.

Nothing could live through so thorough and savage an attack.

I should be dead.

He shook off Aximand’s grip and barged through the blazing wreckage of the dome towards Mortarion, immense in his custom Martian plate. Bodies of Dwell’s greatest minds snapped beneath his weight.

The Iron Tenth’s gunships filled the air with shells again.

He tried to shout, but his throat was a scorched ruin of smoke-damaged tissue. He coughed up ash and seared lung matter.

Explosions detonated prematurely, orange flame and black smoke. Shrapnel and casings fell like hot nails.

I should be dead.

And but for the craft of Malevolus and the Phoenician’s power, he would be.

Fulgrim’s arms were outstretched, and Horus guessed he had summoned a force barrier or kine-shield. Beads of phosphor-bright ichor ran like sweat down his body. Writhing smoke coated his serpent form as dark radiance spilled from his eyes and mouth.

Whatever he was doing, it was robbing the solid rounds of their potency. Not all of it, but most of it.

Six shells tore into Fulgrim’s body, exploding from his spine.

Horus cried aloud as if he had been struck himself. Blood like bright milk spattered Mortarion’s armour. It smoked like an acid burn. Fulgrim screamed and the roar of gunfire and explosions swelled in power. The platform of the dome sagged, solid metal warping in the heat of the fire.

‘Horus! Bring them down!’ gasped Fulgrim. ‘Quickly!’

Aximand and Abaddon fired their bolters at the gunships, hoping for a lucky hit. A cracked canopy, a buckled engine louvre. Impacts pummelled the gunships’ flanks, but Fire Raptors were built to withstand deadlier weapons than theirs.

Mortarion waded through the wreckage, as unbroken as ever, the black blade of Silence unlimbered and trailing a burning length of chain. He roared something in the heathen tongue of his home world as he ran towards the edge of the dome.

The Death Lord hurled Silence like an axeman.

The great reaper blade spun and hammered into the heraldic fist upon the nearest Fire Raptor’s glacis. Heels braced in the shattered dome, Mortarion hauled on the chain attached to Silence’s heel.

The gunship lurched in the air, but the Death Lord wasn’t done with it. Its Avenger cannon flensed Mortarion, driving him back. Plates sheared from him, blood arced in pressurised sprays. Flesh melted in the fury of high power mass-reactives.

And still Mortarion pulled on the chain, pulling the screaming gunship closer.

‘I’ve hooked him!’ yelled Mortarion. ‘Now finish it!’

The pilots fought to escape his grip. The Fire Raptor’s engines shrieked in power, but hand over hand, the downed primarch reeled the gunship in like a belligerent angler.

Horus appeared at Mortarion’s side, running.

Even in his towering armour he was running. Jumping.

He vaulted onto the shattered remains of a cryo-capsule and launched himself through the air. Hooked by the Death Lord, the gunship was powerless to evade. Horus landed on its prow and knelt to grip the haft of Silence as the gunship lurched with the impact of his landing.

He saw the pilots’ faces and drank in their terror. Horus never normally gave any thought to the men he killed. They were soldiers doing a job. Misguided and fighting for a lie, but simply soldiers doing what they were ordered to do.

But these men had hurt him. They’d tried to murder him and his brothers. They’d lain in wait for an opportunity to behead their enemy. That he’d been foolish enough to believe Shadrak Meduson would only have one plan in place inflamed Horus’s humours as much as the attempt itself.

He lifted his right arm, and Worldbreaker’s killing head caught the firelight.

The mace swung and demolished the pilot’s compartment.

The last Fire Raptor swung around the dome. Seeing him atop the second gunship and knowing it was doomed, the Fire Raptor’s cannons roared.

High explosive, armour penetrating shells ripped along the fuselage of the wallowing gunship, shearing it in two. It exploded in a geysering plume of fire, but Horus was already in the air.

Silence in one hand, Worldbreaker in the other, he landed on the back of the last gunship, slewing it around. The Fire Raptor gunned its engines as it tried to shake him from its back. Horus swung Silence in a wide arc and split the Fire Raptor’s spine.

Still roaring, the gunship’s engines wrenched free with a screech of tortured metal. Horus swept Worldbreaker around like a woodsman’s axe and its flanged head ploughed through the gunship’s fuselage, obliterating the pilots and turning the prow to scrap.

The shattered remains fell away as Horus dropped into the dome with both Silence and Worldbreaker held out at his sides.

An explosion mushroomed behind him.

Horus dropped both weapons and ran to Mortarion. He knelt and reached out to clasp his blood-soaked brother to his burned breast. Mortarion’s arms hung limp, tendons ripped from bones and muscles acid-burned raw.

Neither moved, a living tableau of the ashen sculptures of the dead left in an atomic detonation’s wake.

One touch and they would crumble to cinders.

‘My brother,’ wept Horus. ‘What have they done to you?’

THREE

The Bringer of Rain
House Devine
First kill

At first, Loken thought he’d misheard. Surely Russ hadn’t said what he thought he’d just said. He searched the Wolf King’s eyes for any sign that this was another test, but saw nothing to convince him that Russ hadn’t just revealed his purpose.

‘Kill Horus?’ he said.

Russ nodded and began packing up the hnefatafl board, as though the matter were already concluded. Loken felt as though he had somehow missed the substance of a vital discussion.

‘You’re going to kill Horus?’

‘I am, but I need your help to do it.’

Loken laughed, now certain this was a joke.

‘You’re going to kill Horus?’ he repeated, carefully enunciating every word to avoid misunderstanding. ‘And you need my help?’

Russ looked over at Malcador with a frown. ‘Why does he keep asking me the same question? I know he’s not simple, so why is he being so dense?’

‘I think your directness after so oblique an approach has him confused.’

‘I was perfectly clear, but I will lay it out one last time.’

Loken forced himself to listen intently to the Wolf King’s every word, knowing there would be no hidden meanings, no subtext and no ulterior motives. What Russ required of him would be exactly as it was spoken.

‘I am going to lead the Rout in battle against Horus, and I am going to kill him.’

Loken sat back on the rock, still trying to process the idea of a combat between Leman Russ and Horus. Loken had seen both primarchs make war over the last century, but when it came down to blood and death he saw only one outcome.

‘Horus Lupercal will kill you,’ said Loken.

Had he named any other individual, Loken had no doubt the Wolf King would have torn his throat out before he’d even known what was happening. Instead, Russ nodded.

‘You’re right,’ he said, his eyes taking on a distant look as he relived old battles. ‘I’ve fought every one of my brothers over the centuries, either in training or with blooded blade. I know for a fact I can kill any one of them if had to… but Horus.’

Russ shook his head and his next words were spoken like a shameful confession, each one a bitter curse.

‘He’s the only one I don’t know if I can beat.’

Loken never thought to hear such a bald admission from any primarch, let alone the Wolf King. Its frank honesty lodged in his heart, and he would take Leman Russ’s words to the grave.

‘Then what can I do?’ he said. ‘Horus must be stopped, and if you’re going to be the one doing it, then I want to help.’

Russ nodded and said, ‘You were part of my brother’s inner council, his… what did you call it? The Mournival. You were there the day he turned traitor, and you know the Sons of Horus in a way I cannot.’

Loken felt the import of the primarch’s next words before he said them, like the tension in the air before a storm.

‘You will go back to your Legion like the aptrgangr that walks unseen in the wilds of Fenris,’ said Russ. ‘Lay a hunter’s trail within the rogue wolf’s lair. Reveal the flaw to which he is blind, and I can slay him.’

‘Go back to the Sons of Horus?’ said Loken.

‘Aye,’ said Russ. ‘My brothers all have a weakness, but I believe that only one of his own can see that of Horus. I know Horus as a brother, you know him as a father, and there are none who can bring down fathers like their sons.’

‘You’re wrong,’ said Loken, shaking his head. ‘I barely knew him at all. I thought I did, but everything he told me was a lie.’

‘Not everything,’ said Russ. ‘Before this madness, Horus was the best of us, but even the best are not perfect.’

‘Horus can be beaten,’ added Malcador. ‘He is a fanatic, and that’s how I know he can be beaten. Because beneath whatever horrors drive them, fanatics always hide a secret doubt.’

‘And you think I know what that is?’

‘Not yet,’ said Russ. ‘But I’m confident you will.’

Loken stood as the Wolf King’s certainty filled him. He sensed the breath of someone standing near him, the nearness of the ghost that finally convinced him to accept Malcador’s summons to Terra.

‘Very well, Lord Russ, I will be your pathfinder,’ said Loken, extending his hand. ‘You may have your sights set on the Warmaster, but there are those within the ranks of the Sons of Horus to whom I owe death.’

Russ shook his hand and said, ‘Have a care, Garviel Loken. This isn’t a path of vengeance I’m setting you on, nor is it one of execution. Leave such things to the Rout. It’s what we do best.’

‘I can’t do this alone,’ said Loken, turning to Malcador.

‘No, you cannot,’ agreed Malcador, reaching to take Loken’s hand. ‘The Knights Errant are yours to command in this. Choose who you will, with my blessing.’

The Sigillite glanced down at Loken’s palm, seeing the fading echo of a bruise in the shape of a gibbous moon.

‘A wound?’ asked Malcador.

‘A reminder.’

‘A reminder of what?’

‘Something I still have to do,’ said Loken, looking up to the ruined citadel high on the cliff side as the hooded figure of a man he knew to be dead withdrew into its shadow.

Loken turned from Russ and Malcador, following the snaking path that led back down the valley. As he left, the clouds gathered beneath the dome split apart.

And a warm rain began to fall in the Hegemon.

The blood-red Knight climbed through the rocky canyons and evergreen highlands of the Untar Mesas with long, loping strides. At nearly nine metres tall, its mechanised bulk simply splintered the lower branches of the towering bitterleaf trees it didn’t bother to avoid. Some broke apart on impact, some were sheared cleanly by the hard edges of the Knight’s ion shield. A wonder of ancient technology, the Knight was lighter kin to the Titan Legions, a lithe predator to their lumbering war engines.

Its name was Banelash, and a crackling whip writhed at one shoulder mount. Upon the other, banked racks of heavy stubber barrels whined with the energy stored in their propellant stacks.

The Knight’s hull plates were vermillion and ebony, segmented and overlapping like burnished naga scales. It had reaved the borders between warring states of Molech a thousand years before the coming of the Imperium. The Knight was a predator stalking the mountain forests, seeking dangerous quarry to bring down.

Encased within the pilot’s compartment, Raeven Devine, second-born son of Molech’s Imperial commander, let the sensorium surround him with graded representations of the landscape. Plugged into Banelash via the invasive technology of the Throne Mechanicum, its every motion and stride was his to command.

His limbs were its limbs; what it felt, he felt.

Sometimes, when he rode into the secret canyons to join Lyx and her intoxicated followers, the Knight’s heart would surge with memories of its previous pilots; a ghostly parade of wars he’d never fought, foes he hadn’t killed and blood he’d never shed.

Its powered whip had belonged to Raeven’s great-great-grandfather, who was said to have slain the last of the great nagahydra of distant Ophir.

A golden eagle icon within the sensorium depicted his father’s Knight a thousand metres below him. Cyprian Devine, Lord Commander Imperial of Molech, was rapidly approaching his hundred and twenty-fifth year, but still piloted Hellblade like he thought he was the equal of Raeven’s juvenated sixty-four.

Hellblade was old, far older than Banelash, and was said to be one of the original vajras that rode the Fulgurine Path with the Stormlord, thousands of years ago. Raeven thought that unlikely. The Sacristans could barely maintain the war machines of Molech’s noble Houses without their dour Mechanicum overseers to hand.

What hope would they have had before then?

Darting icons representing House Devine’s retainers, beaters and huscarls on skimmer-bikes ranged around his father’s Knight, but Raeven had long since outrun them into the mountains’ misty peaks.

If anyone was going to slay the beasts, it would be him.

The tracks of the rogue mallahgra pair led into the highest regions of the Untar Mesas, a knifeback range of mountains that effectively divided the world in two. It was rare for the great beasts – once so plentiful on Molech, now hunted almost to extinction – to come within sight of human beings, but as their numbers dwindled, so too did the extent of their hunting grounds.

The last three winters had been harsh, and the springs scarcely less so, with snow blocking the paths through the mountains. Prey animals had been driven down to the warmer lowlands, so it was little wonder the mallahgra were forced to descend from their fissure-lairs upon waking from hibernation.

The settlements crouched in the foothills of the Untar Mesas, scattered strip-mining hives and refining conurbation-stacks mainly, were now within the hunting grounds of a ravenous mallahgra and its mate. Three hundred people were already dead, with perhaps another thirty missing.

Raeven doubted any of those taken were alive, and if they were they’d soon wish they’d died in the first attack. Raeven had heard stories of mallahgra that had devoured their victims over days, a limb at a time.

Bleating petitions sent to the city of Lupercalia – a name of exquisite poor taste in these days of rebellion – begged the Knight Seneschal to sally forth and slay the beasts. Despite the high level of alert imposed on Molech with the Warmaster’s treachery, Raeven’s father had chosen to lead a hunting party into the Untar Mesas. As much as he despised his father, Raeven couldn’t deny that the old man knew the value of his word.

Despite Lyx offering innumerable pledges to the Serpent Gods to end Cyprian’s life, they had so far not obliged. Raeven had never really shared his sister-wife’s faith in the old religion, only indulging her beliefs for the carnal and intoxicating diversions they provided from the daily tedium of existence.

The path he was following traced the edge of a plunging cliff. Through breaks in the fog and cloud, Raeven could see the plains thousands of metres below. The trees reached almost to the sheer drop, snapped off where the brutish mallahgra had passed.

Their trail was easy enough to follow. Blood stained the ground in slashing arcs and every now and then he saw splintered nubs of discarded bone jutting from the snow. He’d inloaded the bio-sign taken from the latest attack to Banelash’s auspex, and it was only a matter of time until he came upon the beasts.

‘Sooner than I thought,’ he said, emerging onto a widened area of clear ground, and halting his Knight’s advance as he saw a huge body lying butchered on the snow before him.

At full height, a mallahgra stood nearly seven metres tall, with bulky simian shoulders and long, muscular arms that could tear an unskilled Knight apart. Their heads were blunt, conical horrors of mandibles, tentacles and row upon row of serrated triangular teeth.

They had six eyes, two forward looking in the manner of predators, two sited for peripheral vision and two embedded in a ridged fold of flesh at the back of its neck. Evolutionary adaptations that made them devils to hunt, but Raeven had always enjoyed a challenge.

Not that this beast offered much in the way of threat.

An ivory-furred adolescent male around five metres tall, it lay on its side with its belly carved open. Thick red blood steamed in the cold, and glistening ropes of pinkish blue intestines pooled around its stomach like butcher’s offal. The corpses of a dozen miners lay scattered around the creature’s body.

Raeven walked his Knight around the dead beast, keeping one eye on the sensorium for any sign of the female. Bloodied tracks led into the forest farther back from the edge of the cliff.

Before he could resume the hunt, the ground shook as Hellblade finally caught up to him. A number of skimmer-bikes followed, as Banelash’s sensorium fizzed with static and Cyprian Devine’s lined, patrician face appeared on the pict-manifold.

Wanting to get the first word in, Raeven said, ‘Glad you could join me.’

‘Damn you, boy, I told you to wait for me!’ snapped his father. ‘You aren’t Knight Seneschal yet! First kill isn’t yours to make.’

The skimmer-bikes circled the two Knights, several retainers dismounting to check the miners for signs of life.

‘As always, your snap judgement of my actions is entirely misplaced,’ said Raeven, lowering his pilot’s canopy to the mallahgra’s body and studying the shredded mass of its flanks and chest. By themselves, none of these injuries were mortal, but each would have been excruciatingly painful. The wound in its belly had killed the beast, a disembowelling cut made by something viciously sharp and with the power to rip through tough hide to the organs beneath.

Raeven pulled the canopy back to its full height and said, ‘I didn’t kill it.’

‘Don’t lie to me, boy.’

‘You know me, father, I’m not shy of taking credit for things others have done, but this beast didn’t fall to me. Look at these wounds.’

Hellblade leaned over the corpse, and Raeven took a moment to study his father’s ravaged features in the manifold. Cyprian Devine had eschewed juvenat treatments that were purely cosmetic, only allowing those that actively prolonged his life. In Cyprian’s world, all else was vanity, a character flaw he saw most evidently in his second son.

Raeven’s older half-brother, Albard, had always been Cyprian’s favoured son, but a failed attempt to bond with his Knight forty-three years ago had broken his mind and left him a virtual catatonic. Kept locked away in one of the Devine Towers, his continued existence was a stain on the ancient name of the House.

‘These tears in the beast’s flesh are messy, like something your chain-sabre would do,’ said Raeven as the Devine retainers carried the bodies of the miners to the skimmer-bikes. From the attention one man was getting from a medicae, it appeared there was actually a survivor.

‘The female must have done this,’ declared his father. ‘They must have fought over the spoils and she gutted him.’

‘An unlikely explanation,’ said Raeven, circling the corpse.

‘You have a better one?’

‘If the female killed her mate, then why did she leave the bodies?’ said Raeven. ‘No, something drove her from here.’

‘What could possibly drive a female mallahgra from her mate?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Raeven, lifting one of his Knight’s clawed feet and tipping the hulking mallahgra onto its front. ‘Something that can do this.’

Bloodied craters punctured the creature’s back, each one unmistakably an exit wound of explosive ammunition.

‘It’s been shot?’ hissed Cyprian. ‘Damn it all. House Kaushik, it’s got to be. Those faithless scavengers must have picked up the distress petition and sent their own Knights into the mountains, hoping to steal glory from my table!’

‘Look at these wounds,’ pointed out Raeven. ‘House Kaushik are little better than Tazkhar savages. Their Sacristans can barely maintain the fusion-powered crankers they favour, let alone anything this powerful.’

His father ignored him and strode towards the tree line where the blood-smeared tracks of the second mallahgra disappeared.

‘Sort out the retainers then follow me,’ ordered Cyprian. ‘The female’s injured, so she can’t have gone far. I’ll have her bloody head above the Argent Gate before morning, boy. And if anyone gets in my way, mark my words, I’ll have their heads up beside it.’

Cyprian walked Hellblade into the darkness beneath the bitterleaf canopy, leaving Raeven to deal with mundane business beneath his notice. Raeven turned Banelash and declined the canopy towards the circle of skimmer-bikes where the dead miners were being strapped down.

He linked with the vox-servile and said, ‘Take the bodies back to whichever hell-hole they were abducted from. Issue standard renumeration for death in service to any dependants and send death notices to the aexactor adepts.’

‘My lord,’ said the senior retainer.

‘Out of curiosity, is the survivor saying anything interesting?’

‘Nothing we can understand, my lord,’ said the medicae, one hand pressed to the side of his helm. ‘It’s doubtful he’ll live much longer.’

‘So he’s saying something?’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘Don’t be an idiot all your life, man,’ snapped Raeven. ‘Tell me what he’s saying.’

‘He’s saying “lingchi”, my lord,’ said the medicae. ‘Keeps repeating it over and over.’

Raeven didn’t know the word. Its sound was familiar, like it belonged to a language he couldn’t speak, but was vaguely aware existed. He put it from his mind and turned Banelash, knowing his father wouldn’t approve of his dawdling with the lower orders.

He walked his Knight into the shadow of the towering bitterleaf tree line. His mood was sour as he followed Hellblade’s tracks and the bio-sign of the wounded mallahgra.

One dead beast and another his father was sure to claim.

What a colossal waste of time this hunt had proven to be.

Hellblade was a bullish machine, without the agility of Raeven’s mount, and the trail of broken branches was easy to follow. In many ways, it was the perfect match for Cyprian Devine, a man who lived as though in the midst of a charge.

Cold beams of light shafted through the forest canopy, ivory columns glittering with motes of powdered snow. Raeven followed Hellblade’s tracks through the narrow canyons of the forest, emerging onto a windswept plateau. Patches of crushed rock and smeared blood led into a bone-strewn fissure in a cliff ahead.

‘Gone back to your lair,’ said Raeven. ‘That was stupid.’

His father’s eagle icon in the sensorium was just ahead, two hundred metres into the fissure, and Raeven remembered the last time Hellblade had fought a mallahgra.

It had been on the eve of Raeven’s Becoming, a day some forty-odd years ago, but forever etched in his mind. A rogue Sacristan had tried to kill his father by blowing out the cranial inhibitors of a docile mallahgra with an electromagnetic bomb. The pain-maddened beast almost killed Raeven and Albard, but their father had split it in two with a single strike of his Knight’s chainsabre, despite taking spars of iron through his chest and stomach in the battle.

But that wasn’t the story that caught the people’s imagination.

Raeven had stood before the rampaging monster with only his brother’s powerless energy sabre held before him, a tiny figure who faced down the beast with no hope of victory. Lyx’s carefully placed whispers lauded Raeven’s courage and diminished Cyprian’s.

Years passed, and Raeven expected to take up his hereditary position, but the old bastard just wouldn’t die. Even when Raeven fathered three boys to continue the House name, Cyprian showed no sign of letting the reins of power slip from his grasp.

Denied any power of real worth, Raeven spent the years indulging Lyx in her beliefs, even taking part in some of her cult’s rituals when the inevitable boredom took hold. Lyx was an epicurean of the sensual arts, and the nights they spent beneath the moons, naked and delirious from envenomed Caeban wine were certainly memorable, but ultimately hollow compared to ruling an entire world.

A wash of red light through the sensorium snapped him from his bitter reverie, and he immediately brought Banelash up to full stride. Threat filters filled the auspex, and Raeven heard the familiar snaps of massed stubber fire.

‘Father?’ he said into the vox.

‘The beast!’ returned a voice thick with strain. ‘It wasn’t the other’s mate!’

Raeven pushed Banelash deeper into the darkness. Dazzling arc lights unfolded from the upper surfaces of the Knight’s carapace, flooding the fissure with light. The sensorium could guide him, but Raeven preferred to trust his own eyes when death lay in wait.

Banelash strained at the edge of his control, a wild colt even after all this time. Raeven was tempted to let it take the lead, but kept his grip firm. The older pilots were replete with tales of men whose minds had been lost when they allowed a mount’s spirit to overwhelm them.

Raeven powered the whip and fed shells into the stubber cannon. He felt the heat of their readiness envelop his hands, letting the trip hammer of his heart mirror the thunder of Banelash’s reactor.

The fissure was a winding split in the mountains. Its course was thick with debris, rotted vegetation, frozen mounds of excrement and the half-digested remains of dismembered carcasses. Raeven crushed it all flat as he followed the sounds of las-fire and the shrieking roar of a heavy-gauge chainsabre.

He pulled Banelash into a widened portion of the fissure, a cavern where the walls almost met high above and all but obscured the sunlight.

The spotlight beams lit a nightmarish sight of the largest mallahgra he had ever seen; fully ten metres tall and broader than any of the largest Knights. Its fur was a piebald mixture of white and russet, and its long arms were absurd with musculature. Blood poured from a wound torn in its side, but this beast cared nothing for such hurts.

Hellblade was down on one knee at the edge of a sulphurous chasm that belched noxious yellow fog. Its right leg was buckled and his father was desperately fending off thunderous blows from the monster’s simian arms with the revving edge of his blade. Blood sprayed, but the mallahgra was too enraged to notice.

Raeven lowered his mount’s head and charged, uncoiling the whip and letting fly with a burst of stubber fire. High-calibre bolts burned a path across the mallahgra’s back and it reared at the suddenness of his attack.

Raeven blanched at the monster’s size and the grizzled, ancient texture of its hide. Now he understood his father’s last words.

This wasn’t the dead adolescent’s mate.

It was its mother.

The mallahgra leapt at him, bellowing in outrage. A clubbing arm smashed into Banelash’s canopy. Glass shattered and Raeven sucked in a breath of savage cold. The impact was monstrous, and the beast swung at him again. Raeven swayed aside, pulling the ion shield over his exposed canopy to deflect the blow. The mallahgra’s blackened claws swept past him, barely a handspan from tearing his face away.

Raeven shucked his gun arm forward and a hurricane of stubber fire strobed the canyon with muzzle flare. Tracer rounds stabbed into the mallaghra’s shoulder, setting light to its fur and driving it back. He followed up with a crack from the energy lash that ploughed a bloody trough in its chest.

The mallahgra roared in pain, and Raeven didn’t give it a chance to recover. He stepped in close and slammed the hard edge of his ion shield into its face. Fangs snapped and oily blood poured from its ruined maw. The lash cracked again and peeled the muscle from the monster’s thigh.

A clawed hand tore at his chest armour, but Raeven batted it away with the barrels of his stubber cannon. He brought the arm back and pumped half a dozen shots into its face, shattering the bone and exploding the eye sited in the side of its skull.

The mallahgra surged towards him, and not even Raeven’s genhanced reflexes could match its speed. Its corded arms encircled Banelash, and began crushing the life out of him.

Hot animal breath doused him in rank saliva and the reek of rotten meat. Raeven gagged at the stench and fought to escape the monster’s grip. They stamped back and forth through the cavern like drunken dancers at a Serpent Revel, slamming into walls and dislodging debris from high above. A chunk of rock smashed onto Raeven’s shoulder, buckling his pauldrons and shattering his carapace lights. Broken glass rained into the shattered canopy and Raeven flinched as razored fragments sliced his cheeks.

Warning lights flashed on the damaged sensorium. Armour squealed as it reached its maximum-rated tolerances. Raeven brought his knee up into the mallahgra’s side, where his whip had previously wounded it. The beast roared, almost deafening Raeven, and its pain gave him the opening he needed.

He slammed his ion shield against the bloodied, heat-fused side of the mallahgra’s skull. The monster’s grip loosened and Raeven pulled free of its crushing embrace, unleashing a blitzing stream of fire into its chest and head.

Repeated lashes from his energy whip followed each salvo and the mewling beast stumbled away, its lifeblood flashing to red mist in the cauterising heat of gunfire.

Raeven laughed as he drove it back.

He didn’t see Hellblade surge up on its one good leg behind the mallahgra. All he saw was the fountain of viscous blood as the revving blade of his father’s chainsabre exploded from the mallahgra’s ribcage.

The life fled from its eyes and Raeven felt something caged within his chest for four decades stir at the monster’s death, something barbed and hateful and full of spite. The juddering chainsabre caught on the mallahgra’s ribs. It spasmed with false life before Cyprian wrenched the blade out through its side in a flood of reeking viscera. The gutted beast toppled into the chasm, and anger filled Raeven as it fell.

He turned Banelash to face his father’s wounded Knight.

Hellblade crouched at the edge of the chasm, one leg buckled beyond its ability to bear any weight. The Knight had suffered a grievous hurt, but with the ministrations of the Mechanicum and the Sacristans, it would walk again.

‘It died a good death,’ said Cyprian, between heaving breaths and using the end of his stilled blade to remain upright. ‘Damn shame the head is gone though. No one’s going to believe the size of that thing.’

‘The kill was mine,’ said Raeven with cold fury.

‘Now you’re being ridiculous,’ returned Cyprian. ‘I’m the Knight Seneschal, the right of First Kill was always mine. Don’t piss your britches, boy, I’ll credit you with aiding me. You’ll win a share of the glory.’

‘Aiding? You’d be dead if it wasn’t for me.’

‘But who ended its life? Me or you?’

The cage in Raeven’s chest unlocked and the barbed thing of hate and ambition that imprinting with the Throne Mechanicum had sought to imprison was freed to stab his soul once more.

‘And who will they say ended yours?’ hissed Raeven. ‘Me or the mallahgra?’

Too late, Cyprian Devine saw the depthless well of venom in his son’s heart, but there was nothing he could do to stop what happened next.

Stepping back to plant Banelash’s clawed foot in the centre of Hellblade’s chest, Raeven kicked the Knight into the chasm. His father yelled in outrage, and Raeven watched the ancient machine fall end over end. It slammed into a sharp outcropping of rock and broke apart like a confiscated automaton from the Clockwork City beneath a Sacristan’s forge hammer.

The remains of Hellblade vanished into the sulphurous mist, and Raeven turned away. With every purposeful stride he took from the chasm, the poisonous ambition within him took an ever more defined shape.

Raeven was now Imperial commander of Molech. What would Lyx make of this new development?

Raeven grinned, knowing exactly what she would say.

‘The Serpent Gods provide,’ he said.

FOUR

Reforged
Filum Secundo
The Seven Neverborn

When the Warmaster needed to dominate or awe petitioners he received them in Lupercal’s Court, with its towering, vaulted ceiling of muttering shadows, black battle standards, glimmering lancets and basalt throne. But when simply desiring company, the summons was to his private staterooms.

Aximand had come here many times over the years, but usually in the company of Mournival brothers. In his staterooms, the Warmaster could put aside that heavy title for a few precious moments and simply be Horus.

Like most places aboard the Vengeful Spirit, it had changed markedly over the last few years. Trinkets taken in the early years of the Great Crusade had vanished, and many of the paintings were now hidden by sackcloth. A vast star map with the Emperor at its heart, and which had covered one entire wall, was long gone. In its stead were innumerable pages of densely wound script, together with fanciful imagery depicting cosmological conjunctions, omega-point diagrams, alchemical symbols, trefoil knots and a central image of an armoured warrior bearing a golden sword and glittering silver chalice.

Those pages had presumably been ripped from the hundreds of astrological primers, Crusade logs, histories of Unity and mythological texts that lay scattered like autumn leaves.

Aximand tilted his head to catch a few of the titles, He who saw the Deep; The Nephite Triptych; Monarchia Alighieri; Libri Carolini. There were others, with titles both mundane and esoteric. Some, Aximand noticed, were lettered in gold-leaf Colchisian cuneiform. Before he could read any further, a booming voice called his name.

‘Aximand,’ called Horus. ‘You know better than to stand there like some poxy ambassador, get in here.’

Aximand obeyed, limping past haphazardly stacked piles of books and data-slates towards the primarch’s inner sanctum. As always, it gave him a thrill of pride to be here, to know that his gene-father esteemed him worthy of this honour. Of course, Horus always dismissed such lofty nonsense, but that only made these moments more precious.

Even seated and without the encasement of armour, Horus was enormous, a heroic Akillius or Hektor, a cursed Gylgamesh or Shalbatana the Scarlet Handed. His skin was pink and raw with grafts and regeneration, especially around his right eye where the charred ruin of his skull had been exposed. His hair was still bristly with regrowth, but the attack on the Dome of Revivification appeared to have left no permanent scars. At least none that Aximand could see.

In the immediate aftermath of the ambush, the three primarchs had withdrawn to their flagships to heal and recuperate. The Sons of Horus had levelled Tyjun in a spasm of retaliation, murdering its populace and leaving no stone upon another to root out any other attackers.

Five days later, the Warmaster’s assembled fleets set sail from Dwell, leaving the planet a smouldering wasteland.

Horus worked at a table encircled by a curtain-wall of books, folded charts, celestial hierarchies and tablets of carven formulae.

From the thickness of its spine and tabular aspect of its pages, the book that currently held the Warmaster’s attention was a Crusade log. Even upside down, Aximand recognised the violet campaign badge in the upper corner of the facing page.

‘Murder?’ said Aximand. ‘An old tally, that one.’

Horus closed the book and looked up, a strange irritation in his eyes, as though he had just read something in the log he hadn’t liked. Puckered scar tissue pulled at his mouth as he spoke.

‘An old one, but still relevant,’ said Horus. ‘Sometimes you can learn as much, if not more, from the battles you lose as the ones you win.’

‘We won that one,’ pointed out Aximand.

‘We shouldn’t have had to fight it at all,’ said Horus, and Aximand knew not to ask any more.

Instead he simply made his report. ‘You wanted to know when the fleets translated, sir.’

Horus nodded. ‘Any surprises I should know about?’

‘No, all Sons of Horus, Death Guard and Titanicus vessels are accounted for and have been duly entered in the mission registry,’ said Aximand.

‘What’s our journey time looking like?’

‘Master Comnenus estimates six weeks to reach Molech.’

Horus raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s quicker than he originally calculated. Why the revised journey time?’

‘With the Ruinstorm behind the fleets, our esteemed shipmaster tells me that, and I quote: “the path before us welcomes our fleets like a bordello welcomes bored soldiers with full pockets”.’

Horus’s earlier irritation vanished like a shadow on the sun. ‘That sounds like Boas. Perhaps Lorgar’s rampage across the Five Hundred Worlds has been more useful than I expected.’

‘Lorgar’s rampage?’

‘Yes, I suppose Angron is doing most of the rampaging,’ chuckled Horus. ‘And what of the Third Legion?’

Aximand was used to swift changes of tack in the Warmaster’s questioning, and had his answer at the ready. ‘Word comes that they set course for the Halikarnaxes Stars as ordered.’

‘I sense a “but” missing from that sentence,’ said Horus.

Aximand said, ‘But the word did not come from Primarch Fulgrim.’

‘No, it wouldn’t have,’ agreed Horus, waving to a couch set against one wall upon which hung a variety of punch daggers and quirinal cestus gauntlets. ‘Sit, take some wine, it’s Jovian.’

Aximand poured two goblets of wine from an amethyst bottle and handed one to Horus before sitting on the portion of the couch not obscured by the primarch’s reading material.

‘Tell me, little one, how are your Mournival brothers?’ asked Horus as he sipped some wine. ‘Fulgrim’s power shielded us from the worst of the gunships’ fire, but you…’

Aximand shrugged, also taking a drink and finding its flavour much to his liking. ‘Burns and bruises mainly. We’ll heal. Kibre acts like it never happened, and Grael is still trying to figure out how the Tenth Legion kept three Fire Raptors hidden for so long.’

‘Some dark age tech salvaged from Medusa, I expect,’ said Horus. ‘And Ezekyle?’

‘He’s about ready to fall on his sword,’ said Aximand. ‘You were almost killed, and he blames himself for that.’

‘I dismissed the Justaerin, if you remember,’ pointed out Horus. ‘Tell Ezekyle that if there’s blame to be apportioned, the bulk of it’s mine. He’s not at fault.’

‘It might help if that came from you.’

Horus waved away Aximand’s suggestion. ‘Ezekyle is a big boy, he’ll understand. And if he doesn’t, well, I know Falkus covets his rank.’

‘You’d make the Widowmaker First Captain?’

‘No, of course not,’ said Horus, lapsing into silence. Aximand knew better than to break it and took more wine.

‘I should have known Meduson would have a contingency in case the White Scars failed,’ said Horus at last.

‘Do you think Shadrak Meduson was on one of those gunships?’

‘Perhaps, but I doubt it,’ said Horus. He finished his wine and placed the cup to one side. ‘But what aggrieves me most is the destruction the Legion unleashed in retaliation. Especially the loss of the Mausolytic. Razing it and Tyjun was unnecessary. So much there still to be discovered.’

‘With respect, sir, it had to be done,’ replied Aximand. ‘What you learned, others could learn. And truthfully, I’m not sorry we burned it.’

‘No? Why?’

‘The dead should stay dead,’ said Aximand, trying not to look over the Warmaster’s shoulder at the ornately wrought box of lacquered wood and iron.

Horus grinned, and Aximand wondered if he knew of the dreams that had plagued him before the reattaching of his face. Those dreams were gone now, consigned to history in the wake of his invincible rebirth and rededication.

‘I never considered the Dwellers truly dead,’ said Horus turning to address the box. ‘But even so, a man ought not to be afraid of the dead, little one. They have no power to harm us.’

‘They don’t,’ agreed Aximand as Horus rose from his seat.

‘And they don’t answer back,’ said Horus, hiding a grimace of pain and beckoning Aximand to his feet. With a stiff gait, Horus made his way into an adjacent room. ‘Walk with me. I have something for you.’

Aximand followed Horus into a reverentially dim arming chamber, illumined only by a soft glow above the steel-limbed rack supporting the Warmaster’s battleplate. Spindle-limbed adepts in ragged chasubles worked to repair the damage done by the Fire Raptors’ cannons. Aximand smelled fixatives, molten ceramite and dark lacquer.

Worldbreaker hung on reinforced hooks next to the left gauntlet. The lion-flanked amber eye upon the plastron seemed to follow Aximand as they traversed the chamber. Horus might have died, it seemed to say, but Aximand shook off the sensation of judgement as they approached a high-vaulted forge of smelting and metalworking. The seething glow of a furnace hazed the air.

Only when Aximand followed Horus into the chamber did he see his error. No natural light of a furnace illuminated the forge, but something bright and dark at the same time, something that left a fleeting succession of negative impressions on his retina. Aximand felt corpse breath on the back of his neck and tasted human ash at the sight of a flame-wreathed abomination floating a metre above the deck.

It had once been a Blood Angel. Now it was… what? A daemon? A monster? Both. Its crimson armour was broken, cracked where the evil within it licked outwards in unnatural, eternal flames.

Whoever the legionary within that armour had once been was immaterial. All that remained of him was the scorched prime helix symbol of an Apothecary. It called itself the Cruor Angelus, but the Sons of Horus knew it as the Red Angel.

It had been bound and gagged by chains that were originally gleaming silver, but had since been scorched black. Its head went unhelmed, but its features were impossible to discern through the infernal flames, save for two white-hot eyes filled with the rage of a million damned souls.

‘Why is it here?’ said Aximand, unwilling to voice its name.

‘Hush,’ replied Horus, leading Aximand towards a timber workbench upon which rested implements that looked more akin to surgeon’s tools than those of the metalworker. ‘The Faceless One’s aborted angel has a part to play in our current endeavour.’

‘We shouldn’t trust anything that came from that scheming bastard,’ said Aximand. ‘Exile was too easy. You should have let me kill him.’

‘If he doesn’t take my lesson to heart I may let you,’ said Horus, lifting something from the workbench. ‘But that’s a murder for another day.’

Only reluctantly did Aximand let his gaze turn from the Red Angel, as any warrior was loath to let an enemy fall from sight.

‘Here,’ said the Warmaster, holding a long, cloth-wrapped bundle before him. ‘This is yours.’

Aximand took the bundle and felt the weight of strong metal. He unwrapped it with reverent care, guessing what lay within.

Mourn-it-all’s edge had been badly notched in the fight against Hibou Khan, the White Scar’s borrowed Medusan blade proving to be more than the equal of Cthonian bluesteel.

‘Hard as a rock and hot as hell in the heart,’ said Horus, tapping his chest. ‘A weapon that’s Cthonia to the core.’

Aximand gripped the leather-wound hilt of the double-edged sword, holding the blade out before him and feeling a last part of him he’d not even appreciated was missing now restored. The fuller was thick with fresh etchings that glittered in the daemon-thing’s firelight. Aximand felt lethal potency within the blade that had nothing to do with its powered edges.

‘I need you and your sword, Little Horus Aximand,’ said the Warmaster. ‘The war on Molech will test us all, and you’re not you without it.’

‘It shames me I was not the one to restore its edge.’

‘No,’ said Horus. ‘It honours me that I could do it for you, my son.’

Arcadon Kyro had learned a great many things during his time as a Techmarine of the Ultramarines, but the teaching he’d taken most to heart was that no two vehicles were ever wholly alike in temper or mien. Each was as individual as the warriors they carried into battle, and they too had legacies worthy of remembrance.

Sabaen Queen was as good an example of this as he could wish for. A Stormbird of Terran provenance, it had led the triumphal fly-by over Anatolia in the last days before the XIII Legion launched the campaign to reclaim the Lunar enclaves from the Selenar cults alongside the XVI and XVII Legions. Kyro was yet unborn, but felt Sabaen Queen’s pride to have been part of the Great Crusade’s first true battle.

It was a proud aircraft, haughty even, but Kyro would sooner pilot a prideful craft than a workhorse made resentful by poor treatment. He banked Sabaen Queen around the easternmost peaks of the Untar Mesas, dropping his altitude sharply and pushing out the engines as the landscape opened up. The flight from the defence readiness inspection along the Aenatep peninsula had been a long one, and the Stormbird had earned this chance to flex her wings.

With brown hills and golden fields stretching to Iron Fist Mountain on the horizon, Molech resembled a great many of the Five Hundred Worlds, and was dotted with efficient agri-collectives and crisscrossed by wide roads, maglevs and glittering irrigation canals. It had been brought to compliance without the need for war, yet – for reasons unknown to Kyro – still boasted a garrison force numbering in the millions.

Ultramarines boots were still fresh on the ground, newly deployed as part of a regular rotation of Legion forces between Ultramar and Molech. Vared of the 11th Chapter had returned to Macragge with full honours, passing the Aquila Ultima to Castor Alcade, Legate of Battle Group II within the 25th Chapter.

With the Warmaster’s host said to be somewhere in the northern marches there was likely little glory to be won on Molech, but few warriors were so in need of glory as Castor Alcade.

Thus far, Alcade’s career had been unremarkable. He had assumed the mantle of legate by dint of a service record that showed him to be a warrior of due diligence and requisite ability, but little flair.

Under Alcade’s command, Battle Group II had acquired a largely unearned reputation for ill-fortune. Two particular examples in the last thirty years had turned arming-chamber whispers into ‘fact’.

On Varn’s World, they had fought alongside the Ninth and 235th Companies to crush the greenskin host of the Ghennai Cluster. Alcade coordinated a gruelling flanking campaign, routing the feral greenskin in the highland latitudes before arriving an hour after Klord Empion had broken the enemy host comprehensively at the battle of Sumaae Delta.

During the final storming of the cavern cities of Ghorstel, a series of malfunctioning auspex markers saw Alcade’s assault through the ventral manufactories misdirected into dead end arcologies. Hopelessly lost in the maze of tunnels, the absence of Battle Group II’s companies left Eikos Lamiad and his warriors to fight the bio-mechanical host of the Cybar-Mekattan unsupported.

Lamiad’s heroically-earned victory cemented an already formidable stature and led to his appointment as Tetrarch of Konor, while consigning Alcade’s reputation – through no fault of his own – to self-evident mediocrity.

It was said that the Avenging Son himself had remarked on the matter, saying, ‘Not every commander can be the proudest eagle, some must circle the aerie and allow others to fly farther.’

Kyro had his doubts as to the remark’s authenticity, but that didn’t seem to matter. Those who knew of Alcade’s reputation named him ‘Second String’ – Filum Secundo – forgetting that, by its original meaning, the archer’s second string had to be just as strong and reliable as the first.

A threat auspex chirruped in Kyro’s ear as a mountaintop battery of Hydra anti-aircraft guns unmasked and locked onto the Sabaen Queen. He sent a communion pulse, telling the gunners that he was a friendly, and the threat disappeared from the slate.

‘The Untar Mesas guns?’ inquired Legate Alcade, appearing in the hatchway linking the troop compartment with the cockpit.

‘Yes, sir,’ replied Kyro. ‘A little slow in acquiring us, but I was making them sweat for it.’

‘A little sweat now will save a lot of blood when Horus’s dogs reach Molech,’ said Alcade, strapping himself into the co-pilot’s seat across from Kyro.

‘You really think the traitors will come here, sir?’

‘Given Molech’s location, eventually they must,’ said Alcade, and Kyro heard the hope that such an event might come sooner rather than later. Alcade wanted war to reach Molech. He had the scent of glory in his nostrils.

Kyro understood glory. He’d earned his share of it. Such an allure was more potent than any Apothecary’s opiates. The power of its need was something to be feared, even by transhuman warriors who claimed to be above such mortal weakness.

Alcade scanned the avionics display. His battleplate’s onboard systems would already have given him the Stormbird’s approximate location, but Ultramarines didn’t work with approximates.

‘So what’s your verdict on the Aenatep peninsula?’

Kyro nodded slowly. ‘Fair.’

‘That’s it?’

‘It’ll do if all they have to fight are mortals and xenos, but it’s not Legion strong.’

‘How would you strengthen it?’ asked Alcade. ‘Give me a theoretical.’

Kyro shook his head. ‘In the forge we prefer speculative and empirical – all the potentials and all working actuals. Even the best practical doesn’t become empirical until it’s been proven combat-effective a significant number of times.’

‘A subtle difference,’ said Alcade. ‘Too subtle for most when the bolts are in the air.’

‘That’s why Techmarines are so valuable,’ said Kyro, bringing them down towards the valley of Lupercalia, a name that must surely be changed in light of the Warmaster’s treachery. ‘We calculate how things need to be so the commanders in the field don’t have to.’

More range-markers and Hydras fixed on them, and Kyro let Sabaen Queen dismiss their interrogations with lofty disdain.

‘What would we do without our brave brothers in the forge to keep us mere commanders in line?’ said Alcade.

Kyro said, ‘Good to know you appreciate us, sir.’

‘Did you ever doubt it?’ grinned Alcade. ‘But you didn’t answer the question.’

Kyro spared his legate a sidelong glance. As heroic a warrior of the XIII Legion as any, not even transhuman genhancments could smooth out his patrician features or the finely sculpted planes of his cheekbones. His eyes were pale aquamarine, set in skin like weathered birch upon which he wore a waxed beard forked in the manner of the Khan’s sons. Perhaps he thought it gave him a rakish, dangerous appearance, but together with his tonsured silver hair, it made him look more monk than warrior.

‘I’d bring in another Chapter of the Thirteenth Legion to stiffen its soldiers’ backs,’ said Kyro. ‘Then more artillery. At least three brigades. Maybe some cohorts of Modwen’s Thallax cyborgs. And Titans, can’t go wrong with Titans.’

‘Always so precise,’ laughed Alcade. ‘I’d ask you the time and you’d tell me how to build a watch.’

‘It’s why I was chosen to go to Mars,’ said Kyro.

Ahead of the Stormbird, Lupercalia gouged into the mountains along a stepped valley of ochre stone. Six kilometres wide at its opening, the valley gradually narrowed as it ascended towards Mount Torger and the Citadel of Dawn, where Cyprian Devine ruled Molech with an admirably stern hand. The city’s walled defences were impressive to look at, but archaic and largely valueless against a foe with any real military ability.

Previous Ultramarines commanders had done their best to alter them, employing the primarch’s Notes towards Martial Codification, but they faced resistance from an intransigent population.

‘I sense there’s more you want to say,’ said Alcade.

‘Can I speak freely, sir?’

‘Of course.’

‘The problem with Molech isn’t the emplaced defences or its armed might, the problem is the embedded culture.’

‘Give me your theoretical, sorry, speculative.’

‘Very well. The way I see it, the people of Molech have been raised on tales of heroic Knights riding out to do battle in honourable contests of arms,’ said Kyro. ‘Their world hasn’t seen real fighting in centuries. They don’t know that massed armies of ordinary men with guns is the new reality. Numbers, logistics and planning are the determining factors in who wins and who dies.’

‘A grim view,’ said Alcade. ‘Especially for the Legions.’

‘An empirical view,’ said Kyro, tapping two fingers to the skull-stamped Ultima on his breastplate. ‘Ah, don’t mind me, sir, I was always best at envisaging worst-case scenarios. But if you’re right and the traitors do come to Molech, it’s not the Army regiments they’ll look to kill first.’

‘True, it will be us and Salicar’s Bloodsworn.’

‘We have three companies, and Emperor alone knows how many Blood Angels are on Molech.’

‘I’d say less than half our strength,’ said Alcade. ‘Vared spoke of Vitus Salicar being a warrior not overly given to the spirit of cooperation.’

‘So five hundred legionaries,’ said Kyro. ‘And hyperbole aside, that’s not enough to defend a planet. Therefore the primary burden of defending Molech has to fall on the Army regiments.’

‘They might be mortals, but there’s nearly fifty million fighting men and women on this planet. When war comes to Molech, it’ll be bloody beyond imagining, and it won’t be ended quickly.’

‘But in the final practical, mortals simply can’t resist massed Legion war, sir,’ said Kyro.

‘You don’t think nearly a hundred regiments can hold one of the Emperor’s worlds?’

‘What practical would you give any mortal army resisting Legion forces? Honestly? You know what they call it when baseline humans find themselves fighting warriors like us?’

‘Transhuman dread,’ said Alcade.

‘Transhuman dread, yes,’ agreed Kyro. ‘We’ve both seen it. Remember the breach at Parsabad? It was like the blood had frozen their veins. I almost felt sorry for the poor bastards we had to kill that day.’

Alcade nodded. ‘It was like threshing wheat.’

‘Since when have the noble families of Macragge ever threshed their own wheat?’ said Kyro.

‘Never,’ agreed Alcade, ‘but I have seen picts of it.’

Approach vectors appeared on the display slates in front of Kyro. Alcade fell silent as Sabaen Queen began its descent to the cavern hangar just below the great citadel at the valley’s heart.

The chiming of threat warnings was constant, but Kyro shut them off as he brought the aircraft level with a booming flare of deceleration, followed by the jolt of landing claws meeting the ground.

Alcade unsnapped his restraints and returned to the troop compartment, where fifty Ultramarines sat in banked rows along the aircraft’s centreline and fuselage. Kyro powered down the engines, letting the Stormbird reach its own equilibrium before releasing the locking mechanisms on the assault doors.

As the ground crew rushed to tend the aircraft, Kyro unsnapped his own restraints and finished the last of his post-flight checks. He placed a fist over the aquila on the flight console then made the Icon Mechanicum to honour both Terra and Mars.

‘My thanks,’ he said before ducking into the troop compartment. Armoured in cobalt-blue and ivory, the five squads of Ultramarines were a fine sight indeed, mustered and ready to debark.

The scents of scorched iron, hot engines and venting propellant blew in through lowered assault ramp, a heady mix that took Kyro back to the forge and the simple pleasure of shaping metal.

Gathering the equipment cases containing his servo-harness, Kyro followed the line warriors down the ramp as landing menials and deck crew readied the Stormbird for her next flight.

Didacus Theron was already waiting for them on the landing strip, and from the look on the centurion’s face the news he bore was of a dark hue. A low-born scrambler from Calth, he’d achieved high office within the Legion by virtue of saving the life of Tauro Nicodemus at Terioth Ridge nearly sixty years ago.

‘Grim tidings,’ said Theron, as the legate approached.

‘Speak,’ commanded Alcade.

‘Cyprian Devine is dead,’ said Theron, ‘but that’s not the worst of it.’

‘The Imperial commander is dead and that’s not the worst of it?’ said Kyro.

‘Not even close,’ said Theron. ‘The Five Hundred Worlds are under attack and the whoreson Warmaster is en route to Molech.’

Icy winds howled over the steeldust hull of the Valkyrie, spiralling in ghostly vortices around its cooling engines. Vapour streamed from the leading edges of its wings and linked tailfin, making it look as though it was still in flight. Loken had instructed Rassuah to keep the engines’ fires banked to prevent them icing up completely. Though his armour kept the cold at bay, Loken shivered at the frozen desolation of the mountaintop.

The Urals ran for nearly two and a half thousand kilometres, from the frozen reaches of Kara Oceanica to the ancient realm of the Kievan Rus Khaganate. Ahead, the towering forge spire of Mount Narodnaya was a hazed blur, wreathed in the smoke and lightning of mighty subterranean endeavours.

The riches of these mountains had been plundered by a succession of peoples, but none to match the monumental scale of the Terrawatt Clan. Said to spring from the same root as the Mechanicum, its theologiteks had carved temples into the bones of the Urals during a technological dark age, where they weathered the fury of Old Night in splendid isolation until their very existence became a whispered legend.

When the Terrawatt Clan finally emerged from their lair beneath the Kholat Syakhl, it was to find a planet ravaged by wars fought between monstrous ethnarchs and tyrants. As word of the Clan’s rebirth spread, petitioners came from across the globe to beg for their ancient wonders, offering bargains, treaties and threats in equal measure.

But only one man came offering more than he sought to take.

He called Himself Emperor, a title the Clan Aghas mocked until His vast knowledge of long forgotten technologies became apparent. His willingness to share these lost arts allied the Clan to His banner, and from their archives came many of the weapons that brought Old Earth to Unity. The entombed memory-cores of its eldest Aghas claimed it was their technology, not that of Mars, that precipitated the creation of the first proto-Astartes, a claim utterly refuted by the Mechanicum.

Loken saw little evidence of technological wonder here, just a high ridge of black rock swathed in freezing mists and blustering ash clouds expelled from the buried Dyatlov forge complexes. The rocks were bare of vegetation, sharp-edged and utterly inimical to flora of any kind. Loken turned on the spot, seeing nothing but the solitary landing platform upon which sat the Valkyrie.

He checked the slate he carried, its edges already limned with a coating of pale, fibrous dust.

‘You’re sure this is the place?’ he asked.

‘I have a hunter’s eye, and I’ve flown from one side of Terra to the other on the Sigillite’s business,’ said Rassuah, her voice clipped and efficient. ‘And I’ve landed at the Seven Strong Men many times, Garviel Loken, so, yes, I’m sure this is the place.’

‘Then where is he?’

‘You are asking me?’ said Rassuah. ‘He’s one of yours. Shouldn’t you know?’

‘I never met him,’ said Loken.

‘Neither have I, so why do you think I’ll know?’

Loken didn’t bother to answer. Rassuah was a mortal, but even Loken could tell there was more to her than met the eye. Her augmetics were subtly woven into a physique clearly honed by genetic modification and a rigorous regime of training. Everything about her spoke of excellence. Rassuah claimed to be a simple naval pilot, but smiled as she said it, as if daring Loken to contradict her.

Her inscrutability, skin tone, eye shape and gloss-black hair suggested Panpacific genestock, but she’d never volunteered any information on her heritage, and Loken never asked.

Rassuah had flown him from Old Himalazia to the northern reaches of the Urals to find the first member of Loken’s pathfinders, but it seemed that was going to be more difficult than anticipated.

The man Loken had come to find was Sons of Horus and he…

No, he wasn’t. He was a Luna Wolf.

He hadn’t been part of the Legion when it took that first step on the road to treachery. Not a true son then, but he was a gene-brother, and Loken wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

Yes, Iacton Qruze was one of his fellow Knights Errant, but he’d served with the Half-heard aboard the Vengeful Spirit when things had gone to hell. They had a shared experience of what their lost brothers had done that this warrior could never know.

The wind dropped for a moment, and Loken peered through the stilled clouds of particulate matter, seeing dark outlines like towering giants frozen to the summit. Too tall to be anything living, they were like the heavy columns of some vast temple that had been eroded over centuries of exposure.

He set off towards them, trudging through the wind-blown ash with long strides. The shapes emerged from the clouds, revealing themselves to be far larger than he had suspected, great pillars of banded rock like the megaliths of some tribal fane.

Six of them clustered close together, none less than thirty metres tall, with a seventh set apart like an outcast. Some were narrow at the base, widening like spear blades before tapering towards their peaks. The wind howled through them in a keening banshee’s wail that set Loken’s teeth on edge.

Static buzzed in his helmet, a side effect of the charged air from the unceasing industry beneath the mountains. Loken heard whistles, clicks and burps of distortion, and what sounded very much like soft breath.

Garvi…

Loken knew that voice and spun around, as if expecting to see his fallen comrade, Tarik Torgaddon, standing behind him. But he was utterly alone; even the Valkyrie’s outline growing indistinct in the fog.

He was no longer sure if he’d heard the voice or imagined its existence. It had been an apparition of his murdered friend that had convinced Loken to leave the sanctuary of the lunar biodome, a memory that was growing ever fainter, like the fading echoes of a distant dream.

Had that even happened, or was it a reflection of guilt and shame caught in the splintered shards of his tortured psyche?

Loken had been dug from the ruins of Isstvan III a broken shell of a man, haunted by delusions and phantasmal nightmares. Garro had brought him back to Terra and given him fresh purpose, but could any man return from such an abyss without scars?

He took a moment to balance his humours as bleeding whispers of what might have been vox-traffic drifted on the edge of hearing. Loken’s breath caught in his throat at its familiarity.

He’d heard this kind of thing before.

On Sixty-Three Nineteen.

At the Whisperheads.

Jubal’s horrifying transformation flashed before Loken’s eyes like a stuttering pict-feed and his hand dropped to the holstered bolt pistol. He thumbed the catch from its cover. He didn’t expect to draw it, but just resting his hand on its textured grip gave him comfort.

Moving through the gargantuan rock formations, the squalling static whined and crackled to the rhythm of the ash storm. Did the pillars amplify the interference or was it a by-product of the hundreds of forge temples below him?

The static abruptly cut out.

‘Do you know where you are?’ said a low voice, its accent guttural and hard-boned with palatal edges and rough vowels.

‘Tarik?’ said Loken.

‘No. Answer the question.’

‘The Urals,’ said Loken.

‘This particular mountain.’

‘I didn’t know it had a name.’

‘It’s called Manpupuner,’ said the voice. ‘I’m told it means little mountain of the gods in some dead language. The clans say these are the petrified corpses of the Seven Neverborn.’

‘Are you trying to frighten me with old legends?’

‘No. We were born here, did you realise that?’ continued the voice. ‘Not literally, of course, but the first breed of transhumans were made beneath this mountain.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ said Loken. ‘Where are you?’

‘Closer than you think, but you’ll have to find me if you want to talk face to face,’ said the voice. ‘If you can’t manage that, then we’ll not speak at all.’

‘Malcador said you would help me,’ said Loken. ‘He didn’t say anything about having to prove myself.’

‘There’s a lot that crafty old man isn’t saying,’ said the voice. ‘Now let’s see if you’re as good as Qruze says you are.’

The voice faded into a rising hash of static, and Loken pressed himself against the nearest rock pillar. Smooth where exposed to the wind, pitted where centuries of atmospheric pollutants had eaten away at the rock, the mass of stone was immense and loomed like the leg of a titanic war engine.

He eased his head around its rounded corner, switching between variant perceptual modes. None of the spectra through which his helm cycled could penetrate the fog. Loken suspected deliberate artifice in its occluding properties.

Something moved ahead of him, a half-glimpsed shadow of a cowled warrior with the swagger of complete confidence. Loken stepped away from the rock and gave chase. The brittle shale of the ground made stealth impossible, but that handicap would work against his enemy too. He reached where he thought the shadow had gone, but there was no sign of his quarry.

The mists swelled and surged, and the cragged towers of the Seven Neverborn loomed in the fog as if advancing and retreating. Whispering voices sighed through the vox-static; names and long lists of numbers, tallies of things long dead. Echoes of a past swept away by a cataclysmic tide of war and unremembering.

None were discernible, but the sound struck a mournful chord in Loken. He kept still, filtering out the voices, and trying to hear the telltale scrape of armour on stone, a footstep on gravel. Anything that might reveal a hidden presence. Given the nature of the man he was here to find, he wasn’t holding out much hope.

‘You’ve forgotten what Cthonia taught you,’ said the voice.

It burbled up through the static in his helm; no use for pinpointing a location.

‘Maybe you remember a little too much,’ replied Loken.

‘I remember that it was kill or be killed.’

‘Is that what this is?’ said Loken, moving as slowly and quietly as he could.

‘I’m not going to kill you,’ said the voice. ‘But you’re here to try and get me killed. Aren’t you?’

A flicker of movement in the mist to his right. Loken didn’t react, but gently eased his course towards it.

‘I’m here because I need you,’ said Loken, finally understanding the nature of this place. ‘The Knights Errant? This is where you trained them to become the grey ghosts, isn’t it?’

‘I taught them all,’ said the voice. ‘But not you. Why is that?’

Loken shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Because you are the warrior who stands in the light,’ said the voice, and Loken couldn’t decide if the words were meant in admiration or derision. ‘There’s nothing I can teach you.’

The blurred outline of the cowled warrior stood in the lee of a gigantic stone pillar, confident he went unobserved. Loken held him loose in his peripheral vision, moving as though unaware of his presence. He closed to within five paces. He would never get a better chance.

Loken leapt towards the source of the taunting voice.

The hooded man’s outline came apart like ash in a storm.

Over there, Garvi…

Loken turned on the spot, in time to see an umbral after-image of a man moving between two of the Seven Neverborn across the summit. Loken caught a flash of skin, a tattoo. Not the cowled man.

Whose voice was he hearing? Was he chasing ghosts?

The legends of the Neverborn were garish scare stories of outrageous hyperbole like those recounted in The Chronicles of Ursh. They spoke about phantom armies of killing shadows, mist-born wraiths and nightmares that clawed their way from men’s skulls, but that wasn’t what Loken was up against.

Cracks in his memory and a silent hunter were his foes here.

‘You’re going back, aren’t you? To Lupercal’s lair.’

Loken didn’t waste breath wondering how the nature of his mission could already be known. Instead, he opted to prick his opponent’s vanity.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘And I need your help to get in.’

‘Getting in’s the easy part. It’s getting out that’s going to be a problem.’

‘Less of a problem if you join me.’

‘I don’t make a habit of going on suicide missions.’

‘Neither do I.’

No reply was forthcoming, and Loken considered his options.

As he saw it, he had two; continue blundering around the mist-shrouded mountaintop while being made to look a fool, or leave empty-handed.

He was being tested, but tests only worked if both participants worked towards a common goal. Loken had already played one game without knowing the rules. The Wolf King had beaten him to learn something of his character, but this felt like someone taking pleasure in belittling him.

If Loken couldn’t play by someone else’s rules, he’d play by his own. He turned towards the Valkyrie. The aircraft was invisible in the mists, but its transponder signal was a softly glowing sigil on his visor. Abandoning any pretence of searching the mountaintop, he marched brazenly back to the assault carrier.

‘Malcador and his agents were thorough in their recruitment of Knights Errant,’ said Loken. ‘There’s no shortage of warriors I can assemble in time to make our mission window.’

Loken heard stealthy footsteps in the shale, but resisted the obvious bait. The Valkyrie emerged from the fog and Loken switched the vox-link to Rassuah’s channel.

‘Spool up the engines,’ he said. ‘We’re leaving.’

‘You found him?’

‘No, but put that hunter’s eye upon me.’

‘Understood.’

The footsteps sounded again, right behind him.

Loken whipped around, drawing his weapon and aiming it in one fluidly economical motion.

‘Don’t move,’ he said, but there was no one there.

Before Loken could react, a pistol pressed against the back of his helmet. A hammer pulled back with a sharp snap of oiled metal.

‘I expected more from you,’ said the voice behind the gun.

‘No you didn’t,’ said Loken, lowering his own pistol.

‘I expected you to try a little longer before giving up.’

‘Would I ever have found you?’

‘No.’

‘So what would be the point?’ said Loken. ‘I don’t fight battles I can’t win.’

‘Sometimes you don’t get to choose the battles you fight.’

‘But you can choose how you fight them,’ said Loken. ‘How’s that hunter’s eye, Rassuah?’

‘I have him,’ said Rassuah. ‘Say the word and I can put a turbo-penetrator through his leg. Or his head. It’s your choice.’

Loken slowly turned to face the man he had come to find. Armoured in pitted and scarred gunmetal armour without insignia, he went without helm and his bearded face was matted with dust. A draconic glyph tattoo coiled around his right eye, the mark of the Blackbloods, one of Cthonia’s most vicious murder-gangs.

Loken saw rugged bone structure that mirrored his own.

‘Severian,’ said Loken, spreading his hands. ‘I found you.’

‘By giving up,’ said Severian. ‘By changing the rules of the hunt.’

‘You of all people ought to know that’s how a Luna Wolf fights,’ said Loken. ‘Understand your foe and do whatever is necessary to bring him down.’

The warrior grinned, exposing ash-stained teeth. ‘You think your assassin friend can hit me? She won’t.’

‘If not her, then me,’ said Loken, bringing his pistol up.

Severian shook his head and flipped something towards Loken, something that glittered silver and metallic.

‘Here,’ said Severian. ‘You’ll need these.’

Loken instinctively reached up as Severian stepped away from him. ‘And I had such high hopes for you, Garviel Loken.’

The mist closed around him like a cloak.

Loken didn’t pursue. What would be the point?

He opened his palm to see what Severian had thrown him.

Two gleaming silver discs. At first Loken thought they were lodge medals, but when he turned them over and saw they were blank and mirror-reflective, he understood what they were.

Cthonian mirror-coins.

Tokens to be left on the eyes of the dead.

FIVE

The painted angel
Bloodsworn
Pathfinders

The handhold was a good one, the stone of the ruined citadel still ruggedly impermeable despite being built on a storm-lashed coastline. It reminded Vitus Salicar of the hard rock of the Qarda Massif on Baal Secundus, the hostile range of rad-peaks called home by the tribe that had birthed him.

Granite-hard and bleached of colour after thousands of years’ exposure, the stone of the shattered tower offered plentiful handholds, but few were wider than the breadth of a finger. Salicar had climbed the tower many times, but this was his first attempt at the western facade. Erosion had worn the ocean-facing rock smooth, and truculent winds sought to tear him from his perch.

Clad only in a pair of khaki trews, Salicar’s transhuman physique was sculpted and pale, like one of the Adoni of the Grekan temples given life and motion. His muscled back was tattooed with a winged blood drop that writhed with every motion of his ascent. Salicar’s arms were marked with similar devices at his deltoids and biceps, with his forearms inked with images of dripping chalices and weeping-blood skulls. His hair was blond, long and pulled in a tight scalp lock, his features artistically handsome in their symmetry.

The sea was six hundred metres below him, a surging cauldron of thundering waves breaking against the base of the cliff. The advance of the tide filled deep depressions with foaming white water before its withdrawal revealed blades of rock beneath the surface. To fall would be to die, even for a transhuman engineered to be the perfect warrior by the gene-smiths of the Blood Angels.

And would that not be justice?

Salicar pushed away the troublesome thought and craned his neck back to scan the onward route of his ascent. A lightning strike had split the tower four decades ago, shearing it almost exactly in two. That it still stood was testament to the craft of its ancient builders. The path directly above him was impossible, the stone loose and kept in place only by a miracle of confluent compressional forces. Any ascent by that route would dislodge the entire upper reaches.

His current position at the edge of an arched window opening was tenuous as it was, but Vitus Salicar was not a warrior who refused any challenge once offered. Drazen had risked censure by calling him mad to make an attempt on the western facade, and Vastern told him in no uncertain terms that the Sanguinary Priests would not be held responsible for the loss of his gene-legacy.

So, up wasn’t an option, but across…

The opening was perhaps six metres wide, too far to jump sideways, but at the apex of the window was an overhanging corbel that might once have supported a long-vanished idol of the Stormlord.

Two metres above, and three to the side.

Difficult, but not impossible.

Salicar braced his legs, bending them as much as he was able, and leapt upwards like an enraged fire scorpion. The stone at his feet cracked with the sudden pressure. It fell from the wall as he jumped, and for a heart-stopping moment, Salicar hung in the air as though weightless.

Images of the shattered bones and pulverised organs Vastern had been all too graphic in describing flashed before his eyes. His arms windmilled for the corbel. One outflung hand scraped the edge of the stone and his fingers clamped down hard. He swung like a pendulum, grunting as the tendons of his arm tore.

Pain was good. It told him he wasn’t falling.

He closed his eyes and directed the pain away from his arm, letting it disperse through his body by repeating the mantra of flesh to spirit.

‘Pain is an illusion of the senses,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘Despair an illusion of the mind. I do not despair, so I shall feel no pain.’

Athekhan had taught him that on Fraxenhold. The Prosperine mental discipline was simple, but effective, and soon worked its magic. The pain faded and Salicar opened his eyes, reaching up with his other hand to curl his fingers around the slender lip of the corbel.

He pulled himself up smoothly, as though performing calisthenics in the gymnasia. He swung his legs onto the narrow corbel and stood upright at the centre of the window’s arch. A projecting lip of a pediment above him offered another way onwards, but that route presented no significant challenge. He dismissed it and turned his attention to a portion of stonework further over that had fallen from higher on the tower.

Balanced precariously in a wedge-shaped gap in the wall, it sat on a rocky fulcrum like perfectly balanced scales. Salicar adjudged it wedged tightly enough to support his weight. Without taking the time to second guess himself, he vaulted from his narrow perch and landed on the block.

Right away, he knew he had been mistaken to believe it would support his mass. Though weighing several tonnes, it immediately tipped from position and slid from the wall. Salicar sprang away from the block and rammed his hands into a thin split in the rock above him. Skin tore and blood welled from his hands as he clenched his fists to bear his weight.

The block fell from the wall in a cascade of debris, carrying a wealth of shattered stonework with it. It tumbled end over end before slamming down with a booming explosion of splintered stone and a fifty metre geyser of seawater.

On the black stone quayside at the foot of the tower, heads craned upwards, little more than tiny pink ovals. The colours of their plate allowed Salicar to pick out his sub-commanders; Drazen in vermillion and gold, Vastern in white, Agana in black. The rest of his warriors were plated in Legion crimson, their swords glittering silver in the dying sunlight.

He turned from them and searched for another way onwards, but there was only the lip of the pediment above him. And as much as he desired challenge from this climb, there was no other way that wasn’t simply suicide.

Salicar eased one bloodied hand from the rock and grabbed hold of the projecting lip. With his weight borne, he withdrew his other hand and pulled himself up.

From here, handholds were plentiful, and he reached the uppermost course of mighty blocks without undue effort. He stood atop the ruined tower and drew himself up to his full height, a beautiful, painted man of idealised form.

He lifted his hands above his head, looking down at the crashing waves, transient pools and lethal rocks. Death hung in the balance of a heartbeat’s miscalculation.

And I might welcome it.

Arms swung down to his side, Salicar leapt from the tower.

The Citadel of the Stormlord had been raised at the northernmost peninsula of the island of Damesek; a forsaken spit of lightning-struck peaks carved from volcanic black stone. The island was all but uninhabited and linked to the mainland only by a fulgurite causeway from the pilgrim city of Avadon.

The citadel and the quay at its base were the only man-made structures on Damesek. The quay remained mostly intact, but the citadel was a ruined holdfast constructed in an earlier epoch around a solitary basalt peak. The pale stone of its construction was not native to the region, and the monumental effort it must have taken the pre-technological inhabitants of Molech to bring it here was beyond belief.

One of the planet’s oldest legends told of a mythical figure known as the Stormlord. Where he walked, thunder followed, and his Fulgurine Path had once been a pilgrim route across the landscape. The last portion of that route led to this peak, where the Stormlord had ascended on a bolt of lightning to the celestial ark that brought him to Molech.

Before the dismantling of the Blood Angels Librarius, Drazen had studied a great many such legends in search of the truth behind them, and this was a myth dismissed as allegory by most of Molech’s people.

Most, but not all.

A determined cadre of mendicants whose number dwindled with every passing generation still dwelled in the lower portions of the citadel, subsisting on the alms and offerings left by curious folk who came to gawp at the ruins.

Drazen Acorah first laid eyes on the citadel almost two years ago, and had trained here many times with Captain Salicar and the Bloodsworn. He found much to admire in the malnourished men and women who subsisted in the ruins of this barren coastline.

Like the Bloodsworn, they cleaved to a duty that appeared to serve little purpose, but would never dream of abandoning. They no longer called themselves priests – such a term was dangerous in this age of reason – but the word was appropriate.

There was something tangible in the air here. Not so long ago, Acorah might have openly called it ethereal. But like the azure of the Librarius he had once proudly worn, words like that had been cast aside. The citadel’s stones whispered of something incredible, something he had never felt before, and only with difficulty did he resist stretching out his senses to listen to their secrets.

Eighty-three chosen warriors of the IX Legion fought sparring bouts under the uncompromising gaze of Agana Serkan, their black-armoured Warden. These warriors were among the Legion’s best, hand-picked by Sanguinius to stand as his proxies. Commanded by the Emperor Himself, the Blood Angels had sent a Bloodsworn warrior band to Molech for over a century. As great an honour as it was to serve a direct command of the Master of Mankind, its members were distraught at being denied the chance to fight alongside their primarch against the hated nephilim in the Signus Cluster.

Acorah shared their dismay, but no force in the universe would compel him to break his vow of duty. Salicar had accepted a crimson grail filled with the mingled vitae of the previous Bloodsworn band of Captain Akeldama. Salicar and each of his warriors had drunk from the grail, releasing their predecessors from their oath before refilling it with their own blood to swear another.

He put aside memories of his arrival on Molech and walked to the edge of the quayside. Ocean-going vessels had once braved treacherous seas to bring pilgrims to this place, but many centuries had passed since any vessel had taken moorings here.

The mendicant priests that constantly fussed around them parted to make way for him. Fully armoured in his blood-red battleplate, even the tallest of them barely reached to the base of Acorah’s shoulder guard. They were in awe of him, but their fear kept them distant and Acorah was glad.

Their fear left a bilious taste in his mouth.

They didn’t like that Salicar regularly climbed the tallest tower, but that didn’t stop the captain. They couldn’t voice their objections in terms of blasphemy or desecration and instead cited the instability of its remains.

Acorah heard one of the mendicants gasp in terror and shielded his eyes as he turned his gaze to the top of the tower.

He already knew what he would see.

Vitus Salicar arced outwards from the summit of the tower, his outstretched arms haloed by the sunset like the pinions of a reborn phoenix.

Acorah blinked as Salicar’s body was flickeringly overlaid with vivid imagery: a red gold angel plummeting in fire; a comely youth borne aloft on disintegrating wings; a reckless son careening across the sky on a sun-chariot.

He tasted ash and soured meat, and bit back the urge to let his psyker power move through him as it once had so freely. He spat bile as Salicar plunged into a rocky basin of deep water the surge tide had filled only a fraction of a second before.

The water swept back, revealing his captain kneeling on the black rock between a pair of spear-like stalagmites. Salicar’s head was down, and when he stood upright, Acorah saw the same fatalistic expression he had worn since their return from the Preceptory Line.

Before the waters could rush in and fill the pool again, Salicar jogged over to the quayside and sprang upwards. Acorah knelt and grabbed his captain’s hand, pulling him up. Denied its bounty, the water boomed angrily against the stonework, showering them both with cold spume.

‘Satisfied now?’ he asked, as Salicar spat a mouthful of seawater.

Salicar nodded. ‘Until the next time.’

‘A less understanding man might say you had a death wish.’

‘I do not wish death,’ said Salicar.

Acorah looked back up the length of the tower.

‘Then why do you insist on taking such needless risks?’

‘For the challenge, Drazen,’ said Salicar, moving off towards the fighting men of the Bloodsworn. ‘If I’m not challenged, I grow stale. We all do. That’s why I come here.’

‘And that’s the only reason?’

‘No,’ said Salicar, but did not elaborate.

Acorah felt the tips of his fingers tingle with the desire to wield powers now decreed unnatural. How easy it would be to divine the captain’s true motivations, but another oath bound him against such a course.

They came to where the Legion thralls had placed Salicar’s battle armour, a master-worked suit of crimson plate, golden wings and black trim. His swords hung from a belt of tan leather and his gold-chased pistol was mag-locked in a thigh holster. His helm was a jade funerary mask, as empty of expression as an automaton’s.

‘The mendicants would rather you didn’t climb the tower,’ he said, as Salicar picked up a towel and began to dry himself.

‘They’re afraid I’ll hurt myself?’

‘I think it’s more the tower they’re concerned with.’

Salicar shook his head. ‘It’ll outlast us all.’

‘Not if you keep knocking bits of it loose,’ pointed out Acorah.

‘You fuss around me like a fawning thrall,’ said Salicar.

‘Someone has to,’ said Acorah, as Salicar looped a pair of glittering ident-tags around his neck. Even without his transhuman senses, it was impossible to miss the blood flecks on them.

‘Is it wise to keep those?’ he asked.

Salicar was instantly hostile.

‘Not wise, but necessary. Their blood is on our hands.’

‘We don’t know what happened that day,’ said Acorah, pushing against the nightmarish memory of awakening from a fugue state to find himself surrounded by corpses. ‘None of us do, but if there is guilt, it is shared by us all equally.’

‘I am captain of the Bloodsworn,’ said Salicar. ‘If the burden of guilt is not mine to bear, then whose?’

Yasu Nagasena’s mountainside villa had been extended several times in the last year, with numerous annexes, subterranean chambers and technological additions. It had originally been designed as a place of retreat and reflection, but had become an unofficial base of operations for many of the Sigillite’s operatives.

Instead of a place of solace for those who came here, it was often the last place on Terra they ever saw. Nagasena himself was in absentia on yet another hunt, and Loken’s pathfinders had taken up residence.

The walls of the room at the heart of the villa were covered in wax paper schematics retrieved from the deepest and most secure vaults of the palace. Hundreds of plans, sections and isometrics depicted one of the mightiest vessels ever adapted to the Scylla-pattern construction schemata.

The Vengeful Spirit had formed the core of the Luna Wolves campaigns for two centuries, a Gloriana-class war vessel of such power that entire systems had been cowed by the scale of the devastation it alone could unleash. The precisely inked lines of the plans were covered in hasty scrawls and pinned script paper. Choke points within the superstructure were identified, potential boarding points circled and its regions of greatest vulnerability and strength highlighted with painted brushstrokes. The latter far outnumbered the former.

Shipwrights’ plotter tables formed a circle around two warriors of transhuman scale, both engaged in heated debate as to the nature of the vessel they were to infiltrate.

Loken tapped a stylus against the upper transit decks.

‘The Avenue of Glory and Lament,’ said Loken. ‘It’s the approach to the strategium. Plenty of companionways and gallery decks connect to it, and it’s a natural highway through the ship.’

Loken’s companion was clearly of a different mindset, and shook his cybernetic-threaded skull. His bulk was considerable; broader and taller than Loken, but with a noticeable stoop that brought his pallid features to the same level.

His name was Tubal Cayne and he had once been an Iron Warrior.

‘Shows how long it’s been since you stormed a war vessel,’ he said, jabbing a finger at the funnel points along the transverse transits. ‘A breach there will require a fight, something I was under the impression you wanted to avoid. Besides, any commander worth his salt will have rapid reaction forces stationed here, here and all along here. Or are you telling me the Warmaster’s gone soft in the head as well as mad?’

Despite his primarch’s treachery, Loken felt an absurd need to defend him against Cayne’s insult. The Iron Warrior had a knack for irritating people with his cold logic and utter lack of empathy. Loken had already stepped in to keep Ares Voitek from strangling Cayne with his servo-arm when he suggested that the death of Ferrus Manus might actually have a positive effect on the Iron Tenth.

He took a deep breath to quell his rising choler. ‘The Vengeful Spirit has never been boarded,’ said Loken. ‘It’s a battle scenario we never bothered to run. Who’d be insane enough to board the Warmaster’s flagship?’

‘There’s always someone mad enough to try the one thing you’ve never considered,’ said Cayne. ‘Just look around you.’

‘Then where would you suggest?’ snapped Loken, tiring of Cayne’s incessant naysaying. He knew his irritation was more directed at himself, for each of Cayne’s objections was founded in logic and proper diligence of thought.

Cayne bent to study the schemata again, his eyes darting back and forth and his fingers tracing arcane patterns across the hair-thin lines of the Scyllan architect’s quill. Eventually he tapped a portside embarkation bay of a munitions sub-deck on the Vengeful Spirit’s ventral aspect.

‘The lower deck was always the weakest point in other ships’ defences,’ said Cayne, sweeping his finger out to encompass the adjacent dormitory spaces and magazine chambers. ‘It’s not presented to the planet below, so there’s only going to be menials down there, gun-crews and whatever dregs have sunk below the waterline.’

‘Other ships?’

‘Ships other than the Fourth Legion,’ said Cayne, and Loken felt a tremor of unease at the pride Cayne took when speaking of his former brothers. ‘The Lord of Iron knew a warship without guns is a powderless culverin and took steps to protect them.’

Tubal Cayne had come to the Knights Errant from the gaol of Kangba Marwu, one of the Crusader Host who had been garrisoned on Terra as a potent reminder of the Legion hosts fighting in humanity’s name. Cayne’s evolution of breaching doctrines during the storming of the glacier fortresses of Saturn’s rings was still an exemplary model by which orbital strongpoints ought to be taken. His release from the Legio Custodes cells had been Malcador’s doing, but had only been approved by Constantin Valdor after rigorous psy-screens had revealed no trace of traitorous rancour.

Cayne was not the only parolee from Kangba Marwu set to join this pathfinding mission, but he was the only one Loken had met so far. The Iron Warrior had responded to the treachery of Horus with stoic practicality, lamenting his Legion’s choice of alignment, while understanding that his place was no longer in their ranks.

‘Yes,’ nodded Cayne. ‘That’s your way in.’

Loken traced the route a craft would need to follow to reach the ventral decks and said, ‘That means flying through the guns’ fire zones. Minefields, sentinel arrays.’

‘More than likely, but a small enough craft most likely won’t show up on the threat auspex of cannons that size. And if a shell hits us we’ll be dead before we even know it. So why worry?’

Loken let out a breath at the thought of flying through a gauntlet of ship-killing ordnance and detection arrays. As plans went, it was a risky one, but Cayne was right. This was the portion of the Vengeful Spirit that offered the best way in.

The sound of breath at the doorway forestalled any further discussion. A young girl in a simple cream shift, with gleaming black skin and hard eyes of pale ivory stood at the open door, her hands clasped demurely in front of her. Loken had assumed she was a servant of Yasu Nagasena, but she carried a holstered pistol at her side at all times. He didn’t know what position she occupied within the household, but that she was utterly devoted to the villa’s master was beyond question.

‘Mistress Amita sent me to tell you that Rassuah is on approach,’ she said.

Tubal Cayne looked up. ‘The last of us?’

Loken nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘Then let’s see who else is walking into hell,’ said Cayne.

Rubio and Varren came up from the sparring chambers carved into the rock beneath Nagasena’s villa, slathered in oily sweat and making imaginary sword cuts as they debated the merits of gladius over chainaxe. Though both warriors had left their Legion identity behind, their Legion expertise was still invaluable.

The interior courtyard of the villa was a place of peace and quiet reflection. A pool with a fountain in the shape of a coiled serpentine dragon burbled in the centre of gene-spliced plants and artificial blooms. Half a dozen robed servants tended the garden, and honeyed scents filled the air.

‘So they’re here,’ said Varren upon noticing Loken.

The former captain of the World Eaters was bare to the waist, his flesh a tapestry of knotted scar tissue, as if he had been stitched together as part of some hideous experiment in reanimation. Tattoos coiled around the scars and over his shoulders; each one a badge of honour and a memory of killing.

Macer Varren had come to the Sol system at the head of a patchwork fleet of refugees, together with detachments from the Emperor’s Children and White Scars. In the treachery that followed, Varren’s loyalty had been proven beyond question and Garro had offered him a place within Malcador’s Knights Errant.

His companion, Tylos Rubio, had been the first warrior that Garro had recruited, snatched from the war-torn surface of Calth in the moments after the XVII Legion doomed the Veridian star. A warrior of the Librarius whose powers had been shackled by the Decree of Nikaea, Rubio had once again taken up psychic arms against the Warmaster. The loss of the cobalt-blue still troubled him, and Loken knew exactly how he felt – though for very different reasons.

His features were the polar opposite of Varren’s; sculpted where the World Eater had been battered into shape, unblemished where Varren was forged by scars. His eyes were heavy with regret and loss, but the nascent brotherhood of the Knights Errant was awakening in him a sense of belonging that had hitherto been absent.

‘Where are the others?’ asked Rubio, raising a hand in greeting.

‘Don’t you know?’ asked Cayne. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be psychic?’

‘My powers are not parlour tricks, Tubal,’ said Rubio, as he and Varren fell into step with Loken and Cayne. ‘I do not lightly employ them.’

‘Voitek is already on the platform,’ said Loken. ‘He said the aegis-field needed calibrating.’

‘What about the Half-heard?’ asked Varren.

‘Iacton is–’

‘Not on Terra,’ finished Rubio.

Varren halted as they reached the fortified entrance of the tunnel cut through the mountain that led to the newly-built platforms at the rear of the villa.

‘You just said you didn’t use your powers unless you needed to,’ said Cayne, unlocking the armoured portal and allowing the heavy door to grind into its housing.

‘One does not need psychic powers to know when Iacton Qruze is near,’ said Rubio. ‘He has a presence that far outweighs his belittling epithet.’

With Qruze’s permission, Loken had reluctantly explained the old nickname of ‘Half-heard’ to his fellow Knights. A warrior whose words went unheeded by the vast majority of the Luna Wolves had turned out to have been one of the keepers of the Legion’s soul. Qruze’s days of being disregarded were over, but the name had stuck and always would.

‘So where is he then?’ pressed Varren.

‘He has a heavy burden elsewhere,’ said Rubio. ‘One that grieves and shames him, but one from which he will not turn.’

‘Just like the rest of us,’ grunted Varren.

No one said any more, and they entered the mountain, following a long and winding tunnel bored by industrial-scale meltas. Caged lumen globes were strung from the glass-smooth ceiling, swaying gently in sighs of ventilation.

After a journey of two kilometres, they emerged into a steep sided shaft cut into the haunches of the mountain – a hundred metres wide and three times that in height. In the centre of the cavernous space was a single landing platform, large enough to take a Stormbird, but not much else.

Kneeling beside an opened bank of machine racks at the foot of the platform was a warrior in identical burnished metal armour to the rest of them. Two articulated limbs at his side worked to sort tools and arrange couplings on a long length of oiled cloth. Another two mechanical arms curled over his shoulders arranging nests of cables and preparing connectors to be reattached.

‘Have you not finished yet?’ asked Cayne. ‘You have had ample time to make the necessary adjustments, and Mistress Rassuah is expected at any minute.’

Ares Voitek did not look up or deign to answer, having now learned to resist Cayne’s baiting. He continued working, with all four limbs now embroiled in the guts of the machine. The arms moved with whirring mechanical precision, each one guided by the mind impulse unit attached to the nape of Voitek’s neck.

‘There,’ said Voitek. ‘Not even Severian could find this place now.’

Loken looked up as the shimmering aegis-field rippled with energy across the wedge of light above them. He saw no difference in its appearance, but assumed the Iron Hand had improved its performance in ways he wasn’t equipped to register. The field’s mechanics concealed the platform’s location via a blend of refractive fields and geomagnetic scramblers. To all intents and purposes, the entrance of the landing field was invisible.

Voitek stood and the servo-arms arranged themselves across his back and midriff with a clatter of folding metal. Voitek’s left arm was a brutal augmetic from the elbow down, gleaming silver and kept lustrous by a regime of polishing that went beyond obsessive.

‘If it’s that good, will Rassuah be able to find it?’ asked Varren.

‘She already has,’ grumbled Voitek, his voice artificially rendered and grating through a constant burble of machine noise.

‘Then let’s be waiting for her,’ said Loken.

The five warriors climbed a switchback of iron stairs to the raised platform as the aegis-field rippled with the passage of an aircraft. A bare metal Valkyrie assault carrier descended on rippling cones of jetfire, deafening in the close confines of the shaft. The air became hot and metallic as it turned ninety degrees on its axis to land with its rear quarters aligned with the embarkation ramps.

‘You got them all?’ asked Varren.

‘All four,’ confirmed Loken.

‘Does word come of where we are bound?’ asked Rubio.

‘Saturn’s sixth moon,’ said Loken. ‘To pick up Iacton Qruze.’

‘And after Titan?’ said Ares Voitek. ‘The Warmaster?’

‘We’ll learn that when we are assembled,’ said Loken as the roar of the Valkyrie’s engines diminished and its assault ramp dropped.

Four figures marched from its troop compartment, all in the burnished silver of the Knights Errant and armed with a variety of weaponry. Loken knew them from their data files, but even without that information it would have been child’s play to identify the four warriors.

Bror Tyrfingr; tall, slender and hollow-cheeked, with a long mane of snow-white hair and a loping stride. A Space Wolf.

Rama Karayan; keeping to the shadows, shaven headed, sallow of complexion and dark eyed. Without doubt a son of Corax.

The shaven headed warrior with a forked beard waxed to points could only be Altan Nohai, an Apothecary of the White Scars.

And finally, Callion Zaven. Patrician and haughty, his bearing was a hair’s breadth from arrogant. Zaven’s gaze swept over the waiting warriors, as though judging their worth. A true warrior of the Emperor’s Children.

Loken heard Ares Voitek’s vox-grille blurt a hash of static, and didn’t need Mechanicum augmetics to translate his bone-deep anger at seeing a warrior from the Legion that had murdered his primarch.

The four new arrivals halted at the base of the ramp, and both groups took a moment to gauge the measure of the other. Loken took a step forward, but it was Tyrfingr who spoke first.

‘You’re Loken?’ he said.

‘I am.’

Tyrfingr extended his hand and Loken took it in the old way, palm to wrist. Tyrfingr’s other hand shot up and gripped the back of Loken’s neck, as if to tear out his throat with his teeth.

‘Bror Tyrfingr,’ he said. ‘You brought the silver wolf to bring down the rogue wolf. That’s the best decision you’ll ever make, but if I think your roots are weak, I’ll kill you myself.’

SIX

Nine-tenths of the lore
Tarnhelm
Adoratrice

Though its original purpose had been subverted, the so-called ‘Quiet Order’ of the Sons of Horus still met in secret. The dormitory halls had once housed thousands of deckhands, but only echoes dwelled here in the normal run of things.

Before Isstvan, a time that no longer held meaning for the Legion, the lodge had met only as often as campaign necessity allowed. It had been an indulgence permitted by the primarch, encouraged even, but always subservient to the demands of war. Now it met regularly as the Sons of Horus learned more of the secret arts.

Close to a thousand warriors gathered in the long, vaulted chamber, an army of sea-green plate, transverse helm-crests and crimson mantles. War-blackened banners hung from the dormitory arches, and bloodied trophies were speared on long pike shafts along the chamber’s length. Wide bowls of promethium billowed chemical fumes and orange flame. A slow drum beat of fists on thighs echoed from the walls of stone and steel.

The sense of anticipation was palpable.

Serghar Targost felt it too, but he forced himself to keep his steps measured and his bearing regal. The captain of the Seventh Company was broad and powerful, as were all legionaries, but there was a density to him that gave sparring partners pause when they drew his name in the training cages. His blunt features were not those of a true son, and the old scar bisecting his forehead had been overwritten by a more heinous wound.

An Iron Hands Terminator had struck him in the dying moments of Isstvan V and the impact trauma had almost ended him there and then. The enclosing pressure of his helm had kept the broth of his brain from oozing through the pulverised ruin of his skull. The Apothecaries had sutured the bone fragments together beneath the skin, fixing the largest shards in place with dozens of tensile anchors on the surface of his face.

With Lev Goshen’s help, Targost had attached the ebon claws torn from the scaled pelt of a dead Salamander to the protruding ends of the anchors, giving him the spiked features of a madman. He could no longer wear a battle helm, but Targost considered it an acceptable trade off.

Targost moved through the Sons of Horus, pausing now and then to observe their labours. Sometimes he would offer instruction on the precise angle of a blade, the correct syntax of Colchisian grammar forms or the required pronunciation of a ritual mantra.

The air sang with potential, as though a secret symphony existed just beyond the threshold of perception and would soon burst through into life. Targost smiled. Only a few short years ago he would have mocked the absurd poetry of such a sentiment.

Yet there was truth to it.

Tonight would see the lodge change from a fraternity of dabblers into an order favoured by the touch of Primordial Truth.

Everyone here knew it, and none more so than Maloghurst.

The Warmaster’s equerry entered the chamber via one of the vertical transit spines, clad in a long chasuble of ermine over his battleplate. Maloghurst gave a respectful nod. No rank structure existed within the Quiet Order, save that of lodge master, and even the Warmaster’s equerry had to respect that office.

‘Equerry,’ said Targost as Maloghurst limped to accompany him.

‘Lodge master,’ replied Maloghurst, turning to match Targost’s pace despite the fused mass of bone and cartilage within his pelvis and lower spine that stubbornly refused to heal. He walked with the aid of an ebony cane topped with an amber pommel-stone, but Targost suspected the equerry’s wounding was no longer as debilitating as he made out.

‘I doubt there is a more abandoned space aboard the Vengeful Spirit,’ said Maloghurst with a grin. ‘You realise, of course, that the lodge has no more need to hide itself in shadows.’

Targost nodded. ‘I know, but old habits, you understand?’

‘Absolutely,’ agreed Maloghurst. ‘Traditions must be maintained. Even more so now.’

Maloghurst had earned the soubriquet, ‘the Twisted’, for having a mind that wove labyrinthine intrigues around the Warmaster, but the old nickname had assumed a more literal connotation in the opening shots of the war-making on Terra.

The other Terra, where the misguided fool who believed himself Emperor had stood against the Sons of Horus.

No, Targost reminded himself, back then the Legion had still been the Luna Wolves, their name not yet reflecting the honour of the warrior that led them. Maloghurst had healed, and despite the poor taste of the old nickname, he desired it kept.

They moved through the throng, and as news of Maloghurst’s arrival spread, the warriors parted before them to reveal their destination.

Atop a raised plinth marked with chalked geometric symbols stood two structural beams welded together to form an ‘X’. Chained to the cross was a legionary stripped of his armour with his head fixed in place by a heavy iron clamp across his brow.

Ger Gerradon, late of Tithonus Assault, he’d taken two Chogorian tulwars through the lungs on Dwell, and by the time the Apothecaries got to him his oxygen-starved brain was irrevocably damaged. Nothing remained of the man he had once been, just a drooling meat-form who could serve no useful purpose within the Legion.

Until now.

Sixteen hooded lodge members arranged in a circle around Gerradon held weeping captives taken in the assault on Tyjun. Highborns for the most part, some native to Dwell, some Imperial imports; men and women who’d thrown themselves on the mercy of the Sons of Horus only to find they had none to give. In any conventional war they would be bargaining chips, tools of negotiation, but here they were something altogether more valuable. They sobbed and debased themselves with begging or attempts at bargaining, while others offered their loyalty or things far more precious.

A reverent hush descended on the chamber as Maloghurst and Targost stepped onto the plinth. Maloghurst made a meal out of his step, and Targost shook his head at the equerry’s theatrics.

‘Let’s get this done,’ said Targost, holding out his hand.

Maloghurst shook his head. ‘You can’t simply rush this, lodge master,’ he said. ‘I know you are all about the fundamentals, but this is not a breach to be stormed. Ritual is everything here, Serghar, the proper order of things must be observed, the right words spoken and the offerings made at precisely the right time.’

‘Just give me the knife,’ said Targhost. ‘You speak the words and tell me when to open their throats.’

The captives wailed and their captors tightened their grips.

Maloghurst produced a long dagger from within his robes, its blade curved and worked from dark stone. Its surface was chipped and crude, like something hacked from the ground by savages, but Targost knew its edge to be sharper than any arming chamber tech could match.

‘Is that…’ he began.

‘One of the blades Erebus crafted?’ said Maloghurst. ‘No, not that one of course, but one like it.’

Targost nodded and took the blade, testing its heft and flexing his fingers on the leather-wrapped handle. It felt good in his grip, natural. Made for him.

‘I like it,’ he said and turned to Ger Gerradon.

Like him, Gerradon wasn’t a true son, his features bearing a malnourished sharpness from a Cthonian childhood that no amount of genhancing could ever restore.

‘A loyal member of the lodge and a ferocious killer,’ said Targost. ‘A man born for assault duties. It’s a blow to the Legion to have lost his sword arm.’

‘If I have the truth of it, then Ger will fight alongside his brothers with a new soul within him.’

‘What the Seventeenth Legion call a daemon?’

‘An old term, but as good a word as any,’ agreed Maloghurst. ‘Lorgar’s sons call their twin-flames the Gal Vorbak. Ours will be the Luperci, the Brothers of the Wolf.’

Gerradon’s eyes were open, but unseeing. His lips parted, as though he was trying to speak, and drool spilled onto his chest.

‘Nothing of the man we knew remains,’ said Maloghurst. ‘This will restore him.’

‘Then let’s get it done,’ snapped Targost.

Maloghurst stood before Gerradon, placing a tattooed hand on his scarred chest. Targost didn’t remember the Twisted having tattoos, but recognised their provenance. The books Erebus had shown him, the ancient texts said to have been borne to Colchis from Old Earth, had been filled with stanzas of artes rendered in the same runic script.

‘Be ready with that knife, Serghar,’ said Maloghurst.

‘Have no fear on that score,’ Targost assured him.

Maloghurst nodded and began to speak, but in no language Targost had ever heard. The more the equerry spoke, the less Targost believed it was a language in any sense that he could comprehend.

He saw Maloghurst’s mouth moving, but the motion of his lips wasn’t matching the noise in Targost’s ears; like rusted metal grating on stone, a death rattle and a tuneless singer combined.

Targost coughed a wad of mucus. He tasted blood and spat onto the deck. He blinked away a momentary dizziness and tightened his grip on the stone dagger as the bile in his stomach climbed his gullet. Targost’s eyes widened as noxious black smoke streamed from the blade. The miasma clung to its edges and Targost felt the weight of murder in the dagger’s long existence. The temperature plummeted, his every exhalation visible as a long plume of breath.

‘Now,’ said Maloghurst and the sixteen hooded warriors pulled the captives’ heads back to expose their necks.

Targost stepped towards the nearest, a young man with handsome features and wide, terrified eyes.

‘Please, I just–’

Targost didn’t let him finish and plunged the smoke-edged dagger deep into his throat. Blood fountained from the grotesque wound. The hooded warrior pushed the dying man forward, and Targost moved on, opening one throat after another with no heed of his victims’ horror or last words.

As the last one died, their blood lapped around Targost’s boots and spilled over the edge of the plinth. The chalked symbols drank deeply, and Targost felt a tremor in his hand.

‘Mal…’ he said as his arm lifted the blade to his own throat.

Maloghurst didn’t respond, his lips still twisting in opposition to the unsounds he was making. Targost twisted his head, but the world around him was a frozen tableau.

‘Maloghurst!’ repeated Targost.

‘He can’t help you,’ said Ger Gerradon.

Targost looked into a face alight with malice and perverse enjoyment of suffering. No longer slack with brain death, Gerradon’s features were pulled in a rictus grin. His eyes were milky white and empty, like the unpainted eyes of a doll. Whatever their ritual had drawn from the warp was not Ger Gerradon, but something incalculably old, raw-birthed and bloody.

‘Sixteen? That’s the best you could do?’ it said. ‘Sixteen measly souls?’

‘It’s a sacred number,’ hissed Targost, fighting to keep the blade from reaching his neck. Despite the freezing temperatures, sweat ran in runnels down his face.

‘To who?’

‘To us, the Legion…’ grunted Targost. ‘We’re the Sixteenth Legion, the twin Octed.’

‘Ah, I see,’ said the warp-thing. ‘Sacred to you, but meaningless to the neverborn. After everything Erebus taught you people, you still manage to get it wrong.’

Anger touched Targost, and the blade’s inexorable path to the pulsing artery in his neck slowed.

‘Wrong? We summoned you, didn’t we?’

The thing wearing Gerradon’s flesh laughed. ‘You didn’t summon me, I came back of my own accord. I have so much to teach you.’

‘Came back?’ said Targost. ‘Who are you?’

‘I’m hurt you don’t recognise me, Serghar.’

The smoking edges of the gore-encrusted blade touched Targost’s neck. Skin parted before its razor tip. Blood pumped as he pushed it deeper into his neck.

‘Who am I?’ rasped the daemon. ‘I’m Tormaggedon.’

Rassuah flew the pathfinders from Old Himalazia to Ultima Thule, the outermost structure still considered to be in Terran orbit. Discounting the as yet unfinished Ardent Reef, Ultima Thule was the most recent addition to the inhabited plates that made stately circuits around humanity’s birth rock; smaller than the supercontinent of Lemurya, less productive than the industrial powerhouse of Rodinia and without the grandiose architecture of Antillia, Vaalbara or Kanyakumari.

It had been constructed sixty-two years previously, by workers since assigned to distant sectors of the Imperium. Eclipsed in scale and power by its grander brethren, its entry in the Terran orbital registry was little more than a footnote.

Over the course of its life, Ultima Thule had been quietly forgotten by the vast majority of Terra’s inhabitants. And where most orbital architects would lament such a fate for their creation, anonymity had always been the goal of Ultima Thule.

Its structure comprised of a pair of matte-black cylinders, five hundred metres in length and two hundred wide, connected by a central orb-hub. No armoured windows pierced its structure and no collision avoidance lights strobed to warn of its presence. Any space-farer lucky enough to catch a glimpse of Ultima Thule, could be forgiven for mistaking it for dead orbital junk.

That appearance was deliberately misleading, for Ultima Thule was one of the most sophisticated structures orbiting Terra, its endless suites of auspex quietly monitoring spatial traffic throughout the system.

A docking bay opened on its dark side, remaining visible only as long as it took to retrieve the void-capable Valkyrie. Auspex-hardened blast doors shut behind the assault carrier, and Ultima Thule continued its procession around the planet below as though it had never existed.

Anonymous and forgotten.

Silent and invisible.

Just as Malcador had decreed when he ordered it built.

The Repository was cool, the air kept at a constant relative humidity and temperature. The more fragile artefacts stored here were hermetically sealed in stasis fields, and Malcador tasted the tang of the recessed power generators.

Crystal-fronted cabinets lit up at his passing, but he spared their contents little notice. A book that had once plunged the world into war, sketches by the Polymath of Firenza the Emperor had – wisely, it turned out – deemed too dangerous for Perturabo to see, the half-formed sculpture of beauty incarnate.

Malcador had lied when he told young Khalid Hassan that these rough formed walls were all that remained of the Sigillite Fortress, but some truths were uncomfortable enough without burdening others with them.

The chamber was smaller than those that surrounded it, and it took Malcador a moment only to reach the stele of Gyptia. It sat on a reinforced timber cradle, the black gloss of its original construction undimmed by the passage of millennia. Lives had been lost to retrieve this fragment of humanity’s soul, as was the case with many of the objects stored here.

Malcador closed his eyes and placed his fingertips upon the cold surface of the stone. Granodiorite, an igneous rock similar to granite. Hard wearing, but not indestructible.

Given what it had unlocked in ages past, there was a pleasing symmetry to what it now allowed him to do. Malcador’s breathing slowed and the already cooled air chilled yet further.

‘My lord,’ he said.

Silence was Malcador’s only answer, and he feared the holocaust raging beneath the palace was too fierce, too all-consuming for a reply. Beneath wasn’t strictly speaking correct, but it was the only preposition that seemed to fit.

Malcador.

The Emperor’s voice echoed within his mind, stentorian and dominant, yet familiar and fraternal. Malcador felt its power, even over so immeasurable a distance, but also the effort it was taking to forge the link.

‘How goes the fight?’

We bleed out every day, while the daemons grow ever stronger. I do not have much time, my friend. War calls.

‘Leman Russ is on Terra,’ said Malcador.

I know. Even here, I can feel the Wolf King’s presence.

‘He brings word of the Lion. Twenty thousand Dark Angels are reportedly bound for Ultramar.’

Why does he not make haste for Terra?

Sweat ran down Malcador’s back at the strain of maintaining this connection. ‘There are… unsettling rumours of what is happening in Guilliman’s domain.’

I cannot see the Five Hundred Worlds. Why is that?

‘We call it the Ruinstorm. Nemo and I believe the slaughter on Calth to have been part of an orchestrated chain of events that precipitated the birth of a catastrophic and impenetrable warp storm.’

And what do you believe Roboute is doing?

‘It’s Guilliman, what do think he’s doing? He’s building an empire.’

And the Lion goes to stop him?

‘So the Wolf King says, my lord. It seems the warriors of the Lion stand with us after all.’

You doubted them? The First? Even after all they accomplished in the time before the others took up their swords?

‘I did,’ admitted Malcador. ‘After Rogal’s secret emissaries to their home world returned empty-handed, we feared the worst. But Caliban’s angels came to the Wolves’ aid when Alpharius threatened to destroy them.’

Alpharius… my son, what chance did you give my dream? Ah, even when war presses in from all sides, my sons still seek to press their advantage. They are like the feudal lords of old, scenting opportunity for their own advancement in the fires of adversity.

The regret pained Malcador’s thoughts.

‘Russ still plans to fight Horus eye to eye,’ said Malcador. ‘He sends my Knights to guide his blade and no words of mine can sway him from his course.’

You think he should not fight Horus?

‘Russ is your executioner,’ said Malcador tactfully. ‘But his axe falls a little too readily these days. Magnus felt it, now Horus will feel it.’

Two rebel angels. His axe falls on those deserving its smile.

‘And what happens when Russ takes it upon himself to decide who is loyal and who deserves execution?’

Russ is true-hearted, one of the few I know will never fall.

‘You suspect others may prove false?’

To my eternal regret, I do.

‘Who?’

Another long pause made Malcador fear his question would remain unanswered, but at last the Emperor replied.

The Khan makes a virtue of being unknowable, of being the mystery that none can answer. Some among his Legion have already embraced treachery, and others may yet.

‘What would you have me do, my lord?’

Keep watching him, Malcador. Watch the Khan more closely than any other.

‘I have never wanted to fly anything so much in all my life,’ said Rassuah.

Looking at the sleek, wedge-shaped craft with its jutting, aerodyne prow, Loken couldn’t help but agree with her.

‘I’m told it’s called Tarnhelm,’ he said.

‘Call it what you want, but if I’m not flying it within the hour, there’s going to be blood spilled,’ said Rassuah.

Loken grinned at her eagerness. He disliked aircraft on principle, but even he recognised something beautiful in the Tarnhelm.

Perhaps because it looked so utterly unlike any other aircraft in the Legiones Astartes inventory. The warcraft of the Legions were designed to be brutal, in appearance as well as effect. Their form followed function, which was to kill as quickly and efficiently as possible. Tarnhelm’s sleek lines spoke of an altogether different purpose.

Its basic structure was constructed around a central crew section with bulbous drive pods at the rear that tapered towards the prow and formed the ship’s delta-winged shape. Without any pennants or beacons, there was nothing to give any clue to its identity or affiliation.

‘What is it?’ asked Varren. ‘It’s not an attack ship or a guncutter; too few armaments. And there’s not enough armour for it to be a troop transport. One good hit is going to gut it. I don’t understand what it is.’

‘This is a craft designed to pass through the stars unseen,’ said Rama Karayan, and all eyes turned to look at him, as it was the most any of them had heard him say.

‘Why in the world would you want to do that?’ asked Callion Zaven, his expression as confused as Varren’s. ‘The point of the Legions is to be seen.’

‘Not always,’ said Altan Nohai. ‘What the Khan called a clever fighter is one who not only wins, but excels in winning with ease before the enemy even knows he is there.’

Zaven looked unconvinced. ‘Shock and awe becomes a lot harder when no one sees it coming.’

‘It’s got teeth, mind,’ said Ares Voitek, his servo-arms unlimbering to point out the barely visible seams of recessed weapon nacelles and missile pods. ‘But as Macer says, it’s not an attack ship.’

‘It’s a draugrjúka,’ said Bror Tyrfingr.

Seeing the looks of confusion among his fellow pathfinders, Bror shook his head and said, ‘Don’t you people understand Juvik?’

‘Juvik?’ asked Rubio.

‘Fenrisian hearth-cant,’ said Tubal Cayne. ‘It’s a stripped-down, simplified language. No subtlety to it – punchy and declarative, just like the warriors that speak it.’

‘Have a care, Tubal,’ warned Bror, squaring his shoulders. ‘A man could take offence at that.’

That seemed to confuse Cayne. ‘I don’t see how. Nothing I said was untrue. I’ve met enough Space Wolves to know that.’

Loken expected anger, but Bror laughed. ‘Space Wolves? Ha, I forgot that was your idiot name for the Rout. If I didn’t think you were being completely serious I’d rip your arms off. Stay by my side and I’ll show you just how subtle a Space Wolf can be.’

‘So what’s a draugrjúka?’ asked Loken.

‘A ghost ship,’ said Bror.

A grey-robed servile with augmetic implants worn around her skull like a tonsure had met the pathfinders in the docking bay, and she now led them aboard the Tarnhelm. The vessel’s interior was stripped back, with only the barest minimum of fitments that would allow it to carry crew.

Its astropath was kept in sealed cryo-stasis, and its Navigator had yet to be implanted in the tapered cupola on the dorsal section. The long-axis of the ship was a cramped dormitory, with alcoves serving as medicae bays, equipment stowage and sleeping areas. Individual crew compartments were set towards the rear of the craft, with a slender nave reaching from the communal areas of the ship to its tapered prow.

Rassuah made her way towards the bridge, while the rest of the pathfinders stowed their equipment in cunningly arranged lockers and weapon racks.

The Knights Errant had been extant only a short while, too short for any real traditions to bed in, but a custom that had been readily adopted was for each warrior to retain a single artefact from his former Legion.

Loken thought back to the battered metal crate in which he had kept his meagre belongings; the garrotting wire, the feathers and the broken combat blade. Junk to any other eyes than his, but there had been one item whose loss had grieved him.

The data-slate Ignace Karkasy had given him, the one from Euphrati Keeler. That had been a treasure beyond value, a record of the time when the universe made sense, when the Luna Wolves had been a byword for honour, nobility and brotherhood. Like everything else he had once owned, it was gone.

He snapped his chainsword into the locker’s blade rack, careful to fix it in place. Its blade was fresh from a manufactory city in Albyon and inscribed with a boast that it was warranted never to fail.

Just like the thousands of others forged there.

His bolter was no different, the product of manufactories geared for war on a galactic scale, where the ability to mass-produce reliable weaponry was of far greater importance that any considerations of individuality. Lastly, he placed the mirror tokens Severian had given him into the locker. Loken had thought about throwing them away, but some fatalistic instinct told him that he might yet have need of them.

He closed the locker, watching as the rest of his pathfinders stowed their gear. Tubal Cayne unpacked a piece of surveying gear, a modified theodolite with multiple auspex capabilities, Rama Karayan a rifle with an elongated barrel and oversized sight. Ares Voitek had his servo-harness with its burnished gauntlet icon, and Bror Tyrfingr stowed what appeared to be a leather cestus gauntlet of entwined knotwork with ebon claws like knife blades.

Callion Zaven appeared at Loken’s side, opening the locker next to him and slotting home a custom-worked boltgun with a clawed wing motif acid-etched onto its platework. Within the Luna Wolves, such weapons had been for officers, but the killing fields of Murder had shown Loken that many of the warriors in the III Legion wielded heavily embellished armaments.

Zaven saw Loken’s attention and said, ‘A poor effort, I know. Not a patch on my original bolter.’

‘That’s not your touchstone?’

‘Throne, no!’ said Zaven, unbuckling his hand-tooled leather sword belt and holding it between them ‘This is my touchstone.’

The sword’s handle was tightly wound golden wire, its pommel an ebony talon. The quillons were swept eagle wings with a glittering amethyst mounted at the centre of both sides.

‘Draw it,’ said Zaven.

Loken did so, and his admiration for the weapon increased tenfold. The weapon had heft, but was incredibly light. The handle and setting had been wrought by human hand, but the blade had never known a smith’s hammer. Curved like a Chogorian sweep-sword and milky white, dappling to a jaundiced yellow at its edge, the blade was clearly organic.

‘It’s a vapour-wraith hewclaw,’ said Zaven. ‘Cut it from one of their warrior caste on Jupiter after he’d stuck it through my heart. By the time I got out of the apothecarion my Legion had already moved on and I found myself part of the Crusader Host for a time. Disappointing, but it gave me the time to work the hewclaw into a duelling blade. Try it out.’

‘Perhaps another time,’ said Loken.

‘Indeed so,’ replied Zaven, taking no offence as he took the sword back from Loken. He grinned. ‘I heard how you put down that odious little bastard, Lucius. I wish I’d seen that.’

‘It was over quickly,’ said Loken. ‘There wasn’t much to see.’

Zaven laughed, and Loken saw a glint in his eye that might have been admiration or could have been appraisal. ‘I don’t doubt it. You’ll have to tell me about it someday. Or perhaps we might match blades on the journey.’

Loken shook his head. ‘Don’t you think we have enough enemies before us without looking for them in our own ranks?’

Zaven put his hands up, and Loken was instantly contrite.

‘As you wish,’ said Zaven, his eyes darting to Loken’s equipment case. ‘So what did you keep?’

‘Nothing,’ said Loken, blinking away the after-image of a hooded shadow towards the rear of the compartment. His heartbeat spiked and droplets of sweat beaded on his forehead.

‘Come on, everyone keeps something,’ grinned Zaven, oblivious to Loken’s discomfort. ‘Rubio has his little gladius, Varren that woodsman’s axe, and Qruze keeps that battered old boltgun. And Cayne has… whatever grubby engineer’s tool that is. Tell me, what did you keep?’

Loken slammed his locker shut.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I lost everything on Isstvan Three.’

Aside from the times he’d been deflowering his half-brother’s wife, Raeven had always hated Albard’s tower. Situated in the very heart of Lupercalia, it was a grim edifice of black stone and copper sheeting. The city was in a state of mourning, black flags and the entwined eagle and naga banners hanging from every window. Raeven’s late father might have been a bastard, but he was at least a bastard who’d earned his people’s respect.

Raeven climbed the stairs slowly, taking his time and savouring this culmination of his desires. Lyx and his mother followed behind, as eager as him to consummate this sublime moment.

The tower was kept dark. The Sacristans assigned to Albard’s care claimed his eyes could not tolerate light beyond the dimmest lumen. Raeven’s spies told him Albard never ventured beyond the tower’s top chambers, confined by lunacy and infrequent brushes with moribund lucidity.

‘I hope he’s rational,’ said Lyx, his sister-wife’s words seeming to take their cue from Raeven’s thoughts as they so often did. ‘It won’t be any fun if he’s lost in madness.’

‘Then you should prepare yourself for disappointment,’ said Raeven. ‘It’s a rare day our brother even knows his own name.’

‘He will be rational,’ said his mother, climbing the steps with wheezing mechanical awkwardness.

‘How can you be so sure?’ asked Raeven.

‘Because I have seen it,’ replied his mother, and Raeven knew not to doubt her. That Adoratrice consorts were privy to many secrets was well known all across Molech, but that those of House Devine could witness things not yet come to pass was known only to Lupercalia’s Knights.

The Devine Adoratrices had preserved that ability for thousands of years by keeping the genestock of their House from being diluted by inferior bloodlines. It surprised Raeven that Lyx had not seen what his mother had, but the ways of the Adoratrice were not his to know.

Cebella Devine, his mother and Adoratrice Drakaina to his father, was now at least a hundred years of age. Her husband had rejected cosmetic juvenat treatments for vanity’s sake, but Cebella embraced them with gusto. Her skin was lifted back over her skull like tightened plastic, fixed in place with surgical sutures to a grotesque headpiece that resembled a device of skull-violating horror.

A hunched pair of biologis servitors followed in Cebella’s wake, tethered to her via a series of hissing pipes and feeder tubes. Both were venom-blinded and implanted with numerous monitoring devices and gurgling, hissing cylinders containing gel-nutrients, anti-senescence compounds and restorative cell cultures harvested from vat-grown newborns.

To keep Cebella’s brittle bones from undue stresses, an ingenious scaffold of suspensor fields, exo-lattices and fibre-bundle muscles had been surgically bonded with her skeletal structure.

‘You’d better be right,’ snapped Lyx, straightening her bronze-panelled dress and arranging her hair. ‘It’ll be pointless if he’s no better than a beast or a vegetable.’

Lyx had once been wed to Albard, but her vows had been broken even before he’d put his betrothal ring on her. Though it had been their mother that engineered Raeven and Lyx’s relationship, Cebella held a depthless contempt for her daughter that Raeven could only attribute to jealousy of her apparent youth.

‘It won’t be pointless,’ he said, shutting them both up before they could get into one of their all-too-frequent arguments. His mother’s sickly flesh contorted with what he presumed was a smile, though it was hard to tell. ‘After all this time, I want to see the look in his eyes when I tell him I killed his father.’

‘Your father too, and mine,’ pointed out Lyx.

Their mother’s womb had ejected Raeven mere minutes before Lyx, but sometimes it felt like decades. Today was such a day.

‘I’m aware of that,’ he said, pausing just before he reached the upper landing of the tower. ‘I want him to see the woman who replaced his own mother on one side, his former wife on the other. I want him to know that everything that was and should have been his is now mine.’

Lyx slipped her arm through his, and his mood lightened. As she had done since they were suckled babes, she knew his moods and needs better than he. To her loving populace, her beauty and body were sustained by calisthenics and subtle juvenat treatments.

Raeven knew better.

Many of his wife’s long absences into Lupercalia’s hidden valleys were spent undergoing nightmarish chirurgical procedures administered by Shargali-Shi and his coven of androgyne Serpent Cultists. Raeven had witnessed one such operation, a dreadful blend of surgery, alchemy and carnal ritual, and vowed never to do so again. The Ophiolater claimed to channel the Vril-ya, the power of the Serpent Gods once worshipped all across Molech in an earlier age. Raeven didn’t know if that was true or not, but the results spoke for themselves. Though nearly sixty-five, Lyx could easily pass for less than half that.

‘The serpent moons grow ever fuller,’ said Lyx. ‘Shargali-Shi will call the Vril-yaal to gather soon.’

He smiled. A six day bacchanalia of intoxicating venoms and writhing hedonism within the hidden temple caverns was just what he needed to lighten the coming burden of planetary command.

‘Yes,’ he said with a grin of anticipation, and all but bounded up the last few steps.

The entrance vestibule of the topmost chambers was dark, the two Dawn Guard standing sentinel at the onward doorway little more than dark silhouettes. Despite the poor light, Raeven knew both of them; soldiers from his mother’s personal detail. He wondered if they’d shared her bed, and judged it more than likely from the conspicuous aversion of their gaze.

They stepped aside as Raeven approached, one opening the door for him as the other bowed deeply. Raeven swept past them and moved through richly appointed antechambers, medicae bays and chambers of observation.

A trio of nervous Sacristans awaited them at the entrance to Albard’s private rooms. Each was red-robed, in imitation of their Mechanicum masters, plugged with bionics and rank with sweat and grease. Not quite Cult Mechanicum, but too altered to be thought of as human either. If not for their rote maintenance of the Knights, Raeven would have advocated their elimination years ago.

‘My lord,’ said a Sacristan Raeven thought was called Onak.

‘Does he know?’ said Raeven.

‘No, my lord,’ said Onak. ‘Your instructions were most precise.’

‘Good, you’re a competent Sacristan and it would have irked me to flay you alive.’

All three Sacristans moved aside with alacrity as Raeven pushed open the door. The air that gusted from within was musty and stifling, a fetor of urine, flatus and insanity.

A deep couch with a sagging footstool was set on the edge of a dimmed fireplace that was entirely holographic. Upon the couch sat a man who looked old enough to be Raeven’s grandfather. Denied sunlight and the rejuvenating surgeries of his half-brother, Albard Devine was a wretch of a human being, his skull hairless and pale as newly-hatched maggots.

Before his mind had snapped, Albard’s physique had been robust and stocky, but now he was little more than a drained revenant of parchment-dry flesh sunken over a rack of misaligned bones.

Albard had been cruelly handsome, bluntly so, with the stony harshness people expected of a warrior king. That man was long gone. A gelatinous lesion emerging from the burn scars he’d received upon his maturity leaked yellow pus into his long beard. Clotted with mucus and spilled food the beard reached almost to Albard’s waist, and the one eye that stared at the fire was jaundiced and milky with cataracts.

‘Is that you, Onak?’ said Albard, his voice a tremulous husk of a thing. ‘The fire must be dying. I’m cold.’

He doesn’t even realise it’s a hologram, thought Raeven, and his mother’s assurance that his half-brother would be in a state of relative lucidity seemed dashed.

‘It’s me, brother,’ said Raeven, moving to stand beside the couch. The stench of corruption grew stronger, and he wished he’d brought a vial of Caeban root to waft under his nose.

‘Father?’

‘No, you idiot,’ he said. ‘Listen closely. It’s me, Raeven.’

‘Raeven?’ said Albard, shifting uneasily on the couch. Something rustled beneath the couch in response to Albard’s movement, and Raeven saw the thick, serpentine body of Shesha. His father’s last surviving naga shifted position with creaking leathery motion, a forked tongue flicking from her fanged mouth. Well over two centuries old, Shesha was in the last years of life, near blind and her long, scaled body already beginning to ossify.

‘Yes, brother,’ said Raeven, kneeling beside Albard and reluctantly placing a hand on his knee. The fabric of his coverlet was stiff and encrusted, but Raeven felt the brittle, bird-like bones beneath. A haze of filth billowed from the coverlet, and Raeven felt his gorge rise.

‘I don’t want you here,’ said Albard and Raeven felt a flutter of hope that his half-brother was at least in touching distance of sanity. ‘I told them not to let you in.’

‘I know, but I have something to tell you.’

‘I don’t want to hear it.’

‘You will.’

‘No.’

‘Father is dead.’

Albard finally deigned to look at him, and Raeven saw himself reflected in that glossy white, hopeless eye. The augmetic had long since ceased to function.

‘Dead?’

‘Yes, dead,’ said Raeven, leaning in despite the rancid miasma surrounding Albard. His half-brother blinked his one eye and looked past his shoulder, now aware of the presence of others in the room.

‘Who else is here?’ he said, sounding suddenly afraid.

‘Mother, my mother,’ said Raeven. ‘And Lyx. You remember her?’

Albard’s head sank back to his chest, and Raeven wondered if he’d drifted off into some chem-induced slumber. The Sacristans kept Albard moderately sedated at all times to keep the ravaged synapses of his brain from causing an explosive aneurysm within his skull.

‘I remember a whore by that name,’ said Albard as a rivulet of yellowed saliva leaked from the dry gash of his mouth.

Raeven grinned as he felt Lyx’s rising fury. Men had endured days of unimaginable agony for far less.

‘Yes, that’s her,’ said Raeven. He’d pay for that later, but more and more he relished the punishment more than the pleasure.

‘Did you kill him?’ said Albard, fixing Raeven with his rheumy gaze. ‘Did you kill my father?’

Raeven looked back over his shoulder as Cebella and Lyx drew closer to better savour Albard’s humiliation. His mother’s features were unmoving, but Lyx’s cheeks were flushed in the light of the holographic fire.

‘I did, yes, and the memory of it still makes me smile,’ said Raeven. ‘I should have done it a long time ago. The old bastard just wouldn’t let go, wouldn’t hand me what was rightfully mine.’

Albard let out a wheezing exhalation of breath as dry as winds over the Tazkhar steppe. It took a second for Raeven to recognise the sound as bitter laughter.

‘Rightfully yours? You remember who you’re talking to? I’m the firstborn of House Devine.’

‘Ah, of course,’ said Raeven, standing and wiping his hands on a silk handkerchief he withdrew from his brocaded coat. ‘Yes, well, it’s not like our House can be led by a cripple who can’t even bond with his Knight, now is it?’

Albard coughed into his beard, a dry, hacking retch that brought up yet more phlegmy matter. When he looked up, his eye was clearer than it had been in decades.

‘I’ve had a lot of time to think, over these long years, brother,’ said Albard, when the coughing fit subsided. ‘I know I could have recovered enough to leave this tower, but you and Lyx made sure that never happened, didn’t you?’

‘Mother helped,’ said Raeven. ‘So how does it feel, brother? To see everything that should have been yours is now mine?’

‘Honestly? I couldn’t care less,’ said Albard. ‘You think after all this time I care what happens to me? Mother’s pet Sacristans keep me barely alive, and I know I’ll never leave this tower. Tell me, brother, why in the world would I care what you do anymore?’

‘Then we’re done here,’ said Raeven, fighting to keep his anger from showing. He’d come here to humiliate Albard, but the wretched bastard had been hollowed out too much to appreciate the pain.

He turned to face Cebella and Lyx. ‘Take the blood you need, but make it quick.’

‘Quick?’ pouted Lyx.

‘Quick,’ repeated Raeven. ‘The Lord Generals and the Legions have called for a council of war and I’ll not start my governorship by having anyone doubting my competency.’

Lyx shrugged and pulled a naga-fang filleting knife from the many concealed folds of her dress as she stood above the shrivelled wraith of her former husband and half-brother.

‘Shargali-Shi needs the blood of the firstborn,’ said Lyx, dropping to one knee and resting the blade against the side of Albard’s neck. ‘Not all of it, but a lot.’

Albard spat in her face.

‘This may be quick,’ she said, wiping her face, ‘but I promise it will be agonising.’

SEVEN

The Nameless Fortress
War council
The gift

Loken stepped onto the cold embarkation deck of the orbital fortress. Fixed a hundred kilometres above Titan’s surface and swathed in the darkness of its night-side, the bleak station spun gently above an active cryovolcano. Rassuah had flown the Tarnhelm onto its embarkation deck with a light hand at the controls, her every auspex warning that she was bracketed by lethal ordnance.

Vapour rose from the void-cold flanks of the Tarnhelm, and Loken sweated in his armour. The deck was enormous, with space enough for great prison-barques to disgorge their human cargo and the custodians of the fortress to render them.

A squad of mortal warriors in gloss-red armour and silver-visored helms awaited him at the base of the ramp, but Loken ignored them in favour of the broadly built veteran standing before them.

Armoured identically to Loken, the warrior’s deeply tanned and deeper lined face were well known to him. White hair, kept close-cropped, and a neat beard of the same hue made him look old. Pale eyes that had seen too much were even older.

‘Loken,’ said Iacton Qruze, his voice little more than a whisper. ‘It’s good to see you, lad.’

‘Qruze,’ replied Loken, coming forward to take the old warrior’s hand. The grip was firm, unyielding, as if Qruze were afraid to let go. ‘What is this place?’

‘A place of forgetting,’ said Qruze.

‘A prison?’

Qruze nodded, as though reluctant to expound on the grim purpose behind the nameless fortress.

‘An unkind place,’ said Loken, taking in the featureless walls and bleak, institutional grimness. ‘Not a place to which the ideals of the Imperium easily cling.’

‘Perhaps not,’ agreed Qruze, ‘but only the young and naïve believe wars can be won without such places. And to my lasting regret, I am neither.’

‘None of us are, Iacton,’ said Loken. ‘But why do we find you here?’

Qruze hesitated, and Loken saw his eyes dart in the direction of Tisiphone, the great double-edged sword harnessed across his back.

‘Did you bring them?’ asked Qruze.

‘All but one,’ answered Loken, curious as to why Qruze had ignored his question.

‘Who didn’t you get?’

‘Severian.’

Qruze nodded. ‘He was always going to be the hardest to convince. Well, our mission just went from almost impossible to nigh suicidal.’

‘I think that’s the part he objected to.’

‘He always was a clever man,’ said Qruze.

‘You knew him?’ asked Loken, and instantly regretted it when he saw a distant look enter Qruze’s eyes.

‘I fought alongside the Twenty-Fifth Company on Dahinta,’ said Qruze.

‘The overseers,’ said Loken, remembering the hard fought campaigns to cleanse the derelict cities of scavenger machines.

‘Aye, it was Severian that got us past the circuit defences of the Silicate Palace to the inner precincts of the Archdroid,’ said Qruze. ‘He saved us months of grinding attrition. I remember when he first brought word of the–’

Loken was well used to Iacton Qruze’s wandering reminiscences, but this was not the time to indulge his fondness for old Legion history.

‘We should be going,’ he said before Qruze could go any further.

‘Aye, you’re right, lad,’ agreed Qruze with a sigh. ‘The sooner I’m away from this damn place the better. Necessity is all well and good, but that doesn’t make what we do in its name any easier.’

Loken turned to board the Tarnhelm, but Qruze made no move to follow him.

‘Iacton?’

‘This won’t be easy for you, Garviel,’ said Qruze.

Instantly alert, Loken said, ‘What won’t?’

‘There’s someone here who needs to speak to you.’

‘To me? Who?’

Qruze inclined his head towards the red-armoured gaolers, who snapped to attention in escort formation.

‘She asked for you by name, lad,’ said Qruze.

‘Who did?’ repeated Loken.

‘Best you see for yourself.’

Of all the hells Loken had seen and imagined, few compared to the bleak desolation and hopelessness of this orbital prison. Every aspect of its design appeared calculated to crush the human spirit, from the grim institutional mundanity of its appearance to the oppressive gloom that offered no respite or any hope that its occupants would ever see open skies again.

Qruze had boarded the Tarnhelm, leaving him in the custody of the fortress’s gaolers. They moved with precision and appeared to care little for the fact that he was a warrior of the Legions. To them, he was just another detail to be factored into their security protocols.

They marched him through vaulted corridors of dark iron and echoing chambers that still bore faint traces of blood and faeces no amount of cleaning fluid could ever scrub away. The route was not direct, and several times Loken was sure they had doubled back over their course, following a twisting path deeper into the heart of the fortress.

His escorting gaolers were trying to disorient him, make him lose any sense of which way they might have come or in which direction lay the exit. A tactic that might work on ordinary prisoners, already half-broken and desperate, but one that was wasted on a legionary with an eidetic sense of direction.

As they marched down a winding screw-stair, Loken tried to imagine who could be incarcerated here that might have asked for him by name.

It should have been easy; Qruze had said ‘she’, and he knew few females.

Legion life was an overtly masculine environment, though the Imperium cared little for the sex of the soldiers that made up its armies, flew its starships and facilitated its operation. Most of the women he’d met were dead, so maybe this was someone who’d since learned of his existence. A sister or mother, or perhaps even the daughter of someone he’d once known.

He heard distant screams and the soft echo of weeping. The sounds had no obvious source and Loken had the unsettling impression of years of misery so intense they had imprinted on the walls themselves.

His guardians eventually led him to a barred chamber suspended over a vault of complete darkness. A number of passageways led from the chamber, each narrow enough for a mortal, but almost claustrophobic for a warrior of his stature. They moved along the rightmost corridor, and Loken detected the unmistakable stench of human flesh and ingrained filth and sweat. But most of all he smelled despair.

His escort stopped at a cell secured by a heavy iron door marked with alphanumerics and what looked like some kind of lingua-technis. It meant nothing to him, as he suspected was the point. Everything about this place was designed to be unfamiliar and unwelcoming.

A lock disengaged and the door rose into the frame with a clockwork ratcheting sound, though none of the guards had touched it. Remote contact with a centralised control room most likely. The guards stood aside and Loken didn’t waste any words on them, ducking beneath the lintel and stepping within.

Almost no light penetrated the cell, only diffuse reflections from the corridor outside, but that was more than enough for Loken to make out the outline of a kneeling figure.

Loken was no expert on the female form, but the figure’s loose robes gave little in its shape to distinguish it. A head turned towards him at the sound of the door opening, and Loken saw something familiar in its faintly elongated occipital structure.

A faint buzzing sound came from the high ceiling, and a humming florescent lumen disc sparked to life. It flickered for a few seconds before the freshly routed power stabilised.

At first Loken thought this was a hallucination or another vision of someone long dead, but when she spoke, it was the voice he knew from the many hours they had spent in remembrance.

He remembered her as being small, even though most mortals were small to him. Her skin had been so black he’d wondered if it had been dyed, but the sickly light of the lumen disk made it seem somehow grey.

Her skull was hairless, made ovoid by cranial implants.

She smiled, the expression faltering and unfamiliar. Loken guessed it had been a long time since she had need of those particular muscles.

‘Hello, Captain Loken,’ said Mersadie Oliton.

Hacked from the rock of the mountains long before the I Legion built the Citadel of Dawn, the Hall of Flames was a raked amphitheatre of rulership. In the long centuries since then, a vault had had been built around the amphitheatre, a fortress around the vault and a city around the fortress.

Much had changed on Molech since then, but the Hall retained much of its original purpose. The firstborn scions of House Devine were still ritually burned here and the planet’s rulers still made decisions affecting the lives of millions here. It was, however, no longer a place where mechanised warriors settled their honour duels with fights to the death.

Right now, Raeven almost wished it was.

A hail of stubber fire from Banelash would make short work of the squabbling representatives and silence their strident voices.

As pleasant a fantasy as that was, Raeven took a deep breath and tried to pay attention to what was going on around him. Enthroned at the centre of the amphitheatre, Raeven held the bull-headed sceptre said to have been borne by the Stormlord himself. The artefact was certainly ancient, but that anything could have survived thousands of years without blemish seemed unlikely.

He dragged his focus back to the five hundred men and women filling the tiered chamber; the senior military officers of Molech. Aides, scriveners, calculus logi, savants and ensigns surrounded them like acolytes, and Raeven was reminded of Shargali-Shi and his Serpent Cult devotees.

Castor Alcade and three grim-faced Ultramarines sat on the stone benches at floor-level across from Vitus Salicar. He too was not alone, with a Blood Angel in red gold to his left, another in black to his right.

Tyana Kourion, Lord General of the Grand Army of Molech, sat motionless in the centre of the next tier in her dress greens, stoic and grim. Colonels from a dozen regiments gathered around her like moths drawn to a beneficent flame. Raeven didn’t know them, but recognised Kourion’s immediate subordinates.

The heads of the four operational theatres were each seated beneath the sigil denoting one of the cardinal compass points.

Clad in her signature drakescale burnoose and golden eye-mask was Marshal Edoraki Hakon of the Northern Oceanic, and sat along from her was Colonel Oskur von Valkenberg of the Western Marches, whose uniform looked as though he’d slept in it for a month. Commander Abdi Kheda of the Kushite Eastings wore full body armour as though she expected to fight her way back through the jungles to her posting, and finally the Khan of the Southern Steppe, Corwen Malbek, sat cross-legged with a longsword and rifle balanced across his knees.

Behind the four commanders sat hundreds of colonels, majors and captains of the various regiments of the Imperial Army, each clad in their battledress armour. The sheer variety of uniforms had the effect of making the gathered soldiery look like revellers in a gaudy carnival. Until now, Raeven hadn’t quite grasped just how many regiments were garrisoned on Molech.

His mother and Lyx were in the great gallery above, already in bitter disagreement over the course he should take.

Lyx spoke of the vision she’d had the night of Raeven’s Becoming, of how his actions would decide the course of a great war fought on Molech.

Both claimed the power of foresight, but neither could say with any certainty what those actions would be or in whose favour he would turn the war. Was he to align with Horus, and in so doing be granted dominion of the systems around Molech? Or was it his destiny to fight the Warmaster and win glory and repute in his defeat? Both roads offered hope of fulfilling his sister’s prophetic vision, but which to choose?

In addition to the ground forces, Molech boasted a sizeable naval presence, with a fleet of over sixty vessels, including eight capital ships and numerous frigates less than a hundred years old. Lord Admiral Brython Semper appeared to be asleep, though such a feat was surely impossible in so noisy an environment. Uniformed ratings took notes for him, but Raeven suspected Semper would never read them. He had no interest in ground-pounding warfare. If the Warmaster’s forces reached Molech’s surface, he would already be lost to the void.

Seated apart from the branches of conventional warriors were the Mechanicum contingents, brooding figures swathed in a mix of reds and blacks who each kept to their own little enclaves. Raeven knew more than most of the Mechanicum, but even that was rumour and second-hand gossip culled from his spies among the Sacristans.

In the position of prime importance stood the Mechanicum being designated Bellona Modwen of the Ordo Reductor. The senior Martian Adept was fully encased in gloss-green cybernetic body armour that made her look like a seated sarcophagus. The sinister mech-warrior cohorts of Thallax were hers to command, as was a fearsome array of war machines, tanks and unknowable technologies locked in the catacombs of Mount Torger.

Her magi trained the Sacristans and kept the Knights functional. As such, the Martian Priesthood was a substantial power bloc on Molech and had the right to attend every military conclave, though they seldom exercised that right.

The Mechanicum and the fleet might be keeping their own counsel, but the junior officers of the Army were making up for their absent voices. They loudly hectored the speakers below them, either in complete agreement or to drown out what they saw as rank stupidity.

Raeven couldn’t decide which.

Current Right of Voice belonged to the Warmonger of Legio Fortidus; an amazonian looking woman in an oil-stained khaki bodyglove named Ur-Nammu. In heavily accented Gothic, she set out the position of her Legio, which, to Raeven’s ears ran thusly.

Princeps Uta-Dagon and Utu-Lerna would not endorse any plan that didn’t involve charging the Titans of Legio Fortidus straight at the enemy the instant they landed.

Opinicus, the Invocatio of Legio Gryphonicus, held the view that just because the rest of Legio Fortidus had been wiped out on Mars was no reason for the rest of them to throw themselves on the swords of self-sacrifice.

As Raeven understood it, both Ur-Nammu and Opinicus undertook roughly the same role within their Legios, a form of ambassador between the inhuman Titan princeps and those they must perforce fight alongside.

Their bickering was pointless, for Carthal Ashur, the cruelly handsome Calator Martialis of Legio Crucius had yet to speak. The lesser ambassadors would eventually defer to him, for the largest Titan on Molech was a Crucius engine, the ancient colossus known as Paragon of Terra. Ashur carried the authority of the Princeps Magnus, Etana Kalonice, and if she had been roused from her war-dreams beneath Iron Fist Mountain, then the smaller Legios would undoubtedly fall into line behind her.

The ambassadors of the Legios eventually finished speaking and deliberations moved onto logistical matters: the establishment of supply lines, ordnance depots and stockpiling. Raeven’s threshold for boredom – already stretched thin by the hours of debate – was pushed to breaking point by long recitations of supply levels. A dozen aexactor clerks had already spoken, and dozens more stood in line to be heard.

Raeven rose from his throne and hammered the sceptre on the stone floor of the hall, eliciting fearful gasps from the reliquary keepers. He drew his pistol and aimed it at the nearest scrivener and his parchment-spewing data-slate.

‘You. Shut up. Right now,’ he said, his drawing of the weapon cutting through the droning account of lasrifle power-cell shortages at the Kushite Preceptory Line. ‘All of you listen very carefully to what I’m about to say. I will shoot the next scribe who dares to read an inventory list or stock level. Right through the head.’

The clerks lowered their data-slates and shuffled uncomfortably in place.

‘That’s what I thought,’ said Raeven. ‘Right, will someone tell me something of actual bloody importance. Please.’

Castor Alcade of the Ultramarines stood and said, ‘What sort of thing are you looking to hear, Lord Devine? This is how wars are fought, with properly emplaced lines of supply and a fully functioning infrastructure in place to support the front-line forces. If you want to hold this world against the Warmaster, then these are the things you need to know.’

‘No,’ said Raeven. ‘They’re the things you need to know. All I need to know is where I will ride into battle. I have an army of scriveners, quartermasters and savants to deal with numbers and lists.’

‘The Five Hundred Worlds are burning,’ snapped Alcade, ‘yet my Ultramarines stand ready to fight and die for a world not their own. Speak like that again, and I’ll take every warrior back to Ultramar.’

‘The Emperor Himself tasked your Legion and the Blood Angels with the defence of Molech,’ said Raeven with a mocking smile. ‘You would forsake that duty? I don’t think so.’

‘You would be wise not to test that theory,’ warned Alcade.

‘I am the rightful ruler of Molech,’ snapped Raeven. ‘Military command of this world falls to me, and if I learned anything from my father, may he rest in peace, it’s that a ruler needs to surround himself with the best people he can, delegate authority and then not interfere.’

‘An Imperial commander can delegate authority,’ said Alcade, ‘but never responsibility.’

Raeven struggled to control his anger, feeling it twist in his chest like a poisoned blade.

‘My House has ruled Molech for generations,’ he said with cold hostility. ‘I know the meaning of responsibility.’

Alcade shook his head. ‘I’m not sure you do, Lord Devine. Responsibility is a unique concept. You can share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you. Blood has given you command of Molech, and its security is your responsibility. No evasion, or wilful avoidance of that fact can shift it to others.’

Raeven forced a mask of composure to settle upon his features and nodded as though accepting the legate’s patronising words as wisdom.

‘Your words carry the acumen of your primarch,’ he said, each word filling his belly with cankerous venom. ‘I will, of course, review the recommendations of the tithe-takers in due course, but perhaps this is a time for war stratagems rather than dry lists of numbers and dispute between allies?’

Alcade nodded and bowed in wary agreement.

‘Indeed so, Lord Devine,’ said Alcade, sitting back down.

Raeven let out a poisoned breath that felt like it was scorching his throat. He fixed his gaze on Brython Semper, taking a moment to compose himself and giving the Lord Admiral’s aide time to elbow him in the ribs.

‘Admiral Semper, can you tell us how long we have before the War-master’s forces reach Molech?’

Dressed in a regal purple frock coat of baroque ornamentation, Brython Semper stood and fastened his top button. The Lord Admiral’s hair was silver white and pulled into a long scalp lock, his face a scarred, partially augmetic mask.

‘Of course, my lord,’ he said, inloading the contents of his aide’s data-slate to his ocular implant. ‘The astropathic choirs send word of impending arrivals of scores of vessels, perhaps as many as forty or fifty in total. Nor are the approaching craft making any secret of their arrival. I’m getting all sorts of nonsense about astropaths hearing wolves howling in the warp and ships screaming their designations. More than likely it’s some form of empyreal distortion or simply reflected vox-transmissions, but it’s clear the Warmaster wants us to know he’s coming. Though if he thinks we’re a bunch of cowards who’ll run screaming at the first sign of the enemy, he’s in for a rude awakening.’

Vitus Salicar interrupted the Lord Admiral before he could continue. ‘It would be a mistake to think that just because you outnumber the Warmaster’s fleet, you hold the upper hand. Legion void-war is a savage, merciless thing.’

Semper bowed to the Blood Angel and said, ‘I know full well how dangerous the Space Marines are, captain.’

‘You don’t,’ said Salicar sadly. ‘We are killers, reapers of flesh. You must never forget that.’

Before the Lord Admiral could respond to the Blood Angel’s melancholic tone, Raeven said, ‘How soon will the enemy be here?’

Visibly struggling to contain his temper in the face of Salicar’s dismissal of his fleet’s capabilities, Semper spoke slowly and carefully.

‘The Master of Astropaths’ best estimate is a real space breach any day now, putting them within reach of Molech in around two weeks. I’ve already issued a muster order to pull our picket ships back from the system’s edge.’

‘You won’t engage the traitors in open space?’

‘Since I am not in the habit of throwing away the lives of my crews, no, I will not,’ said Semper. ‘As Captain Salicar helpfully pointed out, the warships of the Space Marines are not to be underestimated, so our best course of action is to dispatch a provocateur force to goad the traitors onto the horns of our orbital guns. Our main fleet will remain within the umbra of the orbital batteries on the Karman line. Between the hammer and anvil of our static guns and the warfleet, we can gut the traitor ships before they can land so much as a single warrior.’

Despite his bombastic tone, Raeven liked the cut of Semper’s jib and nodded.

‘Do it, Lord Admiral,’ he said. ‘Dispatch the provocateur force and wish them good hunting.’

The cell had no furniture, not even a bed. A thin mattress lay folded in one corner, together with a chipped night-soil pot and a small box, like a presentation case for a medal.

‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ said Mersadie, rising from her kneeling position.

Loken’s mouth opened, but no sounds came out.

This was the second dead person he’d seen, but this one was flesh and blood. She was here. Mersadie Oliton, his personal remembrancer.

She was alive. Here. Now.

She wasn’t the same though. The harsh light revealed faded scars tracing looping arcs over the sides and upper surfaces of her diminished skull. Surgical scars. Excisions.

She saw him looking and said, ‘They took out my embedded memory coils. All the images and all the remembrances I’d stored. All gone. All I have left of them are my organic memories and even they’re beginning to fade.’

‘I left you on the Vengeful Spirit,’ said Loken. ‘I thought you must be dead.’

‘I would be if it wasn’t for Iacton,’ replied Mersadie.

‘Iacton? Iacton Qruze?’

‘Yes. He saved us from the murder of the remembrancers and got us off the ship,’ said Mersadie. ‘He didn’t tell you?’

‘No,’ said Loken. ‘He didn’t.’

‘We escaped with Iacton and Captain Garro.’

‘You were on the Eisenstein?’ said Loken, disbelief and wonder competing for his full attention. Qruze had said little of the perilous journey from Isstvan, but neglecting to mention Mersadie’s survival beggared belief.

‘And I wasn’t the only one Iacton saved.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Euphrati got off the Vengeful Spirit, Kyril too.’

‘Sindermann and Keeler are alive?’

Mersadie nodded. ‘As far as I know, but before you ask, I don’t know where they are. I haven’t seen either of them in years.’

Loken paced the interior of the cell, raw emotions surging like a chaotic tide within him. Sindermann had been a dear friend to him. A mentor of superlative intellect and a confidante of sorts, a bridge between trans-human sensibilities and mortal concerns. That Keeler had also survived was a miracle, for the imagist had a real knack for getting herself into trouble.

‘You didn’t know she was alive?’ asked Mersadie.

‘No,’ said Loken.

‘You’ve heard of the Saint?’

Loken shook his head. ‘No. What saint?’

‘You have been out of the loop, haven’t you?’

Loken paused, angry and confused. She was not to blame, but she was here. He wanted to lash out, but released a shuddering breath that seemed to expel a heavy weight of bilious humours.

‘I was dead, I think,’ he said at last. ‘For a while. Or as good as dead. Maybe I was just lost, so very lost.’

‘But you came back,’ said Mersadie, reaching out to take his hand. ‘They brought you back because you’re needed.’

‘So I’m told,’ said Loken wearily, curling his fingers around hers, careful not to squeeze too hard.

They stood unmoving, neither willing to break the silence or the shared intimacy. Her skin was soft, reminding Loken of a fleeting moment in his life. When he had been young and innocent, when he had loved and been loved in return. When he had been human.

Loken sighed and released Mersadie’s hand.

‘I have to get you out of here,’ he said.

‘You can’t,’ she said, withdrawing her hand.

‘I’m one of Malcador’s chosen,’ said Loken. ‘I’ll send word to the Sigillite and have you taken back to Terra. I’m not letting you rot away in here another minute.’

‘Garviel,’ said Mersadie, and her use of his given name stopped him in his tracks. ‘They’re not going to let me out of here. Not for now, at least. I spent a long time in the heart of the Warmaster’s flagship. People have been executed for a lot less.’

‘I’ll vouch for you,’ said Loken. ‘I’ll guarantee your loyalty.’

Mersadie shook her head and folded her arms.

‘If you didn’t know who I was, if you hadn’t shared your life with me, would you want someone like me released? If I was a stranger, what would you do? Turn me loose or keep me imprisoned?’

Loken took a step forward. ‘I can’t just leave you here. You don’t deserve this.’

‘You’re right, I don’t deserve this, but you don’t have a choice,’ said Mersadie. ‘You have to leave me.’

Her hand reached up to brush the bare metal of his unmarked plate. Thin fingers traced the line of his pauldron and swept across the curve of the shoulder guard.

‘It’s strange to see you in this armour.’

‘I no longer have a Legion,’ he said simply, angry at her wilful desire to languish in this prison.

She nodded. ‘They told me you died on Isstvan, but I didn’t believe them. I knew you were alive.’

‘You knew I’d survived?’

‘I did.’

‘How?’

‘Euphrati told me.’

‘You said you didn’t know where she was.’

‘I don’t.’

‘Then how–’

Mersadie turned away, as though reluctant to give voice to her thoughts for fear of his ridicule. She bent to retrieve the presentation case from the ground next to the mattress. When she turned back to him, he saw her eyes were wet with tears.

‘I dreamed of Euphrati,’ she said. ‘She told me you’d come here. I know, I know, it sounds ridiculous, but after all I’ve seen and been through, it’s almost normal.’

The anger drained from Loken, replaced by an echoing sense of helplessness. Mersadie’s words touched something deep within him, and he could hear the soft breath of a third person, the ghost of a shadow in a room where none existed.

‘It isn’t ridiculous,’ said Loken. ‘What did she say?’

‘She told me to give you this,’ said Mersadie, holding out the case. ‘To pass on.’

‘What is it?’

‘Something that once belonged to Iacton Qruze,’ she said. ‘Something she said he needs to have again.’

Loken took the box, but didn’t open it.

‘She said to remind Iacton that he is the Half-heard no longer, that his voice will be heard louder than any other in his Legion.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Mersadie. ‘It was a dream, it’s not like it’s an exact science.’

Loken nodded, though what he was hearing made little sense. At least as little sense as answering a summons to war on the word of a dead man.

‘Did Euphrati say anything else?’ he asked.

Mersadie nodded and the tears brimming on the edge of her eyes like a river about to break its banks spilled down her cheeks.

‘Yes,’ sobbed Mersadie. ‘She said to say goodbye.’

EIGHT

The Eater of Lives
Confrontation
Hope in lies

The apothecarion decks of the Endurance were cold, bare metal and reeked of the embalmers art. Acrid chemicals fogged the air and hissing vats of noxious fluids bubbled on retorts between dull iron slabs, suspended cryo-tubes and racks of surgical equipment.

Mortarion had spent altogether too much time here already in the pain-filled days following the attack of Meduson’s sleeper assassins. Swathed in counterseptic wraps and bathed in regenerative poultices like an embalmed king of the Gyptia, his superhuman metabolism had taken only seven hours to undo the worst of the damage.

A squad of Deathshroud Terminators escorted him through the artificially cold space with their manreapers gripped loosely. The primarch’s honour guard lightly rocked their outsized scythes from shoulder to shoulder to keep them in motion. Even on the flagship, they were taking no chances.

Frost webbed the canted hafts and the light of organ-harvesters glittered from the ice forming on the blades. Armoured in dusky white armour edged in a mixture of crimson and olive drab, they spread out in a pyramid formation, threat auspex alert for the intruder they knew was somewhere on this deck.

Mortarion went bareheaded, fresh skin grafts flushed with highly-oxygenated blood that made him look healthier than he had in centuries. A rebreather gorget still covered the lower half of his face, and gusts of earthy breath sighed from its portcullis-like grille. His sockets were craters cut in a lunar landscape, his eyes nuggets of amberglass.

Silence was clamped to his armour’s backplate. He had no need of its edge, the Deathshroud had more than enough to go round. Instead, he carried the Lantern, a colossal Shenlongi pistol, drum-fed and possessed of an energy matrix few beam weapons of comparable size could match.

The Deathshroud spread out as their sweep of the chamber reached the impregnable vault at its end. Sealed with locks of magnificent complexity, the gene-vault was a place of mystery and a repository of the Death Guard’s future.

Caipha Morarg, late of 24th Breacher Squad, now serving as Mortarion’s equerry, shook his head and put up his bolter as he followed his master into the apothecarion.

‘My lord, there’s no one here,’ he said.

‘There is, Caipha,’ said Mortarion, his voice the breath of a parched desert wind. ‘I can feel it.’

‘We’ve swept the deck from end to end and side to side,’ reaffirmed Morarg. ‘If there was something here, we’d already have found it.’

‘There’s still one place to look,’ said Mortarion.

Morarg followed the primarch’s gaze.

‘The gene-vault?’ he said. ‘It’s void-hardened and energy shielded. It’s a wonder the damn Apothecaries can get in.’

‘Do you doubt me, Caipha?’ whispered Mortarion.

‘Never, my lord.’

‘And have you ever known me to be wrong in such matters?’

‘No, my lord.’

‘Then trust me when I say there’s something in there.’

‘Something?’

Mortarion nodded, and he canted his head to one side, as though listening to sounds only he could hear. The muscles in his face twitched, but with the gorget obscuring his jaw, it was impossible to be certain what expression he made.

‘Open the door,’ he ordered, and a gaggle of hazard-suited Legions serfs ran to it with pneumatic key-drivers and one-time cipher code wands. They inserted the power-keys, but before any were engaged, a green-cloaked Apothecary approached Mortarion under the watchful gaze of the Deathshroud.

‘My lord,’ said the Apothecary. ‘I beg you to reconsider.’

‘What is your name?’ asked Mortarion.

‘Koray Burcu, my lord.’

‘We have just breached Molech’s system edge, Apothecary Burcu, and there is an intruder aboard the Endurance,’ said Mortarion. ‘It is behind that door. I require you to open it. Now.’

Koray Burcu wilted under Mortarion’s gaze, but to his credit, the Apothecary stood his ground.

‘My lord, please,’ said Burcu. ‘I implore you to withdraw from the apothecarion. The gene-vault must be kept sterile and at positive pressure. This entire stock of gene-seed is at risk of contamination if the door is opened even a fraction.’

‘Nevertheless, you will do as I order,’ said Mortarion. ‘I can do it without you, Apothecary, but it will take time. And in that time, what do you think an intruder might be doing in there?’

Burcu considered the primarch’s words and made his way to the gleaming vault door. Numerous key-drivers turned simultaneously under Burcu’s direction as he wanded a helix-code unique to this moment and which would change immediately upon the door’s opening.

The door split at its junction with the wall and a blast of frozen, sharp-edged air escaped from within. Mortarion felt it cut the skin of his face, relishing the needle-like jab of cold. The door swung wider and the hazard-suited thralls withdrew as the reek of preserving chemicals and frost-resistant power cells tainted the air with bio-mechanical flavours. Mortarion tasted something else on the air, a fetor of something so lethal that only one such as he could authorise its release.

But such things were stored in the deepest magazines, locked away in vaults even more secure than this.

‘Touch nothing,’ warned Burcu, moving ahead of the Deathshroud as they stepped over the high threshold of the gene-vault.

Mortarion turned to Morarg and said, ‘Seal the door behind me, and only open it again on my express order.’

‘My lord?’ said Morarg. ‘After Dwell, my place is at your side!’

‘Not this time,’ said Mortarion and his meaning was ironclad.

Devotion to duty clamped down on Morarg’s next words and he nodded stiffly as Mortarion turned and followed Koray Burcu into the vault. No sooner was Mortarion inside than the heavy adamantium door swung closed.

The space within was a hundred metre square vault of frost-white and gleaming silver. Shielded banks of gurgling cryo-tubes lined the walls, and rows of centrifuge drums formed a central aisle.

Illuminated sigils and runic inscriptions of genetic purity flickered on brass-rimmed data-slates, and Mortarion extrapolated mental maps of the gene-code fragments. Here was a collection of mucranoids, there a chemical bath of zygotes that would one day be a Betcher’s Gland. Behind them, bubbling cylinders of eyeballs.

Half-formed organs floated in gestation tanks and puffs of vapour from humming condensers filled the air with chill moisture that crunched underfoot in microscopic ice crystals. Koray Burcu claimed the atmosphere within the vault was sterile, but such was not the case. The air vibrated with potential, a thing pressing itself upon the fabric of reality like a newborn in a rupturing birth sac.

Only he could feel it. Only he knew what it was.

The Deathshroud advanced cautiously, and Mortarion sensed their confusion. To them, the vault was empty, no sign of the intruder their primarch said they would find. That they believed their gene-father might be mistaken amused him. What must it be like for a warrior of the Legions to think such a thing?

Much as it was for a primarch, he supposed.

But they could not sense what he could sense.

Mortarion had spent a lifetime on a world where the monstrous creations of rogue geneticists and spirit channelling corpse-whisperers had haunted the fogbound crags of Barbarus. Where monsters truly worthy of the name were wrought into being every day. Had even fashioned a few of his own.

Mortarion knew the spoor of such beasts, but more than that, he recognised the scent of one of his own.

‘You see, my lord,’ said Apothecary Burcu. ‘It’s plain to see there’s nothing here, so can we all please vacate the gene-labs?’

‘You’re wrong,’ said Mortarion.

‘My lord?’ said Burcu, consulting a grainy holo floating above his narthecium gauntlet. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘He’s here, he just can’t show himself yet, can you?’

The primarch’s words were addressed to the air, but the voice that answered sounded like rocks grinding against one another in a mudslide and seemed to echo from all around them.

Meat. Need meat.

Mortarion nodded, already suspecting that was why he had chosen this place. The Deathshroud formed a circle around Mortarion, warscythes at the ready, sensorium desperately searching for the source of the voice.

‘My lord, what is that?’ asked Burcu.

‘An old friend,’ said Mortarion. ‘One I thought lost.’

No one ever thought of the Death Lord as being quick. Relentless, yes. Implacable and dogged, absolutely. But quick? No, never that.

Silence was a hard iron blur, and by the time its blade completed its circuit, all seven of the Deathshroud lay slain, simply bisected at their midriffs. An apocalyptic quantity of gore erupted within the vault, a glut of shimmering, impossibly bright blood. It sprayed the walls and flooded the polished steel deck plates in a red tide. Mortarion tasted its bitter tang.

Apothecary Burcu backed away from him, his eyes wide and disbelieving behind the visor of his helm. Mortarion didn’t stop him.

‘My lord?’ begged the Apothecary. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Something grim, Koray,’ said Mortarion. ‘Something necessary.’

The air in front of Mortarion looked scratched, a phantom image of a humanoid form etched on an incredibly fine pane of glass. Or a pict-feed with the half-formed impression of a body on it, an outline of something that existed only as potential.

The scratched, hurried impression of form stepped into the lake of blood and gradually, impossibly, the liquid’s outward spread began to reverse. Slowly, but with greater speed as the rich fluid of all life was drawn into its ethereal form, a figure began to take shape.

First a pair of feet, then ankles, calves, knees and muscular thighs. Then pelvic bones, a spine, organs and whipping, cording, glistening musculature wrapping itself around a wet red skeleton. As though an invisible mould were being filled with the blood of the Deathshroud, the powerful form of a towering, transhuman warrior took shape.

Fed and fashioned from the blood of the dead, it was form without the casing of skin. A fleshless revenant with butcher’s hocks of meat laced around ossified ribs, hardened femurs and a skull like a rock. Red-rimmed eyes of madness stared out from lidless sockets and though the body was yet freshly made, it reeked of putrefaction. The thing’s mouth worked jerkily, rubbery tendons pulling taut as the exposed jawline flexed in its housing of bone.

A tongue, raw and purple, ran along fresh-grown nubs of teeth.

For the briefest instant, the illusion of rebirth was complete, but it didn’t last. Flaccid white runnels of decomposition streaked the red meat like fatty tissue, and curls of corpse gas lifted from flesh that wriggled as though infested with feasting maggots. Weeping sores opened across the musculature and purulent blisters popped like soap bubbles to leak viscous mucus.

Glass cracked and warning bells began chiming.

Mortarion looked to his left as, one by one, the bell jars of developing zygotes exploded with uncontrolled growth. Rampant necrosis swelled from algal fronds of stem cells and nascent buds of organs. Veined with black, they grew and grew until the bloated mass ruptured with flatulent brays of stinking fumes.

Chemical baths curdled in an instant, their surfaces frothing with scum and overflowing in glutinous ropes. The centrifuges vibrated as the specimens within expanded and mutated with ultra-rapid growth before dying just as quickly.

Behind the primarch, Apothecary Burcu was desperately trying to manipulate one of the key-drivers while punching in a code that had already been rendered obsolete.

‘Please, my lord!’ he shouted. ‘It’s contamination. We have to get out of here right now! Hurry, before it’s too late!’

‘It’s already too late,’ said the wet, fleshless thing of glistening organs. Burcu turned and his eyes widened in horror at the sight of an oozing weave of translucent skin coating the monster’s body. It grew and thickened over the naked organs, unevenly and in patches, but expanding all the time. Decay claimed the skin almost as soon as it grew, flaking from the body in blood-blackened scabs.

The monster’s hand punched out. Its fingers stabbed through Burcu’s eye lenses. The Apothecary wailed and dropped to his knees as the monster tore the helmet from his head. Burcu’s sockets were ruined craters, gaping wounds in his skull that wept bloody tears down ashen cheeks.

But losing his eyes was the least of Koray Burcu’s pain.

His cries turned to gurgling retching. The Apothecary’s chest spasmed as lungs genhanced to survive in the most hostile environments were assaulted from within by a pathogen so deadly it had no equal.

The Apothecary vomited a flood of rancid matter, falling onto all fours as he was devoured by his hyper-accelerated immune system. Death fluids leaked from every orifice, and Mortarion watched dispassionately as the flesh all but melted from his bones, like the humans of Barbarus who climbed too high into the poison fogs and paid the ultimate price.

His brothers would be horrified by Burcu’s death and his abhorrent murderer, but Mortarion had seen far worse in his youth; the monstrous kings of the dark mountains were endlessly inventive in their anatomical abominations.

Koray Burcu slumped forward and a slurry of stinking black and vermillion spilled onto the deck. The Apothecary’s body was no more, a broth of decaying meat and spoiled fluids.

Mortarion knelt beside the remains and ran a finger through the mess. He brought the sludge to his face and sniffed. The biological poison was a planetary exterminator, but to one raised in the toxic hell of Barbarus, it was little more than an irritant. Both his fathers had worked to render his physiology proof against any infection, no matter its power.

‘The Life-Eater virus,’ said Mortarion.

‘That’s what killed me,’ said the monster, as the regenerating and decaying cloak of skin slithered over its body. ‘So that’s what the warp used to remake me.’

Mortarion watched as waxen skin inched over the skull to reveal a face he’d last seen en route to the Eisenstein. No sooner was it revealed than it rotted away again, an unending cycle of rebirth and death.

Even bereft of skin, Mortarion knew the face of one of his sons.

‘Commander,’ said Mortarion. ‘Welcome back to the Legion.’

‘We go to the killing fields, my lord?’

‘The Warmaster calls us to Molech,’ said Mortarion.

‘My lord,’ said Ignatius Grulgor, turning his limbs over to better examine the reeking, living death of his diseased body and finding it much to his liking. ‘I am yours to command. Unleash me. I am the Eater of Lives.’

‘All in good time, my son,’ said Mortarion. ‘First you’re going to need some decent armour or you’ll kill everyone on my ship.’

It was bad enough when the occupants of the nameless fortress prison had been unknown to Loken, but knowing he had no choice except to leave Mersadie incarcerated cut him to the bone. The cell door closing was a knife in the belly, but she was right. With agents of the Warmaster likely abroad in the solar system, perhaps even on Terra itself, there existed no prospect of her release.

Perhaps his escort sensed the build up of anger in him, for they led him back to the embarkation deck without the needless obfuscation of the route. As Loken had suspected, his final destination had been close to where the Tarnhelm had set down.

The sleek ship sat in a launch cradle, already prepped and ready to depart. Bror Tyrfingr had called it a draugrjúka, a ghost ship, and he was right to do so, but not for its stealthy properties.

It carried people who might as well be ghosts, presences that went unnoticed by all, and – more importantly – whose existence would never be acknowledged.

Loken saw Banu Rassuah in the pilot’s blister on the arrowhead frontal section, and Ares Voitek circled the craft with Tyrfingr, using his servo-arms to point out especially noteworthy elements of the ship’s construction.

Tyrfingr looked up at Loken’s approach. His brow furrowed as though detecting a noisome stench or the approach of an enemy.

His eyes roamed Loken’s face and his hand slipped to his holster.

‘Ho,’ said Tyrfingr. ‘There’s a man whose icerunner’s slipped a sheet. You found trouble?’

Loken ignored him and climbed the rear ramp to the fuselage. The central dormitory section was only half full. Callion Zaven sat at the central table with Tubal Cayne, extolling the virtues of personal combat over massed escalades. At the far end, Varren and Nohai compared scars on their bulging forearms, while Rama Karayan cleaned the disassembled skeleton of his rifle.

Tylos Rubio was nowhere to be seen, and Qruze emerged from the low-ceilinged passageway leading to the pilot’s compartment.

‘Good, you’re back,’ said Zaven, managing to completely misread Loken’s humours. ‘Perhaps we can actually get out of the system.’

‘Qruze,’ snapped Loken, reaching to his belt. ‘This is for you.’

Loken’s wrist snapped out, and the lacquered wooden box flew from his hand like a throwing blade. It flashed towards Qruze, and though the Half-heard was no longer as quick as he once was, he caught the box a finger’s breadth from his chest.

‘What’s–’ he said, but Loken didn’t let him finish.

Loken’s fist slammed into Qruze’s face like a pile-driver. The venerable warrior staggered, but didn’t fall, his heartwood too seasoned to be felled by one blow. Loken gave him three more, one after the other with bone-crunching force.

Qruze bent double, instinctively driving forward into the fists of his attacker. Loken slammed a knee into Qruze’s gut, then spun low to drive an elbow to the side of his head. Skin split and Qruze dropped to his knees. Loken kicked him in the chest. The Half-heard flew back into the lockers, crumpling steel with the impact. Buckled doors flew open and the stowed gear tumbled to the deck: a combat blade, leather strops, two pistols, whetstones and numerous ammunition clips.

The Knights Errant scattered at the sudden violence in their midst, but none moved to intervene. Loken was on Qruze in a heartbeat, his fists like wrecking balls as they slammed into the Half-heard.

Qruze wasn’t fighting back.

Teeth snapped under Loken’s assault.

Blood sprayed the bare metal of his armour.

Loken’s fury at Mersadie’s imprisonment cast a red shadow over everything. He wanted to kill Qruze like he’d never wanted to kill anyone before. With every ringing hammer blow he unleashed, he heard his name being called.

He was back in the ruins, surrounded by death and creatures more corpse than living thing. He felt their claws upon his armour, pulling him upright. He threw them off, tasting the planet-wide reek of decaying meat and the hot iron of expended munitions. He was Cerberus again, right in the heart of it.

Lost to madness on the killing fields of Isstvan.

Spitting breath, Loken swept up the combat blade. The edge glittered in the subdued lighting, hanging in the air like an executioner awaiting his master’s sign.

And for an instant Loken wasn’t looking at Qruze, but Little Horus Aximand, the melancholic killer of Tarik Torgaddon.

The blade plunged down, aimed for Qruze’s exposed throat.

It stopped a centimetre from flesh, as though striking an unseen barrier. Loken screamed and pushed with every scrap of strength, but the blade refused to budge. The handle froze in his grip, blistering the skin with arctic ferocity before turning it black with frostbite.

The pain brought clarity, and Loken looked up to see Tylos Rubio with his hand extended and wreathed in a haze of corposant.

‘Drop it, Garvi,’ said a voice, though he could not say for certain to whom it belonged. Loken couldn’t feel his hand, the icy touch of Rubio’s psykery numbing it completely. He surged to his feet and hurled the blade away. It shattered into icy fragments on the curved fuselage.

‘Throne, Loken, what was that about?’ demanded Nohai, pushing past him to kneel by Qruze’s slumped form. ‘You’ve damn near killed him.’

Qruze demurred, but his words were too mangled by swollen lips and broken teeth to make out. The faces of the warriors around him were pictures in shock. They looked at Loken as they would a lunatic berserker.

Loken went to go to Qruze, but Varren stepped in front of him. Bror Tyrfingr stood next to him.

‘The old man is down,’ said Tyrfingr. ‘Leash your wolf. Now.’

Loken ignored him, but Varren put a hand on his chest, a solid, immovable brace. If he wanted past, he’d have to fight the former World Eater too.

‘Whatever this is,’ said Varren. ‘This isn’t the time.’

Varren’s words were calmly said, and Loken’s anger diminished with every heartbeat. He nodded and stepped back with his fists uncurling. The sight of his brother legionary’s blood dripping from his cracked knuckles was the final parting of the curtain, and reason resumed its position at the seat of his consciousness.

‘I’m done,’ he said, backing away until he reached a wall and slumped down to his haunches. His assault had not exerted him overmuch, but his chest heaved with effort.

‘Good. I’d hate to have to kill you,’ said Tyrfingr, taking a seat at the table. ‘And by the way, you owe me a knife. I spent weeks getting that one balanced properly.’

‘Sorry,’ said Loken, watching Nohai work on Qruze’s ruined face.

‘Ach, it’s only a blade,’ said Tyrfingr. ‘And it was Tylos here that broke it with that witchery of his.’

‘Me?’ said Rubio. ‘I stopped Loken from murder.’

‘Couldn’t you have plucked the blade from his hand?’ asked Tubal Cayne, examining the broken fragments of the blade. ‘I once saw a psyker of the Fifteenth Legion pluck the blades from an eldar swordsman’s hands, so I know it can be done. Or was the Librarius of Ultramar less skilled than that of Prospero?’

Rubio ignored Cayne’s jibe and made his way back to his private compartment bunk. Loken pushed himself to his feet and crossed the deck towards Qruze. Varren and Tyrfingr moved to intercept him, but he shook his head.

‘I only want to talk,’ he said.

Varren nodded and stepped aside, but kept his posture taut.

Loken looked down at Qruze, whose eyes were all but obscured by swollen flesh. Clotted blood matted his beard and purple bruising flowered all across the Half-heard’s face. Impressions of Loken’s gauntlets were battered into his skin. Nohai was clearing the blood away, but that wasn’t making the damage Loken had inflicted look any less severe. Qruze lifted his head at the sound of his approach, seemingly unafraid of further violence.

‘How long did you know she was here?’ said Loken, the calmness of his voice in stark contrast to the fading colour of his skin.

Qruze mopped his cheek where the skin had split and spat a wad of bloody phlegm. At first, Loken thought he wasn’t going to answer, but when the words came, they came without rancour.

‘Almost two years.’

‘Two years,’ said Loken, and his fingers curled back into fists.

‘Go on,’ said Qruze softly. ‘Get it out of your system, lad. Beat me some more if it helps.’

‘Shut up, Iacton,’ said Nohai. ‘And, Loken, step back or I’ll seriously reconsider my Apothecary’s Oath.’

‘You left her to rot in there for two years, Iacton,’ said Loken. ‘After you’d risked everything to save her and the others. Euphrati and Kyril? Where are they? Are they here too?’

‘I don’t know where they are,’ said Qruze.

‘Why should I believe you?’

‘Because it’s the truth, I swear,’ said Qruze, grimacing as Nohai inserted another needle into his skull. ‘Nathaniel might have an idea where they are, but I don’t.’

Loken paced the deck, angry and confused and hurt.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he asked, as the hulking shape of a gold-armoured warrior appeared silhouetted at the boarding ramp.

‘Because I ordered him not to,’ said Rogal Dorn.

A space was cleared for the primarch of the Imperial Fists, though he declined to sit. Chairs were righted and the debris of the recently unleashed violence cleared away. Loken sat the farthest distance he could manage from Iacton Qruze, a terrible weight of shame hanging around his neck. The fury that had driven him to assault the Half-heard had dissipated utterly, though the lie between them still soured his belly.

Rogal Dorn paced the length of the table, his arms folded across his chest. His granite-hard face was stern, and heavy with duty, as though ill-news still swathed him. His armour’s golden lustre was faded, but here on this hidden fortress, nothing of beauty could shine.

‘You were hard on Iacton,’ said Dorn, and the square tones of his voice reminded Loken of how astonishingly soft it had once been. Soft, yet with steel in its bones. That steel was still there, but all softness had been stripped away.

‘No more than he deserved,’ replied Loken. He was being churlish, but even genhanced livers took time to purge black bile.

‘You know that’s not true,’ said Dorn, as Ares Voitek set a cut-down fuel canister in the centre of the table. ‘Iacton was obeying an order from the Lord Protector of Terra. You would do the same.’

The last sentence was as much challenge as it was statement of fact, and Loken nodded slowly.

The months following Loken’s return from Isstvan had shown him the depths of Rogal Dorn’s displeasure as he was pared down to the bone for signs of treachery. That Malcador and Garro had vouchsafed him loyal was perhaps all that had saved him from an executioner’s blade.

‘I recall when I first met you aboard the Vengeful Spirit, Garviel Loken,’ said Dorn. ‘You and Tarik almost came to blows with Efried and… my First Captain.’

Loken nodded, reluctant to be drawn into reminiscence, even with a being as godly as a primarch. He heard the pause where he expected to hear Sigismund’s name, and wondered what, if anything, it meant.

Ares Voitek filled the silence by distributing tin cups around the table via his servo-arms and pouring a measure of clear liquid into each one.

‘What’s this you’re giving me, Ares?’ said Dorn, as Voitek handed him the first filled cup.

‘It’s called dzira, my lord,’ explained Voitek. ‘It’s what the clans of Medusa drink when there’s bridges to be mended between brothers.’

‘And you just happened to have some aboard?’

Loken looked at the clear liquid in the cup, smelling all manner of strange mixtures in its chemical structure.

‘Not exactly,’ said Voitek. ‘But there’s enough alcohol-based fluids aboard the Tarnhelm for someone with a working knowledge of alchymical processes to knock up a viable substitute. Normally a Clan Chief would pass a piyala bowl around his warring sons, but I think we can break protocol on that just this once.’

‘Just this once,’ agreed Dorn and took a drink.

The primarch’s eyebrow raised a fraction, which should have told Loken what to expect. He followed Lord Dorn’s example and swallowed a mouthful of Voitek’s spirit. Its heat was chemical and raw, like coolant drained from the core of a plasma reactor. Loken’s body could process almost any toxin and expel it as harmless waste product, but he doubted the Emperor had dzira in mind when conceiving the Legiones Astartes physiology.

The others around the table, Qruze included, drank from their cups. All apart from Bror Tyrfingr and Altan Nohai reacted as though Voitek had tried to poison them, but kept their reactions to coughs and splutters.

Dorn’s gaze swept the warriors at the table, and said, ‘I know little of Medusan customs, but if the drinking of this dzira has served its clans well, then let its purpose be echoed here.’

Dorn leaned over the table, pressing both palms to its surface.

‘Your mission is too important to fail through internal division. Every one of you is here because you have strengths and virtues that have cleft you from your parent Legions. Malcador trusts you, though some of you have yet to earn such from me. I hold deeds, not faith, gut-feelings or the whispers of prognosticators as the sum of a warrior’s character. Let this mission be what earns you the boon of my trust. Find what the Wolf King needs, and you will have earned the Sigillite a measure of that trust too.’

‘Why were you and Qruze here, my lord?’ asked Macer Varren without embarrassment.

Loken saw a conspiratorial glance pass between Rogal Dorn and Iacton Qruze. The Half-heard dropped his gaze, and Rogal Dorn let out a heavy sigh that made Varren wish he’d never asked.

‘To kill a man I once held in high esteem,’ said Dorn, ever unwilling to shirk from the truth. ‘A good man sent to his death by Horus to sap our resolve and unbind the mortar that holds the Imperium together.’

Loken swallowed another mouthful of dzira, and the shame keeping him pinned to his seat receded enough for him to ask, ‘My lord, do you know where Euphrati Keeler and Kyril Sindermann are?’

Dorn shook his head. ‘No, Loken, I do not, save that they are not on Terra. I am as ignorant of their whereabouts as Iacton, but if I had to guess, and I’m loath to guess, I’d say they were somewhere on Rodinia right now. They move from plate to plate, hidden by their followers and aided by deluded fools. There were reports she had been seen on Antillia, then Vaalbara and even around the globe on Lemurya. I hear reports of her sermonising all across the orbital ring, but I suspect a great deal of those are false dissemination to throw the hunters off the scent.’

‘Surely one woman isn’t worth that effort,’ said Cayne.

‘Mistress Keeler is more than just one woman,’ said Dorn. ‘This saint nonsense that’s sprung up around her is more dangerous than you know. Her words fill malleable hearts with false faith and the expectation of miraculous intervention. She imbues the Emperor with divine powers. And if He is a god, what need has He of His people to defend Him? No, the Lectio Divinitatus is just the sort of invented lunacy the Emperor sought to see ended with Unity.’

‘Perhaps her words give people hope,’ said Loken.

‘Hope in lies,’ replied Dorn, folding his arms and stepping away from the table. His brief time with them was over. The primarch made his way to the boarding ramp, but turned and said one last thing before departing for Terra.

‘I own only the empirical clarity of Imperial Truth.’

Loken knew those words well.

He’d said them once in the water garden on Sixty-Three Nineteen and many times since in the dungeons of Terra. It could be no coincidence that Rogal Dorn repeated them here. The memory of them was a reminder of sundered confraternity, oaths broken and brothers murdered in cold blood.

‘As do I,’ said Loken, but Rogal Dorn was already gone.

NINE

Remember the moon
Good hunting
Provocateur

A vast dome of coffered glass filled the frontal arc of the Vengeful Spirit’s high-vaulted strategium, through which could be seen the inky blackness of Molech’s inner planetary sphere. The few visible points of light were fragile reflections on the armoured hulls of starships of all description and displacement. An armada of conquest attended upon the Vengeful Spirit, surrounding Lupercal’s flagship like prowling pack hunters as they drew the noose on Molech.

Recessed lumen globes bathed the domed chamber in light it had not known since before the war against the Auretian Technocracy. A grand ouslite dais was set at the heart of the strategium, a metre in height, ten in diameter. It had once been part of Lupercal’s Court, a meeting table, podium of address and, in times not so long ago, an altar of sacrifice.

To Aximand, it felt like that phase of the Legion’s past was simply the first stage of its ongoing transformation; another change he had embraced as surely as he embraced his own autumnal aspect. The last blood spilled on its surface had been that of a supposed ally, an arch schemer and manipulator whose ambitions had finally overstepped his reach.

Erebus the snake, the self-aggrandising, self-appointed prophet of rebellion. Mewling and stripped of flesh and power, the base plotter had fled the Vengeful Spirit for destinations unknown.

Aximand was not sorry to see him go.

The bloodied trophies and gory window-dressing that had attended his teachings were also gone, ripped into the void by the impact of a clade killer’s burning attack ship. Dark robed Mechanicum adepts and muttering, shadow-draped Thallaxii had restored the strategium to its former glory. Where Imperial eagles once glared down at the assembled warriors, now the Eye of Horus observed proceedings.

The message was clear.

The Vengeful Spirit was the Warmaster’s ship again, and he its commander. This was a new beginning, a fresh crusade to match the one that had taken them to the very edge of space on a bloodied road of compliant worlds. Lupercal had conquered those worlds once, and he would conquer them again as he forged an Imperium Novus from the ashes of the old.

The Mournival stood with their master at the ouslite dais, lenses cunningly wrought into its upper surfaces projecting three-dimensional topography of Molech’s close-system space. Maloghurst tapped the surface of a data-slate and updated icons winked to life. More ships, more defence monitors, more minefields, more void-traps, more neutron snares, more orbital defence platforms.

‘It’s a mess,’ said Aximand.

‘Lots of ships,’ agreed Abaddon with relish.

‘You’re already thinking of how to get close enough to storm them, aren’t you?’ said Aximand.

‘I already know how,’ said the First Captain. ‘First we–’

Horus held up a gauntleted hand to forestall the First Captain’s stratagem.

‘Take pause, Ezekyle,’ said Horus. ‘You and Aximand are old hands at this, and breacher work barely tests your sword arms. Let’s assay the temper of the new blood you’ve added to the mix.’

Noctua and Kibre straightened as Horus gestured towards the garlanded orb of Molech at the centre of the illumined display.

‘You’re no strangers to a broil of swords and bolters, but show me how you’d crack Molech’s girdle.’

As Aximand expected, it was Kibre who spoke first.

He leaned into the projection and swept a hand out to encompass the orbital weapon platforms with their racks of torpedoes and macro-cannons.

‘A speartip right through their fleet to the heart of the guns,’ said Kibre. ‘An overwhelming assault into the centre, hard and fast, with flanking waves to push their ships into the blade of our spear.’

Aximand was pleased to see Grael Noctua shake his head.

‘You disagree?’ asked Maloghurst, also catching the gesture.

‘In principle, no,’ said Noctua.

Horus laughed. ‘A politician’s way of saying yes. No wonder you like him so much, Mal.’

‘The plan is sound,’ said Abaddon. ‘It’s what I would do.’

‘Why doesn’t that surprise me?’ grinned Aximand.

‘Then let your little sergeant tell us what he would do,’ grunted Abaddon, his veneer of civility worn thin.

Noctua’s face was a cold mask. ‘Ezekyle, I know I’m new in the Mournival, but call me that again and we’re going to have a problem.’

Abaddon’s eyes bored into Noctua, but the First Captain was aware enough to know he’d crossed a line. With the Warmaster at his side, Abaddon could afford to be gracious without loss of face.

‘Apologies, brother,’ he said. ‘I’m too long in the company of the Justaerin to remember my manners. Go on, how would you improve the Widowmaker’s gambit?’

Noctua inclined his head, satisfied his point had been made, but savvy enough to understand that he had strained the bounds of his new position. Aximand wondered when the Mournival had become so fraught that a warrior needed to watch words to his brothers.

The answer readily presented itself.

Since the two whose names could never be voiced had upset a balance so natural none of them even understood it existed.

Noctua took the data-slate from Maloghurst and scanned its display. His eyes darted between its contents and the holographics. Aximand liked his thoroughness. It matched his own.

‘Well?’ said Horus. ‘Lev Goshen tells me you have a bold voice, Grael. Use it. Illuminate us.’

‘The moon,’ said Noctua with a feral wolf’s grin. ‘I’d remember the moon.’

Molech’s Enlightenment was a fast ship, the fastest in the fleet, its captain liked to boast. Given the slightest encouragement, Captain Argaun would extol the virtues of his vessel; a Cobra-class destroyer with engines barely thirty years out of an overhaul and a highly trained and motivated crew.

More importantly, the Enlightenment had tasted blood, which was more than could be said for most of Battlefleet Molech’s warships.

Captain Argaun had fought xenos reavers and opportunistic pirate cutters operating out of the mid-system asteroid belt for years. He was the right blend of aggression and competence.

And best of all, he was lucky.

‘How are they looking, Mister Cairu?’ said Argaun, reclining on his captain’s throne and tapping out updated command notes on an inset data-slate. Behind him, junior ratings tore off order-scrolls from chattering auto-writers and hurried to carry them out.

‘No change in bearing, speed or formation, captain,’ replied Lieutenant Cairu from his position overseeing the combat auspex teams. ‘Vanguard in force, seven vessels at least. The rest of the fleet is following in a gradually widening gun line with its bulk carriers and Titan landers tucked in behind. Looks like a rolling planetary englobement.’

Argaun grunted and looked up at the viewing bay, a flattened, steel-rimmed ellipse fed positional data by banked rows of implanted servitors.

‘Standard Legion tactics then,’ he said, almost disappointed. ‘I expected more of the Warmaster.’

The rotating sphere of the engagement volume filled the viewing bay, lit with identifier icons and scrolling data-streams. Some captains liked to see open space, but to Argaun’s way of thinking, that had always seemed utterly pointless. Given the distances involved in void war, the most a captain might see – if he was lucky – were flickering points of light that vanished almost as soon as they became visible.

He magnified the representation of the battlescape. Signifier-runes had identified most of the vessels in the oncoming fleet.

Death Guard and Sons of Horus.

Neither Legion was noted for subtlety. Both were renowned for ferocity. It was upon this latter characteristic that Admiral Brython’s provocateur strategy hinged.

The Enlightenment led a racing fleet of six fast-attack vessels, and it was their task to seduce the traitors into the teeth of the orbital platforms.

‘There you are,’ said Argaun, picking out the crimson sigil representing the Vengeful Spirit and feeling a thrill of anticipation travel the length of his augmetic spine. The Enlightenment and its accompanying ships were far beyond the reach of the orbital guns. They were exposed, but Argaun wasn’t worried. He’d heard Tyana Kourion say that to see the Legions at war was to witness gods of battle, but that was typical Army nonsense.

In the void, a warrior’s prowess counted for nothing.

A lance strike or a torpedo detonation would kill a legionary just as easily as a deck menial, and any captain careless enough to let a Space Marine ship get close enough to launch a boarding action deserved everything they got.

‘Time to firing range?’

‘Eight minutes.’

‘Eight minutes, aye,’ said Argaun, opening a vox-link to the rest of the provocateur force.

‘All captains, my compliments,’ said Argaun. ‘Begin your launch sequences for prow torpedoes. Full spread, and good hunting.’

‘Torpedoes in the void,’ said Maloghurst, watching as holographic salvoes crawled across the plinth’s display.

‘Time to impact?’ asked Horus.

‘Do you really need me to tell you, sir?’

‘No, but do it anyway,’ said Horus. ‘They’re playing their role, so let’s allow them to think we’re playing ours.’

Maloghurst nodded and estimated the travel time of the enemy torpedoes. ‘I make it ninety-seven minutes.’

‘Actually it’s ninety-five,’ said Horus, steepling his fingers and watching the inexorable unfolding of the battle before him.

‘Ninety-five, aye,’ said Maloghurst as the battle cogitators confirmed the Warmaster’s calculation. ‘Forgive me, sir, it’s been a while since I’ve needed to work deck duty. It’s not a task for which I have any enthusiasm.’

Horus waved away Maloghurst’s apology and nodded in agreement.

‘Yes, I’ve always hated void war over other forms of battle.’

‘And yet, as in all forms of war, you excel at it.’

‘A commander shouldn’t be so far removed from the surging ebb and flow of combat,’ said Horus, as if Maloghurst hadn’t spoken. ‘I am a being wrought for war on a visceral scale, where force and mass and courage are death’s currency.’

‘I almost miss it sometimes,’ replied Maloghurst. ‘The simplicity of an open battlefield, a loaded boltgun in my hand and an enemy in front of me to kill.’

‘It’s been a long time since anything was that simple, Mal.’

‘If it ever was.’

‘There’s truth in that,’ agreed Horus. ‘There’s truth in that indeed.’

Another truth of void war was that until warships came together in murderous congress, there was very little to do but wait. The closure speeds of the opposing vanguards were enormous, but so too were the distances between them.

But when the dying began, it began quickly.

Multiple salvoes of ordnance erupted from both vanguard fleets, each torpedo fifty metres in length and little more than a huge rocket booster capped with an extraordinarily lethal warhead. As scores of torpedoes surged from their launch tubes, barrages of armour penetrating shells blasted from prow batteries.

Each volley was silent in the void, but brutalising echoes reverberated through every gun deck like the pounding drumbeats of titanic slave overseers, deafening those not already insensate to the unending clamour.

Glimmering plasma trails intersected between the fleets, then split apart as they hunted for targets.

First blood went to the Enlightenment. A spiralling torpedo, launched from its starboard launch tubes by Master Gunner Vordheen and his seventy-strong munition crew, smashed through the armour plating of the Sons of Horus frigate, Raksha.

The impact triggered a secondary engine within the torpedo that hurled the main payload deeper into the guts of its target. Like an arena killer whose blade finds a crack in his opponent’s armour, the torpedo ripped through dozens of bulkheads before its primary warhead exploded in the heart of the starship.

Raksha’s keel snapped in two and over a quarter of its seven hundred crew members were immolated in a storm of atomic fire. Sheets of armour plating blew out like billowing sailcloth in a storm. Pressurised oxygen burned with brief intensity as compartment after compartment was vented to the void. The debris of the frigate’s demise continued moving forward in an expanding cone of tumbling iron, like buckshot from an armsman’s shotcannon.

The Imperial destroyer, Implacable Resolve, took the next hits, a torpedo to its rear quarter and a lance strike that sheared off its command tower. The vessel broke formation in a veering yaw, spewing a comet’s tail of debris and vented plasmic fumes. Without captain or command deck to correct her course, the ship fell from the vanguard until the raging hull fires finally reached the ventral magazines and blew it apart in a seething fireball.

Three more vessels were crippled in quick succession; Devine Right, Cthonia Rising, and Reaper of Barbarus. A pair of ‘fist-to-finger’ impacts penetrated the Imperial vessel’s prow armour and a superhot plasma jet roared the length of its long axis. Gutted by searing fires, Devine Right exploded moments later as its weapon stores cooked off. The Death Guard destroyer was reduced to a radioactive hulk and critical reactor emissions that lit up the Imperial threat auspex like a beacon fire. The Sons of Horus frigate simply vanished, dead in the water as its power and life supporting mechanisms failed in the first instant of impact.

Both vanguards had been savaged, but the traitor ships had taken the worst of the engagement. Four vessels remained battle worthy in the Warmaster’s vanguard, though all had taken hits in the opening shots of the engagement.

Their captains were hungry for blood, and they fired their ship’s engines, eager to tear into the enemy at close range. Behind them, the fleets of the Death Guard and Sons of Horus followed suit.

Battle would be joined and the dead avenged.

The Imperial ships would learn what it meant to face the Warmaster.

But Battlefleet Molech had no intention of going head to head with a vastly superior fleet. No sooner had the ordnance struck the traitor vanguard than Captain Argaun issued orders to turn the provocateur fleet around. His remaining ships raced back to Molech and the cover of its orbital weapon platforms.

And, just as Lord Admiral Semper had planned, the blooded fleet of the Warmaster gave chase.

‘Remember the moon, he says,’ grunted Abaddon. ‘As if any Cthonian even took part in that fight.’

Unable to make any sound within the frozen vacuum of the tomb ship, the First Captain’s voice sounded in Kalus Ekaddon’s helmet over the vox.

He didn’t answer. Strict vox-silence protocols were in force, but when had something as trivial as a direct order from the Warmaster troubled Ezekyle Abaddon?

‘Remember the moon,’ repeated Abaddon. ‘For two hundred years, we’ve tried to forget the moon.’

On the flag bridge of the Guardian of Aquinas, Lord Admiral Brython Semper watched the unfolding engagement in the central hololith with a measured sense of satisfaction. He paced with his hands laced behind his back. A cohort of nine Thallax followed him on hissing, piston-driven legs, the low hum of their lightning guns ruffling hairs on the back of his neck.

At least, he told himself it was their strange weaponry.

Semper didn’t like the blank-faced cybernetics, as it always unnerved him to know there was some scrap of a living being within that sarcophagus armour.

Still, at least they didn’t speak unless you spoke to them, unlike Proximo Tarchon of the vessel’s assigned complement of Ultramarines, who proffered unasked-for tactical advice like he were the one who’d spent most of his life aboard a warship.

Tarchon was only a centurion, for Throne’s sake, but still he acted as though the Guardian of Aquinas was his own Legion warship.

To the Mechanicum and the fleet, Semper’s flagship was an Avenger-class grand cruiser, which captured something of the vessel’s majesty, but nothing of its savagery. A part of the Guardian’s crew since his recruitment on Cypra Mundi, Brython Semper knew just how ferocious a machine of war it was.

Its mode of attack was not subtle. It owed nothing to finesse and was bloody in the way two starving rats locked in a box was bloody. Guardian of Aquinas was a gunboat, a sledgehammer vessel that waited for the enemy line to widen before surging into the gap and unleashing hellish broadsides from multiple gun decks.

‘Good hunting indeed, Argaun,’ hissed Semper, as the wounded vessels of the provocateur fleet limped back into range of the orbital weapons platforms. ‘Gave those traitor bastards a bloody nose and then some. By Mars and all his red blades, you did!’

That was overstating the damage caused by the provocateur fleet, but his lavish estimation of it would fire the blood of his crew. The Thallax straightened at the mention of the Red Planet. In pride or some conditioned reflex, he couldn’t tell.

As impressive as Argaun’s attack had been, it was just the prelude to the real fight. Semper cast his critical gaze over the disposition of his fleet, and was content.

Forty-two Imperial vessels were spread between three attack formations; a strong centre of frigates and destroyers, with fast-attack cruisers on the flanks. Two Gothics sailed abeam of the flagship, the Admonishment in Fire and the Solar’s Glory. Both had fought in the reclamation of the birth system and, like the Guardian of Aquinas, they were linebreakers, armed with broadside lances that were sure to wreak fearful havoc among the traitor ships.

Sailing in the leftmost battlegroup was Semper’s mailed fist.

Adranus was a Dominator, and its nova cannon was going to create the gap Semper and the Gothics would rip wide open.

The combined Sons of Horus and Death Guard fleets were in wrathful pursuit of the vessels that had hurt them. As Argaun had communicated, the enemy fleets were moving to englobe Molech, but retained a centre mass to engage the orbital defences and Battlefleet Molech.

Semper saw a textbook planetary assault formation, one any first-year cadet would recognise from the works of de Ruyter, Duilius or Yi Sun Shin.

‘They must not think very highly of us to come at us with so basic an attack,’ said Semper, loud enough for the deck crews to hear. ‘So much for Captain Salicar’s fears of us being outfought.’

Yet for all his outward bluster, Semper was under no illusions that the enemy approaching Molech was supremely dangerous. He’d studied the Warmaster’s tactics during the Great Crusade. His assaults were brutal, without mercy and the enemy almost never saw their doom coming.

This assault felt almost comically simple and direct.

What was he not seeing?

The Warmaster’s fleets would be in range of the orbitals at his back in less than three minutes. The hololith flickered with confirmed firing solutions received from their master gunners.

He’d already authorised captain’s discretion for each of the platform’s commanders. They knew their trade, and needed no direction from him to punish the traitors.

Yet the nagging doubt that wormed its way into his thoughts at the sight of so basic an assault formation wouldn’t go away.

What am I missing?

Platform Master Panrik had a surfeit of weapons aboard the Var Sohn orbital station; torpedo racks, missile tubes, close-range defence cannon, ion shields, mass drivers and battery after battery of macro-cannons.

All were eager to be unleashed.

‘Weapon systems at full readiness,’ reported the deck officer. ‘Command authority transfer on your mark.’

Panrik nodded. They’d achieved full readiness a little slower than he’d have liked. Still within acceptable tolerances, so no sense in making a scene just now.

‘Mark,’ said Panrik, inserting the silver command ring on his right index finger into the slot on his throne. He turned and sub-vocally recited his authority signifiers.

Clamps locked his neck in place, and a whirring, rotating connector plug slotted into the mind impulse unit socket drilled through into his spine.

Information flooded him.

Every surveyor and auspex on the great, crescent shaped platform was now his to access. His organic vision faded, replaced with a sensorium suite of approach vectors, closure speeds, deflection angles and targeting solutions.

In a very real sense, Panrik became Orbital Platform Var Sohn.

A potent sense of might surged through him. Connection burn and inload surge made him wince, but it faded as cognition-enhancing stims flooded his thalamus and occipital lobe.

Implanted vents at the back of Panrik’s skull opened, allowing the heat generated by his over-clocked brain to dissipate.

‘I have command authority, aye,’ replied Panrik, alternating between the local auspex and the feed coming in from the attack logisters of the Guardian of Aquinas. The enemy fleet was coming in hard and fast, looking to roll straight over the orbital defences and break through before suffering too much damage.

A bold strategy, but a risky one.

Too risky, thought Panrik, glancing down at the staggered line of orbitals and the haze of minefields strung between them like glittering jewels.

Panrik cricked his neck and flexed his fingers.

Weapon systems armed in response.

‘Come ahead then,’ he said to the advancing fleets. ‘Give it your best shot.’

00:12

Aximand watched the mottled grey and green marble of Molech rotate below him. Close, so very close. Ice limned the kinetic bracing and frost webbed the plate of his fellow warriors. For the last sixteen hours, he’d been watching the timer in the corner of his visor count down to zero.

00:09

Inaction didn’t suit him. It didn’t suit any of them, but he at least had learned to deal with it. Ezekyle and Falkus were prowling hounds who savoured the swift kill. Not for them the patient hunt. In contrast, Aximand was a bowstring that lost nothing of its power by being kept taut. Yet even he’d found this long, frozen vigil testing.

00:05

Noctua, he suspected, could outlast them all.

Aximand almost smiled as he wondered how long it had taken before Ezekyle broke the vox-silence protocol. Not long. He’d be too full of hubris to resist letting his mouth run away from him.

Aximand remembered the tales of the moon’s fall.

00:02

He remembered chimeric monsters of the Selenar cults; gene-spliced bioweapons, killing machines of flesh and acid and gibbering insanity. He remembered tales of slaughter. Unrestrained, wild, savage and yet to be tempered by Lupercal’s discipline.

But most famous of all was the cry of surrender.

Call off your wolves!

00:00

‘Speartip,’ said Aximand. ‘Light them up.’

‘Contacts!’ shouted the deck officer.

Panrik had seen them no more than a fraction of a second before, but had disregarded them due to their position behind and below Var Sohn. They were faint, no more than flickers.

They couldn’t possibly be hostile.

But they were growing stronger with every passing moment.

‘Malfunctioning mines?’ suggested the auspex master. ‘Or hyper-accelerated debris caught in the flare of a surveyor sweep.’

Panrik didn’t need cognition-enhancing drugs to hear the desperate hope in the man’s voice. He knew fine well what these returns were. He just didn’t know how the hell they’d gotten there.

‘Tomb ships! Throne, they’re tomb ships!’ said the auspex master. ‘I’ve heard of the tactic, but thought it was just a myth.’

‘What in the name of Hellblade’s balls are tomb ships?’

‘Tomb ships,’ repeated the auspex master. ‘Vessels shot into the void and then completely shut down, emptied of atmosphere and left to fly towards their target. There’s no power emissions, so they’re virtually impossible to detect until they fire up their reactors. It’s also next to impossible to pull off.’

‘Clearly not impossible enough,’ said Panrik, each dart of his ocular implant shifting fire-priorities. ‘Retask batteries Theta through Lambda to low orbit echelon fire. Atmospheric bursts only, I don’t want any of our munitions hitting the surface. Ventral torpedo bays recalculate firing solutions and someone get me the Lord Admiral.’

Two ships were right on top of him, a dozen more spread behind the network of orbital platforms. They’d appeared from nowhere, the surveyor returns from their hulls growing stronger as dormant reactors were quick-cycled to readiness and targeting auspex trawled his platform for weak points.

He felt the shudder of point-blank torpedo impacts on the hull through the mind impulse unit link with Var Sohn’s surface systems. He grimaced in sympathetic pain. Armour penetrators, not explosive warheads.

The sensorium came alive with hull-breach warnings and system failures as the newly-revealed ships lashed them with terrifyingly accurate gunfire.

Var Sohn’s defence systems blew apart, one by one.

‘They mean to board us,’ he said with a sick jolt of horror.

This was just the fight he was bred for.

Head hunched low behind a breacher’s shield, moving forward, Mourn-it-all’s enhanced edge cutting through meat and bone and armour with ease. The boarding torpedo smoked and howled in the splintered underside of the orbital plate. Melting ice streamed from its superheated hull, and Sons of Horus breachers poured from its interior.

The rapid reaction force sent to intercept them were dead. Exo-armoured mortals. Highly trained and well armoured. Now nothing more than offal and butcher meat scattered like abattoir refuse.

Yade Durso, second Captain of the Fifth Company, together with five warriors in heavily reinforced battleplate and shields formed a wedge with him at its point. Tactical overlays appeared on his visor; schematics, objectives, kill boxes. Another timer. This one even more crucial than the last.

Remember the moon, Grael Noctua had said.

Aximand threw back his head and howled.

And let raw savagery take him.

A flicker of ignis fatuus was the first warning. Crackling blue teleport flare arced between the primary stanchions of the Var Zerba orbital plate’s command centre. Ear canals crackled in the seconds before a hard bang of displaced air shattered every data-slate within twenty metres of the transloc point.

Ezekyle Abaddon, Kalus Ekaddon and six Justaerin stood in an outward facing ring, their armour glossy and black, trailing vapour ghosts of teleporter flare. A hooded priest of the Mechanicum stood in the centre of the ring of Terminators, a hunched thing of multiple limbs, glowing eye lenses and hissing pneumatics.

The junior officers barely had time to register the presence of the hulking killers before a blitzing storm of combi-bolter fire mowed them down.

‘Kill them all,’ said Abaddon.

The Justaerin spread out, spewing shots that looked indiscriminate, but were in fact, preternaturally exact. The Warmaster’s orders had been unambiguous. The defence platforms were to be captured intact.

Within moments, it was done.

Abaddon marched to the throne at the heart of the control centre. A mewling wretch sat there, soiled and weeping. His eyes were screwed shut. As if that would save him. Abaddon broke his neck and wrenched the limp sack of bones from the throne without bothering to undo the neck clamp. The Platform Master’s head tore off and bounced over the deck before coming to rest by an armaments panel.

‘You,’ barked Abaddon, waving the Mechanicum priest forward. ‘Sit your arse down and get this thing shooting.’

The fight through the Mausolytica had been bloody, but its outcome had, knew Grael Noctua, been a foregone conclusion. The fight through the heart of Var Crixia was just the same. Its defenders were well trained, well armed and disciplined.

But they had never fought transhumans before.

The Warlocked were eternal, a squad never omitted from the 25th Company’s order of battle. Death occasionally altered its composition, but a line of continuity could be traced from its current makeup all the way back to its inception.

Noctua fought along the starboard axial, a gently curved transit way that ran from one tip of the crescent shaped station to the other. Herringbone passageways branched from the main axial like ribs, and it was from these raked corridors that the exo-armoured mortals were attempting to hold them off.

It wasn’t working.

Breachers went in hard and fast, running at the low-crouch. Shields up, heads down, bolters locked into the slotted upper edge. Braying streaks of miniature rockets rammed down the main axial, killing anything that dared to show itself. Automated gun carriages pummelled the advancing legionaries, but were quickly bracketed and shredded by bolter fire.

Static emplacements unmasked from ceiling mounts and hidden wall caskets. Grenade dispensers dumped frags and krak bombs. Battleplate withstood the bulk of it. Legion warriors stomped on through the acrid broil of aerosolised blood and yellow smoke.

Noctua advanced behind the wall of shields, bolter pulled in tight to his shoulder. Ahead, a barricade of hard plasteel and light-distorting refractors extruded from a choke point in the corridor. Bulky shapes moved through the haze.

Sawing blasts of autocannon fire punched into shields. Ceramite and steel splintered. Other weapons fired. Louder, harder and with a bigger, more lethal muzzle sound. A legionary grunted in pain as a shot found a gap in the shields and blew out his kneecap.

Mass-reactives.

The shell ricocheted from hardened bone and travelled down the length of the warrior’s shin. It detonated at his ankle and obliterated his foot. Trailing the shredded remains on a rope of mangled tendons like a grotesque form of penitentiary ball and chain, the warrior kept up with his fellow shieldbearers.

Over the upper edges of the shields, Noctua saw hints of the defenders. It was like looking through a pane of fat-smeared glass. They were big, bigger than even the largest mortal exo-suit, and Noctua was confused until chance light through the refractors granted him a fleeting impression of cobalt-blue and gold plate. An Ultima rendered in mother-of-pearl.

‘Legion foe!’ he shouted. ‘Ultramarines.’

Another volley of hard, echoing shots. Two of the breachers went down. One with the back of his helm a smoking, ruined crater. The other with his head lolling over his back and his throat blown out to the spine.

The advance faltered, but didn’t stop. Legionaries following behind swept up the fallen shields and dressed ranks. One died before he could bring the shield up completely, his shoulders and ribs separated by a pair of bolter shells. Another pitched over without a head as a round slotted neatly through the bolter notch.

Noctua took his turn, bending to grab the shield before it hit the ground. A shot punched the lip of the shield and he felt the blazing edge of the shell score a line across his brow where his Mournival mark was graven.

He slid home his bolter.

‘Onwards,’ he said. ‘We stop, we die.’

Gunshots sounded from one of the herringbone corridors. Stubber fire, cannon blasts and whickering volleys of flechettes.

Pin us in place with Legion forces then overwhelm us with mortal units shooting from the flanks and rear. Clever. Practical.

They could fight their way clear. Retreat, regroup. Find a workaround. But that would take time. Time the fleet didn’t have if it wasn’t going to be savaged by Var Crixia’s guns.

No, retreat wasn’t an option.

Suddenly it didn’t need to be.

An ululating howl came from one of the herringbone corridors, and a pack of dark-armoured warriors charged into the fray. They moved like sprinting acrobats, using the walls as well as the deck to propel themselves forward.

They hit the barricade like a shell from a demolisher cannon, smashing it to splinters with the ferocity of impact. Some fired bolters and wielded blades, others simply tore into their foes with what looked like implanted claws. Blood arced up in cataclysmic geysers and the savagery was beyond anything Noctua had ever seen. Refractors blew out with squalling shrieks and what had previously been hidden was now revealed.

Noctua had thought his reinforcements to be another squad of the 25th Company, but such was not the case. They were still Sons of Horus, or had been once – their armour was a mix of swamp green, soot black and flaked blood. Some went without helms, their faces protean and scabbed with wounds cut into their faces.

The stench of burned meat attended them, and though the refractors were no more, Noctua still felt as though the air between them was somehow polluted. Inhuman strength, beyond even that of a trans-human tore the Ultramarines apart. Limbs were rent from shoulder guards, clawed fists punched through plastrons and thickly-muscled hearts ripped from splintered rib sheaths.

Noctua watched as one of the smoking warriors twisted a helm from a gorget with the head and spinal column still attached. He swung this like a spike-headed flail, battering another of the XIII Legion to death with it.

The warrior spread his arms wide and roared, his maw a red furnace into hell. Scars covered his neck and cheeks, and he bled toxic smoke from two old wounds in his chest.

Shock pinned Noctua in place.

Ger Gerradon, whose fighting days ended on Dwell.

Noctua’s eyes met those of Gerradon, and he saw madness behind that gaze – malignant fire and a soul that burned in its chains. The moment lasted an instant only, and Noctua threw off his horror at what Gerradon had become.

The Ultramarines were dead, no longer a threat.

Time to deal with the enemies that were.

‘Come about,’ ordered Noctua, and the shields lifted high, their bearers turning on the spot as the warriors behind them pushed past. In one fluid manoeuvre, the entire formation of the Warlocked was reversed.

Bolter fire flayed the mortal soldiers, and they balked in the face of sudden reversal. With their Legion allies dead, the mortals knew that the fight was over, and fled.

It went against the grain to let them go, but this plan was of his devising, and he was already behind. Var Crixia’s guns needed to be firing at the right targets.

Noctua turned to see what Ger Gerradon and his warriors were doing, reluctant to let them out of his sight, even for a second.

They were on their knees.

Feasting on the Ultramarines they had killed.

TEN

I want that ship
Warmaster
Stowaway

Horus returned to the bridge. As the tomb ships closed on the orbitals, he’d retired to his personal chambers and left the observation of the coming attack to Maloghurst.

The strategium was a large space, airy and vaulted, but with the return of the Warmaster arrayed in the full panoply of battle, it seemed cramped. Nor had he returned alone, Falkus Kibre and twenty of the Justaerin carrying breacher shields came with him.

Kibre’s helmet hung at his belt. His face was a picture in rapture. Such a change from the bitter resentment he’d worn when the Warmaster removed him from the assault elements. Now he was going into battle at the Warmaster’s side, and no greater honour existed within the Sons of Horus.

‘You’re still set on doing this then?’ asked Maloghurst.

‘I want that ship, Mal,’ replied Horus, rolling his shoulders in a clatter of plate to loosen the muscles beneath. ‘And I’m out of practice.’

‘I counsel you again, sir, you should not do this.’

‘Worried I’ll get hurt, Mal?’ asked Horus, lifting Worldbreaker from his belt. The haft of the mace was the length of a mortal man. Lethal against a Legion foe, absurd overkill against baseline humans.

‘It’s an unnecessary risk.’

Horus slapped a mailed fist on the Widowmaker’s shoulder, a booming clang of metal that echoed through the strategium like rolling thunder.

‘I have Falkus here to protect me,’ said Horus, unhooking his battle helm and hauling it down onto his gorget. The lenses flared red as its auto-senses were activated.

Maloghurst felt a tremor of awe travel the length of his twisted spine. Horus was an avenging angel, an avatar of battle incarnate and the master of war. So terrible and powerful. Maloghurst was horrified his quotidian dealings with the primarch had rendered the miraculous almost banal.

‘I’ve sat on the sidelines for too long, Mal. It’s time everyone remembered that this fight is my fight. It will be my deeds that ensure it’s my name that echoes down through the ages. I won’t have my warriors win my war without me.’

Maloghurst nodded, convinced the moment Horus had secured his helm. He dropped to his knees, though the movement sent a jolt of searing pain through his fused hips.

‘My lord,’ said Maloghurst.

‘No kneeling, not from you,’ said Horus, hauling his equerry to his feet.

‘Sorry,’ said Maloghurst. ‘Old habits.’

Horus nodded, as though people kneeling to him were an everyday occurrence. Which, of course, it was.

‘Bloody the Spirit for me, Mal,’ said Horus, turning and leading the Justaerin to the embarkation deck where his Stormbird awaited. ‘I don’t expect I’ll be gone long.’

This is it. This is what I missed.

‘Tomb ships,’ hissed Admiral Semper, seeing notations on an instructional primer from his cadet days writ large in reality on the hololith. ‘Throne, bloody almighty, tomb ships. They’re fighting the subjugation of the moon all over again. The thrice damned bloody moon.’

The hololith told a tale of horror. Of a plan in tatters, of arrogance and, ultimately, death.

‘If it had been anyone else but the Sons of Horus, I wouldn’t have believed it,’ whispered Semper. ‘Who but the Warmaster would have the audacity to launch a full quarter of his fleet into the void and hope they arrived in time and at the right location?’

Except, of course, the Warmaster hadn’t hoped the tomb ships would arrive where he needed them. He’d known. Known with a certainty that chilled Semper to the bone.

‘The orbital platforms are gone,’ said his Master of Surveyors, hardly daring to believe the evidence of the hololith. Semper shared the man’s disbelief.

‘They’re worse than gone, the enemy has them,’ he replied, watching as the most powerful platforms, Var Crixia and Var Zerba, cracked open the orbitals that the enemy assault forces hadn’t seized. Var Sohn had launched – and was still launching – spreads of torpedoes into his hopelessly scattered fleet.

‘Is the day lost, Lord Admiral?’

The answer was surely obvious, but the man deserved a considered answer. The Lord Admiral swept his gaze over the catastrophic ruin of what had begun as an ironclad stratagem.

He laughed and the nearby Thallax rotated their torsos at the unfamiliar sound. Semper shook his head. He’d forgotten the first rule of war regarding contact with the enemy.

Semper’s rightmost battlegroup was no more. Every vessel gutted by treacherous fire from the captured orbitals. As the warships foundered in the wake of the shocking reversal, the Death Guard surged into them like ambush predators picking off herd stragglers. Alone and overwhelmed, each Imperial ship was brutalised until it was no more than a smouldering ruin.

The crippled hulks were then driven into the gravitational clutches of Molech by snub-nosed ram-ships. Wrecks plunged through the atmosphere. Blazing re-entry plumes followed them down.

Semper had traced the trajectories, hoping against hope that the wrecks would hit the atmosphere too sharply and burn to ash before reaching the surface. Or be too shallow and bounce off, careening into deep space.

But whoever had calculated the angle of re-entry had been precise, and every missile of wreckage was going to strike Molech with the kinetic force of heavy battlefield atomics.

The Sons of Horus swarmed the Adranus, its nova cannon useless at close quarters and its broadsides unable to hold off the raptor packs of Thunderhawks, Stormbirds and Dreadclaw assault pods slamming into its flanks.

With its escorts crippled by the orbitals, the Dominator was easy prey and was being gutted by vultures. An ignoble death, a bloody death. The Dominator was going down hard.

Screaming vox blurts told of thousands of Legion warriors and things of howling darkness ripping it apart from within. He’d ordered the vox shut off, the screams of the Adranus’s crew too terrible to be borne.

Only the centre yet endured.

Admonishment in Fire had been manoeuvring when the first assault teams hit the orbitals. Its captain ordered an emergency burst of the engines which undoubtedly saved her ship. For now. Its lance broadsides had demolished Var Uncad and reduced it to a smouldering ruin.

Solar’s Glory was ablaze, but still in the fight. With the destruction of Var Uncad, it had been spared the full force of the fire intended to cripple it. A handful of light cruisers had weathered the swarms of torpedoes, but none were in any condition to take the fight to the traitors. At least six would be dead in the void within minutes, and the remaining four could barely manoeuvre or muster a firing line.

There would be no crossing-the-T this day.

‘Yes, the day is lost,’ said Lord Admiral Semper. ‘The rest is silence.’

Five Stormbirds flew the flaming gauntlet from the Vengeful Spirit on an assault run. Four streaked forward to take up position alongside the fifth. They peeled away from the Warmaster’s flagship as its vast engines fired, manoeuvring it towards the mighty form of Guardian of Aquinas as it swung in.

The two flag vessels were closing like champions in the crucible of combat, seeking one another out in the midst of slaughter.

It would be an unequal fight. The Vengeful Spirit was old and tough, its marrow seasoned and its blackened soul ready to taste blood. Collimated blinks of light streamed between the two ships, high-energy pulse lasers intended to strip shields and ablative coatings of ice.

Deck after deck of guns boomed silently in the void, hurling monstrous projectiles through the space between them. In void terms, the two warships were at point-blank range. Two swordsmen too close to use their main blades and reduced to stabbing at one another with punch daggers.

They moved in opposition like stately galleons, sliding through clouds of molten debris and listing wrecks with impunity. Bright hurricanes of light streamed back and forth, explosions, premature detonations of intercepted munitions, crackling arcs of squalling, scraping void shields. Hull plates buckled and blew out as both ships traded blows like punch-drunk pugilists.

In their wake, streams of molten debris and shimmer-trails of frozen oxygen glittered in the star’s light. The escorting Gothics attending Guardian of Aquinas came in hard beside her, the Admonishment in Fire and the Solar’s Glory hurling thousands of tonnes of explosive ordnance at the Vengeful Spirit.

The Warmaster’s ship shuddered under the impacts, but it was built to take punishment, built to bully its way through harsher storms than this.

The Endurance came in low, oblique. Shadowed by burning orbitals and pulsing reactor detonations. Its prow weapons savaged the Admonishment in Fire and crumpled its hull as if with a fiery sledgehammer. The stricken ship’s gun decks burned and its weapons stuttered in the face of the Endurance’s assault.

It kept shooting even as the Death Guard vessel rammed it amidships. Millions of tonnes of iron and adamantium moving at speed had unstoppable momentum. The Endurance’s reinforced frontal ram ripped through the weakened armour of its target and drove its grey bulk through the very heart of the Admonishment in Fire.

The Gothic simply ceased to exist, its keel shattered and its exposed interior compartments raked by unending broadsides. The wreckage spun away, spiralling clouds of flash-freezing atmosphere blooming from its shorn halves.

The Solar’s Glory, already ablaze and choking on its own blood had already stopped shooting and its rear quarters vanished in the light of a newborn star. A reactor breach or deliberate overload, it didn’t matter. A white-hot sphere of plasma bloomed from the vessel and engulfed the flanks of the Endurance.

Almost as soon as the fiery explosion flared to life it began to diminish. An inverted hemisphere was gouged in the Endurance’s hull and intense oxygen fires burned with raging intensity before the void snuffed them out.

Any other vessel would have been hopelessly crippled, left wheezing and dying by so grievous a wound. But even more than the Vengeful Spirit, the Endurance was built to take pain. Damage control mechanisms had already sealed off the ruptured decks and it heeled around to rake the engine decks of the Guardian of Aquinas.

Lord Admiral Brython Semper’s flagship was a gutsy fighter, and though it was ablaze from prow to stern, it kept hurting its attackers with murderous broadsides. Through burning fire decks, its master gunners whipped their choking crews to load one last salvo, one final shell, one parting broadside.

Guardian of Aquinas was doomed, but the killing blow would not come from without, it would come from within.

Two of the gauntlet-running Stormbirds were obliterated before they began their attack run. Simply swatted out of existence by the blitzing storm of detonations filling the space between the grappling warships. Another had its trajectory fatally altered by the close passage of a torpedo, sending it into the hot zone of laser bursts where it immediately exploded.

The final pair swooped low over the topside superstructure of the Guardian of Aquinas. They weaved evasion patterns between close-in defence turrets and barrage lines. Raptors on the hunt, they flew almost suicidally close to the gnarled structure of Semper’s flagship.

The hull breach behind the bridge was exactly where it was expected, and both Stormbirds flared their wings as vectored thrust suddenly reversed to match their forward velocity with that of the Guardian of Aquinas. Assault ramps opened and streams of heavily armed warriors dropped from their troop compartments.

Terminators, breachers and assaulters. Hard fighters all and equipped to fight in the kind of war Space Marines were bred to win. Brutal, close-quarter, barging, blade work. Blazing scrum-fights of bolters, stabbing blades and full-contact bloodwork.

First into the Guardian of Aquinas was the Warmaster.

Bolter shells hosed the ten metre transit in horizontal spears of fire. The shooting was disciplined. He’d expect no less from warriors of the XIII Legion. Horus felt the hot breath of near-misses, and the kinetic force of their passage battered the plates of his armour.

Shields hunched before them, scraping the deck, Sons of Horus breachers advanced through the banging fury of the defence. Explosions and gunfire rang from the walls. Metallic coughs of grenade detonations filled its volume with scything shrapnel.

To Horus’s left, Falkus Kibre fired his combi-bolter over the edge of his shield. A Terminator hardly needed a shield, but Falkus hadn’t brought it for his own protection.

‘Maloghurst does love to nanny me,’ Horus had advised the Widowmaker in the instant before launching the assault. ‘Keep it for yourself.’

Never one to gainsay an order if it stood to keep him alive and safe, Falkus had done just that.

The defenders were coming at them from all sides; Ultramarines to the front, a mix of carapace-armoured storm troopers, Army and skitarii to the flanks. The Justaerin advanced in a salient wedge, pushed out in a segmented formation of bolters, blades and shields.

Chaingun fire pummelled the shields and beam cutters sliced through them in white-edged lines. Even Terminator armour was vulnerable. A powerhouse of armoured might, the only thing that could resist a warrior encased in Tactical Dreadnought armour was an identically equipped warrior.

Or so Horus had thought.

Argonaddu went down, the Hero of Ullanor bisected through the chest by a sizzling beam cutter that left a nasty stink of cauterised meat. His killers struggled to reset their weapon, ratcheting cranks and pumping charge-bellows. Horus raised his gauntlet-mounted bolters, their proportions outlandish to any other, but perfectly suited to his primarch’s scale.

A continuous stream of shells briefly linked muzzle flare and target. The beam gunners exploded in a confetti of shredded, scorched meat tissue and volcanic blood.

The skitarii launched an assault into the flanks of their advance. The heavies came first. Combat-augs with grossly swollen musculature who wielded motorised saw blades and polearms with photonic edges.

‘Ware left!’ shouted Kibre, and the Justaerin on the edge of the formation halted and braced for impact. Skitarii were hellish fighters, chosen for aggressive, almost psychopathic tendencies that could be yoked by cybernetics. These were, if anything, more feral than any Horus had seen.

Warriors of the wasteland, post-apocalyptic killers. Reminiscent of the barbarian tribes Horus had last seen as stasis-preserved specimens of pre-Unity. Bedecked in fanged amulets, furred cloaks and scaled breastplates, they charged like men possessed.

A Terminator was a tank in humanoid form, more a war machine than a suit of armour. Only the very best could adapt to its use and only the best of the best fought alongside the Warmaster. A volley of combi-bolters sawed into the skitarii. A dozen fell, two dozen more came on.

They slammed into the Terminators in a flurry of roaring blades and unsubtle firearms. High-load shells exploded against bonded ceramite and plasteel, caroming from deflective angles and ricocheting wildly.

Kibre waded in among them, shooting the head from the nearest skitarii killer. His shield bludgeoned the next, caving his face to a fragmented pulp of liquid flesh and bone. This was the work Kibre loved best. Batter kills, armour blows. Feeling the blood spray your visor, feeling the bones break beneath your fists.

Horus left him to it and jabbed his clawed fist at Hargun, Ultar and Parthaan.

‘Keep the right clear,’ he said. ‘They’ll come from that side next.’

His words were prophetic.

Cloaked in power-fields, ion-bucklers and photon-disruptors, blue cloaked warriors of the Forlorn Spartaks threw themselves at the Sons of Horus. Despite himself, Horus was struck by admiration for the Spartaks’ courage. Transhuman dread could freeze even the bravest warrior in place, but they came anyway.

Ultar swung his rotor cannon to bear and the deafening bray of its spinning barrels filled the transit. Hargun chugged shells from his combi-bolter. Power-fields shrieked under the hammer blow impacts and photon-disruptors were no protection against the detonation of the fat shells.

Parthaan broke formation and closed the distance far faster than anything his size ought to be able to move. A shieldwall could only hold for as long as it remained solid, but rotor cannon and combi-bolter had broken this one open. Parthaan went in head down, like a battering ram, striking left and right with his oversized fist. Crumpled forms were hurled about like refuse, bent in ways no body was meant to bend. They shattered on impact, leaving bright red spray patterns on the wall.

The Spartaks fought a thing that could not be fought, tried to kill he who could not be killed. A dozen fell to Parthaan’s fist, then a dozen more. They threw themselves at him as though eager to join their comrades in death. The warrior of the Justaerin waded through blood and bodies, trampling them to gory mud beneath his armoured boots. Gunfire and blades tore at his armour, tearing the ocean green paint from its surfaces, but doing no harm.

On the opposite flank, Kibre’s warriors were having a harder time against the skitarii. Cauterised fear centres blunted them to the terror of Terminators. Implanted aggression boosters made them wild. Horus was mildly surprised to see two Justaerin on their knees, armour carved open and wet organs flopping out onto the deck.

He hadn’t seen that, hadn’t incorporated it into his plans.

After Ullanor, many claimed the title of Warmaster was simply a recognition of Horus’s rank within the Great Crusade. A bellicose thing, fit only for the purposes of conquest. Something to be set aside when the fighting was done.

To his lasting regret, Horus knew better.

Warmaster was not a title, it was what he was.

The flow of battle was music to him, a virtuoso performance that could be read and anticipated like the perfect arrangement of notes. Battle was a chaotic, unpredictable maelstrom of chance, a random imbroglio where death played no favours. Horus knew war, knew battle as intimately as a lover. Horus knew what would come next as clearly as if he had lived it before.

Now.

Parthaan’s rampage was ended as a coruscating beam of hyper-dense light struck the back of his armour. For an instant it played harmlessly over the blood-matted plate. Then the Justaerin’s armour buckled as though an invisible giant was crushing him in its fist. Plates ruptured as a rising whine of building power split the air over Parthaan’s screams of agony.

A thunderclap of discharge and Parthaan died as he imploded at the subatomic level, and every particle of his being turned inwards and crushed by its own mass. Shattered plates collapsed as though the man within them had simply vaporised and Horus smelled a stink-wind of misted blood and bone.

A beat as the Justaerin struggled to comprehend what had just happened.

‘Ultar!’ shouted Horus. ‘Rapier platform. Conversion beamer.’

The rotor cannon turned on the gun carriage. Ultar walked his shells into it and reduced it to scrap metal.

‘Now they’ll come,’ whispered Horus and swung Worldbreaker from his shoulder. He kept the weapon moving. Even for a being of his stature, it took time to build speed and power with so heavy a weapon.

A warrior with a transverse crest of ivory led the Ultramarines.

A centurion. Visor tags identified him as Proximo Tarchon and Horus assimilated his available service record instantaneously.

Ambitious, honourable, practical.

Gladius, of course. Energised combat-buckler on the opposite arm. Bolt pistol, expected.

Tarchon fired as he ran. The thirty Ultramarines at his back did likewise, maintaining their rate of fire even as they charged.

‘Impressive,’ said Horus. ‘You do my brother much honour.’

Two Justaerin nearest the charging Ultramarines went down, carefully bracketed by the warriors in cobalt-blue. With enough mass-reactives brought to bear, even Tactical Dreadnought armour could be penetrated. Return fire punched half a dozen Ultramarines from their feet. Armour cracked open, flesh detonated.

Horus didn’t give the XIII Legion a chance to fire again.

Without seeming to move, he was suddenly among them. Worldbreaker swung and three Ultramarines exploded as though siege mines had detonated within their chest cavities. A copious volume of blood wetted the air. The flanged mace swung back again, one-handed. Low on an upward arc. Another four warriors died. Their bodies slammed against the walls with bone shattering force, their outlines punched into the steelwork.

Tarchon came at him, gladius arcing towards his throat.

The haft of Worldbreaker deflected the blade. Tarchon kicked him in the midriff, firing his bolter one-handed into his chest. Explosions ripped across the Warmaster’s breastplate and the amber eye at its centre split down the middle.

Horus caught the bolter between the talons of his gauntlet. A twist of the wrist and the weapon snapped just behind the magazine. Horus stepped inside Tarchon’s guard and took hold of his gorget.

Tarchon stabbed with his gladius. Horus felt blood well from the cut. He lifted Tarchon from the deck as though he was a child and clubbed his fist into the centurion’s chest.

The impact drove him back through his men, felling them like corn before the scythe. Horus kept going, sometimes bludgeoning, sometimes disembowelling. Gore boiled on his talons, clotted on Worldbreaker. Dripped from the cracked amber eye upon his breast.

He pushed into the Ultramarines. Surrounded on all sides by transhuman warriors. Honourable men who, only a short few years ago, would have called him lord. They might have balked at his naked ambition, resented his appointment to Warmaster over their own primarch, but still they loved and respected him. And now he had to kill them. They stabbed and shot, undaunted in the face of the might of the demigod in their midst. Blades scored furrows in his armour, bolt shells exploded. Fire and fury surrounded the Warmaster.

Against so many sublime warriors, even a primarch could be brought down. Primarchs were functionally immortal, but they weren’t invulnerable. People often forgot the difference.

In a fight like this, the skill was to find the moments of stillness, the places between the blades and bullets. A chainblade sailed past his head. Horus removed its owner’s. Bolter shells ricocheted from his thigh plate. Horus punched his taloned fist through a warrior’s hearts and lungs.

Always in motion, talons and mace killing with every stroke.

Twenty-three seconds later, the transit was a charnel house. Hundreds dead and every drop of blood wrung to paint the walls.

Horus let out a cathartic breath.

He felt someone approach and reined in a violent reaction.

‘Falkus,’ said Horus. ‘Get me the centurion’s gladius.’

The blast door to the command bridge was bulging inwards. The first blow had hit it like a Titan’s fist. The second buckled the metal and tore its upper corners from the frame. Lord Admiral Brython Semper stood with his duelling sabre unsheathed and the captain’s twin-barrelled Boyer held loosely at his thigh.

The upper barrel was an ancient beam weapon – a volkite, some called it – the underslung portion a one-shot plasma jet. It was a Space Marine killer, but could it kill a primarch?

Would he get the chance to find out?

He’d be lucky to get even a single shot off with the Boyer.

Perhaps a hundred people stood with him; surveyor readers, aides, juniors, scriveners and battle-techs, deckhands. None were combat-trained worth a damn. Only a single squad of armsmen with shotcannons and the nine Thallaxii Ferrox had any hope of inflicting real damage.

Banks of acrid smoke filled the bridge, and the only light was from a few stuttering lumens. The hololith had failed, and hydraulic fluids drizzled from ruptured pipework. Nothing remained of the command network. The vox crackled with screams.

‘We’ll make them pay for this, admiral,’ said a crewman, Semper couldn’t see who.

He wanted to say something suitably heroic. A valedictory speech to inspire his crew and earn them an ending worthy of the Guardian of Aquinas. All that filled his thoughts were the last words Vitus Salicar had said to him.

We are killers, reapers of flesh. You must never forget that.

The blast door finally tore free of its mounting and fell into the bridge like a profane monolith toppled by iconoclasts. A towering figure was revealed, a giant of legend.

Haloed by flames of murder and dripping with blood.

A mantle of stiffened fur wreathed the war god’s shoulders. His armour was the colour of night and gleamed with the fire of dying empires.

Semper had expected a charge, bursts of gunfire.

The god threw something at his feet. Semper looked down.

An Ultramarines gladius, the blade coated in vivid crimson. Its handle was wrapped in red leather. The hemispherical pommel was ivory, inlaid with the wreath-enclosed company number.

‘That belonged to Proximo Tarchon,’ said the god. ‘Centurion of the Ninth Division, Battle Group Two, Legiones Astartes Ultramarines.’

Semper knew he should spit in the traitor’s face or at least raise his weapon. His crew deserved to be led into their last battle by their captain. Yet the idea of raising a weapon against a being so perfectly formed, so sublime, seemed abhorrent.

He knew he faced a betrayer – an enemy, the enemy – yet Semper felt enraptured by his sheer magnificence.

The Warmaster took a step onto the bridge, and it took every ounce of Semper’s willpower not to kneel. ‘Proximo Tarchon and his warriors faced me without fear, for they were trained by my brother on Macragge, and such men are uniquely skilled at death dealing. But Proximo Tarchon and his warriors could not stop me.’

Semper tried to answer the Warmaster, but he couldn’t long hold his gaze and his tongue felt leaden.

‘Why are you telling me this?’ he managed at last.

‘Because you fought honourably,’ said the Warmaster. ‘And you deserve to know how futile it would be to waste your lives in pointless defiance at this point.’

Semper felt the paralysing awe he’d felt of the Warmaster diminish in the face of so arrogant a statement. He wished he’d had the chance to return to Cypra Mundi and watch his son grow to manhood. He wished the blast shutters weren’t down over the viewing bay so he might see the stars one last time.

He wished he could be the one to kill this god.

Semper lifted his duelling sabre to his lips and kissed its blade. He thumbed the activation clasp on the Boyer gun.

‘For the Imperium!’ shouted Semper as he charged the Warmaster.

Horus stood in the midst of carnage. One hundred and eleven people dead in less than a minute. A corpse lay at the Warmaster’s feet, divided into long sections by a diagonal stroke of energised talons.

‘Who was he?’ asked Mortarion, his holographic form wavering on the temporary floating disc projector the Mechanicum had rigged. Beyond the Death Lord’s image, faint impressions of Deathshroud could be seen, trailing their master like ghosts. The disc maintained a constant distance of three metres from Horus, closer than Falkus Kibre would have liked – even for a hologram – but exceptions had to be made for the primarch’s brothers.

‘Lord Admiral Brython Semper,’ said Horus.

‘A Lord Admiral,’ said the Death Lord. ‘Looks like you were right. Our father really does value this world.’

Horus nodded absently and knelt by Brython’s corpse. ‘A pointless death,’ said Horus.

‘He tried to kill you,’ pointed out Falkus Kibre, taking position at the Warmaster’s right hand.

‘He didn’t have to.’

‘Of course he did,’ said Kibre. ‘You know he had to. He might actually have surrendered until you said what you did at the end.’

Horus rose to his full, towering height. ‘You think I wanted him to attack me?’

‘Of course,’ said Kibre, puzzled the Warmaster would even ask.

‘Tell me, then – why did I provoke the Lord Admiral?’

Kibre looked up at Lupercal, and saw a fractional tilt to the corner of his mouth. A test, then. Aximand had warned him that the Warmaster liked to play these little games. Kibre took a moment to marshal his response. Quick answers were for Aximand or Noctua.

‘Because the Lord Admiral’s name would have been reviled forever if he’d surrendered his vessel,’ offered Kibre. ‘He’d fought hard and done all that honour demanded, but to surrender would have cursed his line from here till the end of time.’

Mortarion grinned. ‘What’s this? Insight from the Widowmaker?’

Kibre shrugged, hearing derision.

‘I’m a simple warrior, my lord,’ he said. ‘Not a stupid one.’

‘Which is why I was pleased when Ezekyle put your name forward for the Mournival,’ said Horus. ‘Things have become complex, Falkus, far more so than I thought. And far quicker. It’s good to have a simple man at your side in such times, don’t you agree, brother?’

‘If you say so,’ grunted Mortarion, and Kibre smiled. The gesture was so unfamiliar to him he didn’t at first know what his facial muscles were doing.

The Warmaster placed a hand on his shoulder and walked him to the command throne of Guardian of Aquinas. The hololith had been returned to life, painting a grim portrait of Molech’s future.

‘Tell me what my simple warrior sees, Falkus,’ said Horus. ‘You’re Mournival now, so you need to be more than just a shock trooper. Simple or otherwise.’

Kibre studied the shimmering globe of Molech. He took his time, and it was an effort not to advocate a full drop pod assault immediately. How long was it since he’d had to employ anything other than the directness of breacher tactics?

‘The battle for space is won,’ said Kibre. ‘The weapon platforms are ours, and the enemy ships are crippled or captured.’

‘Tell me about the orbitals,’ asked Horus.

‘They’re manoeuvring to new positions, but we can’t rely on them.’

‘Why not?’

‘Molech’s adepts will be re-tasking the surface missile batteries to destroy the platforms. We’ll take out some before they fire, but they were never intended to resist fire from the ground. At best, we’ll get a few salvoes away before the platforms are inoperable.’

‘Hardly worth the effort to capture them,’ said Mortarion.

‘A few salvoes from orbit is worth a whole battalion of legionaries,’ said Kibre. ‘Calth taught the Seventeenth Legion that much.’

‘He’s right, brother,’ said Horus, zooming in from the view of Molech’s orbital volume to its planetary zones. Four continental masses, only two of which were inhabited or defended to any degree. One heavily industrialised, the other pastoral.

The Sons of Horus and the Death Guard forces would direct the main thrust of their attack upon the latter continent. Molech’s primary seat of command lay within a mountain valley, at a city named for Horus himself, Lupercalia.

The Warmaster jabbed a talon at Lupercalia and traced a route across the continent, over verdant plains, past cities, through mountain valleys, before ending up at a ruined citadel on a storm-lashed island virtually clinging to the coastline.

‘The Fulgurine Path,’ said Horus. ‘That’s the road I need to walk, and this citadel is where we’ll begin.’

‘And the rest of Molech?’ said Mortarion.

‘Unleash your Eater of Lives,’ ordered Horus. ‘Lay waste.’

Loken moved down the corridor with Bror Tyrfingr to his left, Ares Voitek to his right. He kept the shotcannon pulled in tight, looking down the unfamiliar iron sight as he moved smoothly into the drive chamber. He hadn’t used a weapon like this since his time in the Scout Auxilia, but firing bolt weapons aboard a thin-skinned starship was generally frowned upon.

Tarnhelm wasn’t a large ship, so when Banu Rassuah informed Loken she’d detected an unauthorised bio-sign during her final calculations for Mandeville translation, it didn’t take long to narrow down the potential hiding places in which a stowaway could be hiding.

While the rest of the pathfinders secured the frontal areas of the ship, Loken, Tyrfingr and Voitek swept back to the drives.

‘Someone from that grim fortress orbiting Titan?’ asked Voitek, his upper servo-arms clicking with restraint cuffs. ‘That Oliton girl you saw?’

Loken shook his head. ‘No. It’s not her.’

‘Then a warp-thing?’ offered Tyrfingr. ‘Something shat out by the Warmaster’s maleficarum?’

The former Space Wolf had eschewed a shotcannon in favour of his combat blade and knotted leather cestus gauntlet. Its night-bladed claws tapped on his thigh plate in a rhythmic tattoo.

None of them answered Tyrfingr’s question. Each of them knew too much to lightly dismiss such speculation. The drive chamber was the only place left on the ship where anyone could realistically conceal themselves, but so far they had found nothing.

The engine spaces were elliptical in section, with a raised floor and suspended ceiling, flanked on both sides by two enormous cylinders that thrummed with barely contained power. Looped cables encircled narrowed portions of the main drives, and hardwired calculus-servitors with shimmering eyes mumbled binaric plainsong.

A central nave ended at a communion altar, at which stood the unmoving figure of the nameless Mechanicum adept mono-tasked with overseeing the engine functions.

Sitting cross-legged before the altar was a bearded, tattooed warrior in the unadorned plate of the Knights Errant. He was assembling the components of a bolter he’d spread out on the deck.

Loken lowered his shotcannon as the warrior looked up with a disappointed shake of his head.

‘What,’ said Loken, ‘are you doing?’

‘I got bored of waiting for you to find me,’ replied Severian.

ELEVEN

Screaming
Responsibilities
Invasion

Molech was screaming.

It bled magma from a score of wounds gouged by the wreckage dropped from orbit. It burned black where macro-munitions punched through the atmosphere and carved blazing canyons in its crust. Night was banished. The engine plumes of incoming warheads and the explosions of intercepted ones eclipsed the light of the moons.

I have been here before, but I do not remember it.

Little Horus Aximand watched the wreckage of Lord Admiral Brython’s fleet fall like continually dividing meteors. They scratched painfully bright parabolas in the sky. They shed blazing debris over tens of thousands of kilometres. The southern horizon was a fiery smudge of distant conflagrations and hard-burning retros. A pall of smoke pressed down on the landscape, underlit by the apocalyptic radiance of city fires.

Strange lightning arced in the clouds, the inevitable by-product of the sheer volume of metal piercing the atmosphere. Wrecked starships were coming down all across Molech, mostly on the industrialised landmass across the ocean. Its coastal embarkation facilities, starports and Army bases were in ruins, and saturation spreads of the Death Guard rad-bombs had rendered much of it uninhabitable for centuries.

There would be no reinforcements coming from that quarter.

The Catulan Reavers secured the Stormbird’s landing zone, a rain-lashed harbour in the lee of a partially collapsed tower. Waves boomed against the quay, sending up walls of foaming water.

Coming in ahead of the main invasion force, the Warmaster was exposed and vulnerable. Maloghurst and the Mournival cited the assassination attempt on Dwell as reason enough not to descend to this northern island, a volcanic scrap of rock named Damesek.

Horus had brooked no disagreement.

He would be first to Molech’s surface.

Lupercal stood at the base of the tower, resting a bare hand on the pale stone of a buttress. His head was bowed, his eyes closed.

‘What do you think he’s doing?’ asked Grael Noctua.

‘Lupercal will tell you in good time,’ said Aximand.

‘In other words, you don’t know,’ grunted Kibre.

Aximand didn’t bother to answer the Widowmaker, but Abaddon gave him a clout on the back of the head for good measure. The Warmaster craned his neck to see the tower’s upper reaches. Aximand did likewise and hoped this rainstorm would topple it into the sea.

Horus grinned and rejoined the Mournival, nodding as though in answer to an unheard question. The lustre of his battle armour had been restored, the amber eye upon its breast made whole once again. Had he not been blockaded on Mars, Urtzi Malevolus would have sought fault with the restoration work, but Aximand could find none. Unconsciously, his hand lifted to the split Mournival mark on his own helm. The half moon quartered.

‘It’s the sea, you understand,’ said Horus. ‘I recall the smell of it. The salt and the faint hint of sulphur. I know I remember it, but it’s like someone else’s memory.’

He turned on the spot, looking back at the tower, as though trying to picture what it might have looked like in its heyday.

‘You know what this is, of course?’ said Horus.

‘A ruined tower?’ said Kibre.

‘Oh, it’s so much more than that, Falkus,’ said Horus. ‘I’m almost sorry you can’t feel it.’

‘It’s the tower from Curze’s cards,’ said Aximand.

Horus snapped his fingers.

‘Exactly! Curze and his cartomancy. I told him no good would come of trafficking with arcana, but you know Konrad…’

‘I don’t,’ said Aximand. ‘And I count myself fortunate.’

Horus nodded in agreement. ‘He is my brother, but I wouldn’t choose him as my friend.’

‘Sir, why are we here?’ asked Noctua. ‘I don’t understand why we landed on this island when there’s plenty of tactically superior beachheads on the mainland. We should have dropped straight on Lupercalia.’

Horus let his hand drift to Worldbreaker’s haft.

‘You have a fine appreciation of tactical necessity, Grael,’ said Horus. ‘It’s why Little Horus here put your name forward, but you have a lot to learn about people and why they do things.’

‘I don’t understand, sir.’

Horus led Noctua to the tower. He put his new Mournival son’s hand on the stone and said, ‘Because he was here. The Emperor. Everything I learned on Dwell was true. My father came here a long time ago and left from this very tower.’

‘How can you tell, sir?’ asked Abaddon, examining the tower as if it might give up its secrets if he stared hard enough. The First Captain’s scalp was now shaven smooth, his manner still contrite.

‘Because I can feel it, Ezekyle,’ said Horus, and Aximand had never seen their master so vital, so alive. The Warmaster had not felt such a connection to his father since Ullanor, and it was energising him.

Horus closed his eyes again and said, ‘A being like the Emperor does not move gently through the world. His passing leaves a mark, and He left a very big bruise when he left Molech.’

Tilting his head back, Horus let the rain wash his skin. It fell in a hard, violent baptismal. Aximand smelled the smoke from the myriad fires, saw the ruddy haze that was this world’s red dawn.

Lupercal wiped a hand across his face and turned to Aximand.

‘This is where the Emperor left Molech,’ he said. ‘I mean to follow His steps and find what He took from it.’

To rouse dreaming gods from their mountain holds was no small thing. The darkness under the earth was cool and the promise of rest seductive. Decades of slumber had made the gods forgetful, but the siren song of war was insistent. Dreams became nightmares. Nightmares became memories. Marching feet, braying horns and thundering guns.

They had been built for war, these engines of destruction, so to sleep away the years was not for them. In red-lit choral chambers, the plainsong of the Legio warhosts was carried to the domed cavern temples of the God-Machines.

Beneath Iron Fist Mountain, holdfast of Legio Crucius, Paragon of Terra’s reactor roused itself as the embers of its fury were fanned and ritual connections made to the command casket of Princeps Etana Kalonice. Nine hundred and forty-three adepts attended her revival, one for every year of the God-Machine’s existence. They intoned blessings of the Omnissiah for her survival and recited a litany of her victories. Carthal Ashur led the songs of awakening from the inviolate summit of the mountain. Binaric subvocalisation inloaded the horrifying reality of Molech’s tactical situation.

At Kalman Point, bastion of Legio Gryphonicus, Invocatio Opinicus added his voice to that of Ashur’s, his basso tones soaring and filling the gradually awakening god-engines with the urge to fight.

Farther north in the Zanark Deeps, where Legio Fortidus buried itself in shadowed catacombs, Warmonger Ur-Nammu beat binary drums, her guttural call to arms a paean of loss and savagery. Treachery on Mars had destroyed her Legio’s brother engines, and these last survivors were intent on vengeance.

Ten thousand Mechanicum priests fed power to the Legio war engines. Their hearts filled with strength, their armour with purpose and their weapons with the scent of the enemy.

War had come to Molech and the world would soon ring to the tread of the god-engines.

Alivia Sureka ditched the groundcar when the floodwater blew its motor. The engine block geysered steam and she swore in a language not native to Molech.

No way it was moving. Looked like she was on foot from here.

She’d keep to the back streets and avoid Larsa’s main thoroughfares. Terrified people were fleeing the doomed city and she didn’t have time to waste fighting her way through crowds.

Alivia climbed out the car. Ice cold water reached her knees.

And the day had started so well.

One of Molech’s principal starports and commercia centres, Larsa sat at the end of a wedge-shaped peninsula a few hundred kilometres north of Lupercalia’s white noise. It enjoyed a temperate climate carried over the bay from the jungles of Kush, and was kept fresh with coastal winds from Hvitha in the north.

All in all, Larsa wasn’t a bad place to live.

That had been true until this morning, when the burning remains of an Imperial frigate impacted twenty kilometres off the coast. Larsa’s littoral regions were underwater now, its commercia halls abandoned, its bustling markets and traders swept out to sea.

A foamed lake of debris and corpses engulfed the harbour, and only the greater elevation of the inland port districts had saved them. Disaster control squads were engaged in a desperate rescue effort to save those who might still be alive down there.

Alivia didn’t reckon on them finding anyone.

She’d endured the great flood of antiquity, and while today couldn’t compare to that deluge, she knew this was only going to get worse. A second or third wave would be building out to sea, and could be anywhere from minutes to hours away.

She needed to get back to the hab she shared with Jeph and his daughters. They lived on the edge of the Menach district in a hillside tenement along with another two thousand other port workers. Not the most exotic place she’d ever lived, but certainly better than many could hope to afford.

Alivia knew she ought to grab another transport and get the hell out of Larsa. Should have left the minute she heard the Warmaster was coming. Alivia’s time was short, but a stab of guilt knotted her gut each time she thought of abandoning Jeph and the girls.

She bore a heavy burden of duty, but now she’d acquired responsibilities. Mother. Wife. Lover. Just words she’d thought, cosmetic affectations to enhance her anonymity.

How wrong she’d been.

Alivia captained a pilot tender in the harbour, guiding the cargo tankers from Ophir and Novamatia through the submerged defences of Larsa’s approaches. Like everyone else, she’d paused to watch the lights flickering in the night sky. They bloomed and faded like a distant fireworks display. Her first mate said it looked pretty until she snapped that every flash probably meant hundreds of people were dying in battle.

Abandoning the trans-loader she’d been guiding in to port, Alivia immediately put to shore over the protests of her crew. It wasn’t logical, but all she could think of was getting home, hoping Jeph had been smart and kept the girls indoors. He wasn’t the sharpest knife in the block, but he had a good heart.

Perhaps that was why she needed him.

She’d grabbed the first groundcar she could hotwire and driven like a maniac into the hills. She’d reached the mid-level commercia districts when the darkness was dispelled by the fiery descent of the downed starship. Dauntless-class, she had thought. Alivia didn’t bother to watch it hit and drove even harder, knowing what was coming.

The impact tsunami slammed a kilometre and a half into Larsa before the drawback dragged half the city’s inhabitants to their deaths. Caught at the farthest extent of the wave’s force, Alivia had been slammed around by the flood. Old reflexes honed over the years steered the car through the chaos until its motor eventually died.

Fortunately, she was less than a kilometre from the hab-tenement, so didn’t have far to go. Alivia sprinted uphill, the water level dropping the higher she went. The streets were thick with people, some looking down in horror at the drowned coastline, others sensibly packing their belongings.

Alivia pushed on, finally reaching her hab, a mid-level stack of bare plascrete and dirty glass on the edge of the walled starport.

‘Clever boy,’ she said, seeing the hab shutter pulled down over their ground-floor residency. She ran over and banged her fists on the bare metal.

‘Jeph, open up, it’s me!’ she yelled. ‘Hurry, we’ve got to get out of the city.’

Alivia hit the shutter again, and it rose with a clatter of turning gears and rattling chains. She ducked under as soon as there was enough room and took a quick inventory. Miska and little Vivyen clutched their father’s overalls, their sleepy faces lined with worry.

‘Liv, what’s going on?’ asked Jeph, doing a poor job of keeping the fear from his voice. She took his hand and steadied him with gentle stimulation of his pituitary gland to produce a burst of endorphins.

‘We’ve got to go. Now,’ she said. ‘Get the girls ready.’

Jeph knew her well enough to know not to argue.

‘Yeah, sure, Liv,’ he said, calm without knowing why. ‘Where are we going?’

‘South,’ said Alivia as Jeph began wrapping the girls in heavy outdoor coats before helping them pull on their boots.

‘The cargo-five ready to go?’ asked Alivia, bending to retrieve a burnished metal gun-case from a cavity she’d cut in the floor beneath their bed. There was a gun in it, yes, but that wasn’t what was most precious to her in there.

‘Yeah, Liv, just like always.’

‘Good,’ she said, stuffing the gun-case into her kit bag.

‘This why you always say we got to keep it fuelled?’ asked Jeph. ‘In case of trouble?’

She nodded and his shoulders sagged in relief.

‘You know, I always worried it was so you could get out quick if you ever decided you’d had enough of us.’

Alivia didn’t have the heart to tell him both reasons were true.

Miska started crying. Alivia fought the urge to pull her close. She didn’t have time for sentimentality. As one of Molech’s principal port facilities, Larsa was sure to come under attack from Legion forces. She couldn’t be here when that happened.

‘Liv, they’re saying half the city’s underwater.’

‘Maybe all of it soon,’ she said, her eyes sweeping the room to make sure there wasn’t anything else of use they might need on the journey south. ‘That’s why we need to go right now. Come on.’

‘Sure, Liv, sure,’ nodded Jeph, hugging the girls tight. ‘Where are we going again?’

‘We drive south until we hit the agri-belt arterials and hope they’ve not been bombed to oblivion by the time we get there.’

‘Then what?’

‘Then we go to Lupercalia,’ she said.

Far to the east of Lupercalia, the Knights of House Donar held the Preceptor Line, a grand name for a crumbling curtain-wall that marked the edge of civilisation. West were inhabited cities, east the unchecked jungles of Kush, and beyond that only black-gulfed Ophir.

Immense predator beasts stalked the jungle’s humid depths, beasts that had once roamed freely across the land. Centuries of hunting had driven them to the fringes of the world, to hidden mountain fissures, jungle lairs or the arid southern steppe.

Armoured in jade and brass, House Donar boasted seven functional Knights and had kept vigil at the Preceptor Line for thirty generations. That regiments of Belgar Devsirmes and armoured squadrons of the Kapikulu Iron Brigade were also stationed along its length was, in Lord Balmorn Donar’s opinion, hardly worth mentioning.

Flocks of azhdarchid, flesh-hungry mallahgra or roaming packs of xenosmilus rarely emerged from the jungle, but when they did, House Donar was there to drive them back with chainsabres, battle cannon and thermal lances.

Lord Donar ducked beneath the lintel of the main curtain-wall, though the rusted iron arch was easily tall enough to accommodate his Knight’s bulk. His son’s Knight limped after him, one leg stained with oily blood where an azhdarchid matriarch had gored him. Towering, flightless birds with oversized necks and crocodilian beaks, azhdarchid were comical in appearance, but fully capable of wounding a Knight.

As Robard Donar had found to his cost.

Behind the wall, redoubts of dug-in Shadowswords and Baneblades, Malcadors and Stormhammers covered the two Knights as the gate slid shut. Thousands of soldiers mustered on the martial fields, embarking onto armoured transports. The invasion of the traitors had shifted the mobilisation up a gear, but the Preceptor Line had been on a war footing ever since a company of Belgar had been found slaughtered in the jungle.

Dying in the jungle was easy, it had a hundred ways to see a man dead, but something unutterably savage had killed these men. Any number of the jungle beasts might have attacked the men, but what manner of beast would take ident-tags as a trophy?

Just one of many mysteries of the Kushite jungle.

‘Walk tall,’ ordered Balmorn. ‘Don’t let these Army dregs see you limping. You’re a Donar, for Throne’s sake. Act like one.’

Balmorn marched his Knight up a long sloping roadway of scaffolding that led to the widened ramparts. The few functional turrets scanned the jungle. Thermal auspex hunted for targets. Robard followed his father, slower as he compensated for the buckled joints of his leg.

‘Foolish of you to get caught out like that,’ said Balmorn, as his son finally reached the ramparts and braced his Knight’s piston-driven leg against an adjacent blockhouse with no roof.

‘How could I have known the azhdarchid were going to stampede?’ snapped Robard, tired of his father’s baiting. ‘We were lucky to get away at all.’

A gaggle of Sacristans scurried towards the damaged Knight, but Robard warned them off with a bark of his hunting horn.

‘Luck’s got nothing to do with it, lad,’ said Balmorn, rotating his upper body to take in a full panorama from their elevated perch.

It wasn’t pretty.

The sky painted a gloomy picture for Molech. Furnace orange and coal black burned in every direction. The wind carried the stench of burned stone, heated steel and fyceline. Electromagnetic storms raged over the fertile landscape and flashes of orbital weapon detonations mushroomed on every horizon. Balmorn didn’t like to think how big explosions had to be for him to see them all the way out on the Preceptor Line.

As he looked over the jungle canopy, a growing illumination bathed the clouds pressing down on the jungle canopy.

‘What’s that?’ asked Robard. ‘Another bombardment?’

Lord Donar didn’t answer, watching as thousands of black objects streaked from the clouds and arced over the eastern horizon.

‘Too slow to be orbital munitions,’ he said. ‘And too regimented to be wreckage.’

‘They’re too fast and steeply angled for assault carriers,’ said Robard. ‘What are they?’

‘They’re drop pods,’ said Lord Donar.

Three of Ophir’s fuel silos were ablaze.

A lake of flaming promethium engulfed the city’s southern outskirts and was slowly spreading north. The city’s Mechanicum adepts had locked the pumping stations into emergency shutdown. No flames jetted from the vent towers and the ever-present heartbeat of drilling rigs had stilled.

A coaling station at the eastern tip of the continent on the far side of the Kushite jungle, Ophir lay nine thousand kilometres east of the Preceptor Line. Cargo tankers from across the ocean paused here to gorge on the promethium wells before continuing around the northern coastline to the commercia distribution hub of Hvitha or the starports at Loqash and Larsa.

No one called Ophir by its given name. Once it had been called the City of Gold, but centuries of exhaust gases, promethium discharge and oily runoff that stained every structure with a persistent black residue had earned it another name. The soldiers of the Karnatic Lancers knew it as ‘the city without shadows’.

Lieutenant Skander of Seventh Brigade had been enjoying a particularly erotic dream when the alarm klaxons went off. Instantly awake, he bounded upright and grabbed his flak jacket from the footlocker at the end of his bed. He could feel the pulse of void shield generators beneath him. Hydra batteries were firing, the rhythmic thud of their shells unmistakable, even through reinforced plascrete.

Skander dragged on his boots and snapped on his shoulder rig, holstering his bolt pistol and checking the safety. He grabbed his sword belt as he ran to the main vehicle hangar. There wasn’t much use for a sword in a Stormhammer, but he’d sooner go into battle naked than leave his blade behind.

Five hundred Karnatic armoured vehicles filled the chamber, a mix of Chimera variants, Malcador-pattern assault tanks, Minotaurs and a few superheavies. Each flew pennants bearing the emerald and silver pyramid of lances. His own vehicle was a Stormhammer dubbed The Reaper. Drivers, gunners, and enginseers swarmed their vehicles. Shell loaders and fuel trucks sped through the cavernous space.

Distant explosions shook the chamber. Dust fell from the vaulted roof. The planetary assault every Army grunt had fully expected the fleet to spectacularly fail to prevent was now upon them.

An enormously augmented enginseer in oil-stained robes implemented manoeuvre operations quickly and methodically, multiple limbs directing the optimal deployment order. Tanks rolled from their berths, and the throaty bellow of their engines was music to his ears.

Sergeant Hondo waved to him from the front cupola as he ran over. Skander had long believed Hondo lived in the tank, and this only seemed to confirm that suspicion.

‘Guess the admiral got beat,’ said Hondo over the din of sirens.

‘And you’re surprised why?’ replied Skander, hauling himself up the crew ladder to the colossal tank’s roof. ‘Where’s Vari?’

‘Already in place, lieutenant,’ Vari replied from the cramped driver’s compartment. Skander scrambled onto the tank’s forward twin battle cannon turret and dropped into the commander’s hatch. Helmet on, he plugged in to the onboard attack-logister.

Information cascaded; deployment rates, ammunition levels, core temperature and hull integrity.

All in the green.

The enginseer gave them clearance, but before Skander could give the order to move out, something powerful struck the subterranean hangar.

The chamber roof split wide open.

Colossal chunks of sheared plascrete slammed down throughout the chamber. Dust-smeared pillars of sunlight stabbed inside. A squadron of Baneblades was flattened by debris, their hulls smashed open like toymaker’s models.

Skander was slammed forward as a falling chunk of rock struck his helmet. Blood ran down his face and he blinked away tears of sudden pain. Static fogged his visor. He tore the helmet off. It was useless now, split down the middle.

The noise and confusion was unbelievable. The regiment’s tanks in the hangar’s centre had taken the worst of the barrage, pulverised by hundreds of tonnes of debris and high explosives. Detonations ripped across the ready line as follow-on shells found their marks in exposed Malcadors and Chimeras. The main roadway was engulfed in flames, burning pools of fuel spewing thick black smoke. Regimental pennants burned in the fires.

The heat from an exploding Minotaur rolled over him, and Skander looked up through the smashed roof of the hanger to see a sky red with flames and black with smoke. Once a refuge for his tanks, the hangar was now a deathtrap.

‘Get us out of here!’ he shouted and The Reaper lurched forward as Vari fed power to the engines. A clattering, screeching howl of protest told him they’d sheared a track in the barrage. They were ripping the hangar floor apart, but that was the least of Skander’s worries.

Something hammered down in the flaming heart of the hangar, a pair of tapered oblongs. Pale steel and scorched black with re-entry burn. Scalding exhaust vapour billowed from burned out retros. Locking bolts blasted off and the shielded sides of the drop pod dropped like unfolding prop-drives.

Powerful figures emerged from two of the pods, giants in pale armour bearing a spiked skull icon on their shoulder guards. The warriors of the Death Guard waded through wreckage and rubble, but weren’t slowed.

A towering figure in battle armour of bare metal, brass and ivory stepped from his drop pod and into the blazing ruin of the hangar. A giant come to rend their flesh and grind their bones. Framed by fire and a billowing cloak of fibrous mesh, the primarch of the XIV Legion bore a great scythe that shimmered with corpse-light.

Mortarion was attended by cowled Terminators in slab-like armour. They too carried oversized scythes and unquestioningly followed their liege-lord into the fire. Sprays of gunshots reached out to the Death Guard, sparking from impenetrable plates. Shells burst among them, but they marched through their fury without pause.

Their guns were firing. Explosive rounds slaughtered the tank crews who’d survived the initial shelling, pulping them to shredded meat mass. Another pod slammed down behind the first wave. Then another, and another. They fell in pairs, one after the other, each reverberating impact bearing more Death Guard.

The Reaper tried to turn towards Mortarion, but with a snapped track, that wasn’t happening any time soon. Skander engaged his commander’s override, slewing the twin battle cannon turret around. Men were screaming over the fires and continuous sound of falling masonry.

The primarch of the Death Guard saw him, and Skander almost let go of the controls as he stared into the face of his executioner – pale skinned, with the coldest eyes he had ever seen.

He heard the familiar double reverberation of shells ramming home in the breech. A hiss of locking mechanisms and the whine of accelerator drives.

‘Throne, yes,’ he hissed, mashing the firing trigger.

All three hundred and twenty tonnes of The Reaper’s armoured might rocked under the enormous recoil. The twin muzzle flashes all but blinded him. The conjoined pressure waves punched the air from his lungs and the thunder of discharge blew out his eardrums.

Skander fought to take a breath, concussed by the simultaneous detonations of point-blank battle cannon shells. He blinked away after-images as a rain of plascrete dust rained down. Acrid smoke fogged the air, slashed by cherry red fyceline fires.

He dragged in hot, metallic breath and shouted for a reload, though he knew no one would hear and they’d not get another shot off. Skander ducked down into the Stormhammer, cupping his hands over his mouth.

‘Reload! Reload! Throne, give me one more shot at that bastard!’

He repeated his order. He had no idea who was still alive inside The Reaper. Until the main gun was loaded, all Skander could directly control was the cupola’s point-defence gun. It wasn’t a twin battle cannon turret, but it would have to do.

Skander rose up and saw the cloaked figure of the Death Lord standing on his tank. Mortarion’s armour looked to have been tenderised by a forge hammer and his cloak was a ragged scrap. The primarch was a grotesque waxwork, a flesh-slick deathmask.

‘One shot’s all you get,’ gurgled Mortarion, swinging Silence and carving Skander and his Stormhammer apart.

Similar stories played out all across Molech.

The air defence batteries were completely overwhelmed. Two Legion fleets in close orbit were an impossible force to defeat, and the punishing broadsides turned entire regions of Molech into glassy deserts.

Mount Torger was targeted by a mass impact of bunker penetrators, and not even its many point defences could keep the holdfast of the Ordo Reductor from being gutted by an inferno. Fires raged beneath the mountain, fires that would burn for another seventy years before finally bringing it down.

Goshen, Imperatum and the twin fortress cities of Leosta and Luthre were bombed, as were the coastal cities of Desqua and Hvitha. Known as the City of Winds due to its location at the farthest extreme of the Aenatep peninsula, Hvitha all but fell into the ocean as the rock upon which it was built crumbled under the weight of the barrage.

A red rain fell on Khanis, molten iron and micro-debris falling from the fighting in orbit like burning bullets.

People out in the open went up like vent flares, instantly ablaze. They screamed until the heat sucked the air from their lungs. They ran for shelter, but the molten rain soon ate through the canvas awnings and corrugated roofs.

With the bombardment finished for now, the fleets opened their embarkation decks and wave after wave of the Warmaster’s invasion force launched into the upper atmosphere.

They arced down like grains of sand running through a philosopher’s fingers; Stormbirds and Thunderhawks, Fire Raptors and Storm Eagles. Coffin ships and bulk landers. Shoals of matte-black Army transports. Armoured trans-loaders and munitions carriers.

Alert horns howled in every city.

Molech was screaming.

TWELVE

Breakout
Decapitation
Twin Flames

A tidal wave of ocean green crashed onto the beaches at Avadon, but this one didn’t recede, it just kept pushing higher. An armoured fist of firepower and transhuman endurance, this was to be a breakout achieved at maximum speed.

Two hundred Sons of Horus Land Raiders led the speartip’s thrust.

No grace, no finesse, just a thunderous hammer blow to the heart.

Edoraki Hakon, Marshal of the Northern Oceanic, awaited Lupercal’s army with a line of strongpoints, deep trenches, six full regiments of Army and a company of dug-in superheavies. Her defences lined the coastal cliffs and encircled the landward end of the causeway. If the Sons of Horus wanted to reach the mainland, they were going to have to fight their way off Damesek.

Quite why a tactician as superlative as Horus would establish a bridgehead on an island that’s only viable egress point was a slender causeway was beyond her understanding.

It made no sense, but that was what the Warmaster had done.

No one in her command staff could adequately explain Horus’s reasoning, but the opportunity to punish the traitors for their mistake was there for the taking.

Holst Lithonan’s artillery companies on the island’s high bluffs had spent the night duelling with Hakon’s guns, and the Marshal had reluctantly been forced to withdraw her heavier pieces as dawn’s light crept over the horizon.

Freed from suppressive battery fire, traitor guns dumped barrage after barrage of shroud missiles on the Imperials. Banks of glittering electromagnetic fog spewed from spinning shells, breaking firing solutions and disrupting carefully calibrated range-finders.

While Imperial gunners struggled to penetrate the occluding mist, Sons of Horus Land Raiders raced along the last stretch of the causeway to the mainland. Scorpius Whirlwinds sent arcing streams of missiles ahead of them. Their warheads wrecked the emplaced tank traps and ripped up fields of entangling razorwire in a storm of subterranean explosions.

The first Land Raiders slammed down off the causeway into a fury of heavy autocannons, crew-served weapon mounts and emplaced lascannons. Hakon’s superheavy tanks crashed back in their berms as volleys of battle cannons and demolishers added their thunder to the day. Siege mortars and bombards, culverin and howitzers coughed their explosive loads skyward.

The end of the causeway vanished in an earthshaking blizzard of explosions. Deafening hammer blows slammed down, one after the other. So quick and so continuous they merged into one unending concussive procession of detonation. Energy weapons boiled ocean waves to geysers of steam. High explosives churned the beach into hurricanes of glassy shrapnel.

The air reeked of salt and burning metal. Seared meat and blood.

Twenty Land Raiders died instantly. Cored and twisted inside out, they slewed around like disembowelled grazer beasts. Sons of Horus legionaries spilled from the smoke-belching wrecks. Blistering crossfires cut them to pieces. Oxy-phosphor warheads seared the agonised cries from their lungs. Armour shredded and disassembled. Flesh vaporised.

Hakon’s remaining artillery lobbed explosives onto the causeway, hoping to deny the tanks on the beach reinforcements and strangle the breakout at birth. Atlas recovery tanks by the dozen drove wrecks into the ocean as modified Trojans worked nonstop to keep the causeway viable; nothing could be allowed to slow the flood of troop carriers onto the mainland.

More Land Raiders plunged into the maelstrom. Another half dozen, then a dozen more, spreading out as they hit the shell-torn beach. They ground over the corpses of their Legion brothers, finding cover in blood and fuel-filled craters. Return fire blitzed uphill.

The Scorpius barged past gutted Land Raiders, peeling left and right at the causeway’s end. Rotating launchers unleashed rippling salvoes of warheads at the linked strongpoints. Three exploded in quick succession, brought down by implosive warheads that blew out their structural members.

Storm Eagles and Thunderhawks roared overhead, missiles and shells streaming from their wing and nose mounts. Sheets of fire blossomed along the Imperial line, but Edoraki Hakon’s regiments were dug in well, and dug in deep.

Hydra batteries slewed to follow the aircraft. Manticore batteries locked their targeting cogitators onto engine flares. Sky-eagle missiles and rapid firing autocannon shells stitched the sky. Half a dozen gunships were brought down in quick succession, smashing into the cliffs like faulty triumphal fireworks.

Sons of Horus bolters punched spiralling contrails through the shroud smoke. Their missiles arced over and slammed down on gun emplacements. Solid hits were announced by mushrooming flares of white light. Dreadnought talons moved through the heart of the attack like giants. Assault cannons too heavy even for a legionary brayed, and rocket after rocket streaked from rotary launchers.

Whickering storms of gunfire, missiles, energy weapons and gouts of flame burned back and forth across kilometres of beach.

The dead and dying were crushed beneath the roaring tracks of the Land Raiders. Rhinos followed them to the assigned high water mark, and the icy sand was churned to gritty, red paste.

The Land Raider rocked on its tracks as a nearby explosion slammed it to the side. Aximand gripped tight to a stanchion as the heavy vehicle pitched forward into a crater. Its engine roared as it clawed its way out the opposite side. The assault carrier’s armour attenuated most of the noise of battle, but the thrumming bass note of the percussive shock waves were thudding with increasing regularity and force.

‘Getting closer,’ said Yade Durso, line captain of Fifth Company.

‘Getting worried?’ Aximand asked.

‘No,’ said Durso, and Aximand believed him. It took more than emplaced strongpoints, companies of superheavies and regiments of Army to rattle a veteran like Durso.

Aximand’s subordinate turned something over in his hand, dextrously moving it between his fingers like a sleight of hand barker.

‘What’s that?’

Durso looked down, as though unaware of what he’d been doing.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Just an affectation.’

‘Show me.’

Durso shrugged and opened his palm. A golden icon on the end of a chain to be worn around the neck. The Eye of Horus shone red in the light of the compartment.

‘Superstitious, Yade?’

‘Turns out I can be now, Little Horus,’ said Durso.

Aximand nodded, conceding the point. Not so long ago, such behaviour would have been grounds for censure. Now it seemed only natural. Aximand looked back at his warriors, ten Sons of Horus bearing heavy breacher shields and multi-spectral helmet attachments. Each warrior’s armour bore Cthonian gang sigils etched into the plates. Their bolters were decorated with kill markings and grisly trophies hung from every belt.

The Quiet Order had reinstituted the old practices of the home world. Serghar Targost, his throat bound in counterseptic wraps, had advocated the reinstatement of Cthonian iconography and the Warmaster had agreed.

‘I thought we were done with savage totems,’ he said.

‘Just like the old days,’ said Durso. ‘It’s good.’

‘But these aren’t the old days,’ snapped Aximand.

Durso shook his head. ‘You really want to get into this now?’

‘No,’ said Aximand, strangely disquieted at the new tribalistic mien of his warriors. He had thought that with Erebus gone, the XVI Legion was to re-establish itself. It seemed it had, just not in the image he’d expected. Edges worn smooth by centuries of compliance were being made rough again.

Aximand patched his helmet’s visual link to the Land Raider’s external pict-feeds.

There wasn’t much to see.

Shroud bombs blanketed the shale beaches and granite cliffs ahead of them in waves of electromagnetic distortion. Flattened tank traps ghosted from the fog alongside acres of shell-ruined razorwire. Static fizzed the display as muzzle flares from cliff-top artillery fired. Seconds later, the Land Raider shook from a nearby impact of high explosive shells. The vehicle juddered over the wreckage of something that might once have been a Rhino.

Aximand silently urged the driver to hurry up.

The Dwell campaign had spoiled him. The urgent, body slamming fury of that fight was a throwback to the earliest days of the Great Crusade, when the Legions were still developing their modus operandi. It had been a testing time, re-learning lessons taught by wars that were only just evolving from the hell of techno-barbarian tribes hacking at one another in two amorphous hosts of flesh and sweat.

New weapons, new technologies, new transhuman physiques and new brothers to fight alongside. It was one thing to build a Legion, another to learn how to fight as a Legion.

‘Ten seconds,’ called the driver.

Aximand nodded, checking the load on his bolter and moved Mourn-it-all’s scabbard at his shoulder. Full load, and just right. Just like last time. He shifted on the ready line. He rolled his shoulders and pulled his shield in tight. He clenched and unclenched his jaw.

‘Five seconds!’

The pitch of the engine increased, the driver wringing another few dozen metres for the warriors he carried. An explosion rocked the vehicle up onto one track. It landed flat with a crashing boom of grinding stone and protesting metal.

‘Go, go, go!’

The Land Raider came to a grinding halt. The assault ramp hammered down and a roaring crescendo of noise rammed inside. Explosions, gunfire, screams and metal banging on metal. The volume on the world spun into the red.

Aximand heard a breath at his ear and shouted, ‘Kill for the living, and kill for the dead!’

The old war cry sprang unbidden from his lips as he charged into the maelstrom.

His warriors roared in answer.

Thanks to Lyx, Raeven had marched Banelash almost into the ground to get to Avadon, but right now wished he hadn’t bothered. She had woken him in the night, leading him to believe that some carnal adventure was in the offing, but instead she’d offered him entrails and prophecy.

‘The Great Wolf comes to Avadon,’ she’d said, dumping the warm, wet handful of organs in his lap. ‘His throat will bare when the twin wolves of fire are upon you. Cut it and the White Naga of legend will come to you with revelation.’

Raeven gagged on the stench of rotten meat, ready to push her away when he saw her eyes were milky white and without pupil. His mother’s had done that when he was young and what she’d said always came true. Instead of beating her, he asked, ‘Horus? Horus will be at Avadon?’

But she’d gone limp and neither salts nor slaps could rouse her.

Over Tyana Kourion and Castor Alcade’s misgivings, Raeven had immediately mustered his household and marched north to Avadon with ten of his Knights. Two of his sons came with him, Egelic and Banan, while his middle son, Osgar, remained in Lupercalia to retain a ruling presence.

And after a full night’s gruelling march around the spur of the Untar Mesas, and over unending vistas of agricultural land…

Nothing.

Their honourable machines waited like common footsoldiers, awaiting word from Edoraki Hakon on when they might deploy. Denied a place in the order of battle by that humourless Army sow sent spasms of disgust along his spine.

Banelash reacted to his anger by pawing the ground with its clawed feet. Its threat auspex bathed his sensorium in red, and its weapons powered up with a whine of servos. Nearby Army reserve forces backed away from the Knights as their warhorns blared.

‘We should be over that ridge, father,’ said Egelic, Raeven’s oldest son. ‘Why are we not fighting?’

‘Because outsiders have taken Molech,’ hissed Banan, Raeven’s youngest. ‘When the Imperium came, they cut our House’s balls off.’

‘Enough,’ snapped Raeven. Banan was almost thirty and should know better, but his mother doted on him and denied him nothing. His manners were boorish, his arrogance as monstrous as his sense of entitlement.

He reminded Raeven a lot of his younger self, except Banan had none of the charm and charisma he’d had to carry off arrogance and make it look like confidence.

But in this case, Banan was also right.

‘Come with me,’ he said, marching from the area they’d been apportioned and striding through the trenchlines and redoubts. Approaching the forward edge of battle, Raeven linked to the battle cogitators in Edoraki Hakon’s command bunker. Inloading data swarmed the sensorium, and Banelash growled in anticipation.

It could smell the blood and hear the crash of gunfire. This was war, real war, a chance to test itself against a foe more interesting than a rogue mallahgra or a pack of xenosmilus. Raeven felt the echoes of all the warriors who’d piloted Banelash before him, heard the mingled whispers of their battle hunger pump through his body like a shot of ‘slaught.

Raeven doubted he could have turned back even if he wanted to.

He strode through the jumble of ammo depots, Trojans, artillery pits and rear echelon troops. His Knights followed behind, boasting of the enemies they would kill. The ground rose sharply towards the front and the sky raged as though a phantasmagorical storm blazed like gods in battle in the heavens.

Insistent warnings sounded in the sensorium, tagged with Marshal Hakon’s personal signifier. He ignored them and pushed on, striding on to the edge of the cliff.

The end of the causeway was half a kilometre distant, and the space between it and the cliffs was a shattered graveyard of twisted metal and fire. A hellscape of blazing craters, scores of wrecked tanks and hundreds of dismembered bodies.

Thousands of giant warriors pushed forward behind heavy breacher shields. Against small-arms fire and even medium gauge weapons they offered effective protection, but against the kinds of guns Hakon had trained on them, they just weren’t up to the job. Each advance left a trail of bodies, limbless corpses and tributaries of blood to fill craters with red lakes.

Raeven had never seen so many Space Marines, hadn’t even conceived there could be so many at all. Banelash tugged at his mind, urging him to commit, to ride out in glory and smash one of those advancing shield-wedges apart.

‘Come on, father,’ urged Banan. ‘Let’s break them! Smash each one apart in turn until we roll the entire line up.’

He wanted to give the order. Oh, how he wanted to give that order.

‘Yes, we could break one, probably two, maybe even three of the shieldwalls, but that will be all,’ he said, feeling Banelash’s ire at his refusal to ride. ‘Then we would be overwhelmed by the artillery and dragged down by infantry. An ignoble death. Hardly knightly.’

His Knight sent a spasm of neural feedback through his spine at his resistance, and Raeven winced at the severity of it. When he opened his eyes, they were immediately drawn to an up-armoured Land Raider as it smashed through a rockcrete tidal wall, slamming down on bollard tank traps and crushing them beneath its weight.

A banner streamed from the rear of both track guards, each bearing a rearing wolf insignia. Gunfire sparked from the Land Raider’s armour and Raeven saw the direct hit of a lascannon strike its flank where the right-side sponson had been sheared off. It should have blown a hole right into the vehicle.

Instead, the energy of the shot dissipated at the moment of impact and a bloom of fire enveloped the tank, setting the twin wolf banners ablaze.

‘Flare shield,’ he said, recognising similar tech to the ion shields of Banelash.

His throat will bare when the twin wolves of fire are upon you.

‘Lupercal,’ said Raeven.

The deck beneath Grael Noctua shuddered with impacts, rounded arrowheads forming in the plates beneath his boots. The Thunderhawk was a utilitarian design, a workhorse craft that had the virtue of being quick and easy to manufacture.

It was also, relatively speaking, disposable.

Which was scant comfort to the men being carried within it.

Squatting by the rear ramp with the bulky weight of a jump pack smouldering at his back, Noctua felt every impact on the gunship’s hull. He heard every snap of tension cables and creak of press-bolted wings as the pilot made desperate evasion manoeuvres.

Streams of gunfire reached up to the gunship, weaving through the air as the gunners tried to anticipate its movement. Flak pounded the air like drumbeats. Six warriors dropped as armour-piercing shells ripped up through the fuselage and split them like humanoid-shaped bags of blood.

The line of tracer fire intersected with the starboard wing. The engine took the brunt of the impact, then the aileron sheared off.

‘On me!’ shouted Noctua.

The jump light was still amber, but if they didn’t get off this doomed bird, they were going down with it. The Thunderhawk slipped sideways through the air, heeling over to the side as the starboard engine blew out.

He bent his legs and pushed himself out and down, pulling his arms in tight to his sides. He didn’t look back to see if his men were following him. They were or they weren’t. He’d know when he hit the ground.

He felt the explosion of the Thunderhawk above him. He hoped its burning carcass wasn’t about to fall on him. He grinned at what Ezekyle and Falkus would make of that. Three Thunderhawks went up in flames, probably more. It didn’t matter. Everyone knew the aircraft were expendable. Assault legionaries filled the sky.

He ignored them and fixed his attention on the uprushing ground.

His battle-brothers on the beach were embroiled in a quagmire of shelling and interlocking fields of fire. The black shale of the beach reminded Noctua of the massacre on Isstvan V, but this time it was the Sons of Horus doing the dying.

Noctua angled his descent towards the objective given to him by Lupercal himself. The arrangement of strongpoints, trenches and redoubts was exactly as the Warmaster had predicted.

Mortals. So predictable.

An icon in the shape of the new moon, matching the one etched on his helm, overlaid a heavily fortified strongpoint. Layered in outworks, protected by point-defence guns, it was defended by hundreds of soldiers and its placement in the line.

Noctua swung his legs down so he was falling boots first. A pulse of thought fired the jump pack with a shrieking hurricane of blue-hot fire. He’d specially modified the intake/outlet jets to scream as he fired it.

His hurtling descent slowed. Noctua landed with a crash of splitting stone. His knees bent and the burners of his jump pack scorched the strongpoint’s roof. Seconds later the crash of boots on stone surrounded him. By the time he freed the two melta charges from his plastron, he counted twenty-six further impacts.

More than enough.

He slammed the meltas down to either side and bounded back into the air, firing a short burst from the jump pack. His warriors followed suit and no sooner were they in the air then fifty-eight melta bombs exploded virtually simultaneously.

Cutting his burners, Noctua drew his sword and bolt pistol and dropped through the smoking ruin of the strongpoint’s roof. The upper level was utterly destroyed, a howling, screaming mass of dying flesh. He dropped onto the floor below, crashing through its weakened structure and landing in the centre of what had once been a projector table.

Stunned mortals surrounded him with faces like landed fish. Mouths opened in terrified, uncomprehending ‘O’ shapes. He leapt among them, sword cutting three officers down with a single sweep as he shot two more in the face. Before the corpses hit the floor he was moving. Powerful impacts smashed through the ceiling, spilling rock dust and iron beams into what had, only moments before, been a fully functioning command centre.

Dust-covered statues of warrior gods rose up from the debris and slaughtered every living person within reach. Bolter rounds exploded flak-armoured bodies like over-pressurised fuel canisters. Arterial spray painted the walls in criss-crossing arcs. Roaring chainblades hewed limbs and spines, made jigsaws of flesh.

Noctua saw a pair of blank-helmed, piston-legged Thallaxii detach from sentinel alcoves at each of the cardinal entrances. Lightning guns fired, buckling the air, but Noctua rode his jump pack over the coruscating blast. He landed between the Thallaxii, beheading one with his sword, exploding the other’s with an executioner’s bolt-round.

Two more were felled by a mob of Sons of Horus, another pair shot down before they’d taken a single step. Noctua braced himself against a bank of hissing valves and crackling cogitator domes. His jump pack fired, leaving a canyon of scorched flesh in his wake. He came down at the sprint, driving his heel into the chest of the remaining Thallax as he landed.

It slammed back into the wall, the Lorica Thallax unit shattering like glass and spilling the steel-encased spinal cord and skull to the rubble-strewn floor. The last of them swung its plasma blaster around and managed a snap shot that cut a searing groove in his shoulder guard.

Angry now, Noctua carved his sword down through its shoulder.

The blade tore free from its pelvis, and the stricken cyborg died with a burst of machine pain and flood of stinking amniotics.

Noctua rolled his shoulders, irritated the cyborg thing had managed to get so close to him. The flesh beneath was burned, and only now did he feel the pain of it. Thinking of pain, he looked down to see a rolled steel reinforcement bar jutting from his thigh and a Thallax combat blade buried in his plastron.

The latter hadn’t penetrated his armour, but the rebar went right through from the front of his leg to the back. Strange that he hadn’t felt it. He yanked it out, watching the blood flow for a moment, enjoying the novel sensation of being wounded.

He tossed the bar and nodded to his Master of Signal.

‘Get the beacon set up,’ he ordered, pointing to the centre of the ruined hololithic table. ‘There seems appropriate.’

Noctua heard a wheezing breath and looked down to see that one of the stronghold’s command staff was still alive. A dying woman with an ornamented laspistol. Archaic and over-elaborate, but then Imperial officers did so like to embellish their wargear.

Clad in a drakescale burnoose and a golden eye-mask like some desert raider, Noctua saw rank pins on the breast of the uniform beneath. He hadn’t bothered to study the military hierarchy of Molech’s armed forces as Aximand had, but she was clearly high on the food chain. The burnoose was soaked in blood, and the mask had come loose, hanging over one cheek and exposing a withered, disease-wasted eye.

Still enjoying the feeling of pain, Noctua spread his arms.

‘Go on then,’ he said. ‘Take your best shot.’

‘My pleasure,’ said Edoraki Hakon, and put her volkite shot right through Grael Noctua’s heart.

The din of battle pounded Aximand like Contemptor fists. Detonation shock waves battered him, solid impacts shook his shield. Constant shellfire made every step perilous. Unimaginable volumes of blood pooled in the base of craters. The passage of fighting vehicles had ground it into sticky red mortar.

Scything blasts of heavy bolters and autocannons tore across the beach. The shields of the Sons of Horus line bore the brunt of the incoming fire, but not all of it. Legion warriors were falling in greater numbers than Aximand had known since Isstvan.

They marched over the dead, scorched plate cracking beneath them and pulped corpses sucking at their feet as they advanced. Apothecaries and serfs dragged away those too wounded to fight. There was little point in such mercies. A Space Marine too wounded to keep going was a burden the Legion could do without.

Let them die, thought Aximand.

Land Raiders overtaking them on either side threw up sprays of gritty black sand and sprays of stagnant blood. Revving gun platforms on tracks blitzed shells and smoking casings. A Dreadnought with one arm missing staggered in circles as though looking for it. Missiles streaked overhead, breath was snatched from lungs by the overpressure.

The air tasted of overworked batteries and smelting steel, burned meat and opened bowels.

The Imperial line was invisible behind a twitching bank of gunsmoke. Muzzle flare from hundreds of weapon slits flickered like picter flashes at a parade. Explosions painted the sky, and weeping arcs of smoke told where dozens of gunships had died.

‘Tough going,’ said Yade Durso, his helmet cracked down the middle by an autocannon impact on his shield that had slammed it straight back in his face. Blood welled in the crack, but the eye lenses had survived.

‘It’ll get tougher yet,’ he answered.

Something fell from the sky and broke apart as it cartwheeled down the beach, shedding structure and bodies in equal measure. Aximand thought it was a Stormbird but it exploded before he could be sure.

Another gunship crashed. A Thunderhawk this time. It went in hard, nose first. A fan of hard, wet shale sprayed out before it like bullets. A dozen legionaries dropped, killed as cleanly as if by sniper fire. A sharp-edged shard smashed Aximand’s visor. The left lens cracked. His vision blurred.

The gunship’s wing dipped and ploughed the shale, flipping the aircraft over onto its back. The other wing snapped like tinder as it careened along the sand, coming apart with every bouncing impact. The spinning, burning wreckage crashed into a knot of Sons of Horus and they vanished in a sheeting fireball as its engines exploded. Turbine blades flew like swords.

‘Lupercal’s oath!’ swore Aximand.

‘Never thought I’d be glad to be a footslogger in an assault,’ said Durso, lifting the golden icon tied to his shield grip.

Aximand shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Look.’

The three Land Raiders before them looked like they had been struck by the fists of a Titan’s demolition hammer. One was entirely gutted, a blackened skeleton that held only molten corpses. A handful of warriors staggered from the second. Their armour was black – originally so, not scorched by the fires.

‘Aren’t the Justaerin with the First Captain?’ said Durso, recognising the heavy plates of the Terminators.

‘Not all of them,’ said Aximand.

The third Land Raider’s lupine pennants were ablaze, and it had been split open by a ferocious impact.

Horus was down on one knee, his taloned hand pressed to the side of his Land Raider, as though mourning its passing. Blood slicked one side of his dark battleplate and a length of pipework pierced his side like a spear.

‘Lupercal,’ said Durso, awed by a single warrior in the midst of such industrial-scale slaughter. But what a warrior.

‘Sons of Horus!’ shouted Aximand, pushing onward. ‘Rally to me!’

Smoke billowed from the Land Raider’s interior. Twisted warriors stepped through it, their bodies on fire. The lenses of their helms shone the bleached white of bone left in dusty tombs.

Not Justaerin, something far worse.

What had Maloghurst called them?

Luperci, the Brothers of the Wolf.

Serghar Targost had called them something else as the narthecium servitors finally removed the sutures holding his throat together.

Twin Flames.

Now Aximand knew why. Their armour was utterly black. Not painted black like the Justaerin and not from the vehicle’s destruction, but from the infernal warpfires burning within them.

Ger Gerradon was first out. Aximand could still picture the two swords plunging into his chest, the lake of blood that formed around him as he bled out on the floor of the Mausolytic. Gerradon cared nothing for the fires lapping his armour. Nor did the seven other figures clambering from the wreckage.

Sons of Horus formed up on Aximand, a hundred warriors at least. He couldn’t be sure because of the smoke. Each legionary saw what he saw. The Warmaster threatened.

The Mechanicum had proofed Lupercal’s vehicle against all but a Titan’s fury, and every piece of intelligence suggested that none of the Imperial Legios had any gross-displacement engines yet in the field. So what had done this?

The answer wasn’t long in coming.

They rode out of the smoke, articulated giants in crimson and gold, banners streaming gloriously from their segmented carapaces. The ground shook with the pounding beat of their clawed feet and the ululating skirl of their hunting horns.

Crackling lances and screaming swords held before them, the Knights of Molech charged the Warmaster.

THIRTEEN

Beacon
Cornered wolf
I made this

He drew in a lungful of hot, metallic air. It burned to breathe, but the alternative was worse. His head pounded and it felt like someone was pressing a steel needle through his left eyeball. His chest hurt, and felt like someone was pressing something considerably larger than a needle through it.

‘Get up,’ said a voice.

Grael Noctua nodded, though the gesture sent the needle deeper into his brain.

‘Get up,’ repeated Ezekyle Abaddon.

Noctua opened his eyes. Imperial strongpoint. Interior burned and ruined. I did this. There was a drop assault and I killed some Thallax. He didn’t think there had been a squad of gloss-black Terminators filling the shattered command centre.

Corposant danced over the titanic plates of their dark armour and Noctua tasted the ice metal flavour of teleport flare.

‘The beacon did its job then?’ he said.

‘About the only thing you managed to get right,’ said Abaddon, directing his warriors with sub-vocal Cthonic argot. ‘The Imperial line’s already rolling up now the Justaerin are here.’

Noctua rolled onto his side, the effort of drawing air into his lungs making him sweat. He pushed himself upright, almost retching with the effort. Upright at last, but unsteady on his feet, Noctua immediately understood the problem. His heart had been destroyed.

The dying woman. The officer. Her pistol had been something more than just a laspistol. Something considerably more than just a laspistol. He looked down and saw the neat, cauterised hole burned through his plastron and into his chest. He knew if he picked up the rebar that had been jammed in his leg, he’d be able to thread it through the hole in his chest and out through his back without effort.

‘She shot me,’ he said. ‘The bitch shot me.’

‘From what I hear, you let her,’ said the First Captain, shaking his head. ‘Stupid. I’m behind schedule. And now Kibre will likely roll up his flank first.’

Noctua sought the dying woman, but she was already dead. Her head lay at an unnatural angle to her shoulder because that was about all that was left of her after the impact of mass-reactives to the chest.

‘You got away lightly,’ he said.

Abaddon took hold of Noctua’s shoulder guard and spun him around. The First Captain’s Terminator armour gave him a head of height advantage. Noctua looked up into eyes that were like those of a wolf on the hunt, and whose prey was in danger of slipping away.

‘Get your men back in the fight,’ said Abaddon, ‘or I’ll finish what she started.’

‘Yes, First Captain,’ said Noctua.

The Knights bore down on the Warmaster, and Raeven had never felt so sure, so righteous in the anticipation of a kill. His arms burned hot with the readiness of his stubber cannons and the crackling energy arcs of his whip.

The warriors who’d ridden to glory before Banelash was his screamed at him, crowding his senses with their echoing war shouts. He heard their voices, a chorus of wordless fury. None of them had ever claimed so grand a kill, and they all wanted to feel what Raeven felt.

He channelled their skill and power, used it.

Banelash was the tip of the wedge, the lance thrust aimed at the Warmaster’s heart. Egelic and Banan held tight to his flanks. Heads lowered, ion shields held out over their hearts.

Reaper chainblades pulled back to strike.

He loosed a wild laugh. He was Imperial commander. The first kill was his to make, and what a kill it would be.

Warriors whose armour looked to be on fire surrounded Horus, but the strangeness of the sight gave Raeven no pause. His sensorium told him more warriors were en route to rescue their leader. They would be too late.

He clenched his fist and a blazing stream of high-energy lasers pumped from his shoulder mount. Four of the black warriors were all but incinerated. The Land Raider was sawn in half.

Horus rose to his feet, and even though he went helmed, Raeven could imagine the fear in his eyes. Banelash cracked its whip and the Warmaster was catapulted into the wrecked Land Raider. Purple arcs of lightning flared from his shoulder and chest as he struggled to rise.

The floating cross hairs of Raeven’s gunsight centred on the amber eye at the Warmaster’s chest.

‘Got you,’ said Raeven as he unleashed the furious power of the weapon he’d saved just for this moment, his thermal lance.

Blitzing spears of sun-hot light enveloped Lupercal, but when Aximand blinked away the pinwheeling after-images, he saw only darkness around his lord and master. The Luperci clung to the Warmaster like devotees beseeching an ascending god to stay.

They howled and Aximand felt the day’s heat snatched away.

Time slowed. Not the way it sometimes did in the heat of battle. Not like that at all. In fact, it didn’t slow so much as stop.

The world possessed the quality of timelessness, as though time never had, never would and never could exist here. Galaxies might swirl into being and spin themselves to extinction and it would be the blink of an eye. A blowfly could beat its wings and it would take an eternity to complete the motion.

It bled from the black warriors surrounding the Warmaster, as though they drew from some unfathomable well within them. Or maybe some dreadful power reached through them and allowed a measure of its world to seep into this one.

The bolts of killing power from the Knight’s armaments passed into the Luperci. And vanished. Swallowed whole as though the Twin Flames had become dark windows to another realm of existence.

And then it was over, and Aximand stumbled as the flow of time caught up to him and the world snapped back into focus. He steadied himself on his shield, his heart straining as though pinned in a suit of skin too small for him.

‘What…’

It was all he managed before the Luperci broke their embrace with the Warmaster. Rivulets of black fire clung to Lupercal’s armour, but he was alive.

The Knight leading the charge paused, stupefied that its target wasn’t dead. Its weapons lifted to rectify that upset, but the fractional pause had already cost it its one advantage.

And a fraction was all that Horus needed.

I should be dead.

Nerve endings on fire. Pain. Pain like he’d never known.

Even the attack on the Dome of Revivification hadn’t been as bad. Burns and physical trauma he could endure, but the barbed fires of the Knight’s whip sawed at his nerves like gleeful torturers.

I should be dead.

No time to reflect that he wasn’t. Deal with the pain. Force it down into the pit. Endure it later.

Mal and Targost’s Luperci had saved him. No time to wonder how. Retreat was not an option. He had been hurt and needed to hurt back. Aximand and the Fifth Company were en route. This would be over before they reached him.

Horus looked up at the charging Knights.

I am alive, and that was your only chance.

The Luperci streamed from him, a flock of raptors loosed from the rookeries of his armour. Far faster than anything living ought to move. Where they had clung to him was marked by burns. Frost burns. Horus followed them, swinging Worldbreaker around his head.

The first Knight took a backward step, and Horus laughed.

‘Afraid now?’ he bellowed.

Screaming vox chatter filled his helmet. He tore it off and threw it away.

Luperci swarmed the legs of the Knight, climbing and vaulting. Hand over hand, gripping the lips of segmented plates. They tore as they climbed, snapping connector cables, ripping out servos and coupling rods. Ger Gerradon climbed fastest and punched a clawed fist into the pilot’s compartment. The Knight’s whip snapped, flagellating itself to shake him loose. More Knights advanced, flanking the leader.

Get close. Get inside their reach.

Chugging cannons thundered, muzzle flare churning the ground to powder. Solid rounds chased Horus, but he put the first Knight between him and its fire. Stubber shells ripped across the lead Knight’s carapace and thermal lance mount. The weapon exploded.

Another Knight body slammed the first, crushing two more of the Luperci who howled as they died. It rammed its ion shield into its leader’s carapace, sending the last of them hurtling through the air. Glass and lubricant drizzled like tears.

The revealed pilot was a darkly handsome man with a cruel smile.

Horus laughed. You still think you can kill me.

He dived as the Knight’s foot stomped down. Horus rolled to his feet and ripped his taloned gauntlet through a knot of pneumatics at the Knight’s ankle joint. It staggered, gyroscopic servos screaming as they fought to keep the war machine upright.

A third and a fourth Knight were moving into firing positions. More jostled for position behind them.

Keep moving. Don’t let them pin you in place.

Horus was the lone wolf among the fold, weaving between the legs of his attackers. But the creatures of this fold could crush him, burn him and gut him. Stamping feet pounded the ground flat. Roaring chainblades wider than a Javelin speeder stabbed around him. The energy whip of the lead Knight cracked and fused a three metre trench of glass in the sand.

Horus scrambled onto the claw mechanism of a Knight’s splayed foot. He gripped the ribbed cabling at its ankle and bent his legs. From a crouch, he leapt as high as he could. Worldbreaker swung and a knee joint exploded. The Knight’s leg buckled and it took a drunken step, every stabilisation system powerless to keep it upright.

The Knight crashed down, its armour crumpling, the carapace split open. Flames engulfed the downed machine as the power cells of its weapon mount exploded. Horus saw the pilot screaming inside the canopy as he burned to death.

Another Knight went down, its upper torso detonating in a cherry red fireball. Horus felt a wash of heat that had nothing to do with its destruction. A squadron of three Glaives roared over the black beach, their insanely powerful volkite carronades rippling in a haze of recent discharge.

The huge tanks were Fellblade variants, ruinously demanding of resources and expertise to produce. Only with great reluctance had Mars approved the implementation of a Legion tank bearing such a weapon. The Luna Wolves had been among the first Legions to receive the Glaives, a further sign of the Emperor’s favour.

More tanks appeared behind them, superheavies all. Two squadrons of Shadowswords and the cousins of the Glaive, the Fellblades themselves. Searing beams stabbed from volcano cannons and accelerator turrets crashed back with armour-piercing shells. The noise was deafening. Echoing booms were thrown back from the cliffs.

Three Knights were all but obliterated, a pair of molten legs and a pair of weapon mounts all that remained. A fourth threw its ion shield up just quick enough to deflect the full force of a high-density shell that nevertheless ripped its entire arm and most of its shoulder away.

The Knights were monstrously outgunned and they knew it. The hunting horn of the lead Knight loosed an ululating blast and they fled back the way they had come. Humbled and broken, they left half their number dead and ruined.

Horus drew in a breath of fyceline-scented air, letting the exertion and stress of the fight drain from him. Oily sweat ran down his ruddy face and pooled in blood-caked grooves in his armour. His body was running hot to re-knit his flesh. Keeping a body at such a high pitch was exhausting. Even for a primarch.

He heard the clatter of armour as warriors formed up around him, shields rammed into the sand in a makeshift defensive work. He already knew there was no need.

The battle was already won.

A trailing vox-bead dangling from his gorget after he’d thrown away his helmet told him as much. Noctua’s decapitation strike had broken the centre and most likely killed the senior enemy officer. Teleporting Justaerin and the Catulan Reavers were clearing the trenches with Ezekyle and Kibre showing no mercy.

With the defence line’s abandonment, thousands of armoured vehicles moved up the bloody beach; Land Raiders, Fellblades, Rhinos, Sicarans and finally the Chimeras of Lithonan’s auxiliaries. Predators of all types followed them, together with recovery tractors, scout tanks, and Trojan resupply vehicles.

Apothecarion troops swarmed the battlefield, gathering the wounded as the smoke of bombardment was blown out to sea. Fires burned from the multitude of wrecks littering the coastline.

‘A heavy cost,’ said Horus as Aximand approached and drove his shield into the sand. He coughed and there was blood in his mouth.

‘Sir!’ said Aximand. ‘Sir, are you hurt?’

Horus shook his head before realising that, yes, he was hurt. Badly hurt. He reached out and steadied himself on Aximand. The last time he had been surrounded by his warriors and almost fallen it had ended badly for everyone.

‘I’m fine, Little Horus.’

They both knew it was a lie, but agreed upon it anyway.

‘Taking on ten Knights?’ said Aximand. ‘Really?’

‘I killed one and the rest fled at the sight of me.’

‘More like the sight of the Glaives and Shadowswords,’ said Aximand.

‘Careful,’ said Horus, increasing the pressure on Aximand’s arm a fraction. ‘If I was being ungenerous, I might think you were belittling this victory.’

Aximand nodded, heeding Lupercal’s warning and said, ‘You’re sure you’re fine?’

‘I’m better than fine,’ said Horus. ‘I won.’

The black sand of Avadon’s coastline had reminded Grael Noctua of Isstvan V, but the promethium fires lining the roadway from the beach and the reviewing stand built at its edge was pure Ullanor. Night had fallen, but the sky was still cut by phosphor-bright trails of wreckage coming down from orbit.

Storm Eagles and Fire Raptors circled overhead, like hunting birds eager to be loosed once more.

Perched on a narrow peninsula, Avadon was swathed in darkness, with only the moon’s reflected radiance in the ocean to limn its hard edges. The lights of the city’s hab-towers, Legion monuments and commercia were all extinguished, its thousands of inhabitants clinging to the dark and hoping the Legion would pass them by.

An army of conquest had landed on Damesek, and it was forming up around Avadon, preparing to advance south across the continent’s agricultural heartland towards Lupercalia. Seeker and reconnaissance squads were already in the wind, and intelligence on the disposition of Molech’s hundreds of thousands of soldiers was flooding back to Legion command.

The Mournival accompanied the Warmaster as he marched between ranked up companies of the Legion. Hasty repairs made him magnificent again, though none were battle-worthy. He walked with a slight limp, imperceptible to most eyes, but to Noctua’s calculating gaze it was blindingly obvious.

The reviewing stand was just ahead, built from the ruins of the defensive line’s demolished strongholds. Six Deathbringer Warlords towered behind it, four in the graphite and gold of Legio Vulcanum, two in Vulpa’s rust and bone. Moonlight reflected from the heavy plates of their armour. Weapon mounts vented exhaust gases like hot, animal breath.

Twenty-six Titanicus engines had landed at Damasek – eleven from Vulcanum, six from Interfector, four from Vulpa and five from Mortis, the largest concentration of Titans that Noctua had seen since Isstvan III. The ten Reavers stood like vast monuments in Avadon’s outer manufactorum districts, while six Warhounds stalked the edges of the muster fields like wary guard dogs.

‘Reminds me of the Triumph,’ said Ezekyle, approvingly.

‘That’s the idea,’ replied Lupercal.

‘Aren’t triumphs usually held after a campaign?’ asked Noctua, and the First Captain shot him an angry look. The delay his wounding at the hands of a mortal had caused Ezekyle was something the First Captain wasn’t going to forget in a hurry.

‘Unless you’re one of the Phoenician’s rabble,’ said Kibre.

‘It’s symbolic, Grael,’ said Horus. ‘When we left Ullanor it was as the Emperor’s servants. When we leave Molech we will be our own masters.’

Something in the Warmaster’s tone told Noctua that wasn’t the whole truth, but a warning glance from Aximand advised against pursuing the matter. He nodded and hid a grimace of pain as it felt like someone was plunging an ice cold blade into his chest.

‘Grael?’ said Horus, pausing and giving him a sidelong glance.

‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘My own fault.’

‘No argument there,’ grunted Ezekyle.

Horus nodded and they resumed their march.

The Apothecary who’d treated Noctua at battle’s end had all but demanded he remove himself from the order of battle and submit to heart-implantation surgery. Noctua had refused all but the most basic attention.

He forced himself to keep up, feeling the cold blade of pain twist deeper into the empty cavity within his chest. Feeling another’s eyes upon him, Noctua turned his gaze from the Warmaster to the warriors lining his path.

Ger Gerradon grinned at Noctua in a way that made him want to put a fist through his face. Fully-helmed Luperci with static-filled eyes surrounded Gerradon, many more than Noctua had seen during the assault on Var Crixia.

How far had Maloghurst and Targost gone in seeking volunteers to become hosts for these flesh-eating warp killers?

Gerradon looked over his shoulder and raised his eyebrows.

You will be one with us soon, the look said.

Neverborn.

Unburdened…

‘Did you know you and this city share a name, Ezekyle?’ said the Warmaster, as they approached the reviewing stand. Noctua turned from Ger Gerradon and tried to shake the thought that he was looking at his future.

‘We do?’ asked the First Captain.

‘Abaddon, I mean. Ezekyle was said to be an ancient prophet, though it seems he might simply have been a witness to Old Earth’s first encounters with xenoforms. I’ve found several mentions of an Abaddon,’ he said. ‘Or Apollyon or Avadon, depending on whether you’re reading the Septuagint or the Hexapla. Or was it the Vulgate? So many versions, and none of them can agree.’

‘So who was Abaddon?’ asked Kibre. ‘Or don’t we want to know?’

Horus paused at the foot of the steps to the reviewing stand.

‘He was an angel, Falkus,’ said Horus. ‘But don’t let the term mislead you. Back then, angels were soaked in blood, the right hand of a vengeful god who sent them into the world of men to lay waste and kill in his name.’

‘Sounds just like you,’ said Aximand, and they all laughed.

Horus ascended to the stand, but the Mournival didn’t follow. This was their place, invisible in the wings while Lupercal basked in adulation. Noctua took a moment to look out over the assembled legionaries.

The Warmaster’s sons stretched as far as the eye could see. At least sixty thousand Space Marines. By conventional reckonings of numbers, it was a paltry force with which to conquer a world.

But this was the XVI Legion, the Sons of Horus, and this was more than enough. It was practically overkill.

The Warmaster took centre stage, Worldbreaker and his talon raised high. The Deathbringer Warlord Titans loosed deafening blasts from their warhorns and the thousands of legionaries pumped their fists in the air at the sight of Lupercal.

‘From a world of darkness, I did bind daemons and death-doers in the form of wolves.’

Horus swept his maul down and night became day as the Reaver Titans surrounding Avadon opened fire with every one of their weapon systems. They rained down a continuous barrage of lasers, rockets and plasma until the city and all living things within were consumed in a fiery holocaust.

Vox-links broadcast the Warmaster’s voice through the horns of the Titans, and his pronouncement shook Noctua’s bones.

‘So perish all who stand against me.’

‘Iacton,’ said Loken, standing at the door to Tarnhelm’s crew compartment. Since entering the warp, the Knights Errant spent most of their days gathered around the long table, swapping exploits and expertise. Ares Voitek was repeating a story of his Legion’s assault on a nomadic fleet of xenos and humans. His servo-arms described the manoeuvres of several starships.

The story petered out as they saw Loken.

‘Garviel,’ replied Qruze. ‘If you’ve come to finish the job, I’ll not stop you, lad.’

‘I might,’ said Bror Tyrfingr.

‘I’m sorry I missed it the first time,’ sniggered Severian.

Loken shook his head. ‘I’m not here to fight you.’

‘Then what do you want?’

‘To live up to the words I said to Callion Zaven.’

The former Emperor’s Children legionary looked up at the sound of his name, his attention momentarily diverted from the polishing of his hewclaw blade.

‘What did you say to him?’ asked Qruze.

‘I told him that we had enough enemies before us without looking for them in our own ranks.’

‘Then why did you almost kill Iacton?’ asked Cayne.

‘Shut up, Tubal,’ said Varren, replacing bladed teeth on his axe that hadn’t lost a fraction of their lethal sharpness.

‘What?’ said the former Iron Warrior. ‘It’s a valid question.’

‘Not the point,’ replied Ares Voitek.

Qruze nodded and swung his legs out from beneath the table to face Loken. Aboard ship, the legionaries went without armour, and Loken saw the corded strength within the Half-heard’s frame like tempered steel or seasoned heartwood. He wore a sleeveless bodyglove and tan fatigues tucked into knee-high black boots.

His face bore little trace of Loken’s assault, just a slight discolouration of the skin around his right eye.

‘Good words,’ said Qruze. ‘Hard to live up to when trust is in such short supply, eh?’

‘For what it’s worth, I’m sorry,’ said Loken, taking a seat at the table.

Qruze waved away his apology and poured himself a beaker of water. He poured Loken a drink, which he accepted. ‘I’ve been waiting for that beating ever since I found out you were alive, lad.’

‘There’s just one thing I don’t understand,’ said Loken.

‘Just one?’ grunted Qruze. ‘Then you’ve a better grasp of things than me. What is it you don’t understand?’

‘If Lord Dorn told you to keep Mersadie’s existence secret, why did you tell me about her on the prison fortress?’ asked Loken. ‘You could have just boarded Tarnhelm, and I’d have been none the wiser.’

‘Secrets have a way of coming out,’ said Altan Nohai. ‘In that place, in that time, it was right that Iacton spoke.’

Qruze nodded. ‘I’d gone to Titan with Lord Dorn to kill a man.’

‘Who?’

‘Solomon Voss, you remember him?’

Loken nodded. ‘I never met him, but I had heard the name around the Vengeful Spirit.’

‘A good man. Too good. I think that’s why Lupercal kept him around for so long before sending him back to us. Voss had done nothing wrong, but we couldn’t let him live. Horus knew that, knew it would weigh heavily on whoever swung the blade. And like Altan says, secrets have a habit of coming out. The bigger they are the more likely they’ll come out just when you don’t want them to.’

‘What does Solomon Voss have to do with Mersadie?’

Qruze leaned over the table and rested his arms on the table.

‘I’m going to be very clear so there’s no misunderstanding,’ he said. ‘We few are heading back to face the Warmaster. The chances of us making it back alive are virtually irrelevant. I thought you deserved to know she was still alive before we left.’

Loken sat back, his face stony. ‘Will Lord Dorn kill her too?’

‘I think he considered it.’

‘What stopped him?’ asked Rubio.

‘You’re the maleficarum,’ said Bror Tyrfingr. ‘You tell us.’

Rubio shot Bror an irritated glance, but Ultramarian virtue kept him from trading insults with the Fenrisian.

‘Compassion,’ said Zaven, setting down his sword. ‘Not a virtue I’d expected from the Lord of the Fists, but perhaps he’s not as hewn from stone as we all thought.’

Qruze said, ‘It pained the primarch to execute Solomon Voss, more than you know. Another tally to add to Lupercal’s butcher’s bill. More blood on his hands.’

They lapsed into silence until Loken withdrew the presentation case Mersadie had given him. He placed it on the table and slid it across to Qruze.

The Half-heard recognised it and eyed the case warily.

‘What’s that?’

‘I don’t know. Mersadie said I had to give it to you.’

‘Well open it for Throne’s sake,’ said Varren, when Qruze made no move to touch the box. ‘Don’t keep us all in bloody suspense.’

Qruze flipped open the case and frowned in puzzlement. He lifted out a pressed disc of hardened red wax affixed to a long strip of yellowed seal paper.

‘An Oath of Moment,’ said Tubal.

‘It’s mine,’ said Qruze.

‘Of course it’s yours,’ said Bror. ‘Loken just gave you it.’

‘No, I mean it’s mine,’ said Qruze. ‘I made this, back in the day. I know my own seal work when I see it.’

‘To what action does it oath you?’ asked Tubal Cayne.

Qruze shook his head. ‘No action. It’s blank. I made this in the days leading up to the Isstvan campaign, but I was never oathed for that fight.’

‘Did you give it to Mersadie?’ asked Loken.

‘No, it was in my arming chamber,’ said Qruze, turning the seal over in his gnarled hands. ‘Did Mistress Oliton say anything about why I was to have this?’

‘She said to remind you that you were the Half-heard no longer, that your voice would be heard louder than any other of the Legion.’

‘What does that mean?’ asked Ares Voitek.

‘Damned if I know,’ said Qruze. ‘Garviel? What else did she say?’

Loken didn’t answer, staring at the suggestion of a hooded shape in the shadows he knew none of the others would see. The figure shook his head slowly.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘She didn’t say anything else.’

FOURTEEN

Apollo’s Arrow
Engine kill
Elektra complex

Ophir belonged to the Death Guard. Its refineries, mills and promethium wells were now slaved to the will of Mortarion and the Warmaster’s Mechanicum cohorts. The fires had been contained, the damage repaired, and within ten hours of the XIV Legion’s assault, Ophir’s infrastructure was fully functional.

Squadrons of tankers were assembled, filled with precious fuel for the fleets of Land Raiders, Rhinos and battle tanks rumbling on cracked permacrete aprons. Ten thousand Legion warriors stood ready to march westward to the fields of battle, but there was a problem.

Nine thousand kilometres of dense jungle.

Nine thousand kilometres of rocky crags, undulant hills, ridged spines and plunging river basins. Like the Arduenna Silva of Old Earth, Molech’s generals believed the jungles of Kush to be utterly impenetrable and thus only an ancient curtain-wall warded against assault from that axis. Its local name was the Preceptor Line. Orbital augurs revealed negligible Imperial presence upon it.

But where the generals of Old Earth had been proved wrong, those of Molech were right to believe the jungles an impassable barrier. The terrain was bad enough, but killer beasts dwelled in its steamy interior; roving azhdarchid flocks, territorial mallahgra or predator packs of xenosmilus.

And those were the least of the great monsters rumoured to dwell in the jungle’s dark heart.

A solitary Rhino drove out from the hundreds of Death Guard vehicles rumbling at the jungle’s edge. Unremarkable in appearance, its hull was old and scarred with damage. Its cupola-mounted bolters were missing, and the heraldry of the Death Guard looked to have been burned off in the fighting to seize Ophir. It passed between the high towers raised to keep watch on the jungle and vanished from sight.

The lone vehicle followed the line of an old hunting trail once used by House Nurthen until the last of that line had been slain when a bull mallahgra tore his Knight apart during mating season. Overgrown and unfavourable to anything other than a tracked vehicle, the trail was just about practicable.

The sound and vibration of its engine couldn’t help but attract attention. A pack of spine-backed xenosmilus stalked the Rhino, a muscular blend of sabre-tooth and crocodile, with chameleonic fur and a voracious appetite for flesh.

The pack leader was a monstrous beast with spines like spears and fangs like swords. It matched the Rhino in bulk, and its hide rippled with dappled shadows of the jungle and fleeting shafts of sunlight. As the Rhino followed the trail along the edge of a rocky slope, the pack sprang its trap. Three beasts ran in from the side. They shoulder-barged the Rhino, clawing its hull and gouging the metal with yellowed claws.

The pack leader leapt from hiding and paws like sledgehammers bludgeoned the vehicle from the trail. It tipped onto its side and rolled down the slope into what had once been a river basin.

Now it was a killing floor.

The rest of the pack charged in, tearing at the upturned Rhino and peeling its armour back like paper. Before they could completely wreck the vehicle, an enlarged hatch slammed open in its side and a bulky figure stepped onto the dry basin.

Encased in a fully-sealed exo-suit intended for the internal maintenance of plasma reactors – and which had been the precursor to Terminator armour – the figure was snapped up in the pack leader’s jaws.

Hook-like teeth deep in the beast’s jaws sawed into the layered adamantium and ceramite. Heavy plates groaned, but the monster didn’t taste flesh. Roaring in anger, the xenosmilus swung its head and threw the figure at a tumble of boulders. Rock split, but the armour held firm.

The Rhino’s occupant rose smoothly to his feet as if being flung around like a rag doll by enormous predators was of no consequence to him. The pack abandoned the Rhino and formed a circle. Caustic saliva dripped from their jaws.

The armoured warrior reached up and snapped open a complex series of locking bolts and vacuum seals. He removed his helmet and dropped it to the ground. The revealed face was in constant flux between life and death, the skin rotting to carrion meat and restoring itself between breaths.

‘Pack hunters?’ said Ignatius Grulgor. ‘Disappointing. I was hoping for some of the bigger beasts.’

The xenosmilus didn’t attack. Their spines stood erect as they smelled the corruption on this prey-thing. Bad meat even the scavengers wouldn’t touch.

The tall reeds surrounding Grulgor died first, a spreading wave of death that turned the ground black with rotted vegetation. He exhaled toxins, plagues, bacteria and viral strands once banned in an earlier age, but which man’s greed had allowed to endure.

His every breath turned the air into a lethal weapon.

The pack leader collapsed, coughing necrotic wads of dissolving lung matter. The flesh melted from its bones in an instant, a time-lapsed pict-feed of decay run in fast forward. The pack died with it as Grulgor extended the reach of the Life-Eater, growing exponentially stronger with his every breath that wasn’t breath.

The jungle was dying around him. Trees collapsed into decaying mulch in a heartbeat. Rivers curdled to dust and vegetation to gaseous ooze.

He was ground zero, patient zero and every vector imaginable.

His touch was death, his breath was death and his gaze was death. Where he walked, the jungle died and would never know growth again.

Ignatius Grulgor was the Life-Eater given sentience, a walking pandemic. A god of plague to rival the Nosoi of Pandora’s folly or the terrible Morbus of the Romanii.

What had once been impenetrable jungle was dissolving like ice before the flamer. Thousands of hectares sagged and flowed around Mortarion’s reborn son like melting wax.

Ignatius Grulgor retrieved his helmet and returned to the Rhino, which now sat in a morass of cancerous vegetation. His warp-infused flesh was easily able to right the vehicle and its tracks slammed down on a sopping carpet of purulent matter.

Where before he could see barely ten metres in any direction, now the horizon receded into the distance as he spread his rampant corruption to its farthest extent.

Ignatius Grulgor climbed back into the Rhino and continued driving west over a pestilential wasteland of decay.

Fifty kilometres behind, the Death Guard followed.

The floor of Noama Calver’s Galenus was awash with blood, spilling from side to side with every manoeuvre her driver was forced to make. Constructed from an extended Samaritan chassis, the interior of the Galenus was equipped with a full surgical suite and twenty casualty berths.

Every one of those berths was filled twice over. About a third of the soldiers they carried were dead. Kjell kept urging her to ditch the corpses, but Noama would sooner throw herself out the back than abandon her boys like that. Her surgeon-captain’s uniform was supposed to be pale green, but was soaked in blood from the chest down. Ruby droplets dotted lined mahogany skin that was too pale from too little sleep and too many long days in the medicae wards. Eyes that had seen too many boys die were heavy with regret and remembered every one of them.

The Galenus Mobile Medicus was a heavy tracked vehicle as wide and long as a superheavy. But unlike pretty much every other superheavy she knew, it had a decent kick to its engine. That could usually get the wounded out of harm’s way, but there were still plenty of things that could move faster than them.

Nothing she could do about that, so instead she concentrated on the matter in hand.

She and Lieutenant Kjell had pulled the soldier from the wreck of a Baneblade whose engine exploded ninety kilometres south of Avadon. Tags said his name was Nyks, and his youthful eyes reminded her of her son serving off-world in the 24th Molech Firescions.

Those same eyes begged her to save his life, but Noama didn’t know if she could. His belly had been opened by a red-hot shell fragment and promethium burned skin slithered over his chest like wet clay.

But that wasn’t what was going to kill him. That particular honour would go to the nicked coeliac artery in his abdomen.

‘He’s not gonna make it, Noama!’ shouted Kjell over the roar of the engines. ‘I need help over here, and this one might actually live.’

‘Shut up, lieutenant,’ snapped Noama, finally grasping the writhing artery. ‘I’m not losing this one. I can get it.’

The glistening blood vessel squirmed in her grip like a hostile snake. The Galenus rocked and her grip slackened for a fraction of a second.

‘Damn it, Anson!’ she shouted as the artery slid back into the soldier’s body. ‘Keep us level, you Throne-damned idiot! Don’t make me come up there!’

‘Trying, ma’am,’ said Anson over the vox, ‘but it’s kind of hard travelling at this speed and with all this traffic.’

Hundreds of vehicles were fleeing the carnage at Avadon, heading for the armed camp forming six hundred kilometres south around Lupercalia. Regiments from bases along the edges of the Tazkhar Steppes and the hinterlands of the east around the Preceptor Line were already congregating on Lupercalia, with more on the march every day.

All well and good. Assuming they made it that far.

Scuttlebutt from vox-fragments and the lips of wounded men said enemy Titans were pursuing them. Noama put little faith in such talk. More than likely the rumours were typical grunt pessimism.

At least she hoped so.

‘Are we going to make it, captain?’ asked Kjell.

‘Don’t ask me such stupid questions,’ she snapped. ‘I’m busy.’

‘The Sons of Horus are going to catch us, aren’t they?’

‘If they do I’ll be sure to let you know,’ said Noama.

She’d heard a man with no arms and legs claim the Titans of the three Legios were on the march to save them, but didn’t know whether that was a dying man’s fantasy or the truth. Knowing what she knew of the things men and women said in their most pain-filled moments, Noama inclined to the former.

‘Get back here, you slippery little bastard,’ said Noama, pressing her fingers into the soldier’s body. She grasped for the artery. ‘I can feel the little swine, but it’s making me work for it.’

Her fingers closed on the torn blood vessel, and hair-fine suture clamps extruded from her medicae gauntlet to seal it shut.

‘Got you,’ she said, pinning the artery in place with deft twists of her fingertips. Noama stood straight and, satisfied the worst of the boy’s life-threatening injuries was dealt with for now, brought over the implanted nursing servitor with a sub-vocal command.

‘Seal him up and wrap those burns in counterseptic gels,’ she said. ‘I’m not getting the bleeding stopped just for him to die from a damned infection, you understand? Right, now watch his blood pressure too, and let me know if he starts spiking. Clear?’

The servitor acknowledged her orders and set to work.

Noama moved onto the next hideously wounded soldier.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Been in the wars have we?’

The twin Warlords of Legio Fortidus strode from the gloomy caverns of the Zanark Deeps side by side followed by the last of their Legio. Princeps Uta-Dagon’s force numbered two Warlords and four Warhounds. On most battlefields that would be enough firepower to easily carry the day.

Against the force on Uta-Dagon’s threat auspex it would be spitting in the eye of the tempest.

When word had come of the civil war on Mars, Uta-Dagon had assumed his Titanicus brothers would be at the heart of the fighting, standing with those loyal to the Emperor. Only later, as more details emerged of the catastrophe engulfing the Red Planet had the truth emerged.

They were all that remained of Legio Fortidus.

In the end, though, it changed nothing.

Molech was at war, and the architect of his Legio’s doom was before him.

Uta-Dagon floated within his amniotic casket within the head section of Red Vengeance, the Warlord Titan he had piloted for eighty years and whose name he had changed after a vivid waking dream in the Manifold. His sister-princeps, Utu-Lerna had likewise been compelled to rename her engine, a Warlord whose new designation was Bloodgeld.

Uta-Dagon had long since sacrificed his organic eyes to the service of the Legio, but Red Vengeance’s auto-senses interpreted the sky a vivid crimson.

<A good sky to die beneath,> said Utu-Lerna, reading his thoughts through the Manifold as she so often did. Twins whose cords had been cut in the rains of Pax Olympus, their birth was seen as auspicious. And so it had proved when both were taken as babes by the Collegia Titanicus.

<Red Vengeance and a red sky.>

<For the Red Planet,> finished Utu-Lerna.

Burning starships streaked the sky. Had his brothers on Mars seen skies like this before they died? He hoped so, for it had been under such a sky the Legio had been born, fighting in the Dyzan Valley against the resurgent Terrawatt Clan.

<I see them, brother,> said Utu-Lerna. Bloodgeld’s warsight was keener than that of Red Vengeance and Uta-Dagon had learnt to trust his twin’s interpretations of her engine’s senses.

Moments later Uta-Dagon saw them too. Fifteen engines on the static-laced horizon, striding south in pursuit of the survivors of Avadon. A great column of armoured vehicles swarmed the Titan’s feet. Scavengers following apex predators.

In three minutes or less, the enemy Titans would be in range of the retreating Imperial forces. Thousands would die unless the pursuers could be given a more tempting target.

Uta-Dagon heard an intake of breath behind him and twisted his withered form around in the fluid-filled casket. Ur-Nammu had seen them too, her almost human face underlit by the soft glow of the threat auspex. Like Uta-Dagon, the Warmonger was Mechanicum. She was not engine-capable, yet had chosen to die with her brothers and sisters.

<You should not be afraid, Ur-Nammu,> said the princeps. <Today we will join our brothers in death.>

‘I do not fear death, my princeps,’ said Ur-Nammu, before correcting herself and presenting her answer in the Manifold. <I fear that I will be of no help to you in the coming fight.>

<Your presence here honours me,> said Uta-Dagon. <You are what others in the Titanicus call an executor fetial, since you can move between the Legios freely. You have no need to die in my engine.>

<Where else would I wish to die?> asked Ur-Nammu and the simple honesty of her cant needed no reply.

The princeps returned his attention to the approaching battlescape, its vector contours and salient features forming in the interface within his skull. Manifold records quickly identified the traitor engines.

Reavers: Dread Wake, Hand of Ruin and Myrmidion Rex of Legio Mortis; Silence of Death and Pax Ascerbus of Legio Interfector, dubbed the Murder Lords after Isstvan III. Nightmaw of Legio Vulcanum.

Warhounds: Kitsune and Kumiho of Legio Vulpa, Venataris Mori and Carnophage of Vulcanum.

And then the Warlords: Mask of Ruin, Talismanik, and Anger’s Reward, also of Vulcanum. Xestor’s Sword and Phantom Lord of Legio Mortis.

Data on the enemy engines flowed around Uta-Dagon, engagements fought, engine kills, maintenance profiles and damage records. In a straight up fight, such details could mean the difference between victory and defeat. Here they were unnecessary. The chance to perhaps do a little more damage before being destroyed.

<They see us, brother,> said Utu-Lerna.

<Flank speed,> ordered Uta-Dagon, and his Mechanicum priests drove the reactor to a higher pitch. Red Vengeance increased its pace, thunderous footfalls cracking the ground and smashing maglevs where there wasn’t enough clearance to avoid them.

Uta-Dagon felt intense heat swell his phantom limbs as his weapon systems spooled up to fire. His right arm was the searing power of a volcano cannon, his left the clenched fist of a hellstorm cannon. He felt the passage of scores of missiles moving through his body of iron and sinew to the launchers at his carapace.

<Warhounds moving to circle us, sister.>

<They think us pitiful, brother.>

<Shall we disabuse them?>

<No, let us play the crippled Legio they think us,> said Utu-Lerna, with what he could hear was a grin on her wraith-like face.

<You always did have the best ideas, sister,> said Uta-Dagon.

It called itself the Teratus, though the Manifold of Red Vengeance had identified it as Pax Ascerbus, a Reaver of Legio Interfector. Blood was its new oil, the sentience of a million warp scraps its marrow and its corrupt machine-spirit was a howling, warp-stitched thing of murder-lust.

With four Warhounds at its feet, it strode with grim purpose towards Legio Fortidus. Talismanik and Phantom Lord marched at its back, and the Teratus dredged power from its every system to keep ahead of the larger engines. They howled at it to slow its advance, to let them dispatch the doomed Legio, but the Teratus ignored them.

The engines of Fortidus were running at barely half power, woken too soon and without the proper consecration. Too long at rest had reduced their reactor fires to embers. Void shields were still sparking from emergency ignition and their walk was the leaden shuffle of a condemned man en route to his execution.

The Warhounds circling the two Warlords were poor specimens. Wary, where they ought to be aggressive. Keeping close to the larger engines where they should be duelling with their opposite numbers.

<Enfeebled half-engines,> it said, and the moderati flesh-things roosting in the weapon compartments flinched at the scrapcode-laced barbs in the cant. <The death of their Legio has broken them. Killing them will be mercy.>

He sent his own Warhounds out to engage the Fortidus Scout Titans with a pulsed order through the Manifold. Warhorns braying, the eager pups surged forward. They wove in and out of each other’s path, eager to claim the first kill.

The Teratus increased its stride, unconsciously trying to match the pace of the smaller engines. The gap between it and the following Warlords grew wider.

Ranging fire snapped between the Scout Titans. The Teratus ignored it. A baring of fangs, nothing more. Warnings shimmered at the edge of its perception. Power surges, fusion warnings. Emission flares. At first they made no sense.

Then, with a sudden pulse of awareness, he realised how it had been misled, its own sense of righteous superiority causing it to see what it wanted to see.

Neither of the Fortidus engines was as enfeebled as they first appeared. Their reactors surged to life with high-volume plasma injections. A terminally-risky manoeuvre that would end a reactor’s useful life in one final sunburst of searing brilliance. Weapon systems blazed with power and opened fire in the same instant.

Kitsune and Kumiho suffered first. Shrieking salvoes of Hellstorm fire stripped them of their void shields. Pinpoint volcano cannon shots incinerated their princeps’ compartments and left their thrashing limbs pawing the earth. Venataris Mori and Carnophage scattered at the first barrage of shots, but not fast enough. Venataris Mori fell with a leg blown off and Carnophage ploughed a hundred metre furrow with its canopy as its gyros overcompensated for its princeps’ desperate evasive manoeuvres.

<Engine kill!> blared the Manifold with open-vox transmission from Legio Fortidus. The Teratus screamed and its moderati-creatures howled in pain. It bled power from propulsion to the forward void shields. Too little, too late.

While the Warlords of Fortidus were killing the Teratus’s Scouts, theirs were sprinting forward, heads down and weapons blazing. Jackals hoping to bring down a land leviathan. Turbo fire, gatling fire and streaking missiles stripped the Teratus’s void shields in squalling flares of discharge.

But Scout Titans didn’t take on a Battle Titan and live.

The Teratus turned the gatling blaster on its nearest attacker. Warhounds were fast and agile, but nothing could outrun gunfire.

A storm of incendiary shells burst its voids and staggered it in a ferocious cannonade. Stripped of its shields and speed it was dead in the water. A shock-pulse of melta reduced its princeps canopy to subatomic slag.

Self-guiding missiles streaked from the Teratus’s upper carapace and swatted another Warhound into the ground. Its legs flailed as it tried to right itself. The Teratus slammed its vast foot down. The Warlord’s enormous bulk crushed it flat.

The Teratus fed on the death scream of its victim, drawing the binaric energy into its corrupted Manifold. Its horns blasted a triumphal roar. Its shields were failing, peeled back by niggling fire from the two remaining Warhounds. The Reaver took a backward step as a combined barrage of Hellstorm cannon from the advancing Warlords blew out the last of its protection.

Warhounds were consummate lone predators, but they were also superlative pack hunters. They darted in, weapons punishing the Reaver’s vulnerable rear section. The armour on its reactor housing began peeling back.

Warning sigils flashed through its mind. Coolant leaks, plasma venting. It took another backward step, knowing it needed to link with the Warlord Titans it had tried so hard to outpace. Its right leg locked up, fused by repeated fire from the two Warhounds. The joints and servos there were on fire, and no amount of damage control would free it.

The Teratus watched the two Warlords of Legio Fortidus close.

It felt their weapons lock Pax Ascerbus in their sights, felt the power that had infused it in the blood-soaked hangar temples flee its iron flesh.

It locked its own weapons in return.

<Come,> said the Teratus. <We die together.>

The threat of two Warlords in the flank now became too serious to ignore, and the traitor Titans broke off their pursuit of Avadon’s defenders to crush the Imperial engines.

Leaving the blazing corpses of the Teratus and the Warhounds in their wake, Red Vengeance and Bloodgeld limped into the teeth of Talismanik, Phantom Lord, Myrmidion Rex and Mask of Ruin.

In the end, it took another three hours for the last engine of Legio Fortidus to fall.

Red Vengeance and a red sky.

For the Red Planet.

Cebella Devine had long since lost any pleasure she might once have taken in tormenting her stepson. Albard’s hope had died first, then his expectation of death. He knew they could keep him alive indefinitely.

The nightmare of his continued existence eroded his sanity to the point where her icily-constructed barbs fell on deaf ears. She would have killed him long ago, but a firstborn son carried the bloodline. Shargali-Shi’s treatments would only work with the vital fluids of the bloodline.

Cebella dismissed the Sacristans at Albard’s door.

Some intimacies were for a mother alone.

The holographic fire burned in the hearth, casting its fictive heat and illumination around the gloomy chamber. She had come here so often she could pick out individual flame shapes and tell how long remained before the cycle would repeat.

She turned from the phantom light as a line of blood teared in the corner of her eye. Brightness hurt, and only regular injections of complex elastins and glassine meshes within her eyeballs allowed her to see at all. The droplet ran down the drum-tight skin of Cebella’s face, but she didn’t feel it. Her skin had been grafted, stretched and injected so many times it was deadened to virtually all sensation.

The stench within Albard’s chambers was undoubtedly noisome, but like her tactile perceptions, her olfactory senses had also atrophied. Shargali-Shi had promised to restore and enhance her faculties, and each procedure brought her closer to the perfection she had once possessed.

The silver of her exo-skeleton glittered in the firelight, and Albard looked up from his chair of furs and putrescence. Saliva leaked from the side of his mouth and matted his unkempt beard, but his organic eye was clearer than it had been for a long time.

Raeven’s visit had galvanised him.

Good. She had need to vent the pain of her grief upon another.

A blunt, wedge-shaped head rose from behind Albard’s chair and a forked tongue tasted the air. Shesha, her former husband’s naga. It hissed and sank back to its slumbers, as decrepit and useless as its current master.

‘Hello, Cebella,’ said Albard. ‘Is it that time already?’

‘It is,’ she replied, kneeling beside him and placing her augmetic-sheathed hands on his lap. The encrusted filth on his coverlet revolted her. It looked like he’d soiled himself, and for once she was glad she could no longer smell things.

‘Where’s Lyx?’ he asked, his voice cracked and brittle. ‘It’s normally her that plays the vampire.’

‘She is not here,’ said Cebella.

Albard gave a dry, hacking cough that turned into snorts of laughter.

‘Standing at her husband’s side as he fights for Molech?’

‘Something like that,’ said Cebella, producing a trio of amethyst vials and a hollow naga fang from the folds of her dress.

Albard’s wheezing laughter died at the sight of the vials, and had it not carried the risk of ripping the skin all the way to her ears, Cebella would have smiled.

She moved the coverlet aside to reveal Albard’s scrawny, wasted legs. Pressure sores and puncture marks ran the length of his inner thigh, the skin around them scabbed and raw.

‘Are the Sacristans cleaning these?’ she asked.

‘Scared I might get an infection and poison you?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The bloodline must be pure.’

‘Even the word pure sounds dirty in your mouth.’

Cebella lifted the naga fang and pressed it to what little meat remained in Albard’s leg. The skin dimpled like cured vellum, and purpled veins stood out like roads on a map.

Albard leaned forward, and the movement was so unexpected that Cebella flinched in surprise. It had been years since she’d seen her stepson move more than the muscles of his face. She hadn’t been sure that he could move at all.

‘Lyx usually taunts me with Raeven’s exploits,’ said Albard, and there was a mocking edge to his tone that made Cebella want to cut his throat here and now. ‘Aren’t you going to do the same?’

‘You said it yourself, your brother fights for Molech,’ she said, her voice flat.

‘No, no, no,’ sniggered Albard. ‘The way I hear it, my stepbrother left two of his sons dead at Avadon. Terrible shame.’

Cebella surged forward, scattering the jars. Blood or no blood, she was going to kill him. She’d drain him dry from the jugular.

‘My grandsons are dead!’ she yelled, blood-laced spittle flying as the skin at the corners of her mouth split. Her hand snatched for his neck.

‘Wait,’ said Albard, staring over her shoulder. ‘Look.’

Cebella turned her head as Albard’s hand pressed something beneath his coverlet. The holographic fire exploded with blinding radiance, and Cebella screamed as the light stabbed into her delicate eyes like hot needles.

‘Shesha here doesn’t have any venom left to blind you,’ hissed Albard. ‘So this will have to do.’

Cebella clawed at her face. Red tears streaked her cheeks and she tried to rise. She had to get away, had to have her Sacristans take her to Shargali-Shi’s hidden valley.

Albard’s hand rose from his coverlet and gripped hers.

Cebella looked down in surprise, seeing Albard through a gauzy veil of red. His grip was firm, unyielding. Her flesh cracked, and stinking blood oozed between his fingers.

‘Your grandchildren?’ continued Albard. ‘The midwife should have strangled those inbred freaks with their still-wet cords. They’re no better than the beasts we once hunted… you’re all monsters!’

She struggled in his grip. The taut skin ripped along her forearm. Anger overcame her shock and she remembered the naga fang in her other hand. She brought it around and stabbed for where she thought his neck would be.

The fang stabbed into his shoulder, but so swathed was he in furs that she doubted it pierced his husked flesh. She fought to pull away, but madness gave Albard strength. Shocking, unfamiliar pain bloomed as the skin of her arm split all the way to her shoulder. It sloughed from the muscle beneath, like a débutante consort slipping off an opera glove.

Horror pinned her in place as Albard dropped the sheath of skin he’d torn from her arm. He gripped her by the skeletal frame of the exo-suit – using her weight for leverage, he hauled himself to the edge of his chair with a grimace of ferocious effort.

The fire dimmed and she saw something glitter in his other hand.

A blade of some kind. A scalpel? She couldn’t tell.

Where had Albard obtained a scalpel?

‘Lyx enjoys my pain,’ said Albard as if she’d asked the question out loud. ‘She knows just how to hurt me, but she’s not too thorough in gathering up her little toys.’

The scalpel sliced down in two quick slashes.

‘I learned a lot about suffering from my bitch wife,’ said Albard. ‘But I don’t much care about your suffering. I just want you to die. Can you do that for me, whore-mother? Can you just please die?’

She tried to reply, to curse him to an eternity of pain, but her mouth was full of liquid. Bitter, rich, metallic liquid. She lifted the naga fang as if she might yet slay her murderer.

‘Actually, I lied,’ said Albard, slicing the scalpel neatly through the tendons of her wrist. The fang clattered to the floor as her hand went limp. ‘I do care about you suffering.’

Cebella Devine slumped back onto her knees, convulsing as her arteries pumped litres of blood into Albard’s lap. The exo-suit twitched and spasmed as it struggled to interpret the signals coming from her dying brain.

Eventually it stopped trying.

Albard watched the life flee Cebella’s blood-limned eyes and let out a dusty sigh that he had been keeping inside for over forty years. He pushed his stepmother’s corpse from his lap and gathered his strength. It had almost been too much to fight her. He was little better than a cripple, and only hatred had given him the strength to kill her.

Looking down at the dead body, he blinked as – just for a moment – he saw the carcass of a mallahgra. Steel struts of armature became bone, furred robes became animal hide. Cebella’s too-tight skinmask was the scarab maw of the mountain predator that had taken his eye and cursed him to this augmetic that filled his skull with constant static burr.

Then she was Cebella again, the bitch who had murdered his own mother and replaced her. Who had birthed two unwanted siblings and poisoned them both against him with talk of old gods and destiny. He should have killed her the moment she first came to Lupercalia and insinuated herself into House Devine.

His lap was sticky with her blood. It smelled awful, like bad meat or milk left to curdle in the sun. It was the smell of her soul, he decided. It had made her a monster, and once again it seemed as though her outline blurred, becoming the mallahgra of his nightmares.

Albard dropped the scalpel onto his stepmother’s body and cleared his throat. He spat phlegm and brown lung gunk.

‘Get in here!’ he shouted, as loudly as he could. ‘Sacristans! Dawn Guard! Get in here now!’

He kept shouting until the door opened and his mother’s pet Sacristans warily pushed open the door. Their half-human, half-mechanised faces were not yet incapable of registering surprise, and their eyes widened at the sight of their mistress lying dead before the fire.

Two armed soldiers of the Dawn Guard stood at the doorway. Their expressions were very different to those of the Sacristans.

He saw relief and knew why.

‘You two,’ said Albard waving a hand at the Sacristans. ‘Kneel.’

Ingrained obedience routines saw them instantly obey, and Albard nodded to the two soldiers behind them. In the instant before he spoke, he saw them not as mortals, but as towering knights of House Devine. Armoured in crimson and bearing glorious pennants from their segmented carapaces, he saw himself reflected in the glassy canopy.

Not as the half-man he was, but as a strong, powerful warrior.

A god amongst men, slayer of beasts.

Albard pointed at the kneeling Sacristans.

‘Kill them,’ he ordered.

The Sacristans raised hands in supplication, but twin las-bolts cored their skulls before they could speak. Their headless bodies slumped onto the stone-flagged floor next to Cebella.

Albard waved the two soldiers – or were they heroic knights? – forwards. It seemed that their steps were surely too heavy to be those of mortals.

‘Strip that witch of her exo-suit,’ said Albard. ‘I’m going to need it.’

FIFTEEN

The Cave of Hypnos
White Naga
Angel of Fire

A new Land Raider had been found for the Warmaster. Equipped with a flare shield, layered plates of bonded ceramite with ablative ion disruptors, shroud dispensers and frag-launchers, the Mechanicum had repeated their claim that it was proof against all but the weapons of a battle engine.

Horus let Ezekyle kill sixteen of them to remind them of the last time they had made that boast.

The Land Raider idled in the foothills of a mountain chain known as the Untar Mesas. Thousands of armoured vehicles surrounded it, connected together in laagers to form miniature fortresses. The Lord of Iron himself would have approved of the defences arranged around the Warmaster.

An unbroken chain of supply vehicles – tankers, ammo carriers and Mechanicum loaders – stretched back to the coast. Warhounds prowled the line of supply like watchful shepherds, and two Warlords in the colours of Legio Vulcanum stood sentinel over the Warmaster.

Horus climbed into the hills with the Mournival arranged around him in a tight circle. Farther out, Terminators of the Justaerin slogged uphill, looking more like relentless machines than living beings encased in armour.

Ger Gerradon’s Luperci were out there too, unseen in the darkness. Horus could feel their presence like a scratch on the roof of his mouth. Invisible, but impossible to ignore.

A sky the colour of disturbed sediment swirled overhead, and smoke curled from wrecked orbital batteries and missile silos on the mountaintops. Lightning split the night, a sky-wide sheet that silhouetted the jagged teeth of the mountain. Rain fell in a deluge. A hundred new waterfalls spilled from the cliffs. Horus knew grander peaks than these, but viewed from this perspective it seemed like they were the tallest he had ever seen. It looked like they might snag the moon at its passing.

Fire Raptors and Thunderhawks flew overhead through static-charged clouds. Their engines were distant burrs over thunder that sounded like artillery. Energy discharges from the fighting in low orbit had wreaked havoc in the planet’s atmospherics. A cascade effect of violent tempests was spreading all over Molech. Horus knew those storms were only going to get worse until a final apocalyptic event cleared the last of it.

‘It’s madness to stop like this,’ said Abaddon, his armour streaked with rainwater and moonlight. ‘We’re too exposed. First the gunships on Dwell and then those Knights. It’s almost like you’re trying to put yourself in harm’s way. It’s our job to take those kinds of risks.’

‘You’ve known me long enough to know I am not cut from that kind of cloth, Ezekyle,’ said Horus. ‘I am a warrior. I cannot always sit back and let others shed blood for me.’

‘You’re too valuable,’ pressed Abaddon.

‘We have been down this road before, my son,’ said Horus, letting all four of them understand that this was his final word on the subject.

Abaddon let the matter go, but like a hunting hound with the scent of blood in its nostrils, Horus knew he’d be back to that particular argument before long.

‘Very well, but every moment we delay, the deeper the bastards can dig in,’ said Abaddon.

‘You still believe this world matters?’ asked Noctua, as breathless as a mortal. Horus paused and listened to Grael’s heartbeat through the rain. His secondary heart was still catching up to the level of his original, and his circulation likely wouldn’t ever be as efficient as his supra-engineered biology required.

‘What do you mean matters?’ said Abaddon.

‘I mean as a military objective, something to be won in battle then held and consolidated?’

‘Of course,’ said Abaddon. ‘Molech is a stepping stone world. We control it and we control the Elliptical Way, easy access to Segmentum Solar’s warp routes and the bastions worlds of the Outer Systems. It’s a precursor world to the assault on Terra.’

‘You’re wrong, Ezekyle,’ said Aximand. ‘This invasion has never been about anything as prosaic as territory. As soon as we win this fight, we’ll abandon Molech. Won’t we, my lord?’

‘Yes, Little Horus,’ said the Warmaster. ‘Most likely we will. If I’m right about what the Emperor found on Molech, then it won’t matter what worlds we hold. All that’s going to be important is what happens when I face my father. That’s always been at the heart of this.’

‘So why are we fighting as if we give a damn about Molech?’ asked Kibre. ‘Why wage a ground war at all?’

‘Because what we will take away will be worth more than a hundred such rocks,’ said Horus. ‘You have to trust me on this. Do you trust me, Falkus?’

‘Of course, sir.’

‘Good, then no more questions,’ said Horus. ‘We should reach the cave soon.’

‘What cave?’ said Aximand.

‘The cave where the Emperor made us forget Molech.’

The woman’s hard-wearing fatigues suggested a port-worker, maybe a rigger. Hard to be sure with the amount of blood covering them. Her chest rose and fell in stuttering hikes, every breath a victory. She’d been brought to Noama Calver’s Galenus by a weeping man with two children in tow. He’d begged Noama to save her, and they were going to give it a damn good try.

‘What happened to her?’ asked Noama, cutting the woman’s bloodied clothes away.

The man didn’t answer at first. Sobs wracked his body and tears flowed down his open, earnest face. The two girls were doing a better job of holding it together.

‘I can do more for her if I know what happened,’ said Noama. ‘Tell me your name, you can do that, can’t you?’

The man nodded and he wiped his snot and tear streaked face with his sleeve like a child.

‘Jeph,’ he said. ‘Jeph Parsons.’

‘And where are you from, Jeph?’ said Noama.

The woman moaned as Kjell began cleaning her skin and attaching bio-readout pads. She tried to push him off, strong for someone so badly hurt.

‘Easy there,’ said Kjell, pressing her arm back down.

‘Jeph?’ asked Noama again. Keep your eyes on me.’

He was looking at the brutalised flesh of his wife’s body, seeing the blood dripping from the gurney. The woman reached up and took his hand in hers, leaving red marks on his wrist. She was a strong one, saw Noama, badly hurt but still able to offer comfort to those around her.

Jeph took a deep breath. ‘Her name’s Alivia, but she hates that. Thinks it sounds too formal. We all call her Liv, and we came from Larsa.’

The Sons of Horus had landed in force at Larsa, wiping out the Army forces stationed there in one brutal night of fighting. The port facilities were now in enemy hands, which could only be a bad thing.

‘But you got her and your children out,’ said Noama, ‘that’s good. You did better than most.’

‘No,’ said Jeph. ‘That was all Liv. She’s the strong one.’

Noama had already come to that conclusion. Alivia had the lean, wolfish look of a soldier, but she wasn’t Army. She had a faded tattoo on her right arm, a triangle enclosed in a circle with an eye at its centre. Blood covered the words written around the circle’s circumference, but even if it hadn’t they were in a language Noama didn’t recognise.

She’d caught shrapnel in the side, some glass in the face. Nothing that looked life-threatening, but she was losing a lot of blood from one particular wound just under her ribs. The readouts on the slate didn’t paint a reassuring picture of her prognosis.

‘We joined a column of refugees at the Ambrosius Radial,’ said Jeph, the words pouring from him now the dam inside had broken. ‘She thought she’d got out of Larsa quick enough, but the traitors caught up to us. Tanks, I think. I don’t know what kind. They shelled us and shot us. Why did they do that? We’re not soldiers, just people. We had children. Why did they shoot at us?’

Jeph shook his head, unable to comprehend how anyone could open fire on civilians. Noama knew just how he felt.

‘She almost did it,’ said Jeph, his head in his hands. ‘She almost got us out, but there was an explosion right next to us. Blew off her door and… Throne, you can see what it did to her.’

Noama nodded, digging around in the wound below Alivia’s ribs. She felt something serrated buried next to her heart.

A fragment of shrapnel. A big one. The volume of blood coming from the wound meant it had probably sliced open her left ventricle. With a proper medicae bay it would be simple procedure to save Alivia, but a Galenus wasn’t the place for such complex surgery. She looked up at Kjell. He’d seen the bio-readouts and knew what she knew. He raised an eyebrow.

‘I have to try,’ she said in answer to his unvoiced question.

The import of the words went over Jeph’s head and he kept speaking. ‘They killed everyone else, but Liv drove that cargo-five like it was an aeronautica fighter. Threw us all around the cab with tight turns, hard brakes and the like.’

‘She drove you out of an attack by enemy tanks?’ said Kjell, making his impressed face as he sorted out the instruments they’d need to cut Alivia open and get to her heart. ‘That’s a hell of a woman.’

‘Just about blew the engine out,’ agreed Jeph, ‘but I guess that’s why she wanted a ‘five. They’re not max-rated riggers, but their engines pack a punch.’

Noama placed an anaesthesia mask over Alivia’s mouth and nose, cranking up the delivery speed. The rate of blood loss meant they had to be quick.

‘You got your children out,’ she said. ‘You saved them.’

Alivia’s eyes opened and Noama saw desperation there.

‘Please, the book… it says… have to… get to… Lupercalia,’ she gasped into the mask. ‘Promise me… you’ll get us… there.’

Alivia took Noama’s hand and squeezed. The grip was powerful, urgent. Conviction and courage flowed from it, and the need to make Alivia’s last wish a reality was suddenly all that mattered to Noama. It only relaxed when the gas began to take effect.

‘I’ll get you there,’ she promised, and knew she meant it more than she’d meant anything in her life. ‘I’ll get you all there.’

But Alivia didn’t hear her promise.

In the decades since Molech’s compliance, something large and predatory had made its lair in the cave. Bones lay scattered by an entrance large enough for a Scout Titan, and not even the rain could cover the stench of partially digested remains. The earth at the cave mouth was a sopping quagmire, but blurred impressions of clawed feet wider than a Dreadnought’s crossed and recrossed.

‘What made these, sir?’ said Aximand, kneeling by the tracks.

Horus had no answer for him. The tracks were from no beast he remembered from Molech, though given the fractured recall of his time on this world that shouldn’t have surprised him.

And yet it did.

The Emperor hadn’t erased his memories, only manipulated them. Greyed some out, blurred others. He knew the indigenous beasts of Molech. He’d seen their heads mounted on the walls of the Knightholds, had studied their images and dissected corpses in illuminated bestiaries.

So why did he not recognise these tracks?

‘Sir?’ repeated Aximand. ‘What are we going to find in there?’

‘Let’s find out,’ said Horus, pushing aside his doubts and marching into the darkness. The Justaerin’s suit lamps swept the wide entrance, and the claws of Horus’s talon shimmered with blue light as he followed them inside. Strobed shadows painted heavily scored walls. Abaddon went next, then Kibre, Aximand and Noctua.

The cave corkscrewed into the mountain for perhaps a hundred metres, lousy with distorted echoes and strangely reflected light. As tall as a processional on a starship, the passage shimmered with rainwater seeping through microscopic cracks in the rock. The shifting beams caught falling droplets and shimmering rainbows arced between the walls.

They paused as the low, wet growl of something large and hungry was carried from deeper in the tunnels. Territorial threat noise.

‘Whatever that is, we should leave it alone,’ said Kibre.

‘For once I’m in total agreement with you, Falkus,’ said Noctua.

‘No,’ said Horus. ‘We go on.’

‘I knew you were going to say that,’ said Abaddon.

‘And if we run into whatever that is?’ asked Aximand.

‘We kill it.’

The Mournival drew closer to Horus, each with a bladed weapon and firearm drawn. Moisture drizzled the air. It pattered on armour plates and hissed on powered blade edges.

‘You know what it is, don’t you?’ said Aximand.

‘No,’ said Horus. ‘I don’t.’

The sounds of animal breath rasping over dripping fangs came again. It drew Horus on even as some primal part of his brain told him that whatever lurked in the darkness beneath the mountain was something not even he could defeat.

The thought was so alien that he stopped in his tracks.

The intrusion to his psyche was so subtle that only a thought so incongruous to his self-image revealed its presence. It didn’t feel like an attack though, more an innate property of the cave.

Or a side effect of whatever had happened here.

Horus pressed on, the passageway eventually widening into a rugged cavern thick with dripping stalactites and blade-like stalagmites. Some ran together in oddly conjoined columns, wet and glistening like malformed bones or mutant sinews.

A stagnant lake filled the centre of the cavern, its surface a basalt mirror. Rotted vegetation, festering dung and heaps of bone taller than a man were heaped at the water’s edge. The ambient temperature dropped by several degrees, and plumes of breath feathered before the Warmaster and his sons.

Horus’s skin tingled at the presence of something achingly familiar yet wholly unknown. He’d felt something similar at the base of the lightning-struck tower, but this was different. Stronger. More intense. As though his father were standing just out of sight, hidden in the depths and watching. Shadows stretched and slithered as the beams of the Justaerin’s lamps swept around the chamber.

‘I have been here before,’ he said, removing his helmet and hooking it to his belt.

‘You remember this cavern?’ said Aximand as the Mournival and Justaerin spread out.

‘No, but every fibre of my body tells me I stood here,’ said Horus, moving through the chamber.

Light refracting through the translucent columns and crystalline growths imparted colour to the walls: bilious green, cancerous purple, bruise yellow. They were standing in the guts of the mountain. Literally. A chamber of digestion. A suitlight played over the lake, holding steady enough for Horus to picture it as a low-hanging moon.

Not Molech’s moon, but Terra’s moon, as though the lake wasn’t a body of water at all, but a window through time. He’d sat with his father on the shores of the Tuz Gölü and skimmed rocks at the image of the moon and for a moment – just a fleeting moment – he could smell its hypersaline waters.

The light moved on and the water was just water. Cold and hostile, but just water.

With a growing sense of purpose, Horus made his way towards the water’s edge. Shadows where no shadows ought to be stretched over the walls, and a thousand muttering voices seemed to rise from the water. He glanced back at the Mournival. Could they hear the voices or see the shadows? He doubted it.

This cave was not entirely of this world, and whatever was keeping it anchored was fraying. Just by being here he was tugging on its loose threads. The image of bones and sinews returned, something organic, the architecture of the mind.

‘That’s what you did here,’ he said, turning on the spot. ‘You cut through the world here and reshaped us, made us forget what we’d seen you do…’

‘Sir?’ said Aximand.

Horus nodded to himself. ‘This is the scab you left behind, father. Something this powerful leaves a mark, and this is it. The bruise you left behind when you shaped your lie.’

The frayed edge pulled a little more. The scab peeled back.

Ghost shapes moved through the cavern, given life by his picking at the wound in the angles of space and time. Each was numinous and smudged, like figures seen through dirty glass. They were indistinct, but Horus knew them all.

He walked among them, smiling as though his brothers were here with him now.

‘The Khan stood here,’ said Horus as the first figure stopped and took a knee on his left. A second figure knelt to his right.

‘The Lion over there.’

Horus felt himself enveloped in light, cocooned by its cold illumination. He’d retraced the steps he’d taken almost a century ago without even knowing it.

Horus moved back, detaching from a rendering of his own body in ambient light. Like his spectral primarch brothers, his radiant doppelgänger knelt as a figure approached from across the lake. Gold fire and caged lightning; the Emperor without His mask.

‘What is this?’ demanded Abaddon, his bolter raised and ready to fire. The figures were only now becoming visible to them. Horus waved their weapons down.

‘An imprint left over from days past,’ he said. ‘A psychic figment of a shared consciousness.’

The ghost of his father walked over the surface of the lake, wordlessly repeating whatever psycho-cognitive alchemy he had wrought to reshape the pathways in the minds of his sons.

‘This is where I forgot Molech,’ said Horus. ‘Maybe here is where I will remember it.’

Aximand raised his bolter again, aiming it at the numinous being on the water. ‘You said that thing is an echo? A psychic imprint?’

‘Yes,’ said Horus.

‘Then why is it boiling the lake?’

The chirurgeon’s metallic fingers trembled as they applied yet another flesh-graft to Raeven’s right arm. The skin from pectorals to wrist was pink and new like a newborn’s. The pain was intense, but Raeven now knew that physical suffering was the easiest pain to endure.

Edoraki Hakon’s death meant the task of keeping the thousands of soldiers who’d escaped Avadon alive had fallen to him. Legio Fortidus had won the retreating Imperial forces a chance to properly regroup in the wooded vales of the agri-belt. With luck and a fair wind, they should link with forward elements of Tyana Kourion’s Grand Army of Molech outside Lupercalia in two days.

Coordinating a military retreat was hard enough, but Raeven also had to deal with an ever-growing civilian component. Refugees were streaming in from the north and east. From Larsa, Hvithia, Leosta and Luthre. From every agri-collective, moisture-farm and livestock commercia.

Borne in an armada of groundcars, cargo carriers and whatever motive transport could be found, tens of thousands of terrorised people had been drawn to Raeven’s ragamuffin host.

He’d welcomed the burden, the role so consuming it kept him from dwelling on the loss of his sons. But with the threat of immediate destruction lifted, Raeven’s thoughts turned inwards.

Tears flowed and grief-fuelled rages had seen a dozen aides beaten half to death. A hole had opened inside him, a void that he only now recognised had been filled by his sons.

He’d never known joy to compare to Egelic’s birth, and Osgar’s arrival had been no less wonderful. Even Cyprian cracked a smile, the old bastard finally pleased with something Raeven had done.

Banan had struggled to enter the world. Birth complications had almost killed him and his mother, but the boy had lived, though he had ever been a brooding presence in the feast halls. Hard to like, but with a rebellious streak Raeven couldn’t help but admire. Looking at Banan was like looking in a mirror.

Only Osgar now remained, a boy who’d displayed no aptitude or appetite for knightly ways. Against his better judgement, Raeven had allowed the boy to follow Lyx into the Serpent Cult.

The chirurgeon finished his work and Raevan looked down at the crimson, oxygenated flesh of his arm. He nodded, dismissing the man, who gratefully retreated from Raeven’s silver-skinned pavilion. Other chirurgeons had been less fortunate.

Raeven rose from the folding camp-seat and poured a large goblet of Caeban wine. His movements were stiff, the new flesh and reset bones of his chest still fragile. Banelash had been badly damaged, and the repercussions of the Knight’s hurt were borne by his body.

He swallowed the wine in one gulp to dull the ache in his side. He poured another. The pain in his side dimmed, but he’d need a lot more to dull the pain in his heart.

‘Is that wise?’ said Lyx, sweeping into the tent. She’d arrived from Lupercalia that morning, resplendent in a crimson gown with brass and mother-of-pearl panels.

‘My sons are dead,’ snapped Raeven. ‘And I’m going to have a drink. Lots of drink in fact.’

‘These soldiers are looking to their Imperial commander for leadership,’ said Lyx. ‘How will it look if you tour the camp stumbling around like a drunk.’

‘Tour the camp?’

‘These men and women need to see you,’ said Lyx, moving close and pushing the wine jug back to the table. ‘You need to show them that House Devine stands with them so that they will stand with you when it matters most.’

‘House Devine?’ grunted Raeven. ‘There practically isn’t a House Devine anymore. The bastard killed Egelic and Banan, or didn’t you hear me tell you that when you got here?’

‘I heard you,’ said Lyx.

‘Really? I just wanted to be sure,’ snapped Raeven, turning and throwing his goblet across the pavilion. ‘Because for all it seemed to affect you, I might as well have been talking about a particularly good crap I’d had.’

‘Horus slew them himself?’

‘Don’t say that name!’ roared Raeven, wrapping a hand around Lyx’s neck and squeezing. ‘I don’t want to hear it!’

Lyx fought against him, but he was too strong and too enraged with grief. Her face crumpled and turned a livid shade of purple as he squeezed the life out of her. He’d always thought of her as fundamentally ugly, even if her outward appearance suggested otherwise. She was broken inside, and the thought sent a spasm of loathing through him. He was just as broken as her.

Perhaps they both deserved to die.

Maybe so, but she’d go first.

‘My sons were to be my immortality,’ he said, almost spitting in her face as he pushed her back against the pavilion wall. ‘My legacy was to be the honourable continuance of House Devine, but the bastard Warmaster has put paid to that dream. My sons’ armour rusts on Avadon’s beach, and their bodies lie rotted and unclaimed. Food for scavenger birds.’

He felt something sharp at his groin and looked down to see a hooked naga fang pressed against his inner thigh.

‘I’ll slice your balls off,’ said Lyx, pressing the needle-sharp point hard against his leg. ‘I’ll open your femoral artery from your crotch to your knee. You’ll empty in thirty seconds.’

Raeven grinned and released her, stepping away from his sister-wife with a grunt of amusement. Colour returned to her face and he was sure that the excitement he saw in her eyes was mirrored in his own.

‘Cut my balls off and House Devine really is finished,’ he said.

‘A figure of speech,’ said Lyx, massaging her bruised throat.

‘Anyway, your womb will be as barren as the Tazkhar steppe by now,’ said Raeven as Lyx poured them both a drink.

He shook his head and took the goblet she offered him. ‘We make a pair don’t we, sister dearest?’

‘We are what our mother made us,’ replied Lyx.

He nodded. ‘So much for your talk of turning the tide.’

‘Nothing has changed,’ said Lyx, putting a hand out to stroke the pink flesh of his neck. He flinched at her touch. ‘We still have Osgar, and he knows full well the importance of the continuance of the House name.’

‘Shargali-Shi is more of a father to that boy,’ said Raeven, only now understanding what a mistake it had been to allow him anywhere near the Serpent Cult. ‘And from what I hear, he has no interest in taking just one consort nor becoming father to a child. He won’t be the one to keep the Devine name alive.’

‘He doesn’t have to be a father, so long as he puts a child in the belly of a suitably pliant consort,’ said Lyx. ‘But that’s a talk for when this war is concluded.’

Raeven nodded and accepted more wine. He felt a calming fuzziness at the edges of his perception. Wine and pain-balming chems were a heady mixture. He struggled to remember what they’d been talking about before their lover’s tiff.

‘So do you think I’m still the one whose actions will turn the tide of this war?’

‘If anything, I’m even more certain of it,’ said Lyx.

‘Another vision?’

‘Yes.’

‘Tell me.’

‘I saw Banelash in the heart of the great battle for Molech. In the shadow of Iron Fist Mountain. The tread of war gods shakes the earth. Flames surround the Knights of Molech. Death and blood breaks upon Banelash in a red tide and you fight like the Stormlord himself.’

Lyx’s eyes misted over, cloudy with psychic cataracts.

‘A battle to end all battles rages around your Knight, yet no blade, no shell, no enemy can lay it low. And when the appointed hour comes, the mightiest god on the field is slain. Its fall is a rallying cry, and all about scream the Devine name!’

The opaqueness of Lyx’s eyes faded and she smiled, as though a great revelation had just been revealed to her.

‘It’s here,’ she said, breathless with excitement.

‘What is?’ said Raeven, as the air turned chill.

‘The White Naga.’

‘It’s here? Now?’

Lyx nodded, turning around as though expecting to see the avatar of the Serpent Cult within Raeven’s pavilion.

‘The blood sacrifice made at Avadon has brought its divine presence into the realms of men,’ she said, taking his hand. ‘The deaths of our sons has earned you the right to speak with it.’

‘Where is it?’

‘In the forest,’ said Lyx.

Raeven snorted at the vagueness of her reply. ‘Can you be more specific? How do I find it?’

Lyx shook her head. ‘Ride Banelash into the forest, and the White Naga will find you.’

It moved faster than anything Horus had ever known.

Faster than an eldar blade-lord, faster than the megarachnids of Murder, faster than thought. Its body was mist and light, sound and fury.

A Justaerin was the first to die, his body split down the middle as though he’d run full tilt into a bandsaw. His body emptied of blood and organs in a heartbeat.

Horus moved before anyone else, slashing his taloned gauntlet at the glittering light. His claws cut empty air and a golden fist slammed into his stomach. Doubled over, he saw Aximand shooting. The Widowmaker hunted for a target.

Noctua was down on one knee, clutching his chest. Abaddon ran to his side, a long-bladed sword held low. Stuttering muzzle flare lit the cavern in strobing bursts. Suit lights swayed and danced. Hard volleys of mass-reactives shattered crystalline growths, blew out fist-sized lumps of calcified stone. The Justaerin moved to interpose themselves between their attacker and the Warmaster.

Noctua fired from his knees. Kibre added his combi-bolters to the sweeping barrage, not aiming, just firing.

They hit nothing.

The cavern was suddenly gloriously illuminated. An angel of fire, with swords of lightning held outstretched. Faceless, remorseless, Horus recognised it for what it was. A sentinel creature, a final psychic trap emplaced by the Emperor to destroy those who sought to unpick the secrets of His past.

Horus could barely fix on the beast.

Its radiance was so fierce, so blinding. Its swords unleashed forking blasts of lightning, and Aximand was hurled across the cavern. His smoking body slammed into a wall. Stone and armour split. Horus knew the impact trauma was enough to break his spine.

Coruscating blue swords lashed out like whips. Abaddon dived to the side, his pauldron sheared clean away. A portion of the First Captain’s shoulder remained inside, and bright blood sheeted his arm. One of the Justaerin took a step towards his downed captain before remembering his place.

The creature turned its gaze upon the Terminator. The warrior staggered. The combi-bolter fell from his grip as he struggled to tear off his helmet. His screams over the vox were agonised. Liquid light writhed in the joints of his armour, spilling out in blistering streams of white-green fire.

Horus shucked his taloned gauntlet, slamming shells into the breech of the inbuilt bolters. He often spoke of the murder-haruspex of Cthonia that led him to the weapon in an arming chamber of a long-dead warlord. That wasn’t entirely accurate, but the truth was for Horus alone. The gauntlet’s baroque craftsmanship was unmatched, and though Horus had been little more than a callow youth at the time, the gauntlet fitted his blood-scabbed hand as though fashioned just for him.

A two metre tongue of flame blazed from the weapon. The recoil was savage, but Urtzi Malevolus had built his armour well and suspensor compensators kept it on target. Scads of light flew from the angel like molten steel. Torn from its body, its essence dimmed, dissolution turning it to vapour in seconds.

It shrieked and the air between it and Horus buckled with concussive force. The last Justaerin flew apart, shattering like an assembly diagram of something vastly complex. His skeleton and internal biology atomised in a flash burn of intense light.

Horus flew back, as though lifted by a hurricane. He came down hard in the water, its freezing temperature ramming the breath from him with an explosive fist. His mouth filled with black water. Throat muscles reacted instantly to seal his lungs and shift breathing to secondary respiratory organs.

He spat black mouthfuls and rose from the water in time to see Abaddon pinned in place by blazing tridents of lightning. Light poured from the First Captain’s mouth. Kibre’s gunfire sprayed the angel of fire, surrounding it in swarms of phosphor embers. Enough mass-reactive shells to put down a bull-grox achieved precisely nothing against the blazing sentinel.

Horus marched from the lake, whips of fire arcing from his talon. Noctua plunged his sword into the angel’s back. The blade melted in an instant and Noctua cried in pain, clutching his ruined hand. Aximand crawled towards the fight, spine cracked, legs useless.

Horus didn’t bother to shoot the angel. He killed the power to his talons with a thought. Its essence was godly and mortal weapons were useless. He reached for his only other option.

The angel spun to face him, releasing Abaddon from its crackling barbs. The First Captain fell to his front, broiled near death by divine fire.

The angel descended on Horus, wings of bright flame erupting from its back. The swords of lightning became elongated claws. Furnace heat blazed from its body.

Horus stepped to meet it.

He swung Worldbreaker in an upward arc, like a hammer thrower from an ancient age. A weapon forged by the Emperor’s own hand, Worldbreaker was a gift from a god. Its killing head buried itself in the flaming body of the angel.

Only one thing could end this creature, and that was the power that had birthed it.

The angel exploded. Streamers of fire arced from its death like blazing promethium. It shrieked as the power binding it to this place was shattered. By the time the Warmaster’s maul had completed its swing, the angel was no more.

Its scream lingered long, echoing throughout the mountain, all across Molech and through uncounted angles of space and time. The embers of its sun-hot core drifted to the cavern floor like grave-bound fireflies.

And with its death, Horus remembered Molech.

He remembered everything.

SIXTEEN

Flagship
Exogenesis
Infiltration

Even after everything that had happened, the betrayal, the massacre and all that came later, the sight of the Vengeful Spirit still had the power to take Loken’s breath away. She was monstrous and beautiful, a gilded engine whose only purpose was to destroy.

‘We should have known it would end this way,’ he whispered, as the image of his former flagship shimmered on the slate.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Rassuah.

‘We set out from Terra to make war,’ said Loken. ‘That’s all. Sigismund was right. The war will never be over, but what else should we have expected when we crossed the stars in ships like that?’

‘It was a crusade,’ said Rassuah. ‘And you don’t set out to reclaim the galaxy with kind words and good intentions.’

‘Ezekyle had a similar argument with Lupercal before we reached Xenobia. He wanted to make war with the Interex straight away. The Warmaster told him that the Great Crusade had evolved, that since the human race was no longer on the edge of extinction the nature of the Crusade had to change. We had to change.’

‘Change is hard,’ said Rassuah. ‘Especially for people like us.’

Loken nodded. ‘We were created to fight, to kill, and it’s hard to change what you were born to do. But we were capable of so much more.’

He sighed. ‘Whatever else we might have achieved, we’ll never get the chance. From now on there is only war for us.’

‘It’s all there is for any of us,’ said Rassuah.

They’d translated into Molech’s system space on the very inner edge of the Mandeville point. A risky manoeuvre, but with a ship as fine as Tarnhelm and a pilot of finesse, it was worth the risk.

The approach to Molech was made in near silence, with Tarnhelm’s systems running at their lowest ebb. A brief burst of powerful acceleration during a moment of sunspot activity hurled the stealth ship towards Molech. Momentum would do the rest.

In the three days since, the pathfinders had spent their time in solitary reflection, preparing their wargear and running through individual preparations. For Rubio that involved meditation, for Varren and Severian the obsessive dismantling and reassembly of weaponry. Voitek and Qruze played Regicide every hour, while Callion Zaven honed the monomolecular edge of his hewclaw blade. Alten Nohai spent his time teaching Rama Karayan a form of martial art that looked curiously peaceful. Only Bror Tyrfingr was restless, pacing the deck like a rutting stag in mating season.

Loken spent the time alone, trying to ignore the shadowed suggestion of a hooded figure in the corner of his bunk-alcove. He knew it wasn’t there, that it was just a memory given form, but that didn’t make it go away.

It spoke to him, though he knew the words were all in his mind.

Kill me. When you see me, kill me.

‘She’s been hurt,’ said Qruze, as the wallowing form of the Vengeful Spirit hovered over the table. He pointed to blackened portions of the hull, impact craters along the spinal fortresses and sagging buttresses made molten by concentrated laser fire. ‘Someone made her pay for victory.’

‘It was a scrappy fight,’ said Varren, pointing out the drifting wrecks of numerous light cruisers and orbital platforms. ‘They got up close and bloody.’

The image of the Warmaster’s flagship was being projected by the device Tubal Cayne had brought. A compact logic engine of some kind, around the size of a small ammo crate. Loken had watched the former Iron Warrior run a portion of the device over the Scyllan shipwrights’ plans in Yasu Nagasena’s villa.

Those schemata were now displayed in three-dimensional holographic form, every structural member and compartment rendered in the finest detail. The image flickered as inloads from Tarnhelm’s forward surveyors updated the ship’s appearance from what had been built to what was approaching.

Tubal Cayne made adjustments to the device, zooming in on various parts of the ship with an architect’s precision. Too quick for the rest of them to follow his working, the former Iron Warrior hunted out weaknesses in the structure, gaps in the defences for them to exploit.

‘Anything?’ asked Tyrfingr, tapping his fingers on the table.

‘Ventral spine on the portside looks good,’ said Severian.

‘If you want to die,’ replied Cayne.

‘What?’ said Severian, his voice low and threatening.

‘Look at the internal structure beyond,’ said Cayne, highlighting a section of transverse bracing. ‘The Vengeful Spirit is Gloriana-class, not Circe. We’d pass too close to a main transit arterial. There will be automated defences here, here and here, with warden-sentinels at these junctions.’

‘I could get past them.’

‘But you’re not doing this alone, are you?’

Severian shrugged and sat back. ‘Where would you suggest?’

‘As I told Loken, the lower decks are always the weakest point in most ships’ defences. Just as I suspected, it’s not presented to the planet below.’

‘So?’ asked Varren.

‘You people,’ said Cayne with a shake of his head. ‘So fixated with putting an axe in someone’s head.’

‘I’ll put one in your head soon,’ said Varren.

‘Why? I am simply telling you of a better way to infiltrate our target.’

‘Explain how,’ said Loken.

Cayne zoomed in on the lower decks, to a portion of the hull ravaged by torpedo impacts and broadsides. From what Loken remembered of those sections, Cayne was showing them dormitory spaces and magazine chambers.

‘These areas on a Scylla-pattern Gloriana were designed for menials, gun-crews and whatever lagan has sunk to the ship’s bowels,’ said Cayne. ‘They are not Legion spaces, so it is highly unlikely any repair work has been undertaken.’

‘That one,’ said Rama Karayan, pointing to an impact crater in the shadow of a collapsed deflector array. Almost invisible, even to Cayne’s device, it was a deep gouge in the Vengeful Spirit’s flank. ‘A wound easily large enough allow Tarnhelm entry.’

‘A good choice, Master Karayan,’ said Cayne.

‘Exload that to Rassuah,’ said Loken.

‘I already have,’ replied Cayne.

Rassuah let Cayne’s device and the motion of Tarnhelm guide her, allowing the ship to feel its way through the maze of destroyers, frigates, system monitors and orbital patrol boats. Cayne’s device was plugged into the ship’s avionics panel and was plotting a constantly-updating route.

The traitor fleet was enormous, many hundreds of vessels moored at high anchor. The bigger ships kept themselves geostationary, but didn’t otherwise move. The light cruisers and destroyers were the ones Rassuah needed to worry about. They patrolled the void above Molech, vigilant hunters and guard dogs all in one. Threat auspex lashed orbital space in search of prey. Even if a search sweep passed right over the Tarnhelm, Rassuah didn’t think they’d sniff out the stealthy infiltrator.

But in case they enemy got lucky, she ghosted the Tarnhelm between scads of orbital junk, keeping as many drifting wrecks between her and the hunters as possible.

Just the kind of delicate, hyper-intricate flying only one schooled and augmented by the surgeons of the clade masters could achieve. Even so, a fine sheen of perspiration beaded her brow.

‘You let me know the instant any of those destroyers so much as changes a micron of its course,’ she said.

Cayne nodded, but gave her a look of patronising indulgence.

She didn’t know exactly what his device was, but Cayne asserted it could pick a path through even the most densely layered defences, and so far it hadn’t let them down. Retroactively-emplaced mines, electromagnetic pulsars and passive auspex had been seeded through high orbit, but the device had sniffed every one of them out and provided course corrections to avoid them.

When she’d asked him where it had come from, all he had said was that it was a confection designed by the Lord of Iron in one of his more introspective moments. She’d laughed at that, telling him she hadn’t figured his primarch being one prone to introspection.

He had looked at her strangely and said, ‘The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards solitude.’

Leaving her with an assurance that the device would function perfectly well without him, Cayne returned to the crew spaces and Ares Voitek had taken his place. While Rassuah would pilot the ship, Voitek would crew its weapons. Any significant weapons’ fire would likely announce their presence as surely as a vox-hail, but better to be prepared. Voitek had plugged into the console, his senses meshed with the passive auspex.

‘Servitor-crewed one-shot,’ he said picking up the active surveyors of a torpedo with an implanted servitor to fire it upon detection of a target. ‘Nine hundred kilometres high on your ten.’

‘I see it,’ said Rassuah, angling their course to avoid its arc of coverage.

‘Overlapping sentinel array dead ahead,’ said Voitek.

‘Can you burn out its auspex with a tight-focus volkite beam?’

‘I can. Generating micro-burst solution.’

‘Ares, wait,’ said Rubio, appearing at the hatch behind them, his face lined with effort. ‘Don’t shoot it.’

‘Why not?’ asked Voitek. ‘I have a perfect firing solution.’

‘Destroy it and you will alert our enemies.’

‘I don’t intend to destroy it, simply blind its main auspex.’

‘It’s not the auspex you need to worry about.’

‘We take this one down and we open the largest gap,’ explained Voitek. ‘The only time these things register with the command ship is when they detect something. Its going dark won’t be noticed.’

‘Open fire and you’ll find out just how wrong it’s possible to be,’ said Rubio. ‘There is a corrupt Mechanicum sentience onboard, something analogous to a Thallax, but tasked only with maintaining a link in an auspex chain. Break that chain and the enemy will know of our presence.’

‘We need that gap,’ said Rassuah. ‘Cayne’s toy can only find a way to the Vengeful Spirit if there’s a gap.’

Rubio nodded and closed his eyes. ‘I will give you your gap, Rassuah. Be ready, Ares. Shoot when I give the word.’

Witchlight hazed Rubio’s eyelids, and his crystalline hood pulsed with corposant. Rassuah felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise. Rubio’s eyes darted back and forth, as though following a tortuous maze where one wrong turn meant disaster. His lips parted and a breath of frozen mist sighed out.

‘Shoot,’ he said. ‘Now.’

Rassuah didn’t see anything happen. Voitek’s control of the weapons was via an implanted servo-arm and the volkite beam was too quick and too precise. Even so, she held her breath.

Rubio opened his eyes, but his hood still glowed. His skin was pale and he looked like he’d just eaten something unpleasant.

‘What did you do?’ asked Rassuah.

‘I implanted an image of dead space within its polluted mind,’ said Rubio. ‘Voitek destroyed its eyes, but it is seeing what I want it to see. It believes it is still part of the auspex chain.’

‘How long will it believe that?’

‘As long as I keep the image strong in its consciousness,’ said Rubio, holding firm to the door stanchions. The strain of holding false thoughts in a deviant cyborg’s mind was taking its toll.

Cayne’s logister chimed as it registered a newly opened gap and offered up a path. Rassuah was already easing Tarnhelm through with a twitch of manoeuvring jets.

‘Fly steady, and fly smooth,’ cautioned Rubio.

‘It’s the only way I fly,’ Rassuah assured him.

The Vengeful Spirit loomed ahead of Tarnhelm, a vast edifice of black metal, two hundred kilometres and closing. Rassuah shivered at the sight of the Warmaster’s flagship, as though it were a voracious oceanic predator and they a bleeding morsel swimming heedlessly towards it.

Everything about the Vengeful Spirit was threatening.

Each gun port was a snarling maw, every cloistered broadside array a serrated cluster of gargoyles and daemons. The huge amber eyes on its flanks, none smaller than a hundred metres across, were actively staring at her. The blade of its prow was an assassin’s dagger whose sole purpose was to cut her throat.

Rassuah tried to shake off the creeping horror of the vessel. Throne, it was just a starship! Steel and stone, an engine and a crew. She whispered clade mantras to clear her thoughts. She fixed on Tarnhelm’s displays and controls, but always found her gaze dawn back to the Vengeful Spirit’s hellforged eyes.

The impact crater yawned before Tarnhelm like a gateway to the abyss, a black hole into the unknown.

‘Starships have machine-spirits, yes?’ asked Rassuah.

Voitek looked up from the console, his half-machine face showing puzzlement at the timing of her question.

‘A gift of the Omnissiah, yes,’ he said at last. ‘Every complex machine has one bestowed upon it at the moment of its activation. The larger the machine, the greater the spirit.’

‘So what kind of spirit does this ship have?’

‘You know its name, what do you think?’

‘I think that any ship built to rule over a world of toxins and murder has a spirit best avoided.’

‘And yet we must fly into the heart of this one,’ said Voitek as the Vengeful Spirit swallowed the Tarnhelm whole.

They met on an island at the centre of an artificial lake. Reflected moonlight wavered on its gently rippling surface. The location spoke of earlier times in the Legion’s history, before ritual had replaced tradition. When things had been simpler.

Now it seemed that even that simplicity had been a lie.

A flaming spear rammed into the ground at the centre of the island burned with orange light, bathing the features of those assembled in a ruddy glow of health that belied their true condition.

Abaddon’s skin was waxy with regenerative balms and fresh-grafted skin. Noctua now boasted a clicking augmetic for a right hand, while Aximand was supported by a spinal armature while his shattered vertebrae regrew. Only Falkus Kibre had fought the angel of fire and emerged unscathed.

Maloghurst stood with the Mournival, for once looking like the least wounded among them. Ger Gerradon and his growing band of Luperci also gathered to hear of the invasion’s next phase.

‘We have achieved great things, my sons, but the hardest fight is yet to come,’ began Horus, circling the burning spear and placing a hand over the amber eye at his chest. ‘The enemy mass before us, an unbroken host of men and armour stretching all the way to Iron Fist Mountain. Armies from all across Molech are gathering, but they will not stop us from reaching Lupercalia.’

Aximand stepped from the circle.

Of course it would be Aximand. He would have fought the coming battle a hundred times already in his head. Of all his sons, Little Horus Aximand was the most fastidious, the most conscientious. The one whose thoughts came closest to his own.

‘The numbers do not favour us, my lord,’ said Aximand.

‘Numbers aren’t all that decide a battle,’ pointed out Kibre.

‘I know that, Falkus, but even so, we’re outnumbered nearly fifty to one. Perhaps if the Death Guard fought with us…’

‘Our brothers of the Fourteenth Legion are poised to be the anvil upon which the hammer of the Sons of Horus will break the Imperials,’ said Horus.

‘They’ll be with us for the coming fight?’ said Aximand. ‘We can count on that?’

‘Have you ever known Mortarion’s sloggers to fail?’ said Horus.

Aximand nodded, conceding the point. ‘What are your orders?’

‘Simple. We fight for the living and kill for the dead. Isn’t that what you say?’

‘Something like that,’ grinned Aximand.

‘What’s at Lupercalia?’ asked Abaddon, his voice forever burned down to a scorched rasp. ‘What did you learn from the thing in the cave’s death?’

Horus nodded and said, ‘I remembered why the Emperor came here, what He found and why He didn’t want anyone else to know about it. Lupercalia is where I’ll find what we need to win this long war.’

‘So what did it show you?’ asked Aximand.

‘All in good time,’ said Horus. ‘But, first, I have a question for you, my sons. Do any of you know how life began on Old Earth?’

No one answered, but he hadn’t expected them to; the question too far beyond their usual sphere of interaction.

‘Sir?’ said Maloghurst. ‘What does that have to do with Molech?’

‘Everything,’ said Horus, enjoying this rare moment to be a teacher instead of a warrior. ‘Some of Earth’s scientists believed life began as an accidental chemical reaction deep in the oceans around hydrothermal vents. A chance energy gradient that facilitated the transformation of carbon dioxide and hydrogen into simple amino acids and proto-cells. Others believed life came to Earth by exogenesis, microorganisms entombed deep in the hearts of comets travelling the void.’

Horus walked to the edge of the lake, his warriors parting before him. He knelt and scooped a handful of water in his palm. He turned to face his sons and let it spill between his fingers.

‘But that’s not where you and I came from,’ said Horus. ‘As it turns out, our dream didn’t begin on Earth at all.’

This was a part of the ship Loken had never visited. But even if he had, he doubted he would have recognised it. The Tarnhelm sat canted at a shallow angle on a buckled plate exposed to the void. Landing claws held it tight to the deck, and Rassuah kept the engines at their lowest pitch.

Loken led the pathfinders from the ship and into the cratered section of the Vengeful Spirit, his armour gusting puffs of exhaled breath. Feathers of vapour bled from the heat of his armour’s backpack. The sound of his breathing filled his helmet as he crossed the ruptured chamber.

‘Rassuah, once we’re inside, take Tarnhelm out and follow our progress via the armour locators as best you can,’ said Loken. ‘And keep close to the hull. If this goes bad, we’ll need a quick evacuation.’

‘You want me to keep my hunter’s eye in?’ asked the pilot.

‘As best you can.’

‘Count on it,’ said Rassuah, signing off.

Infinite space stretched behind him, an unending black tapestry of emptiness and points of aeons-old light. Before him was the vessel where he’d known his greatest joys and deepest woes.

He was back on the Vengeful Spirit and didn’t know how to feel.

The best and worst of his memories had been shaped in its arming chambers and companionways. He’d known his greatest friends and seen them become his most terrible enemies. Loken felt like a murderer at the scene of his crime, or a tortured shade revisiting the place of his death.

He’d known that returning here would be difficult, but actually being here was something else entirely.

A hand pressed against his left shoulder guard. He’d proudly borne the heraldic icon of the Sons of Horus there. Now it was a blank space, burnished grey.

‘I know, lad,’ said Iacton Qruze. ‘Strange to return, eh?’

‘We called this ship home for the longest time,’ said Loken. ‘The memories I have…’

Qruze tapped a finger to his temple.

‘Remember her as she was, not the beast they’ve turned her into. Everything began on this vessel and everything will end on it. Mark my words, lad.’

‘It’s just a ship,’ said Severian, moving over the crumpled deck. ‘Steel and stone, an engine and a crew.’

Qruze shook his head and followed Severian.

Loken felt old eyes upon him. He told himself it was just his imagination and set off after Qruze. He followed the rest of the team deeper into the cavern blown in the side of the ship.

By the look of its walls it had once been a dormitory space. Now it was an empty void. Every loose piece of apparatus had been explosively vented into space by whatever weapon had torn through the ship’s hull.

‘Transverse impact,’ said Ares Voitek, pointing out tear lines and direction of blast shear. ‘This was a lucky hit, a torpedo brought down by point-defence guns and spiralling away.’

‘I wonder if it felt lucky to the people inside,’ said Altan Nohai. ‘Lucky or not, they still died.’

‘They were traitors,’ said Varren, pushing past. ‘How does it matter how they died? They died, that’s enough.’

‘They died screaming,’ said Rubio, a hand pressed to the side of his helmet. ‘And they’d been screaming for a very long time.’

The pathfinders spread out, moving to where the nearest interior bulkhead was still intact. Voitek moved across the wall, his servo-arms tapping and clicking along the bulkhead as though searching for something.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘There is atmosphere on the other side. Cayne?’

‘Setting up now,’ said Cayne.

He placed the same device he’d used to thread the maze of seeded defences surrounding the Vengeful Spirit at Voitek’s feet. A detachable wand connected via a coiled cable snapped out and he panned the wand up and down.

‘You are correct, Master Voitek,’ he said, consulting a softly glowing slate on his device. ‘A passageway, sealed at one end by debris. The shipwright’s plans indicate there is a way through in the other direction, a sub-transit that leads up to an ammunition runnel-path for a lower gun deck.’

‘Will it get us deeper into the ship?’ asked Loken.

‘I already said it would,’ said Cayne. ‘Aren’t you familiar with the layout of sub-decks on the gunnery levels?’

‘No, not particularly.’

Cayne shook his head as he packed up his device and slotted the wand back home. ‘You Luna Wolves, it’s a wonder you were able to find your way around at all.’

Severian drew his combat blade. ‘I can kill him if you want,’ he offered.

‘Maybe later,’ said Loken.

Severian shrugged and leaned forward to scratch a symbol onto the wall, an angular rune of vertical and crosswise lines.

‘You know futharc?’ said Bror Tyrfingr, looking over Severian’s shoulder. ‘How do you know futharc?’

‘What’s futharc?’ asked Loken.

‘Battle sigils,’ said Severian. ‘Scouts of the Space Wolves – sorry, the Vlka Fenryka – use them to guide follow-on forces through void-hulks and the like. Each symbol gives the main host information about what’s ahead, the best routes to take. That sort of thing.’

‘You didn’t answer my question,’ said Bror Tyrfingr.

‘The Twenty-Fifth Company served with your lot more than once,’ said Severian, finishing his script. ‘A wolf named Svessl taught it to me.’

‘Something he’ll regret if I ever see him,’ grunted Bror.

Qruze and Rama Karayan moved past Bror and Severian. They began unfolding a blocky series of struts and portable generators from a series of narrow crates that might once have contained rockets for a missile launcher.

This was Karayan’s area of expertise, and he quickly set up what looked like a framed template of a door. With Voitek’s assistance, Karayan hooked his construction to a generator and wound a crank until a gem-light on its side turned green.

Karayan pressed a snap-covered activation switch. A shimmer of liquid energy bloomed around the frame’s inner edges, spreading until it filled the enclosed space like the surface of a soap bubble. It rippled, filmy with rainbow colours.

‘Integrity field established,’ said Karayan. ‘Safe to breach.’

Voitek nodded and his servo-arms reached through the field to grip projections on the bulkhead.

‘Breaching now,’ said Karayan as precision melta-cutters on the back of the frame burned with short-lived, but ferocious intensity. They sliced through the bulkhead instantaneously, and Ares Voitek yanked the cut slab of metal back through the integrity field.

‘We’re in,’ said Varren.

Shock greeted the Warmaster’s pronouncement. Disbelief and confusion. Aximand felt the ground beneath him turn to shifting sand at the truth of the Warmaster’s words.

‘Don’t you feel it, my sons?’ continued Horus. ‘Don’t you feel how special Molech is? How singular among all the worlds we have won it is?’

Aximand found himself nodding, and saw he wasn’t the only one.

Lupercal walked in a circle, jabbing a fist into his palm with every sentence.

‘At the dawn of the great diaspora, the Emperor travelled here in humble guise and found the gateway to a realm of immortal gods. He offered them things only a god-in-waiting could offer, and they trusted Him. They gave Him a measure of their power, and with that power He wrought the science to unlock the mysteries of creation.’

Horus was radiant as he spoke, as though he had already ascended to a divine plane of reality.

‘But the Emperor had no intention of honouring His debt to the gods. He turned on them, taking their gifts and blending them with His genecraft to give birth to demigods. The Emperor condemns the warp as unnatural, but only so no other dares wield it. The blood of the immaterial realm flows in my veins. It flows in all our veins, for as I am the Emperor’s son, you are the Sons of Horus, and the secret of our genesis was unlocked upon Molech. The gateway to that power is in Lupercalia, far beneath the mountain rock. Sealed away from the light by a jealous god who knew that someday one of His sons would seek to surpass His deeds.’

And finally Aximand understood why they had come here, why they had expended such resources and defied all military logic to follow in the footsteps of a god.

This would be the moment they rose to challenge the Emperor with the very weapons He had kept for Himself.

This was to be the apotheosis of them all.

Karayan and Severian led the way, moving into the tangled mess of the corridor beyond the integrity field. Loken and Qruze went next, followed by the others in quick succession. The corridor was dark and cluttered with smashed metal. Only the faint glow of helmet lenses and the occasional spark from fusing machinery lit the way. Debris littered the deck. Ruptured pipes drizzled the air with moisture and vapour.

Loken’s auto-senses tasted it as the stagnant water in a bleak mountain tarn. He heard static like a rasp drawn over stone. Whispers lingered.

The Seven Neverborn. The Whisperheads. Samus. Samus is here…

Loken shook his head to clear the unbidden thought, but it was lodged like a splinter worming its way deeper into his flesh. He saw Rubio reach out a steadying hand to the wall, then flinch as though it were red hot.

Loken focused on Callion Zaven’s back, imagining how it would look blown open with a mass-reactive or chewed up by a chainsword. He wondered if Zaven’s death scream would echo with perfect pitch as he died.

‘Loken?’ said Altan Nohai. ‘Is something wrong? Your heart-rate is elevated.’

‘I’m fine,’ said Loken, the image of murder lingering like the taste of blood. ‘This place, it’s hard being back.’

If the Apothecary heard the lie, he gave no sign. Loken pressed on, hearing the soft breath at his shoulder that he couldn’t possibly be hearing.

They moved down the corridor, reaching a junction of dripping echoes and tangled cabling hanging from the ceiling spaces. Blue sparks spat from a crumpled junction box. An Eye of Horus had been crudely painted on the wall in white. Drip lines made it look as though it was weeping milky tears.

‘Cayne, which way?’

‘As I said, straight on and up the stairs at the end.’

Severian was already moving, bolter pulled in tight. It looked as though his body was utterly still from the waist up. The barrel of his weapon never wavered, never so much as drifted a millimetre from his eyeline.

Moving silently in power armour was a trick only a few could manage, but Severian and Karayan elevated it to an art form. If anything, Rama Karayan moved with even less apparent effort than Severian, mirroring his path as they pushed ahead.

Loken felt clumsy in comparison, every echo of his footfalls sounding like the stomping tread of a Dreadnought. He could see that the others felt the same way.

The scrape of a blade behind him set Loken’s teeth on edge, like an Apothecary’s saw grinding through bone. In deference to Bror Tyrfingr’s displeasure, Severian left the marking of their path to the warrior of the Rout. It would be his gene-sire making this future assault, and the symmetry was pleasing.

Iron stairs were just where Cayne had said they would be, and the pathfinders climbed to one of the ventral gun decks. The top opened into a high-ceilinged chamber of acoustic baffles that sagged from the walls in wadded lumps and filled the air with drifting particulates. Another Eye of Horus on the wall. Loken reached out to touch it. The paint was still wet.

Shielded from the guns’ pressurised venting of superheated propellant by heavy mantlet shutters, the ammunition runnel-path was a sunken roadway ten metres wide behind the ranked-up guns. In battle, a constant stream of flatbed gurneys would ride the rails, distributing shells to the macro-cannon batteries and hauling discarded casings to the smelters.

The guns were silent, but chains rattled in enormous windlasses and the rumble of magazine elevators set the air vibrating. The sour smell Loken had tasted earlier returned, stronger this time. The voices scratching at the edge of hearing like animals left out in the rain became clearer.

‘What is that?’ said Zaven.

‘You hear it?’ asked Loken.

‘Of course, it’s like a part-tuned vox in another room,’ said Zaven. ‘It keeps saying the same thing over and over.’

‘What are you hearing?’ asked Rubio urgently.

‘I don’t know exactly,’ said Zaven. ‘It’s gibberish. Maelsha’eil Atherakhia, whatever that means.’

‘No, it’s not words at all,’ said Varren. ‘It’s screaming. Or maybe someone’s trying to chop a chainaxe through adamantium.’

‘That’s what you hear?’ said Tubal Cayne. ‘Getting hit on the head all those times must have damaged the aural comprehension centres of your brain.’

Rubio put himself between Cayne and Varren. His psychic hood flickered with light, though none of it was of his doing.

‘What do you hear?’ demanded Rubio.

‘The noise of a gun deck,’ said Cayne. ‘What else would I hear?’

Rubio nodded and said, ‘Be thankful you are a man of pure reason, Tubal Cayne.’

‘What’s going on, Rubio?’ said Loken.

The psyker turned around, addressing them all. ‘Whatever you think you’re hearing, it’s not real. Low-level psychic energy is simmering beneath the surface. It’s like background radiation, but within the mind.’

‘Is it dangerous?’ said Nohai. ‘I’m showing elevated adrenal levels and combat responses in every single one of you.’

‘Because he just told us we’re under the effect of maleficarum!’ hissed Bror Tyrfingr, baring his canines.

Macer Varren unhooked his axe, finger hovering over the activation stud. The noise of its chained teeth would be heard for hundreds of metres in all directions.

Rubio’s fists clenched and ghostlights danced in the crystalline matrix of his hood. The whispering in Loken’s helmet drifted away, as if carried on a stiff breeze. Soon it was gone, leaving only the percussive hammering of the gun deck. He let out a breath.

‘What are you doing?’ Tyrfingr asked Rubio.

‘Shielding you all from the psychic bleed-off that permeates this ship,’ said the psyker, and Loken heard the strain in his voice. ‘Everything you hear from now on will be the truth.’

The thought gave Loken no comfort.

SEVENTEEN

Beasts of Molech
Mission-critical
No perfection without imperfection

The horizon had been burning for days. Jungle fires were nothing new, but in all his life, Lord Balmorn Donar hadn’t seen anything to match the scale of this conflagration. Worse, the leading edge of the blazing jungle was no more than a day away at best.

‘Is it the Death Guard?’ asked Robard, marching his Knight onto the wall to join his father. The leg of Robard’s Knight had been repaired, but it was a patch-job by second-rate apprentices. With the main axis of enemy advance coming from the north, the Preceptor Line had been stripped of its Mechanicum adepts and most of its Sacristans. Every one of them had been seconded to Iron Fist Mountain to service the God-Machines of Legio Crucius.

‘It can’t be the Death Guard,’ he said. ‘It can’t be anyone. Even the most potent fire-throwers, chem-flayers or rad-bombs would take months or years to cut a viable path without destroying your own army.’

‘Then what is it?’

Lord Donar took his time before answering. His sensorium rendered the sky as a flat black smudge, but sometimes – just for a fraction of a second – it broke apart into buzzing static, like an unimaginably vast swarm of flies.

‘I don’t know, boy,’ he said at last, ‘but I’m damn sure it isn’t a fire.’

‘My thermal auspex says otherwise,’ said Robard. ‘So do the wall guns.’

‘Aye, but the readings are spiking hard then dying away almost to nothing before repeating the cycle,’ pointed out Lord Donar. ‘I’m not a bloody expert, but even I know fires don’t behave like that. I don’t know anything that behaves like that.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘What we always do, boy,’ said Lord Donar. ‘We hold the Line.’

The beast packs hit the wall an hour later.

The azhdarchid came first. The fleetest of the great beasts, they raced ahead of the black tide engulfing the jungle. Their long necks were scaled and feathered, their crocodilian beaks stretched and snapping in animal panic.

The wall guns opened up when they came within a thousand metres of the Preceptor Line. The noise was tremendous, even encased within the armour of a Knight. Lord Donar filtered out their cries and watched the flocks charge through a streaming hurricane of rotor cannon fire. Heedless of the carnage, the loping, flightless birds screamed as the shells cut them down without mercy.

At six hundred metres, the seven Knights of House Donar opened fire. Battle cannon shells left five metre craters and flying, disassembled bodies in their wake. Stubber cannons carved bloody trenches through the horde. Scores fell, trampled to pulp by those behind them. The killing ground was a quagmire of blood-soaked earth and unrecognisable meat. The air misted red, tasted of metal shavings.

Xenosmilus packs came next, hundreds of the monstrous quadrupeds charging for the wall in snarling desperation. The guns pulped them. Flesh and bone shredded in thousands of bloody explosions. Basilisks and Medusa of the Kapikulu Iron Brigade lobbed shells over the wall with their gun barrels at maximum elevation.

Seismic shock waves and pulverising overpressure from close-range detonations shook the wall and the facing stonework split with sharp cracks. Entire swathes of the Preceptor Line visibly sagged.

Massacre wasn’t a big enough word to encompass the slaughter, but the rampaging flocks soon found gaps where the Preceptor Line’s wall guns were non-functional. Too close for the artillery to engage, streams of the predator beasts surged towards the wall.

‘With me!’ shouted Lord Donar, striding to cover the gaps. He rolled his shoulders, and the Knight responded. Weapons charged, ammo-hoppers engaged. Solid slugs rammed into breeches. Targeting icons snapped into focus. Too many to choose from. Too many targets to miss. Lord Donar felt the Knight’s spirit and all its previous pilots’ thrill at the nearness of death.

Other nobles gave names to their Knights, but to House Donar it was the man inside that counted. A machine might have glorious history, but pair it with a below-par warrior and no amount of glory would matter.

Lord Donar counted at least two hundred azhdarchid, twice that many xenosmilus. More beasts than he’d seen in his life. The snapping, hooting, cawing packs were actually trying to claw and bite their way through the wall. What was behind them that could be so bad as to drive them to annihilate themselves like this?

A black miasma oozed from the tree line, a bank of questing smoke. All the world’s insect life come to watch the killing.

No time to ponder, there was fighting to be done.

The azhdarchid were trapped at the base of the wall, screeching and battering themselves to destruction at its corpse-heaped base. The xenosmilus packs were climbing the wall like besiegers, iron-hard claws digging into the crumbling, cracking stonework and hauling their enormous bodies up its angled facade.

Lord Donar picked out a milling pack at the base of the wall and unleashed a one-two punch from his battle cannon mount. Twin explosions mushroomed. Mangled bodies tumbled through the air, burned unrecognisable. His stub-cannon raked side to side, snatching roaring beasts from the wall. Corpses slithered downward to join the ever-growing heap of dead animals at its base.

A turret to his right blew out as a pair of imperfect shells exploded prematurely. The shattered oblong of blackened metal tumbled down the wall in flames. More turrets were falling silent as their ammo reserves ran dry.

‘Cover the gaps!’ ordered Lord Donar. ‘Robard! You take it.’

His son’s Knight strode out to the crumbled portion of the wall where the smoking base of the turret still sat. Bracing one leg on the wall, Robard leaned out and stabbed his thermal lance into the hordes. A screech of magma-hot air exploded among the azhdarchid, vaporising at least nine of them. His stubber flensed the wall.

But for every dozen beasts they killed, twice that came behind them. A never-ending stream of monsters was abandoning the disintegrating jungle. Death at the hands of Imperial guns was preferable to facing what had driven them from their lairs. The black miasma was dissolving the thick-boled trees, reducing them to decayed mulch.

The xenosmilus were on the ramparts. Their heavy paws were bloody, their claws all but torn out by the climb. Lord Donar decapitated a beast with a single shot.

‘Too close for battle cannon!’ shouted Robard.

‘Perfect for reaper work!’ answered Lord Donar, striding his machine over to the thickest concentration of beasts surging onto the battlements.

His reaper blade roared to life, six metres of razor-toothed chainsaw. The first beasts over the wall were cut in half with a single sweep. Dismembered corpses were hurled twenty metres by the blade’s spinning teeth. A return stroke tore broken merlons from the wall. Lord Donar could fight like this all day. Let every beast of the jungle come. He would kill them all.

The Knights roved the wallhead. Stubbers fired dry or until their barrels grew too hot to shoot. Reaper blades cut down anything that reached the wall. The killing was mechanical. Death delivered by machine to animal like robot slaughtermen in an abattoir.

Robard’s reaper blade was clogged with bone and annealed flesh, so he used his thermal lance as a club. His mass was a weapon too, crushing foes beneath clawed feet. He was alone. And surrounded.

But the beasts pushing past him didn’t turn and attack his vulnerable rear. They dropped to the esplanade, running pell-mell to put as much distance between them and the wall. Squads of Devsirmes opened fire on them, but only a handful of beasts were brought down.

Lord Donar turned his Knight around in time to see the blackened, rotting edges of the jungle smashed apart as the mallahgra arrived. The simian giants bounded towards the wall in long, fist-dragging leaps. Their beetle-like heads were lowered like battering rams.

‘Luthias, Urbano, the gate! Now!’ ordered Lord Donar. ‘Robard, the wall is yours, don’t lose it, boy!’

The two named Knights turned from the hewing at the ramparts and followed their lord.

A pair of xenosmilus vaulted onto Urbano’s back and fouled the workings of his reaper blade long enough for another six to gain the walls and drag him down. Weapons sill firing, Urbano was pulled over the rampart. Lord Donar and Luthias strode through the fighting towards the gate.

The Kapikulu’s few remaining Malcadors assumed dug-in firing positions either side of the gateway. Weapon teams of Belgar Devsirmes occupied elevated sangars and sandbagged pillboxes.

Small-arms fire stabbed at the walls. Las-rounds, missiles and heavy bolters. Inconsequential compared to the Knights’ weapons.

Lord Donar and Luthias reached the gate just as the first mallahgra hit. The metal deformed, then deformed again and again. One after another, the mallahgra combined their superior mass to smash the gate from its mounting though it must surely have shattered the bones in their shoulders and necks. Hinges the size of Earthshaker cannon barrels tore from their mountings as the gate finally gave in to the pressure.

A tide of grey-furred giants rammed through the gate, all muscle, fangs and fury. Lord Donar shot the skulls from the first two with a burst of stubber shells. Luthias vaporised the three behind them with his thermal lance. The Malcadors shredded flesh and turned the gateway into a solid volume of gore.

Lord Donar fired until his stubber burned through his reserve ammo-hoppers. He’d seen Tyrae’s icon go dark. His death went unwitnessed and with another Knight’s loss, more and more of the beasts were gaining the ramparts.

The battlements were lost. A tide of rampaging monsters was spilling over the wall.

Luthias died as a pair of rearing mallahgra smashed open his carapace and cut him in half with razored stumps of claws. Lord Donar waited for them to turn on him, but the gigantic creatures simply kept on going, pounding away from the wall.

Only then did Lord Donar notice what he should have seen from the beginning of this assault. The beasts were not the danger. They weren’t attacking the Preceptor Line as a military force, they were attacking because it was in their way. He should have opened the damn gate long ago.

‘All forces, stand down,’ ordered Lord Donar. ‘Get out of their way. House Donar, to me!’

It went against the grain to allow beasts to go unmolested, but to fight here was to die. Something worse was coming, something they had to have numbers to fight. The last four Knights stepped aside, taking what cover they could as an avalanche of jungle creatures swarmed the wall and fled the battlefield.

Soldiers of the Kapikulu and Devsirmes were still dying, crushed in the stampede, but Lord Donar could do nothing for them. He kept his Knight pressed tight to the inner face of the wall. It shamed him that the Preceptor Line had been breached, but there had been no chance of holding it. The beasts would likely take refuge in the mountains caves at the edge of the Tazkhar Steppe. Those that didn’t would be eliminated by Abdi Kheda’s Kushite Eastings if they travelled farther west or north.

It took another hour before the tide of jungle creatures was ended. The last beasts were poor specimens indeed, crippled, aged and diseased things. The Devsirmes shot them as they passed, and those shots were mercy kills.

The Preceptor Line was in ruins – the gateway was choked with dead animals and entire sections of the wall were breached from close-range artillery blasts.

Only one scaffold ramp still offered access to the wall, and Lord Donar climbed it warily, hearing every creak of timber and groan of over-stressed metal. The top of the wall was a shattered ruin of broken stumps where protective merlons had once offered protection. Its entire complement of turrets had been destroyed, or were without ammunition.

Straight away, Lord Donar saw none of that would matter.

The Kushite jungle was gone, wiped out entirely.

Six hundred million hectares of lush vegetation were now an unending morass of necrotic black ooze. Lord Donar knew only one weapon that could comprehensively destroy life with such speed.

The black miasma at the edge of what had once been a jungle of incomparable depth and fecundity began dissipating like night before the dawn. His sensorium broke up into buzzing static as what looked like a trillion flies lifted from the ocean of decay beyond the walls.

Lord Donar punched the canopy release and let the segmented hood of his Knight fold back into its carapace. The stench hit him first, a paralysing reek of spoiled meat, dung and polluted earth.

As the miasma continued to lift, Lord Donar saw an army of invasion grinding its way through the decaying remains of the jungle. Enormous fuel tankers bearing the golden heraldry of the Ophir promethium guilds stretched to the horizon where striding Titans moved with ponderous steps.

Led by a virtually wrecked Rhino, a host of fighting vehicles and giant artillery pieces threw up great clods of black mud from their tracks as they advanced on the wall. Marching grimly alongside them were thousands of Legion warriors in plate that had once been a pale ivory, but which was now plastered with filth and decaying matter.

At the head of the army was an armoured giant in a matted cloak of scraps and iron. His face was a leering skull gagged by a bronze mouthpiece and he bore a reaper blade of such scale that it seemed possible he had hacked the jungle down single-handedly.

Lord Donar saw scores of monstrous culverins and wide-mawed artillery pieces fed enormous breacher shells. His heart hardened as he turned his Knight about and made his way from the wall.

‘Father?’ said Robard, as Lord Donar reached the ground.

‘Knights of House Donar,’ he said. ‘March with me.’

Lord Balmorn Donar strode through the gate, his Knights quick to follow him through the corpse-choked gateway.

The Knights stood before the impossible army of the Death Guard. Grumbling superheavies took aim at them with Titan-killing weaponry; volcano cannons, plasma blastguns and accelerator cannons. The overkill was ridiculous. Target locks appeared on Lord Donar’s auspex, too many to count.

Enough weaponry to kill a dozen Knight Houses were trained upon them and the wall they had spent their lives defending. Lord Donar’s guns were empty and useless. Only his reaper blade was still viable, and he would match it against the whoreson master of the Death Guard.

‘Only one order left to give,’ said Robard.

‘Charge!’ shouted Lord Donar.

With the lower gun deck marked, the pathfinders moved deeper into the Vengeful Spirit. They kept to the runnel-path, hugging the walls when baying servitors stalked past above. They moved when distant rumbles obscured the sounds of their passing.

From the gun deck they followed Cayne’s directions, moving out into dimly-lit arterials. They threaded a path towards structural hubs where a torpedo or macro-cannon impact would do the most damage and areas where practicable boardings into wide staging areas could be effected. Bror Tyrfingr marked such places in futharc, and Ares Voitek planted hidden locator beacons with encrypted Imperial triggers to guide assault boats and torpedoes.

Loken was ostensibly the leader of the mission, but he moved in a daze, still struck by the incongruity of being aboard the Vengeful Spirit. The lower decks were unfamiliar to him and yet curiously welcoming. Oft-times he would hear a whisper at his shoulder that would direct him without recourse to confirmation from Cayne’s surveyor machine.

He saw more of the graffiti Eye of Horus, and each time Loken saw the paint was still sticky, as though there was someone just ahead of Severian marking their onward route. Like portraits in a gallery, each Eye seemed to follow him, as though the ship itself were silently watching foreign organisms moving within its body.

I see you. I know you…

He wondered if anyone else saw them.

Qruze looked at him strangely, as though aware something wasn’t right. Loken heard the soft sigh of breath, real breath, not the hiss of exhalations through a helmet grille. The breath of an old friend. Rubio was shielding them from the psychic emanations permeating the ship. What then did that make this?

Auditory hallucinations caused by the trauma of Isstvan or a dead friend aiding him? Latent psychosis or wishful thinking?

Garvi…

Loken saw a drifting figure at the junction ahead.

Mechanicum, black robed and hooded with augmetics. Cables trailed from the tech-priest’s spine, and a host of blue-eyed servo-skulls orbited his transparent skull. A retinue of hunched, dwarf servitors followed him, chattering in binaric spurts and burps. The skulls spun to face them. Their eyes flared cherry red.

Rama Karayan dropped and pulled his bolter to his shoulder. Its sight was linked to his visor. The weapon coughed a three-round burst, far softer than any bolter had a right to sound. The lone tech-priest dropped silently, crumpling in on himself like a building undergoing controlled demolition.

Two of his accompanying retinue died in the same burst.

Before the other servitors could react, Severian was on them.

His combat blade stabbed. Once, twice, three times.

The servo-skulls floated above the corpses, held fast by a web of cables and copper wires. The light in their eyes stuttered. Severian sawed through something under the tech-priest’s hood. Oily fluid sprayed and the floating skulls fell to the deck.

He waved the rest of the pathfinders forward.

‘Clear the junction,’ he ordered.

They hauled the bodies out of sight and packed them into a darkened alcove farther down the corridor. Voitek’s servo-arms stripped a panel and loose debris from the roof spaces to conceal them.

‘Gunnery overseer,’ said Varren, pulling back the hood.

Loken didn’t see how he could know that. The corpse’s skull was little more than a gruel-filled bowl of detonated brain matter and machine fragments. A gold vox-grille hung from the flapping lower jaw, and iron teeth fell out as Varren let go.

‘Not like any I’ve seen,’ said Severian.

‘We had ones like this on the Conqueror,’ said Varren, tapping a crude, electrode-spiked implant still attached to a scrap of skull and trailing numerous bare cables into the detritus of its brain.

‘Hardwired with motivational barbs. Deck guns don’t reload as quickly as they ought to? The pain centres of the brain get a jolt. A battery misses its target? Double jolt. Miss again and the brain’s flash-burned to vapour. Gets a warship’s gun-crews highly motivated.’

‘The Luna Wolves never needed such things,’ said Qruze, disgusted.

‘This isn’t a Luna Wolves vessel anymore.’

‘Did those servo-skulls send an alarm signal?’ asked Rubio.

‘That depends on whether Karayan’s shot broke the noospheric link before they could exload a warning,’ said Voitek.

‘Is there any way to know for certain?’ asked Loken, looking up into the silent stare of another painted Eye of Horus.

Voitek tapped the tech-priest’s ruined skull. ‘Not any more.’

‘His absence will soon be noted,’ said Tubal Cayne. ‘Regardless of whether the tech-priest or his skulls sent an alarm or not.’

Qruze shook his head. ‘By the time it’s noticed we’ll be long gone.’

‘Then let’s not waste the time in between,’ said Loken.

The deeper the pathfinders penetrated the Vengeful Spirit, the stronger the sensation of an invisible member of their team grew in Loken’s mind. He paused often, using the guise of checking corners and their back trail to see if he could see their phantom accomplice. He felt no threat from the presence, even as he understood it indicated a deeper malaise within his psyche.

Dark service stairwells brought them onto metal gantries and vaulted chambers hung with distant, flapping things that might have been banners but probably weren’t. Some bore stitched Eyes, and Loken tried not to look at them.

They avoided contact where possible, killing only when necessary. Severian’s combat blade and Karayan’s silenced bolter did most of the work, but Callion Zaven’s hewclaw blade was wetted, and Voitek’s servo-arms permanently closed the throats of many a laggardly deckhand. Those they killed were uniformly human or cyborgised menials. The deep regions of the ship were rarely visited by Legion warriors and the pathfinders made full use of that small advantage.

Time passed slowly, the diurnal cycle that provided the illusion of day and night aboard a starship no longer in place. Hours became days in Vengeful Spirit’s deep spaces. They measured time by the sourceless chants of unseen choirs and the machine noises of pipework and ducts. To Loken, it sounded like the distant parts of the ship whispering to one another, passing messages and exchanging frightful secrets.

Scattered lumen strips, furnace lights and isolated chambers where skeletal inhabitants of the lower decks gathered in islands of flare-light were all that illuminated the lower decks. Bells tolled constantly, klaxons blared, and screeching Mechanicum adepts in tattered black robes set the pace of work for their wretched charges with whips and crackling prods.

‘It’s time we breached the upper decks,’ said Bror Tyrfingr, as Tubal Cayne halted their progress to update his plotter with fresh measurements. ‘We’ve roamed below the waterline long enough.’

‘The higher we go, the more we risk exposure,’ said Qruze.

‘And encountering Legion forces,’ added Karayan.

‘Bring them on,’ said Varren. ‘It’s about time my axe split some traitor skulls.’

‘That axe of yours will be heard all the way to the strategium,’ said Altan Nohai. ‘As soon as the Sons of Horus are aware of our presence, this mission is over.’

‘We’re not here to fight,’ Loken reminded Varren. ‘We’re here to mark the way for the Sixth Legion to assault.’

‘Then it’s time to mark mission-critical targets,’ insisted Bror. ‘Main gun batteries, Legion arming chambers, reactor spaces, command and control nodes. And once we mark them, we move forward. The Wolf King isn’t above a bit of subtlety and misdirection, but he won’t come at the Warmaster from the shadows. He’ll come at him head on, fangs bared.’

After facing Leman Russ across the hnefatafl board, Loken was inclined to agree, but the thought of heading into more familiar spaces within the ship was an unappealing prospect.

‘You’re right, Bror,’ he said. ‘It’s time to show why we were chosen for this mission. We need to mark this vessel’s jugular, ready for the Wolf King to tear out. We’re going higher into the Vengeful Spirit.’

Another vox-interrupt tried to cut across Banelash’s sensorium, but the echoes of its former pilots dissipated it before it could reach him. Just like him, they did not care to hear Tyana Kourion’s demands for him to return to the battle-line.

The Grand Army of Molech was assembling in the hills north of Lupercalia, stretching eastwards from the rugged haunches of the Untar Mesas to Iron Fist Mountain. With thousands of armoured fighting vehicles, hundreds of thousands (if not more) soldiers, battery after battery of artillery and two Titan Legions mobilising to fight, the Lord General could surely manage without one Knight.

He’d searched the upland forests for days now, climbing through rugged crags and mossy valleys to find the White Naga. His initial thrill of being on the verge of something miraculous had faded almost as soon as he’d left camp. The divine avatar of the Serpent Cult had singularly failed to manifest before him, and his patience was wearing thin.

He’d chosen a direction at random, marching his Knight from camp with purposeful strides. The damage the Warmaster had inflicted was still there, a bone-deep hurt that would never go away, a permanent reminder to rival that of the loss of his sons. Being connected to Banelash via his spinal implants made their loss seem remote, disconnected, as though it had happened to someone else.

Tragic, yes, but ultimately bearable.

That remoteness would end as soon as he disconnected, and he entertained the wild idea of never removing himself from Banelash. Ludicrous, of course. Prolonged connection with the machine-spirit of a Knight filled a pilot’s brain with foreign memories, unrelated data junk and sensory phantoms.

To remain within a Knight for too long was to embrace madness.

As crazed as it was, the idea had taken root and could not be dislodged.

Raeven’s mouth was parched and his stomach growled. He hadn’t eaten before leaving camp, and wine soured in his belly. Recyc-systems filtering his waste were allowing him to continue without food and water, but he could already feel toxins, both physical and mental, building throughout his body.

If the White Naga didn’t reveal itself soon, he wouldn’t survive to return with any divine boon. The thought of dying alone in the deep forest amused him momentarily. How ludicrous an end it would be for a Knight of Molech. He would become a statue of iron and desiccated flesh, standing alone and forgotten for thousands of years. He imagined debased savages of a future epoch discovering him and coming to worship at his corpse as though Banelash were an ancient pagan altar.

He blinked as the sensorium flickered and stretched like poured syrup. The images it displayed were not externally rendered by machines, rather they were mental projections, controlled stimulations of his synapses to trigger a visual representation of the auspex returns.

Then Raeven saw it wasn’t the sensorium that was faulty.

It was the landscape that was twisting.

Normally the display was a monochromatic thing, stripped bare for clarity in battle, but now it erupted with sensation. The trees blossomed with new life and incredible growth. Flowers sprouted where he walked and their perfume was intoxicating and almost unbearably sweet. Colours with no name and sounds hitherto unheard assailed him. Raeven saw circulatory systems in every blade of grass, unblinking eyes on every leaf, a history of the world in every rock.

Every colour, every surface became unbearably sharp, excruciatingly real and swollen with vital potential. It was too much, a sensory overload that threatened to burn out the delicate connections within his mind. Raeven gasped, nausea stabbing his gut. If it hadn’t already been empty, he would have puked himself inside out.

Banelash staggered in response, an iron giant lumbering like a drunk. The Knight’s bulk smashed writhing branches apart and dislodged rippling boulders. Its energy whip lashed out, felling centuries old trees that shrieked as they fell. The rain-slick ground offered no purchase, as though it wanted him to fall, and Raeven fought to keep the Knight upright.

To fall so far from help would be death, but the thought no longer amused him. He wrestled with the controls as the overwhelming ferocity of the world’s hyper-reality cut him open and pared him back to the bone.

‘Too much,’ he screamed. ‘It’s too much!’

‘There is no such thing as too much!’

The power of the voice stripped the blinking leaves from the trees for a hundred metres and set Raeven’s mind afire like an aneurysm. The armourglass canopy of his Knight cracked and he screamed as blood filled his right eye.

He finally righted his staggering Knight.

And saw the divine.

‘The White Naga,’ he gasped.

‘One of my many names. I am the Illuminator, the beginning and the end, the ontological ideal of perfection.’

Without conscious thought, Banelash knelt before the godly being. The White Naga shimmered with light, a sun come to Molech in corporeal form with a heat so savage it would burn him from existence in the blink of an eye.

‘Here,’ wept Raeven. ‘Throne, you’re here…’

Amorphous clouds of scented musk attended it, together with the sound of mirrors shattering in their unworthiness to reflect such beauty. Its manifestation was wondrous and inconstant, a tapestry of writhing, winged serpentine imagery.

‘Your blood sacrifice brings me to Molech, Raeven Devine.’

Its many arms reached for him, beckoning him. Raeven wanted nothing more than to bring his Knight to its feet and lose himself in its embrace. To surrender to beauty was no surrender at all.

A last shred of human instinct restrained him, screaming that to submit to the White Naga would bind him to its service forever.

And would that be so bad…?

Its every incarnation was burned and reborn, as though it ever sought to reach a pinnacle of perfection. A starburst of ice-white hair haloed eyes the colour of indulgence.

Raeven wanted to speak, but what could he say to a god that would not be trite?

‘Speak and do as you wish, Raeven Devine. That is the whole of the law. You are free to throw off the shackles of those who chain your will and confine your desires. All must be free to indulge in every excess! Wring every moment of sensation and you draw closer to perfection.’

Raeven struggled to follow its words, each one a hammer blow against the inside of his skull.

‘Mankind was once free, Raeven, well-born and living with honour. That freedom intrinsically lead to virtuous action, but the Imperium has shackled your species. And so constrained, your noble natures fight to remove that servitude, because men will always desire what they are denied.’

The message was so simple, so pure and clear that it amazed him he hadn’t grasped it on his own. The barbed anger he’d felt before the Ritual of Becoming twisted in his gut, a powerful knot of painful disgust that misted his eyes with tears.

And as though filtering lenses had dropped over his eyes, Raeven saw through his tears to what lay beyond the White Naga’s veil.

Bloated and serpentine, it was no creature of the divine, but a hideous monster straight from the ancient bestiaries. A loathsome snake of iridescent scales and draconic wings, grasping arms and a grotesque face at once beautiful and repugnant.

‘What are you?’ cried Raeven.

It heard his horror and its glamours dug their claws deeper in his mind. The image of a godlike avatar warred with the bestial thing he knew it to be.

‘I am your god, your deliverer. I will lead you to glory!’

‘No,’ said Raeven, feeling the White Naga’s powerful will wrapping around his own like a constrictor. He held to the barbed hatred in his heart, and the White Naga cried out as they tore at its presence.

‘You don’t offer freedom,’ said Raeven, forcing each word out through the narcotic musk surrounding the creature. ‘You offer enslavement. It’s a lie, a damned, filthy lie!’

The musk surged with intoxicating power, and Raeven felt the monster’s rage like a physical force. It battered him towards submission. Whatever the White Naga truly was, it reared up on its coiled serpent body to face him through Banelash’s canopy.

‘What is more foolish than denying the perfection of an all-embracing being? There can be no creed, no leader, no faith that is as harmonious, perfect and finished in every respect as I. What madness would cause you to reject me?’

Raeven felt the walls of his resistance crumbling and fought to hold onto the heart of his sense of self. The image of the monster was slowly overlaid with the beauty of a god. Desperate survival instincts threw up a fragment of the tedious classes on aesthetics he’d been forced to endure in his youth.

‘There is no such thing in the world as perfection!’ he screamed, dredging his memories for the teachings of his boyhood tutors. ‘If a thing were perfect, it could never improve and so would lack true perfection, which depends on progress. Perfection depends on incompleteness!’

The White Naga’s hold on him slipped. Just for a second, a fraction of a second. It was enough for him to look into its eyes and see the yawning abyss of madness and ego that thought nothing for a single other living being, and cared only that they fall to their knees and adore it.

Raevan clenched his fist and Banelash coiled its energy whip.

With a cry of rage, horror and anguish he swung.

The whip cracked, its photonic length slashing down through the White Naga’s powerfully muscled shoulders. Milky light spurted from the wound, as though the creature was formed from hyper-dense liquid under intense pressure.

A wing crumpled, torn like tissue, and its upper arm spun away like a broken tree branch. The whip tore through the creature’s torso and its anguished screams were those of a god whose most fervent believer has turned against it.

The White Naga – or whatever damned thing it truly was – lurched away from Banelash. Shock twisted its once beautiful features and made it ugly. Worse than ugly, the furthest extreme of loathsomeness wrought into being. Its repellent form fuelled Raeven’s towering sense of injustice.

Raeven shucked his other arm and felt the heat of his thermal lance engage. He rarely employed the lance, its killing power too swift and sure for his liking. But that was exactly what he needed right now. The White Naga surged in anger, its ruined body bleeding radiance from the galaxy of stars in its chest.

One wing hung from its muscular back, and its right side was a crumpled, molten mass of lightning-edged flesh where its arms hung limply at its side.

Raeven burned the thermal lance through its chest.

And ran.

EIGHTEEN

Eventyr
Torments
Deaths overdue

Every bump in the road was exquisitely transferred up through the suspension of the Galenus to send jolts of pain into Alivia’s side. Her chest hurt abominably, and the fresh grafts in her chest pulled painfully every time she shifted position on the gurney.

Still, she knew she was lucky to be alive.

Or at least lucky it hadn’t been worse.

‘You need more pain balms?’ asked Noama Calver, the surgeon-captain, seeing her pursed lips.

‘No,’ said Alivia. ‘I’ve slept for altogether too long.’

‘Sure, just let me know if you need any though,’ she said, missing Alivia’s meaning. ‘No need to suffer when there’s a remedy right here.’

‘Trust me, if it gets too bad, you’ll be the first to know.’

‘Promise?’

‘Hope to die,’ said Alivia, crossing her heart with her hand.

Noama smiled with matronly concern. She squeezed Alivia’s arm as though she were her own daughter, which was exactly the emotion Alivia had planted in her mind. Noama Calver had a son serving in an off-world Army regiment and her concern for his wellbeing ranked only slightly higher than the wounded men under her care.

Alivia didn’t like using people this way, especially good people who might have helped her if only she’d asked. Getting to Lupercalia was too important for her – for them – to take any chances that Calver might not have helped.

Kjell had been even easier. A good man, he’d joined the Medicae out of a desire to stay away from the front lines – little realising that medics were often in the thickest fighting without a weapon. The Grand Army of Molech was preparing to meet the Warmaster’s army in open battle, so it had been child’s play to ease his thoughts towards heading south to Lupercalia.

Noama moved down the Galenus, checking on the other wounded they carried. Every one of them ought to be back with their units, but they’d kept quiet when Noama ordered her driver, an impressionable boy named Anson who just wanted to get back to Lupercalia to see a girl called Fiaa, to drive away from the fighting.

Too easy.

Jeph lay stretched out on a gurney farther down the Galenus, snoring like an engine with a busted gear. She smiled at the softening of his features, hating herself for making him care for her so much. She’d had enough of time alone, and there were only so many years a girl could spend on her own before company, any company, was infinitely preferable. She knew she should have left him back in Larsa the minute the starship crashed, but he wouldn’t have lasted another hour without her.

Honestly, back in the day, would you have looked twice at him?

An easy enough question to answer, but it wasn’t that simple.

There’d been complications. Two complications to be exact.

Miska and Vivyen sat playing a board game called mahbusa with a number of ebony and ivory counters. She’d taught it to them a few months back. An old game, one she’d learned in the counting houses of the Hegemon, though she suspected it was older even than that compact city of scribes.

The girls had been suspicious of Alivia at first, and rightly so. She was an intruder in their world. A rival for their father’s affections. But she’d won them over with her games, her kindness and her fantastical stories of Old Earth’s mightiest heroes and its magical ancient myths.

No one told a story quite like Alivia, and the girls had been captivated from the beginning. She hadn’t even needed to manipulate their psyches. And quite without realising it, Alivia found herself cast in the role of a mother. It wasn’t something she’d expected to relish, but there it was. They were good girls; cheeky, but with the charisma and wide eyes to get away with it.

Alivia knew Jeph wasn’t the reason she’d gone back to the hab, it had been for Miska and Vivyen. She’d never even considered being a mother, wasn’t even sure it was possible for someone like her. She’d been told she had greater concerns than individual lives, but when the first impacts hit Larsa, Alivia had understood how foolish she’d been to blindly accept that.

Every part of her mission was compromised by having attachments. She’d broken every rule she’d set herself when she first came to Molech, but didn’t regret the decision to become part of their family. If John could see her now, he’d laugh in her face, calling her a hypocrite and a fraud. He’d be fully justified, but she’d still kick him in the balls for it and call him a coward.

Vivyen looked over at her and smiled.

Yes, definitely worth it.

The girl got up from her box seat and came over to Alivia with a hopeful look in her eye.

‘Who’s winning?’ asked Alivia.

‘Miska, but she’s older, so it’s okay.’

Alivia smiled. Okay. One of Oll’s words. Another thing she’d taught them. They said it in the scholam, where the other children looked strangely at its unusual sound.

‘I can teach you a few moves if you like,’ said Alivia. ‘I was taught by the best. Could give you an edge.’

‘No, it’s okay,’ said Vivyen, with all the earnestness of a twelve-
year-old. ‘I do lots of things better than her, so it’s good she has this.’

Alivia hid a smile as she saw Miska make a face behind Vivyen’s back and make a gesture her father wouldn’t approve of.

‘Are you all right?’ said Alivia, as Vivyen climbed onto the gurney. ‘It’s been pretty hard since we left Larsa, eh?’

Vivyen nodded. ‘I’m fine. I didn’t like it when the tanks were shooting at us, but I knew you’d get us out in one piece.’

‘You did?’

‘Yes.’

Alivia smiled. A child’s certainty. Was there anything surer?

‘Will you read me a story?’ asked Vivyen, tapping the gun-case tucked in tight next to Alivia. Even wounded, she hadn’t let herself be parted from it.

‘Of course,’ said Alivia, pressing her thumb to the lock plate and moving it in a way she kept hidden from the girl. She opened the case, feeling over her Ferlach serpenta to the battered storybook she’d taken from the Odense Domkirke library. Some people might say stolen, but Alivia liked to think she’d rescued it. Stories were to be told, not for sitting in an old museum.

The longer she owned the book, the more she wondered about that.

A dog-eared thing, its pages were yellowed and looked to be hundreds of years old. The stories inside were much older, but Alivia had made sure the book would never fall apart, never fade and never lose the old, fusty smell of the library.

Alivia opened the book. She knew every story off by heart and didn’t need to read from the page. The translation wasn’t great, and what she read often didn’t match the words written down. Sometimes it felt like the words changed every time she read it. Not by much, but just enough for her to notice, as though the stories liked to stretch and try new things every once in a while.

But the pictures – woodcuts, she thought – were pretty and the girls liked to ask questions about the strange looking people in them as she read aloud.

Vivyen pulled in close, and Alivia hissed as the synth-skin bandage pulled taut again.

‘Sorry.’

‘It’s okay,’ said Alivia. ‘I’ve had worse.’

Much worse. Like when the guardian angel died, and Noama thought she’d lost me when my heart stopped…

She ran a finger down the list of stories. ‘Which one do you want to hear?’

‘That one,’ said Vivyen, pointing.

‘Good choice,’ said Alivia. ‘Especially now.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Nothing, never mind. Now do you want me to read it or do you have any more questions?’

Vivyen shook her head and Alivia began.

‘Once there was a very wicked daemon, and he made a looking-glass which made everything good or beautiful reflected in it seem vile and horrible, while everything worthless and bad looked ten times worse. People who saw their reflections ran screaming from their distorted faces, and the daemon said this was very amusing.

‘And when a pious thought passed through the mind of anyone looking in the mirror it was twisted around in the glass, and the daemon declared that people could now, for the first time, see what the world and mankind were really like. The daemon bore the looking-glass everywhere, till at last there was not a land nor a people who had not been seen through this dark mirror.’

‘Then what did he do?’ asked Vivyen, though she’d heard this story a dozen times or more.

‘The daemon wanted to fly with it up to heaven to trick the angels into looking at his evil mirror.’

‘What’s an angel?’

Alivia hesitated. ‘It’s like a daemon, only it’s good instead of evil. Well, most of the time.’

Vivyen nodded, indicating that Alivia should continue.

‘But the higher the daemon flew the more slippery the glass became. Eventually he could scarcely hold it, and it slipped from his hands. The mirror fell to Earth, where it was broken into millions of pieces.’

Alivia lowered her voice, leaning fractionally closer to Vivyen and giving her words a husky, cold edge.

‘But now the looking-glass caused more unhappiness than ever, for some of the fragments were no larger than a grain of sand and they blew all around the world. When one of these tiny shards flew into a person’s eye, it stuck there unknown to them. From that moment onward they could see only the worst of what they looked upon, for even the smallest fragment retained the same power as the whole mirror. A few people even got a fragment of the looking-glass in their hearts, and this was very terrible, for their hearts became cold like a lump of ice. At the thought of this the wicked daemon laughed till his sides shook. It tickled him so to see the mischief he had done.’

Miska had come over by now, drawn by the rhythmic cadences of Alivia’s voice and the skill of the ancient storyteller. With both girls tucked in next to her, Alivia told the rest of the story, of a young boy named Kai whose eye and heart were pierced by a sliver of the daemon’s looking-glass. And from that moment, he became cruel and heartless, turning on his friends and doing the worst things he could think of to hurt them. Ensnared by a wicked queen of winter, Kai was doomed to an eternity imprisoned upon a throne of ice that slowly drained him of his life.

But the parts they loved the most were the adventures of Kai’s friend, a young girl named Gerda who always seemed to be just about the same age as Miska and Vivyen. Overcoming robbers, witches and traps, she found her way at last to the lair of the winter queen.

‘And Gerda freed Kai with the power of her love and innocence,’ said Alivia. ‘Her tears melted the ice in Kai’s heart and when he saw the terrible things he had done, he wept and washed the sliver of the daemon’s mirror from his eye.’

‘You forgot the bit about the word Kai had to spell,’ said Miska.

‘Ah, yes, mustn’t forget that bit,’ said Alivia. ‘The ice queen had given her oath that if Kai could solve a fiendishly difficult puzzle to spell a special word, then she’d let him leave.’

‘What word was it?’ asked Vivyen.

‘A very important word,’ said Alivia with mock gravitas. ‘A word that still echoes around the world today. All the way from Old Earth to Molech and back again.’

‘Yes, but what is it?’

Alivia flipped to the end of the story and was about to speak the word she’d read a hundred times. In the original language it was Evigheden, but that wasn’t what was on the page now.

‘Liv?’ asked Miska, when she didn’t answer.

‘No, that can’t be right,’ said Alivia.

‘What is it?’ said Vivyen. ‘What’s the word?’

‘Mord,’ said Alivia. ‘It’s Murder.’

The main war tent of the Sons of Horus was hot and humid, like a desert after the rains. Thick rugs of animal fur were spread across the ground, weapon racks lined the billowing fabric walls and a smouldering fire burned low in a central hearth. Like the halls of a plains barbarian chief or one of the Khan’s infrequent audiences, it was bare of the comforts that might be expected of a primarch.

Horus stood at the occidental segment of the firepit, reading from a book bound in human skin. Lorgar claimed that corpses from Isstvan III provided its binding and pages, and, for once, Horus had no reason to doubt him.

Symbolism, that was the word his brother had used when he’d asked why a book already bleeding with horror needed to be bound so unwholesomely. That was something Horus understood, and he had arranged the others sharing the taut angles of his war tent accordingly.

Grael Noctua stood to attention across from him in the oriental aspect of the soul and breath of life. Tall and proud despite the injuries he had suffered on Molech, his augmetic hand was almost fully meshed with his nervous system, but a void still existed where his heart once beat.

Ger Gerradon stood in the septentrional aspect of earth, his porcelain-white doll’s eyes reflecting none of the firelight. Birth, life, death and rebirth were his aspect. Facing the leader of the Luperci in the meridonal position of fire was the floating figure of the Red Angel. Both stared at one another with crackling intensity, immaterial monsters bound to mortal flesh.

One a willing host, the other a willing sacrifice.

The book had enabled Horus to learn much of the Red Angel’s origins on blood-soaked Signus Prime. Just as it had allowed him to pass the rites of summoning to Maloghurst.

The words Horus spoke were not words as such, but harmonics resonating in an alternate plane of existence like musical notes or a key in a lock. Their use reeked of black magic, a term at which Lorgar sneered, but the term fit better than his Colchisian brother knew.

With each couplet, the chains encircling the Red Angel pulled tighter. All but one. Its armour creaked and split still further. Hissing white flame licked at the cracks. The chain encircling its skull melted away, dribbling from its mouth in white-hot rivulets.

‘Is that wise?’ asked Noctua as the Red Angel spat out the last of its binding.

‘Probably not, Grael, but needs must.’

The Red Angel turned its burning eye-sockets upon Horus.

‘I am a weapon, Horus Lupercal, the agonies of a thousand damned souls distilled into a being of purest rage,’ it said. ‘And you keep me bound with chains of cold iron and ancient wards? I hunger to slay, to maim, to wreak havoc on those that once called this shell brother!’

Its words were like hooked barbs drawn through the ear. Anger bled from the daemon, and Horus felt himself touched by its power.

‘You will have your share of blood,’ said Horus.

‘Yes,’ said the Red Angel, sniffing the air and licking its lipless face with a blackened tongue. ‘The enemy host musters before you in numbers uncounted. Millions of hearts to devour, an age of suffering to be wrought upon bones of the dead. A wasteland of corpses shall be the playthings of the letters of blood.’

Noctua turned to Ger Gerradon and said. ‘Are all warp things so ridiculously overwrought?’

Gerradon grinned. ‘Those that serve the lord of murder do enjoy some bloody hyperbole, certainly.’

‘And who do you serve?’ asked Horus.

‘You, my lord,’ said Gerradon. ‘Only you.’

Horus doubted that, but this wasn’t the time for questions of loyalty. He required information, the kind that could only be harvested from beings not of this world.

‘The death of my father’s sentinel in the mountain has revealed many things to me, but there are still things I want to know.’

‘All you need know is that there are enemies whose blood has yet to be shed,’ said the Red Angel. ‘Unleash me! I will bathe in an ocean of blood as deep as the stars.’

‘No,’ said Horus, unsheathing the claws within his talon and turning to stab them through the chest of the Red Angel. ‘I need to know quite a bit more than that, actually.’

The Red Angel screamed, a blast of superheated air that billowed the roof of the war tent. The chains creaked and spat motes of flickering warp energy. Cracks spread over the daemon’s face, as though the flames enveloping it now had license to consume it.

‘I will extinguish you,’ said Horus. ‘Unless you tell me what I want to know. What will I find beneath Lupercalia?’

‘A gateway to the realm beyond dreams and nightmares,’ hissed the unravelling daemon, cracks spreading down its neck and over the plates of its armour. ‘A ruinous realm of madness and death for mortals, the uttermost domain of misrule wherein dwell the gods of the True Pantheon!’

Horus pushed his claws deeper into the Red Angel’s chest.

‘Something a little less vague would be better,’ said Horus.

Despite its agony, the Red Angel laughed, the sound dousing the last flames in the firepit. ‘You seek clarity where none exists, Warmaster. The Empyreal Realm offers no easy definitions, no comprehension and no solidity for mortals. It is an ever-shifting maelstrom of power and vitality. What you seek I cannot give you.’

‘You’re lying,’ said Horus. ‘Tell me how I can follow my father. Tell me of the Obsidian Way that leads to the House of Eyes, the Brass Citadel, the Eternal City and the Arbours of Entropy.’

The Red Angel bared its teeth at Ger Gerradon in a blast of fury. The chains binding its arms creaked. The links stretched.

‘You betray your own kind, Tormaggedon! You name what should not be named!’

Gerradon shrugged. ‘Horus Lupercal is and always was my master, I serve him now. But even I don’t know the things you know.’

‘The Obsidian Way is forbidden to mortals,’ said the Red Angel.

‘Forbidden doesn’t mean impossible,’ said Horus.

‘Just because the faithless Forethinker walked the road of bones does not mean you can follow Him,’ hissed the Red Angel. ‘You are not Him, you can never be Him. You are His bastard son, the aborted get of what He was and will one day be.’

Horus twisted his talons deeper, feeling only a hollow space of scorched organs and ashen flesh within.

‘You cannot end me, mortal!’ cried the daemon. ‘I am a thing of Chaos Eternal, a reaper of blood and souls. I will endure any torments you can devise.’

‘Perhaps you can, but I didn’t devise these torments,’ said Horus, nodding towards the flayed-skin book. ‘Your kind did.’

Horus spoke words of power and the Red Angel screamed as the spreading black veins thickened and stretched. Smoke streamed from its limbs, coming not from its fires, but the dissolution of its very essence.

‘I have your attention now?’ asked Horus, clenching a taloned fist within the Red Angel’s body. ‘I can tear your flames apart and consign every scrap of you to oblivion. Think on that when you next speak.’

The Red Angel sagged against its chains.

‘Speak,’ it hissed. ‘Speak and I will answer.’

‘The Obsidian Way,’ said Horus. ‘How can it be breached?’

‘As with all things,’ snarled the daemon. ‘In blood.’

‘Now we’re getting somewhere,’ said Horus.

The Red Angel fell slack in its chains and Horus withdrew the crackling claw from the daemon’s body. Slithering black ichor dripped from the blades and squirmed into the earth around the firepit like burrower worms.

‘Did you get what you needed?’ asked Gerradon.

Horus nodded slowly, flexing his talons. ‘I believe I did, Ger, yes. Though I can’t help thinking I should have got it from you.’

Gerradon shifted uncomfortably, perhaps understanding that being summoned to Lupercal’s war tent was not the honour he might have imagined.

‘I don’t follow, my lord.’

‘Yes you do,’ said Horus. ‘As I understand it, you are brother to the Red Angel. You are both children of Erebus, one birthed on a world of blood, the other on a world of fire.’

‘As in the mortal world, there are hierarchies among the neverborn,’ said Gerradon. ‘To my lasting regret, a being wrought on a daemon world by a dark prince of the warp is more exalted than one raised by a mortal.’

‘Even a mortal as powerful as Erebus?’

‘Erebus is a deluded whelp,’ spat Gerradon. ‘He believes himself anointed, but all he did was open a door.’

‘And that’s the crux of it, isn’t it?’ said Horus, circling Gerradon and letting his talon blades scrape across the Luperci’s armour. ‘You can’t come into our world unless we let you. All the schemes, all the temptations and promises of power, it’s all to get into our world. You need us more than we need you.’

Gerradon squared his shoulders, defiant now.

‘Keep telling yourself that.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me what it knew?’

‘I told you why.’

‘No, you spun a plausible lie,’ said Horus. ‘Now tell me the real answer or I’ll get to the really interesting couplets in that book of horrors.’

Gerradon shrugged. ‘Very well. It was a rival. Now it’s not.’

Horus sheathed his talons, satisfied with Gerradon’s answer. He turned from the daemon-things and approached Noctua, who’d stood as immobile as a statue throughout this process of daemonic interrogation.

‘There’s a lesson for you here in the proper application of power,’ said Horus. ‘But that’s not why I summoned you.’

‘Then why am I here, sir?’ asked Noctua.

‘I have a special task for you, Grael,’ said the Warmaster. ‘You and Ger actually.’

Noctua’s face fell as he understood that his task would keep him from the coming battle. He rallied a moment later.

‘What would you have me do, my lord?’

Horus put a paternal hand on Noctua’s shoulder guard.

‘There are intruders aboard my flagship, Grael.’

‘Intruders?’ said Noctua. ‘Who?’

‘A prodigal son and two faithless cowards who once fought as your brothers,’ said Horus. ‘They lead a rabble of that troublesome Sigillite’s errant fools into the heart of the Vengeful Spirit.’

‘I will find them,’ promised Noctua. ‘And I’ll kill them.’

‘Very good, Grael, but I don’t want them all dead.’

‘You don’t?’

‘Kill the others if they give you trouble,’ said Horus, ‘but I want the prodigal son alive.’

‘Why?’ asked Noctua, forgetting himself for a moment.

‘Because I want him back.’

Iron Fist Mountain dominated the eastern skyline, and farther south, a black smudge on the horizon spoke of distant fires somewhere around the Preceptor Line. A vast assembly of Imperial might – his army – filled the agri-plains north of Lupercalia.

Raeven pushed Banelash forward, staggering as toxins in his blood distorted his perception of the Knight’s sensorium. It swayed and crashed with phantom images of winged serpents, hideous, fanged mouths and eyes that burned with the fury of rejection.

The thought of what he had almost given into made him sick.

Or was it the thought of what he’d given up?

He no longer knew nor cared.

Raeven walked his Knight towards the thousands of armoured vehicles, scores of regiments and entire battalions of artillery below. A thousand shimmering banners guided him in, regimental pennants and company battle flags, muster signs and range-markers.

House banners streamed from the carapaces of assembled nobility: Tazhkar, Kaushik, Indra, Kaska, Mamaragon. Others he didn’t recognise or couldn’t make out. Their Knights dwarfed the Army soldiers, but they were a long way from being the biggest, most destructive killers on the field.

A dozen war engines of Legio Gryphonicus and Legio Crucius strode through designated corridors to take up their battle positions. Mighty. Awe-inspiring.

But all dwarfed by the immovable, man-made mountain at the centre of the line.

An Imperator Titan, Paragon of Terra was a towering fortress of adamantium and granite, a mobile citadel of war raised by long-cherished artifice and forged in blood and prayer. A temple to the Omnissiah and a destroyer god all in one, the Imperator was the central bastion upon which each wing of the army rested.

The black and white of the Legio were the heraldic colours of Princeps Etana Kalonice, whose Mechanicum forebears had piloted the first engines on Ryza.

The heat from its weapons hazed the air, and Raeven blinked away tears of exhaustion.

Connection fatigue made his bones ache, made every part of him ache. Broken glass ground in his joints and the stabbing pain behind his eyes was like something trying to burrow out from the centre of his brain. Fluids recycled around his body many more times than was healthy had kept him alive, but were now poisoning him.

A patrolling squadron of scout Sentinels found Raeven staggering from the tree line overlooking the army. They turned heavy flamers and multi-lasers on him, and he readied his own weapons in response before the proper protocols were issued and returned.

‘Get me to the Sacristans,’ wheezed Raeven.

He lost track of time. Or it slipped away from him.

Either way, he remembered falling from Banelash’s opened carapace, rough hands – metal hands – lifting him down and carrying him to his pavilion.

Lyx was waiting for him, but the hurt look in her eyes only made him smile. He liked hurting her, and couldn’t think why. She asked questions he couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. His answers made no sense anyway.

Needles stabbed his flesh. Toxic blood was siphoned from him and fresh litres washed in. Pain balms soothed his ground glass joints, smoothed his rough edges.

Time fractured, moved out of joint. He heard angry voices and chattering machines. He actually felt fluids moving through him, as though he was a great pumping station over the promethium wells at Ophir. Sucking up immense breaths of fuel and spitting it out into the great silos.

The image of himself as a vast pump pleased him.

No, not a pump – an engine. An agent of change that drove the lifeblood of the planet around its myriad systems. Infrastructure as circulatory system.

Yes, that was the metaphor he liked.

Raeven looked down. His arm was dark iron, a pistoning length of machinery thick with grease and hydraulic fluids. Promethium coated his arms and he imagined sitting up as it gushed from his mouth in a flaming geyser. His other arm was a writhing pipe, plunging deep into the ground and gurgling with fluids pumped up from the depths of the planet.

He was connected to Molech’s core…

The enormity of that thought was too much and his stomach rebelled. That one man could be so intimately connected with the inner workings of an entire world was a concept beyond his grasp. His mind plunged into the depths of the planet, streaking faster than light, past its many layers until shattering through the core and emerging, phoenix-like from the other side…

Raeven gasped for air, gulping in swelling lungfuls.

A measure of clarity came with the oxygen.

Lofty metaphors of planetary connection and bodily infrastructure diminished. With every breath, Raeven’s awareness of his surroundings pulled a little more into focus. He mouth tasted of metal and perfume, dry and with a mucus film clinging to the back of his throat.

Raeven was no stranger to mind-expanding narcotics. Shargali-Shi’s venoms had allowed him to travel beyond his skull often enough to recognise the effects of a powerful hallucinogen. He’d had his share of balms too. Hunting the great beasts took a willingness to suffer pain, and Cyprian had beaten an acceptance of pain into him as a child.

The balms he could understand, but hallucinogens?

Why would the Sacristans administer hallucinogens?

‘What did you give me?’ he asked, knowing at least one Sacristan was nearby. Some Medicae staff too most likely from the sound of low voices, shuffling footsteps and the click of machinery.

No one answered.

‘I said, what did you give me?’

‘Naga venom mixed with some potent ergot derivative,’ said a voice that couldn’t possibly be here. Raeven tried to move his head to bring the speaker into his line of sight, but there was something wrong.

‘Can’t move?’

‘No, why is that?’

‘That’ll be the muscle relaxants.’

A hissing, clanking sound came from behind Raeven and he rolled his eyes to see an old man looking down at him. The face he didn’t recognise at first, clean shaven and greasy with healing agents.

But the voice, ah, no mistaking that voice.

Or the hissing, clanking exo-suit encasing his wasted limbs.

‘I’m still hallucinating,’ said Raeven. ‘You can’t be here.’

‘I assure you I am most definitely here,’ said Albard Devine, his one good eye fluttering as though finding it difficult to keep focus. ‘It’s taken forty years, but I’m finally here to take back what’s rightfully mine.’

His stepbrother wore clothes several sizes too large for him. They hung from his bony frame like rags. The laurels of an Imperial commander were pinned to his lapel.

‘You can’t do this, Albard,’ said Raeven. ‘Not now.’

‘If not now, then when?’

‘Listen, you don’t need to do this,’ said Raeven, trying to keep the panic from his voice. ‘We can work something out, yes?’

‘Are you actually trying to bargain for your life?’ laughed Albard; a wheezing, racking cough of a sound. ‘After all you stole from me, all you did to me? Forty years of torture and neglect and you think you’re going to talk your way out of this?’

‘That exo-suit,’ said Raeven, stalling for time. ‘It’s mother’s isn’t it?’

‘Cebella was your mother, not mine.’

‘She’s not going to like that you’re wearing it.’

‘Don’t worry, she doesn’t need it anymore.’

‘You killed her?’ said Raeven, though he’d already come to that conclusion. Death was the only way Cebella Devine would be parted from her exo-suit. But he needed more time; for the Dawn Guard to realise there was a snake in their midst, for Lyx to return.

Someone, anyone.

‘I cut your mother’s throat,’ said Albard, leaning close enough for Raeven to smell his corpse breath. ‘She bled out in my lap. It was almost beautiful in its own way.’

Raeven nodded, and then stopped when he realised what he’d done.

Either Albard didn’t notice or didn’t care that he’d moved, too lost in the reverie of his stepmother’s murder. The muscle relaxants were wearing off. Slowly. Raeven wasn’t going to be wrestling a mallahgra anytime soon, but surely he’d be strong enough to overcome a cripple in an exo-suit?

‘Where’s Lyx?’ asked Raeven. ‘Or did you kill her too?’

‘She’s alive.’

‘Where?’

‘She’s here,’ said Albard, leaning down to adjust the medical table on which Raeven was lying. ‘Trust me, I don’t want her to miss out on what’s going to happen next.’

Someone moved behind Raeven and the table rotated on its central axis, bringing him vertical. A restraint band around his waist kept him from falling flat on his face. A pair of Dawn Guard stood at the entrance to the pavilion, and a gaggle of Sacristans worked at the machines supposedly restoring him to health.

His heart sank at the sight of the armoured soldiers. Their loyalty was enshrined in law to the scion of House Devine, and with Albard abroad from his tower, they were his to command.

The men flanked Lyx, her hands fettered and her eyes wide with incomprehension. A gag filled her mouth and tears streaked her cheeks.

‘What’s the matter, Lyx?’ said Albard, lurching with the unfamiliar gait of the exo-suit. ‘The future not playing out as you planned it? Reality not matching your visions?’

He ripped the gag from her mouth and threw it aside.

She spat in his face. He slapped her, the metal encasing his hand tearing the skin of her cheek. Blood mingled with her tears.

‘Don’t you touch her!’ shouted Raeven.

‘Lyx was my wife before she was yours,’ said Albard. ‘It’s been a long time, but I seem to remember her liking that sort of thing.’

‘Look, you want to be Imperial commander, yes?’ said Raeven. ‘You’re wearing the laurel on your lapel, I see that. Fine, yes, fine, you can be commander, of course you can. You’re the firstborn son of Cyprian Devine. The position’s yours. I give you it, have it.’

‘Shut up, Raeven!’ screamed Lyx. ‘Offer him nothing!’

Raeven ignored her.

‘Be Imperial commander, brother. Lyx and I will leave, you’ll never hear from us. We’ll go south, over the mountains to the Tazkhar steppe, you’ll never see us again.’

Albard listened to the rush of words without expression. Eventually he held up his hand.

‘You’re offering me what’s already mine,’ said Albard. ‘By right of birth and, well, let’s just call it right of arms.’

‘Shut your mouth, Raeven!’ howled Lyx, her face beautiful in her tears and pain. ‘Don’t give him anything! He killed our son!’

‘Ah, yes, didn’t I mention that?’ said Albard.

Every molecule of air left Raeven’s body. As surely as if a pneumatic press had crushed him flat. He couldn’t breathe, his lungs screamed for air. First Egelic and Banan, and now Osgar. Grief warred with anger. Anger crushed grief without mercy.

‘You bastard!’ screamed Raeven. ‘I’ll kill you! I’ll hang your entrails from the Devine Towers. I’ll mount your head on Banelash’s canopy!’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Albard, pressing a hand down on Raeven’s chest. ‘The drugs coursing around your body came from Osgar’s supply. Such a good boy, he always came to visit his poor deranged uncle in his tower. Kept me informed of the comings and goings around Lupercalia, how Shargali-Shi’s devotions to the White Naga were spreading to his cousins in the Knights.’

Seeing Raeven’s horror at the mention of the Serpent Cult’s avatar, Albard grinned. The resemblance to a leering skull was uncanny.

‘He didn’t say that every one of your Knights is a devotee of the Serpent Cult?’ said Albard. ‘Didn’t mention that they were no longer loyal to you, but to the cult? No? Well, you always did see Osgar as the runt of the litter, didn’t you? No taste for fighting, though I’m given to understand he was a hellion in the debauches.’

Raeven tried to struggle against his bindings, but even with the tiny control he’d regained, it wasn’t enough.

‘Osgar even smuggled stimms and the like past Cebella’s Sacristans from time to time. Such a shame I had to kill him. As much as he had a fondness for indulging his insane old uncle, I don’t think he’d forgive me killing both of you. And I think you’ll agree that your deaths are long overdue.’

‘You can’t do this,’ pleaded Lyx. ‘I am the Devine Adoratrice, I saw the future. It can’t end this way! I saw Raeven turn the tide of the war, I saw him!’

‘You’re wrong, Lyx,’ said Albard, ‘Osgar told me you never actually saw Raeven in your visions. You saw Banelash.’

Albard nodded to the Dawn Guard holding Lyx.

The soldier forced her to her knees and placed the barrel of his bolt pistol against her head.

‘I saw–’ Lyx began, but a gunshot abruptly ended her words.

‘No!’ bellowed Raeven as Lyx fell forward with a smoking crater in the back of her skull. ‘Throne damn you, Albard! You didn’t have to do that… no, no, no… you didn’t… please no!’

Albard turned from Lyx’s body, and drew a hunting knife from a leather sheath at his waist.

‘Now it’s your turn, Raeven,’ he said. ‘This won’t be quick, and I promise it will be agonising.’

NINETEEN

Casualties of war
The order is given
The Stormlord rides

The transit was thick with bolter shells. They spanked from projecting stanchions and blasted portions of the walls away. Across from Loken, Qruze ducked back into cover and ejected the magazine from his weapon. The barrel drooled smoke and heat.

Qruze slapped a fresh load into the weapon. He shouted to Loken.

‘Get in the damn fight!’

Loken shook his head. This was all wrong.

More shots filled the corridor leading to the armoury. A security detail of Sons of Horus – together with a number of Mechanicum adepts – were inside, hunkered behind a bulwark designed to prevent an enemy from seizing the stockpile of ammunition, weapons and explosives.

A grenade detonated nearby. Fragments of hot iron pinged from his armour. A few embedded. None penetrated.

‘Loken, for Cthonia’s sake, shoot!’ shouted Qruze.

The bolter in his hands felt like a relic dug up by the Conservatory. Something fascinating to look at, but whose purpose was alien and unknown. He could no more bring the gun to bear than he could understand the mechanisms of the machine that crafted it.

‘Loken!’

The pathfinders had encountered the Sons of Horus en route to mark the armoury for a tertiary torpedo strike. Guiding futharc sigils had been scraped into the wall, warning assault teams away, and they’d paused for Tubal Cayne to divine a path towards a nearby ordnance signum array.

Severian and Karayan were scouting potential routes when the Sons of Horus had marched straight into the radial hub.

The watch sector had been Loken’s, but he’d missed them.

He hadn’t heard them or even been aware of their approach.

Lost in contemplation of a painted Eye of Horus on the opposite bulkhead and trying not to listen to the scratch of voices at the periphery of hearing.

The first he’d known of the enemy was when their sergeant called out, demanding identification. Stupid, he should have shot first.

Mutual surprise was all that saved the pathfinders.

Neither force had expected to encounter the other. The fleeting shock was just enough time for Loken to raise the alarm.

The Sons of Horus regrouped down the radial corridor towards the armoury as Altan Nohai and Bror Tyrfingr had opened fire.

‘Contact!’ reported Cayne.

Qruze leaned out and fired a short burst.

‘Come on, Loken,’ he shouted between bursts. ‘I need you with me to go forward!’

The hard bangs of bolter fire and the chugging beat of an emplaced autocannon filled the transit with a storm of solid rounds. Ricochets bounced madly from the walls. A shell fragment deformed the metal beside Loken’s helmet.

He gripped his bolter, his grip threatening to crush the stock.

This isn’t right.

The Sons of Horus were traitors, the Warmaster the Arch-traitor.

But these are your brothers. You accepted their brotherhood, and swore to return it as a brother.

‘No,’ he hissed, slamming the bolter against the faceplate of his helmet. ‘No, they’re traitors and they deserve to die.’

You are a Son of Horus. So is Iacton. So is Severian. Kill them and kill yourself if you would damn all of Lupercal’s lineage!

Loken fought to keep the voice out.

The vox crackled.

‘Go when you hear us,’ said Severian.

Assaulting an armoury was a sure-fire way to end up facing some extremely potent ordnance, but what choice did they have?

‘Tubal? Only two ways in or out?’ shouted Qruze.

Cayne nodded, sweeping through layers of deck schematics. ‘Yes, according to the extant plans.’

‘Both covered?’

‘Voitek and Rubio are blocking the other one,’ said Varren, not shooting, but ready with his chainaxe.

‘So they’re not getting out,’ said Qruze. ‘But they’ll be voxing for help right now.’

‘Voitek is employing a vox-jammer,’ said Cayne, zooming in on the image of their current location.

‘How long before the adepts burn though it?’ asked Zaven, firing down the transit to the armoury. ‘And is anyone else even slightly concerned that we’re shooting into an armoury?’

‘Eighteen seconds till burn through,’ answered Cayne. ‘So long as you don’t hit anything sensitive in there we should be fine.’

‘Sensitive?’ said Bror. ‘Hjolda! It’s a bloody armoury, everything’s sensitive!’

‘On the contrary, I think you’ll find–’ began Cayne, but Qruze shut him up.

‘Stow it,’ said Qruze, glancing over at Loken. ‘Everyone keep shooting and be ready.’

‘You said the armoury has only two exits?’ said Zaven.

‘Yes,’ confirmed Cayne.

‘So how’s Severian getting in?’

‘Ready?’ said Severian.

Karayan nodded and Severian set the timer for two seconds.

They rolled aside as the graviton grenade detonated with a pulse of energy that made him sick to his stomach. An orb of anomalous gravitational energy swelled to a diameter of exactly a metre and increased the local mass of steel girders and air-circulation units within the reinforced ceiling void a thousand-fold.

A sphere of ultra-dense material compacted in on itself like the heart of a neutron star and fell into the armoury with the force of an Imperator Titan’s footfall.

Karayan was first through the hole, dropping into the armoury like a weighted shadow. Severian followed him an instant later. He landed at the edge of the crater punched in the deck and brought his bolter up.

The enemy reacted to the intruders in their midst quicker than Severian would have liked. They were Sons of Horus, what else could he expect? Severian put a bolt into the nearest, displacing and ripping a burst through another. Return fire chased him.

Karayan favoured knifework. His non-reflective blade found the gap between a sergeant’s helmet and his gorget. He plunged and twisted. Blood sprayed. He moved on, diving, rolling, using the walls and floor. His knife killed the Mechanicum adepts. Chemical fumes misted the air. Floodstreams painted the walls with brackish, oily fluids.

Severian took a knee and pumped another three shots out.

Two legionaries dropped, the third brought an energised buckler around in time to deflect the bolt. Severian’s surprise almost cost him his life. The warrior was too bulky, had too many arms.

Forge lord. Manipulator harness.

He leapt at Severian, a photonic combat blade on a mechanised limb arcing for his neck. Severian threw up his bolter and the blade carved through it. Slowed enough for his armour to take the hit. A second and third arm snapped at his helm and shoulder. Severian barged forward, elbow cracking into the forge lord’s faceplate.

Company colours said Fifth; Little Horus Aximand’s lot.

They rolled on the deck, grappling. Fighting like the murder-gangs of Cthonia in the pits. Knees, elbows, heads; weapons all. The forge lord had more than him and his were harder. Claws tore chunks from Severian’s battleplate. A plasma cutter seared a fire-lined groove in the deck plate a finger breadth from his head.

Severian rammed his helmet into his opponent’s visor. Lenses cracked. Not his. The blade skittered over the armoury floor, its edge fading without a grip.

He rolled. A boot crashed into his helmet. He rolled again.

Ignition flare. A blur of blue-edged light.

Pain and blood. Lung burping itself empty through his plastron.

Severian hooked an elbow around the forge lord’s flesh and blood arm and twisted. Pain shot through to his spine, but the arm snapped with a satisfying crack of tinder.

The forge lord grunted in momentary pain. A manipulator claw slammed into Severian’s face. He ripped the knife from the broken manipulator arm and hacked the claw from the harness. Black oil and lubricant sprayed him. It tasted of malt vinegar.

The forge lord’s spewing binary made the muscles in his armour spasm. Severian shoulder checked his opponent, stabbing the hissing blade into his neck and chest. He cut connector cables and mind impulse unit links. The servo-arms went limp, dead weight now. A bolter shell impacted on the underside of his shoulder guard. Fired from the floor. He spun around and stamped down on a helmet, crushing it like an ice sculpture.

The forge lord came at him again, but without his threshing, clawed arms he was no match for Severian. Too many hours in the armoury, not enough in the arming cages. Severian spun around the clumsy attack and twisted one of the limp servo-arms. He jammed it in the small of the forge lord’s back and manually triggered the plasma cutter. Blue-hot light exploded from the forge lord’s helm lenses. He screamed as superheated air burned its way out of him.

Severian dropped the smoking corpse in time to take a bolt-round in the chest. Thousands of fiery micro-fragments stabbed into his chest through the wound torn by the energised blade. The impact and explosion hurled him back against a rack of bolters. They clattered around him, fresh-oiled and pristine.

He grabbed one. Unloaded, of course. No quartermaster ever stored his weapons fully loaded. Severian tried to stand, but the bolt shell had punched him empty of breath. A traitor legionary swung his bolter to bear while drawing his chainsword.

Efficient, thought Severian as the bolter fired.

Severian was looking down the barrel and even in the moment of seeing the muzzle flare, he knew he should already be dead. Then he saw the spinning round hovering in the air before him. A web of pale lines, like frosted spiderwebs, coated the round.

+Move!+ hissed a voice in his head. Rubio.

Severian dived to the side and the round blew apart the weapon rack behind him. His would-be killer stared in astonishment and took aim again. An explosion lifted him from his feet. Blood misted the air, arcing in a fan from his shattered chest. Gunfire suddenly filled the armoury, multiple sources and directions. The deafening roar of a chainaxe. Severian grabbed a fallen magazine and slammed it hard into his new bolter.

‘Clear!’ shouted a voice. Tyrfingr.

‘Clear!’ Qruze.

‘Grenades, Iacton? Really?’ Tubal Cayne.

Severian grinned. Breath sucked back into his remaining lung and secondary organs. Pain came with it and he pursed his lips.

‘You lot took your bloody time,’ he said as Ares Voitek approached and offered him a hand up. Severian took it and hauled himself to his feet. Gunsmoke fogged the armoury, the stink of bolter propellant. Armoured bodies opened like cracked eggs lent their meaty, metallic, oily odour to the space.

‘Only four seconds from your breach,’ said Ares Voitek.

‘That all?’ said Severian, gratefully putting his arm around the former Iron Hand’s shoulders. ‘Could have sworn it was longer.’

‘That’s combat for you,’ said Voitek. ‘Unless you’re an Iron Hand with internal chrons. Then you know exactly how long has elapsed since the commencement of an engagement.’

‘I’ll take your word for it.’

‘Nohai!’ shouted Qruze. ‘Quickly, Zaven and Varren are down!’

They sealed the armoury and carried the wounded from the site of the battle. Nobody would miss the signs of fighting, but at least they could keep the bodies from being discovered for a while. Cayne swiftly navigated forgotten passageways and corridors in search of somewhere isolated and secure.

They tried not to leave a trail of blood.

The chamber Cayne led them to was filled with wrecked tables and chairs, its walls covered in water-damaged murals and obscene graffiti. Some seemed oddly familiar to Loken. The scale of the furnishings and its abandoned nature told him it had once been a retreat for mortals, but he could think of no reason why he might have come to a place like this.

Nohai went to work on Varren and Zaven. Rubio offered his aid, and Nohai gratefully accepted it. Both fallen warriors were badly hurt, but of the two, Zaven’s wounds were the more serious.

‘Will they make it?’ asked Qruze.

‘In the apothecarion, yes. Here, I don’t know,’ said Nohai.

‘Do what you can, Altan.’

Loken sat with his back to a long bar, toying with a set of mildewed cards marked with swords, cups and coins. He’d known someone who’d played an old game of the Franc with such cards, but couldn’t focus on the face. A man? Yes, someone of poetically low character and unexpectedly high morals. The name remained elusive, frustratingly so for a transhuman warrior with a supposedly eidetic memory.

He felt eyes upon him and looked up.

Tubal Cayne stood beneath an obscene mural rendered in anatomically precise detail – thankfully, time and water damage had obscured the offending portions. Cayne sat with one hand on his device, the other resting on the grip of his bolter.

‘What?’ said Loken.

‘You are finding it onerous being here, Loken,’ said Cayne.

‘Is that a question or a statement?’

‘I have not yet decided. Call it a question for now.’

‘It’s strange,’ admitted Loken, slipping the cards into a pouch at his waist. ‘But there’s little left of the ship I knew. This vessel bears the same name, but it’s not the Vengeful Spirit. Not the one I knew. This is a twisted reflection of that proud ship. It’s unpleasant, but no more than I’d expected.’

‘Truly? I had concluded you were experiencing significant psychological difficulties. Why else would you not take part in the fighting at the armoury?’

Loken was immediately on guard, but forced down an outright denial. He stood and brushed water droplets from his armour.

‘This used to be my home,’ he said, walking slowly towards Cayne. ‘Those Sons of Horus used to be my brothers. It shames me that they are now traitors.’

‘It shames us all,’ added Qruze from a booth across the room where he was cleaning his bolter.

‘Speak for yourself,’ said Severian, who sat on the long bar etching kill-notches into his vambrace with his newly-acquired photonic combat blade. The punctured lung made his words breathy.

‘No,’ said Cayne. ‘That is not it. If it were, I would expect to see the same psychological markers in Iacton Qruze and… wait, what is your full name, Severian?’

‘Severian’s all you need to know, and even that’s too much.’

‘You did not fire a single shot, Loken,’ said Cayne. ‘Why not?’

Loken was angry now. He rose to his feet and crossed the chamber to stand in front of Cayne. ‘What are you saying, that I’m not up to the task? That you can’t rely on me?’

‘Yes, that is exactly what I am saying,’ answered Cayne. ‘You are showing all the hallmarks of severe post-traumatic damage. I have been watching you ever since we boarded the Vengeful Spirit. You’re broken inside, Loken. I urge you to return immediately to the Tarnhelm. Your continued presence is endangering the mission and all our lives.’

‘You need to back off,’ said Severian, spinning his combat blade around to aim its glittering tip at Cayne.

‘Why? You of all people know Loken is unfit for this mission.’

Loken slammed Cayne back against the mural.

He pressed a forearm hard against Cayne’s throat.

‘Say that again and I’ll kill you.’

To his credit, Cayne was unfazed by Loken’s attack.

‘This only further proves my point,’ he said.

Qruze appeared at Loken’s side and put a hand on his shoulder.

‘Put the gun away, lad.’

Loken frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’

He looked down and saw he had his bolt pistol pressed against Cayne’s chest. He had no memory of drawing the weapon.

Bror Tyrfingr eased Loken’s arm from Cayne’s throat.

‘Hjolda, Loken,’ said Bror. ‘There’ll be plenty more people trying to kill us soon enough without you doing the job for them.’

‘Do you regret leaving the Sons of Horus?’ asked Cayne. ‘Is that it? Is that why you came on this mission, to return to your former master’s side?’

‘Shut up, Tubal,’ snapped Bror, baring his teeth.

‘I do not understand why you all wilfully ignore Loken’s damage,’ said Cayne. ‘He attacks Qruze at Titan, he fails to fight against his former brothers, potentially costing the lives of two of our team. And now he holds a gun on me. We are at a mission-critical stage of our infiltration, and Loken cannot continue. I am not saying anything the rest of you haven’t thought.’

Loken stepped back from Cayne and holstered his pistol. He looked around at the rest of the pathfinder team.

‘Is he right?’ he demanded. ‘Do you all think I’m unfit to lead this mission.’

Qruze and Severian shared a look, but it was Varren who answered, limping over from where he’d been patched up by Altan Nohai. The former World Eater’s chest was a perforated mass of bolter impacts and bloodstains. Skin packs and sealant grafts were all that kept his innards where they belonged. His skin was oily with sweat as his genhanced body burned hot with healing.

‘We have a leader,’ said Varren. ‘I shed blood with Nathaniel and Tylos to bring Loken back from Isstvan. Any warrior who lived through that slaughter deserves our respect. He deserves your respect, Tubal. Malcador and the Wolf King thought Garviel Loken fit for this mission, and I’ll not gainsay them. Nor should you.’

Cayne said nothing, but gave a curt nod.

‘Is this the will of the group?’

‘It is,’ said Bror Tyrfingr. ‘If any man deserves a chance to strike back at the Warmaster, it’s Loken.’

‘You are making a mistake,’ said Cayne, ‘but I will say no more.’

Altan Nohai appeared at Varren’s side, his arms slathered in blood to the elbows.

‘Zaven?’ asked Qruze.

Nohai shook his head.

The Battle of Lupercalia began, as the industrialised wars heralding the first collapse of Old Earth once had, with a pre-dawn barrage. Fifty-three newly-landed artillery regiments with over twelve hundred guns between them shattered the day with thunderous fire from upraised Basilisks, Griffons and Minotaurs.

Heavier guns waited in artillery depots for the general advance, the Bombards and Colossus, the Medusas and the Bruennhilde. Their guns were unsuited for long range barrages, and would follow the mechanised infantry to pound the Imperial ridge in the moments before the final escalade.

Army regiments sworn to the Warmaster advanced in wide convoys behind a creeping barrage of high explosives and a glittering screen of shroud bombs. Tens of thousands of armoured carriers daubed with the Eye of Horus and bearing icons of unnatural provenance roared towards the enemy. Battle tanks bore hooked trophy racks of corpses, and one glacis in five bore a chained prisoner from Avadon.

Hideous Mechanicum constructs of dark iron, clanking legs, spiked wheels and bulbous, insectile appearance marched with feral packs of skitarii keeping a wary distance.

A tide of armour and flesh roared over the wide expanse of the lowland agri-belts. The continent’s breadbasket of arable land, gold and green from horizon to horizon, was churned to ruin beneath their biting tracks. Totem carriers on flatbed transporters bore beaten iron sigils on swaying poles amidst hundreds of robed brotherhoods.

Self-anointed with bloodthirsting titles, their chants and rhythmic drumbeats were carried on unnatural winds to the waiting Imperial forces.

Perhaps half of the Titan engines of Vulcanum, Mortis and Vulpa followed the dread host. The Interfector engines were nowhere to be seen. The battle with Legio Fortidus had cost the Warmaster dearly. His Legios held the advantage of numbers, but the Imperials had an Imperator Titan and scores of Knights. A Knight was no match for a Titan, but only a fool would ignore their combined strength.

Tyana Kourion watched the advance of the Warmaster’s army from the flattened crescent ridge fifteen kilometres away. She leaned back in the cupola of her Stormhammer superheavy, panning her magnoculars from left to right. Eschewing battle dress, she wore her ceremonial greens. Though they were uncomfortable and hot, her entire regiment had chosen to emulate her defiance to keep her from standing out to enemy snipers.

‘A lot of them, ma’am,’ said Naylor, her executive officer. He sat in the secondary turret at the rear of the vehicle, scrolling through reports coming in from the flanking observation posts.

‘Not enough,’ she said.

‘Ma’am?’ said Naylor. ‘Looks like plenty to me.’

‘Agreed, but where are the Sons of Horus?’

‘Letting the poor bloody mortals take the brunt of it.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Kourion, unconvinced. ‘More than likely getting us to expend munitions on sub-par troops. It galls me to waste quality rounds on turncoat dross.’

‘It’s either that or let them roll over us,’ pointed out Naylor.

Kourion nodded. ‘The Legion forces will show themselves soon enough,’ she said. ‘And until then we’ll make these scum pay for their lack of loyalty.’

‘Is the order given?’

‘The order is given,’ said Kourion. ‘All units, open fire.’

Yade Durso kept the Stormbird low, hugging the mountain rock of the Untar Mesas. Imperial fighters from the mountain aeries of Lupercalia duelled the vulture packs in screaming dogfights at higher altitudes, but nap-of-the-earth fighting was Legion work.

Little Horus Aximand sat alongside Durso in the pilot’s compartment at the head of fifty Sons of Horus. They were oathed to the moment and eager to fight.

Ten Stormbirds held station with Aximand’s craft in a staggered echelon. The drop-ships of Seventh Company flew above, their weapons already in acquisition mode.

‘They’re eager,’ said Aximand.

‘Rightly so,’ answered Durso.

‘Too eager,’ said Aximand. ‘The Seventh Company were mauled at Avadon. They don’t have the numbers to indulge in pointless heroics.’

The threat auspex trilled as it sniffed out the unmistakable emissions of weapons fire. Flickering icons appeared on the slate, too many to process accurately. The Imperial host became a red smear blocking the way onwards to Lupercalia.

‘So many,’ said Durso.

‘We do our job there’ll be a lot less soon,’ said Aximand. ‘Now look for gaps in the line.’

Aximand hooked into the various vox-nets, parsing the hundreds of streams in discreet synaptic pathways, sorting the relevant from the inconsequential. All they needed was for just one enemy commander to let hunger for glory overcome tactical sense.

Company level vox: tank commanders calling in targets, spotters yelling threat warnings and enemy attack vectors.

Command level vox: pained orders to abandon damaged tanks, pick up survivors or overtake laggardly vanguard units.

A screaming wall of encrypted scrapcode howled behind it all. Dark Mechanicum comms screeching between the towering battle-engines. He turned it down, but it kept coming back. The sound was grating on a level Aximand knew was simply wrong.

‘No machine should sound like that,’ he said.

Aximand listened to the streams of vox-traffic long enough to gather the information he needed; unit positionals, vox-strengths and priority enhancements. Taken together it painted a picture as vivid and complete as any sensory simulation. As the Stormbird broke through the clouds, Lupercal’s voice broke through every Legion channel.

‘My captains, my sons,’ he said, ‘Warriors’ discretion. Engage targets of opportunity. Withdraw only on my command.’

‘Take us in, Yade,’ ordered Aximand.

‘Affirmative,’ responded Durso, lifting the golden Eye of Horus he kept wrapped around his wrist and putting it to his lips and eyes. ‘For Horus and the Eye.’

‘Kill for the living and kill for the dead,’ said Aximand.

Durso pushed the Stormbird down.

The pain of his failed Becoming was nothing compared to the agony he suffered now. The neural interface cables implanted in Albard’s scabbed spinal sockets were white-hot lances stabbing into the heart of his brain. They’d never properly healed from the day they’d been cut into him.

Banelash was fighting him. It knew he was an intruder and sought to throw him off like a wild colt. The spirits of its former masters knew that Albard was broken, knew that he had failed once already to bond with a Knight.

The dead riders did not welcome the unworthy into their ranks.

Albard fought them down.

For all their loathing, he had decades of hate on his side. He felt the echo of Raeven’s presence in Banelash’s machine heart, but that only made him more determined. His stepbrother had violated everything that Albard had once held dear.

Now he would return the favour.

The Knight’s systems glitched and continually tried to restart and break his connection. The modifications his Sacristans had made kept them from shutting him out. The heart of the Knight was screaming at him, and Albard screamed right back.

Forty-three years ago, he had sat opposite Raeven and let fear get the better of him. Not this time. Blinded in one eye by a raging mallahgra in his youth, the simian beasts had always held a special terror in Albard’s nightmares. When one had broken free on his day of Becoming, a day that should have been his proudest moment, that terror had consumed him.

His Knight had felt his fear and rejected him as unworthy. Condemned in the eyes of his father, he’d been doomed to a life of torture and mockery at the hands of his stepbrother and sister.

Raeven had killed his father? Good, he’d hated the miserable old bastard. Albard had taken his vengeance with a hunting knife and an intimate knowledge of human anatomy learned on the other side of the blade. His faithless step-siblings were now entwined in an irrigation ditch, bloating with nutrient-rich water and corpse gases. Food for worms.

He winced as a fragment of Raeven’s lingering imprint on the Knight’s core stabbed at him. He felt Raeven’s disgust, but worse, he felt a shred of his pity.

‘Even in death you mock me, brother,’ hissed Albard, guiding the twenty-two Devine Knights through the rear ranks of the Imperial regiments. Hundreds of thousands of men and their armoured vehicles awaited the order to move out. Tyana Kourion wasn’t going to make the same mistakes Edoraki Hakon had made at Avadon.

This would be no passive defence line, but a reactive battle of manoeuvre. Opportunities for advance were to be exploited, gaps plugged. This latter task was the role she had assigned to the Knights of Molech, a glorified reserve force. The indignity of it was galling, the insult a gross stain on the honour of Molech’s knightly Houses.

Knights from House Tazkhar marched past, weapons dipped in respect. Many mocked the sand-dwelling savages, but they knew their place – not like the uppity bastards of House Mamaragon, whose strutting Paladins jostled for position in the vanguard. As if they could ever rise to be First House of Molech. House Indra’s southern Knights bore banners of gold and green, and Albard suspected that they flew fractionally higher than his.

A blatant attempt to eclipse House Molech in glory.

Such temerity would not go unanswered, and Albard felt Banelash’s weapon systems react to his belligerent thoughts. Anger, insecurity and paranoia blended within his psyche, goaded into a towering narcissism by a lingering presence, an infection newly acquired within the sensorium.

Something serpentine and voluptuous, hideous yet seductive, lurked in Banelash’s heart. Albard longed to know it and brushed his mind-touch over it.

The combined fury of the Knight’s former pilots surged in response. A reaction of fear. Albard gasped as the sensorium swam with static, phantom images and violent echoes of past wars. A system purge, but it was too little too late. The infection within the sensorium bled into Banelash’s memories, twisting them with unremembered indignities and delusions of grandeur.

Albard heard sibilant laughter as his damaged mind tried to parse the now from the remembered, but those regions of the brain required for a full interface had been irreparably damaged forty-three years ago. His own memories poured into the sensorium, mingling with long-ended wars and imagined kills. He drew the venomous infection into himself, drinking it down like fine wine.

The sensory rendition of the battlefield around him blurred and twisted like a slowly retuning pict-feed, one image fading and another swimming into focus.

What had once been an ordered Imperial camp of machine fabricated shelters, supply depots, ammunition stockpiles, fuel silos and rally points became something else entirely. Men in boiled leather jerkins and iron sallets marched to and fro. Some wore gleaming hauberks of iron scale. They carried long iron-bladed swords and axes across their shoulders. They marched in dreary lockstep. Hundreds of hunting hounds snapped at their heels, goaded forward by whip-bearing packmasters.

A crash of thunder belched from the vast, dragon-mouthed carronades fringing the hillsides in their thousands. Entrenched in wicker gabions and earthen ramparts, the gunnery academies of Roxcia and Kyrtro had brought their finest culverin and mortars to punish the enemy with shot and shell. Colourful flags snapped in the conflicting thermals above the powder-hungry weapons.

Gunners sweated and heaved, running their iron behemoths back into firing positions. The barrels were swabbed out and fresh powder charges rammed down. Heavy stone spheres were lifted by barrel-chested Tazkhar slaves.

As impressive as the guns were, they were nothing compared to the splendour of the knightly host.

Incredible warriors in all-enclosing plate rode powerful destriers with fantastical caparisons depicting rearing beasts such as had not been seen on Molech for generations.

Albard turned to see the knights riding alongside him.

Cousins, nephews and distant relations, all of the Devine Blood. They rode into battle on wide-chested warsteeds, but not one of their mounts could match the golden stallion upon which he rode, a beast with a mane of fire and wide, powerful shoulders. A king among horsekind.

‘My brothers!’ cried Albard, letting the blissful serpentine venom spread to each of them. ‘See what I see, feel what I feel!’

Some struggled, some almost resisted, but every one of them surrendered in the end. Their secret desires and ambitions were fuel to the infection and it took their every scrap of lust, guilt and bitterness and twisted into something worse.

He turned in the saddle, looking over at the twin lightning bolt emblem streaming from his vexillary’s banner pole. The ancient heraldry of the Stormlord himself blazed in the noonday sun, an icon of such brilliance that it illuminated the battlefield for hundreds of metres in all directions.

This was his banner.

He was the Stormlord, and these knights were the same vajras who had ridden the Fulgurine Path with him all those centuries ago. A towering sense of self-importance filled him, and he raked back his spurs. Banelash ploughed through regiments of infantry as the Stormlord saw a vast and monstrous creature through the billowing clouds of cannon fire.

A titanic beast, a giant of inhuman scale.

Scaled in black and white, it bellowed with the sound of thunder. A world devourer.

This was the foe he had been summoned to slay.

TWENTY

The Battle of Lupercalia

The Thunderhawk was wrecked, a gutted carcass that had survived just long enough to get them on the ground. It would never fly again, but who cared about that? Abaddon staggered from the flames and ruin of the crash site, throwing out hails to the Justaerin.

Two definitely dead, one not responding.

So, call it three dead. About what he’d expected in getting this close to the guns of Iron Fist Mountain. They’d lose more by the time they seized the trenches and blockhouses spread around its base and lower slopes like a steeldust fungus. Gunships flashed towards the mountain, barrages of typhoon missiles rippling from their launchers and shells sawing from their assault cannons and hurricane bolters.

Streaks of artillery and anti-aircraft fire slashed overhead. Explosions, flak and the continuous bray of gunnery dropped a constant rain of dust and ember flare. Storm Eagles made a more difficult target than Thunderhawks, but the sheer volume of fire coming off the mountain was swatting more of them from the sky with every passing second.

The wrecks of dozens of gunships were spread over the low foothills. Crashing hadn’t been the intent of the plan, but it had been a more than probable outcome and an accepted risk. Five hundred Terminators formed up amid the flames and smoke of the crash sites.

The Imperial gunners thought they’d repulsed the airborne assault on their right. They were wrong. Just because an aircraft went down didn’t mean the warriors within were dead.

Especially if those warriors were Sons of Horus.

A Storm Eagle slammed down on the rocks to Abaddon’s left. Exploding ordnance mushroomed from the wreckage. Falkus Kibre appeared through the swirl of black smoke surrounding it.

‘Did you even crash?’ asked Abaddon, seeing the Widowmaker’s armour was undamaged by fire or impact.

‘No. Pilot brought us down in the lee of a scarp,’ said Kibre, gesturing with his combi-bolter. ‘Five hundred metres east.’

‘I swear you are the luckiest bastard I ever met,’ said Abaddon, his voice grating and without the powerful tones he had once possessed. The Emperor’s angel of fire had stolen that aspect of him, burned it clean out of him and left him with this gargoyle’s rasp. Barring a few bruises, the Widowmaker had come through that encounter unscathed.

‘The more I fight, the luckier I get.’

Abaddon nodded. He checked the counter in the corner of his visor.

Four minutes.

The smoke and dust of the crashing gunships was still obscuring their presence, but that wouldn’t last for long. The thunder of artillery on the plain swelled. Still the heavier guns in the rear, the main assault waves yet to crash home.

‘Everything still on target?’ asked Kibre.

‘Seems to be.’

‘Best find some cover then.’

‘That cliff ahead?’

‘It’s not much.’

‘Best I can see.’

Abaddon nodded and opened the vox to the Justaerin.

‘New assault position,’ he said. ‘Advance to my marker and keep your damn heads down.’

‘Inspiring,’ said Kibre. ‘I can see why Lupercal made you First Captain.’

‘Now’s not the time for inspiring,’ said Abaddon. ‘Now’s the time to hope the damn Mechanicum don’t miss.’

Var Zerba was one of the oldest defence platforms orbiting Molech, and had accrued a sizeable arsenal over the decades. Torpedo racks, missile tubes, mass drivers, collimated boser weapons and innumerable batteries of macro-cannons had been designed with the goal of smashing attacking fleets to ruin.

But such weapons were equally capable of wreaking havoc on planetary targets.

Ezekyle Abaddon had seized Var Zerba virtually intact, and the frigates, Selenar’s Spear and Infinity’s Regret had almost burned out their reactors dragging it from its geostationary position over Molech’s oceans to a point fixed just above the agri-belt north of Lupercalia.

Farther west of the battlefield to account for the planet’s rotation, but otherwise in the perfect position to wreak havoc from above.

Orbital barrages were not subtle weapons, nor were they discriminate. Their use during battlefield operations was almost entirely unheard of. Their vast quantities of fire were too dangerous, too unpredictable and too destructive should something go wrong. A misfiring munition, a flare of atmospheric discharge or a simple miscalculation could be enough to send city-levelling ordnance wildly off-target.

But when the target was the largest mountain on Molech, perhaps the risk might be deemed acceptable.

The Bloodsworn knelt with their swords drawn and buried in the earth before them. Each warrior had anointed the crimson plates of their armour with the Black, and waited as Warden Serkan moved among them, smearing ash across the winged blood drop on their shoulder guards. As the shells crashed down on the advancing horde he offered each warrior a measure of his wisdom and listened to their last words.

No one was under any illusion that this would be anything other than a last stand. Drazen Acorah knew he would not live to see another sunrise, but the thought did not trouble him overmuch. That they had killed Imperial soldiers in the jungle was not in any doubt, even if he still could not explain how it had happened.

Not only had they murdered innocents and hunted like beasts, but they failed in their duties as exemplars of all that was good and noble in the Legions. The Warmaster had already tarnished the honour of the Legions such that none would ever trust them again, and the Blood Angels had allowed themselves to be party to that.

The Bloodsworn had come to Molech to fight, but they had come to this battlefield to die.

Vitus Salicar stood, and ninety-six Blood Angels rose to their feet behind him, each man holding his blade up to the sky in salute. Not to the enemy; they were unworthy of any recognition. This was a final salute to the Emperor and Terra, to Sanguinius and Baal.

Salicar used an oiling cloth to clean his power sword of dirt, and Acorah saw the ident-tags swing from the blood drop pommel. Acorah needed no psyker powers to feel the weight of guilt attached to them. The rust and unmistakable tang of mortal blood told its own tale.

Salicar saw him looking and sheathed the blade. The ident-tags rattled against the iron and leather scabbard.

‘You are still set on this course?’ asked Acorah.

‘I am,’ confirmed Salicar. He made a fist and lifted his arm, bent at the elbow. Ten Rhino armoured carriers fired their engines, jetting oilsmoke and setting the ground atremble.

‘You should not seek to dissuade me, Acorah. I would not sully this moment with having to discipline you.’

‘I seek to do no such thing,’ he said, though the rebellious thought had already crossed his mind. He’d dismissed it immediately. His powers were strong, but not so strong that he could alter a will so set in stone.

‘Do you believe this is penance?’ he asked.

‘I do,’ said Salicar.

‘You’re wrong,’ said Acorah, placing his hand on the partly obscured Legion symbol at his commander’s shoulder guard. A familiar gesture, almost too familiar. He and Salicar were battle-brothers, but they were far from friends.

Salicar looked down at Acorah’s hand. ‘Then what is it?’

‘It’s justice.’

‘Go!’ shouted Aximand.

Third Squad broke from cover, moving and firing as Ungerran Dreadnought Talon opened fire with their cannons and missile launchers. Streaming salvoes of high-calibre shells and spiralling missiles hammered the line of mesh fortifications. Filled with rubble and stacked like children’s blocks, they were ideal temporary fortifications.

Temporary or not, they were going to be bloody to overrun.

Behind him, the Stormbirds smoked in the flames of impact and hard burn landings. Nearly five hundred Sons of Horus poured onto the rugged landscape of the Untar Mesas, less than a hundred metres from the stepped defences.

No matter whether an assault came by land, sea or air, that last hundred metres would always need to be crossed by warriors willing to face the enemy head on.

This flank of the Imperial line rested on the mountain foothills, stretching away in a gentle crescent until it reached the towering peak of Iron Fist Mountain.

The twenty kilometres between here and there was an unbroken line of Imperial tanks and infantry. Well dug in, well positioned and, by the looks of things, well led. Jaundiced clouds of smoke drifted across the lines, the ejecta of Imperial guns mixed with the explosions of Lupercal’s heavy artillery.

Titans duelled with city-levelling ordnance, the thunder of their steps felt even from here. The Imperator at the centre of the line wasn’t marching. Its upper section turned only enough for it to bring its apocalyptic weaponry to bear. Its guns were tearing bloody wounds in the Warmaster’s army with every shot. Hundreds were dying with every blast of its hellstorm cannon and hundreds more to the plasmic fury of the annihilator. Missiles, laser blasts and hurricanes of bolter fire wreathed its upper towers and bastions in smoke.

Single-handedly, the Imperator was gutting Lupercal’s army.

Or at least the mortal portion of it.

Aximand’s attention was drawn from the destroyer Titan to a flash of brightness at the Titan’s base. Crimson-painted Rhinos surged forward in a wedge to split the attack in two. A glorious charge into the enemy ranks, the kind that only Legion warriors would dare.

‘Bold, but foolish,’ hissed Aximand. The enemy host was too vast for so few warriors to break apart, even warriors of the quality of the Blood Angels.

The hiss of a passing las-bolt brought him back to his own fight.

‘There,’ shouted Aximand, pointing at the base of a stepped salient where a flurry of Stormbird rockets had split the reinforced mesh. Rubble threatened to pour out. All it needed was a little encouragement. ‘Squad Orius, bring that wall down! Baelar, take it when it’s open.’

A burst of missile contrails arced from a patch of rocks to Aximand’s left. A towering explosion of rubble detonated from the defences. Blasted rocks fell in a rain of shattered stone and debris. Even before the dust of the explosion blew out, Squad Baelar were moving. Jump packs flared from the cliff above, where Aximand’s pure assault elements had landed.

Gunfire reached out to them. Six were blasted from the air before they reached the apex of their powered leap.

‘Did you see that?’ asked Yade Durso.

‘I did,’ said Aximand.

‘No mortal shooters did that.’

‘Agreed, that’s Legion.’

Thudd guns punished the defences where the shots had come from, but Aximand knew they’d hit nothing. If he was right in who was there, they would have already displaced. Squad Baelar landed just before the emplaced blocks and braced their legs for another leap.

The ground erupted in a sheet of fire as a line of remote-activated melta mines detonated.

Aximand ducked back as his auto-senses shut down to protect him from the brightness. Squad Baelar were all but incinerated. A single warrior got airborne, but only his upper half. Stuttering jets carried his corpse over the wall.

‘Just far enough away to need two jumps,’ hissed Aximand. ‘They knew assaulters would need to land there.’

‘Definitely Legion,’ said Durso.

‘Not Blood Angels,’ replied Aximand, which left only one possibility. ‘The Ultramarines are here.’

‘Third Squad is in position,’ Durso voxed. ‘Ungerran are ready.’

‘Hit them with everything,’ said Aximand. ‘Maximum suppression. We’re taking this wall ourselves.’

A pressure within Abaddon’s helmet was the first sign of the incoming barrage. His teeth ached and his visor dimmed in anticipation of impact.

‘You’re looking up?’ asked Kibre. ‘Do you want to be blinded?’

‘How often do you get to be this close to such awesomely destructive firepower?’

‘Even once is too often.’

Abaddon grinned, an unusual enough occurrence for him that he surprised himself. Since his injury he’d had precious little to laugh about. The angel’s fire had done more than take his voice, it left him with a constant smoulder in his bones. Like an underground fire that never goes out, but burns and burns even when no fuel remains to sustain it.

‘Think of it this way,’ said Abaddon. ‘When it hits, we’ll either walk right through the ruins or we’ll be dead. Anyway, if I die, Lupercal will need someone to be First Captain.’

‘I don’t want it earned this way.’

Anger touched Abaddon at Kibre’s sentimentality. ‘How else do you think you’ll get it?’

Kibre didn’t answer, and Abaddon turned his gaze to the heavens. Molech’s skies had been ripped with electrical storms and raging atmospheric disturbances since the invasion began. Low-hanging clouds seethed like overloading generators. Finally they burst apart, unable to contain the rampant energies within them.

Forking traceries of blue light arced between them and the mountain’s highest peaks, as though the holdfast were a vast lightning rod. Squalling clashes of expending void shields filled the sky with blooming oilspills of light. The lightning danced on the invisible barrier, stripping it back with every strike.

And with every screeching blast, the void shields grew closer to their extreme tolerances. Like a bubble stretched to its maximum expansion, they screamed as they blew out. A micro-storm blasted skyward as feedback detonated the generators and explosions geysered around the throat of the mountain.

But this was just the precursor.

Glassy rods of laser fire touched the mountain peak, coring deep into the rock. Superheated steam blasted skyward. Spurts of molten rock garlanded the high peak in a fiery golden crown.

Yet even this was a prelude.

Torpedo volleys and macro-cannon shells launched from Var Zerba at hyperfast velocities punched through the clouds on the coat-tails of the lasers. The mountain’s defensive guns sought to bring them down, but the catastrophic detonations of the void shield array had blown out almost every targeting cogitator.

Orbital munitions designed to penetrate subterranean bunker complexes slammed into the mountain, punching into the shafts bored by the orbital lasers. Iron Fist Mountain was hardened to resist aerial bombardment and ground based artillery, but an orbital barrage was many orders of magnitude greater than anything the builders of Legio Crucius had envisioned.

The top five hundred metres of the mountain simply vanished.

Warheads just short of atomic power struck deep into its heart, tearing apart the internal structure of the hollowed out mountain in a hellish firestorm. Vast buttresses of adamantium buckled and melted in temperatures normally found in the cores of stars. Bracing beams and load-bearing archways collapsed and a cascade of structural instability shook the entire mountain.

A flaming caldera formed as the weight of the mountain’s exterior fell inwards. Iron Fist Mountain crumbled like a sand sculpture, every second of collapse adding to the speed of its dissolution. Kilometres-high plumes of explosive gases and dust clouds billowed in a fire-shot mushroom cloud.

The shock wave of impacts and the instantaneous destruction of an entire mountain raced outwards in a pulsing series of seismic pressure waves. Abaddon gripped tightly to the rock as though the earth sought to shake him loose. Explosions of rock and flame shot from the mouth of the newly-formed volcano.

An avalanche of debris spilled downwards, millions of tonnes of shattered rock and steel. A tidal wave of destruction that buried the Imperial defences clustered around the mountain under hundreds of metres of rubble.

‘First Company,’ said Abaddon, as the shock waves began to dissipate.

Five hundred Terminators rose from cover and marched into the hellstorm surrounding the mountain’s destruction.

Vitus Salicar rode at the head of the Blood Angels, his crimson Rhino’s engines roaring like a mesoscorpion in heat. He’d ordered the Techmarines to overcharge the engines. They’d burn out within minutes, metal grinding on metal and erupting in flames as oil feeds burst under pressure. It wouldn’t matter. These Rhinos would never need to move again once this task was done.

‘An end for all of us,’ he said.

They left burning trails behind them where fuel manifolds had already cracked. The flames spread quickly through the fields, and a wall of smoke and fire rose behind them.

There could be no retreat now, even if they desired one.

The traitor line was an unbroken wall of flesh and iron, tanks and marching soldiers as far as the eye could see. Smoke banks from booming artillery obscured the rear ranks. Gunfire snapped and explosions cratered the ground.

Shots punched the up-armoured glacis of his Rhino, but didn’t penetrate. A las-round clipped his shoulder guard, vitrifying the ash and dirt smeared over his Legion symbol. A glassy scab formed over the blood drop.

He looked left and right. Like him, Drazen Acorah and Apothecary Vastern rode in the cupola of their Rhinos, while Warden Serkan squatted atop his vehicle like the savage tribal chiefs of Baal Secundus atop their chariots in ages past.

‘For the Emperor and Sanguinius!’ shouted Salicar as linked bolters on the roof of the Rhino opened fire. A few traitors in deliberately ripped Army fatigues and fetishised helms were punched from their feet.

He picked his target. Army Chimera with the Eye of Horus daubed in umber on the frontal glacis. A banner of ragged cloth streaming behind it with a bleeding eagle upon it. A vehicle for a commander or soldier of rank.

The engine behind Salicar blew out with a hard bang and a solid, concussive thud. He tasted burning promethium and lubricant. The vehicle gave one last spurt of power to the tracks before seizing with a dreadful clash of splintering metal and ripping gears.

The Rhino slammed head on into the painted Chimera. Metal buckled and deformed. The heavier Space Marine vehicle smashed the Chimera’s frontal section like foil paper. Salicar vaulted from the Rhino’s roof, using the collision to propel him deep into the enemy ranks.

His scaled cloak billowing behind him like golden pinions, the captain of the Bloodsworn sailed through the air and crashed down in the midst of the charging traitors. His sword swept out, its edges blazing with amber fire. Men died.

Behind him, the Rhino’s spiked bull bar had disembowelled the enemy vehicle like a carcass on a butcher’s slab. Black smoke billowed as the assault doors opened and the Blood Angels poured out. They slammed into the scattered traitors, bludgeoning them from their path with kite shields and short, stabbing thrusts of their swords.

Salicar moved and killed with grace and beauty, like a dancer whose every move was choreographed to match those of his foes. Mortals tried to cut him down, but his movements were too fast, too supple and too beautiful. His flame-lit edge opened their bodies, his gold-chased pistol spat headshots with every pull of the trigger.

Gun fire struck him on the chest and shoulders. Some of it even cut down the soldiers he was fighting. They knew they couldn’t fight Salicar on an equal footing and were looking to kill him any way they could. He kept moving, putting as many of the enemy around him as he could. If they planned to shoot him down, they would kill their own men to do it.

The Blood Angels formed arrowheads of red-armoured killers around their war-leaders. Warden Serkan smashed through a knot of bare-chested warriors with their flesh scarified by knife blades. His eagle-winged symbol of office carved them new wounds, but none that would ever heal.

Alix Vastern, the Apothecary who knew every inch of human physiology and who had spent a lifetime repairing it, now bent his every effort to destroying it. Drazen Acorah fought with a monstrous twin-bladed axe, hewing a red path through to a squad of augmented soldiers adorned in blood-lined flesh cloaks and whose weapons were those of the techno-barbarians that once warred over the ruined hellscapes of Old Earth.

Salicar pushed through the masses of packed soldiery to link with him. No blade touched him, but las-rounds and solid slugs gouged and bit his plate. In any other fight, the goal was to make space. To move, to find the gaps between the foe and drink deep of the killing thirst. Here, the aim was to fill that space with their flesh, to make them his shields.

All around, the charge of the enemy continued unabated. Chimeras roared past towards Tyana Kourion’s Grand Army of Molech. For all their trappings of savagery, the Warmaster’s army was disciplined.

Salicar beheaded a pair of mortals bearing a heavy bolter and kicked another with a demolition charge in the chest. The man’s ribs shattered and he flew back through the air. The charge he’d carried detonated and tore the sponson from a nearby battle tank. It slewed around and exploded a moment later.

Salicar knelt as the shock wave washed over him.

He rose to his feet and pushed on, his honour guard finally catching up with him. They had discarded their shields. Defence was now irrelevant, attack was all that mattered.

The bladed formations of the Blood Angels converged to form a single spear thrust right through the centre of the enemy. Perhaps a quarter of Salicar’s warriors were dead. Sheer weight of fire had done what the enemy’s individual prowess could not. They fled before his wetted blade. Gunshots smacked his arms and legs.

His visor display flickered with warnings, but he cared nothing for them. He was to die this day, and no warning would change that.

Drazen Acorah now fought at his side, his axe blades gleaming red and wet. His lieutenant saw him and gave a curt nod. All that could be spared in the fight’s fury. Salicar returned the gesture as he saw a hellish fire silhouette the mortals before him.

Acorah cried out and dropped to his knees, the axe falling from his grip. The press of bodies closed on him, knives and rifles and swords stabbing for him. Salicar thrust and cut, keeping the rabble back. A shot smacked into his back, a heavier round. He staggered. Another clipped his helmet and he fell to one knee.

He reached out and gripped Acorah’s shoulder guard.

‘Stand, brother!’ he ordered.

Acorah looked up.

Crackling lines of power hazed his helmet, and the lenses shone with inner light. A blood-red radiance of arterial wonder.

‘It’s here!’ cried Acorah. ‘Throne save us, it’s here!’

Salicar sprang to his feet as a towering fury surged through him, a killing rage like nothing he had ever known.

No, that wasn’t true.

He had known this once before.

Months before in the Kushite jungle. A red mist of unimaginable hatred and rage, the unbridled anger of a million souls. Every hostile thought and primal impulse given free rein.

Salicar gasped, an exhalation of feral savagery.

A figure moved through the flames before him, a warrior of transhuman scale. Its armour was blackened red and wreathed in fire.

Worse, it was armoured as he was. Wreathed by flames that seared the eye, the winged blood drop on its shoulder guard was unmistakable.

Whatever this thing was, it had once been a Blood Angel.

Chains dragged behind it and it hovered a full metre above the bloody ground. Its face was a scorched horror of eternally burning meat, fire-blackened and pulled tight in a rictus grin of horrified anger. In one hand it carried a severed head, that of Warden Agana Serkan.

‘Behold our kin,’ it said, and Salicar felt his ears bleed within his helm.

The mortals gathered around him fell to their knees. No longer seeking him dead, but supplicating themselves to the monstrous hellspawn. Salicar wanted to murder every one of them. Not fight them, not kill them, but slaughter them. He wanted to bathe in their blood, to strip himself of armour and slather his naked flesh with their entrails.

Their hearts he would devour. From their bones he would suck the marrow. Their eyes would be sweet, their blood ambrosia. Salicar’s every civilised move was stripped away as he saw himself drowning in the blood of his kills, each skull taken paving the way for his immortality.

‘This is what you all want, Vitus,’ said the fallen angel, reaching out to him. ‘Accept it. Your brothers have already drunk from the bloody chalice I offered them on Signus. They now slay in my name. They slake their thirst for blood without remorse. I know you felt the echoes of that moment in your own slaughters, Vitus. Feel no guilt for that, embrace the killer angel within. Join your brothers. Join me.’

Salicar felt a presence beside him and reluctantly averted his gaze from the daemon-thing. Drazen Acorah stood at his side, one hand holding his axe before him like a talisman.

‘I name you warp spawn!’ cried Acorah, the witch-light within his helm spreading over his body to envelop the blades of his axe.

‘I am the Cruor Angelus, the Red Angel!’ cried the fire-wreathed abomination as a pair of flaming swords erupted from its gauntlets. ‘Bow down before me!’

Apothecary Vastern moved to stand between the Red Angel and his captain. ‘I know you,’ he said. ‘You are Meros of the Blood Angels! My battle-brother of the Helix Primus, now and always. No power in the galaxy can break that bond!’

‘I am the ragefire, I am the sinister urge, the red right hand and the ender of lives!’ said the warp-thing. ‘Meros is long gone. He and Tagas lit the soulfires within me, but the soul of your primarch and his corruption is the blood in my veins.’

Salicar fought to contain his rage and resist surrendering to its red temptation. Every fibre of his willpower was fraying, searing to ash within his mind. To give in would be easy, to submit and accept the bloodlust within him.

Acorah reached out and placed a hand on Salicar’s shoulder guard. The fulgurite lightning bolt carved through the ash flickered and danced with golden light. Salicar drew a great draught of air into his lungs, like a drowning man finally reaching the surface.

He blinked away the bloody haze that had fallen across his vision. He ripped off his helmet and threw it aside. The fetor of the battlefield waxed strong in his sense. Blood and opened meat, urine and mud.

His Blood Angels knelt in the dirt around him, looking to him for guidance. Traitors surrounded them, looking to them as avatars of murder and slaughter, as newfound gods to worship. The thought sickened him, that they might be venerated by such dregs.

Firelight reflected on the ident-tags wrapped around the pommel of Salicar’s sword. And what had once been guilt became the promise of salvation.

We are the Blood Angels.

We are killers, reapers of flesh.

But we are not murderers, we are not savages.

Vitus Salicar turned so that every one of his warriors could see him. He reversed his grip on his sword. They met his gaze. They knew. They understood. They aligned their blades as he did.

‘Join me,’ said the Red Angel. ‘Be my blood-letters.’

‘Never,’ said Salicar, driving his gladius up through the base of his jaw and out through the top of his skull.

Two Warhounds of Interfector, a snapping engine named Lochon and a limping beast dubbed Bloodveil, gave covering fire. Aximand and the Fifth Company charged under a blitzing hurricane of turbo fire and vulcan shells. Portions of the mesh-block wall had already given way. The new-birthed volcanic explosion on the far flank had toppled loose blocks from the top of the makeshift barricade, and the fire from the two Warhounds did the rest.

‘Over it,’ shouted Aximand. ‘Take the fight to them.’

The Sons of Horus wove a path through the rubble, some firing from the hip, others pausing to aim. Aximand did neither. He kept his weapon pulled tight to his chest. Speed was his best hope of reaching the defences alive.

Ten Scimitar jetbikes flashed overhead, strafing the defenders with heavy bolter fire. Detonations rippled behind the blocks. The jetbikes turned hard, bleeding off speed for a quick turnaround.

A mistake, Aximand knew. As below, so above.

Speed was survival.

Shots from something rapid firing reached up and tore half the Scimitars from the sky, but a trio of larger attack speeders followed up with barking lascannon fire. An explosion clawed skyward, quickly followed by another. Gunfire chased the speeders, but by now the Scimitars were back on station and let rip over the defenders.

The crash of Titans made Aximand look up in time to see Lochon stamp down on a distant section of the walls. Debris spilled out and Sons of Horus swarmed over the breach. Bloodveil shadowed its impulsive cousin, firing controlled bursts of vulcan fire. Ejected shells spat from the rear of the weapon in a waterfall of scrap metal.

Behind the Warhounds came Silence of Death, a Reaver with deep gouges burned into its carapace. It had been wounded in the fight for Molech and one particular burn scar imparted a lopsided grimace to its pilot’s canopy.

The Titan braced its legs, appearing to squat slightly, like an animal about to defecate.

‘Down!’ shouted Aximand, dropping to a crouch with his helmet tucked into his chest as far as it would go. The Reaver’s blastgun and melta cannon fired with a shriek of rupturing air. The path of the weapons ignited, an instantaneous flashburn of light.

Aximand’s armour warned of a cataclysmic spike in temperature that vanished almost as soon as it registered. Thunderclaps of superheated air washed over him in a thermal shock wave.

Paint blistered on his back and shoulders.

Aximand pushed himself upright. The middle of the wall was gone. Apocalyptic explosions had tossed what remained around, leaving the way open for the infantry.

Aximand ran towards the flaming ruin of the wall, threading a path through the blistering heat haze. The rock underfoot was molten and glassy. His auto-senses were lousy with thermals, just a bleeding mass of false target readings.

A series of ferocious explosions hurled Aximand into the air.

Massed battle cannon fire.

He came down hard on the fused remains of a block that had once been part of the defences. He rolled, his armour cracked open in a dozen places. His helmet was split down the middle. He tore it off, and struggled to find his feet. His innards felt like they’d been compressed in a Warlord Titan’s assault fist. Concussive trauma. His lungs fought to take a breath. When they did it was searing hot, painful. He tasted burned meat, scorched metal and stone.

Sons of Horus lay dead all around him, split plates and boiled meat. Yade Durso picked himself up, holding his hand as though he was in danger of losing it. Aximand saw an Interfector Warhound lying across the remains of the wall. One side was ripped away, its mechanical innards spilled and its crew a burned smear on the inner faces of its carapace.

Bloodveil or Lochon, he couldn’t tell.

Vapour ghosts made visibility a joke beyond forty metres. His eyes burned with the acrid fumes of melta residue. Shapes moved in the smoke. Tall, loping. Hunched low and racing through the geysers of superheated air.

Knights. At least a dozen. Aximand struggled to remember the force disposition documents he’d read.

Green and blue heraldry, a fire-topped mountain: House Kaushik. Arcology-dwelling House, low tech resources. Estimated six Knights maximum. Threat level: medium.

Coiled snake icon over a field of orange and yellow. House Tazkhar, southern, steppe-dwelling nobles of noted savagery and cunning. Estimated eight Knights in total. Threat level: high.

They came in pairs; one moving, one shooting. Heavy stubbers raked the walls and thermal cannons stabbed like bright lances through the smoke. Aximand experienced a moment of paralysis when he thought they were coming for him, but the Knights had bigger prey in mind.

Void shield flare blazed like sheet lightning behind him as the Knights went after the remaining Warhound and the Reaver. An unequal fight, but when had that ever mattered? The Knights swept past, over the ruin of the block wall, hunting horns blaring from their carapaces.

Then Aximand saw who was really coming for him.

Armoured in cobalt-blue and gold, a transverse crest of white on a legate’s helmet. Bright silver blades unsheathed.

XIII Legion.

Ultramarines.

The Justaerin were wasted in this fight. Nothing remained of the Imperial right flank. Ashen statues that had once been men, buried wrecks of tanks that had become inescapable ovens. Artillery positions were buried in rock, and the twisted barrels of Basilisks and Minotaurs jutted from drifts of hot ash.

Mewling survivors begged to be pulled from avalanches of rock that were slowly cooking them to death. Abaddon didn’t give them the mercy of a bullet.

He saw a Warlord on its knees, its lower legs fused and melted to the rock of the mountain. Its back was bent as it tried to right itself. All that was keeping it upright were its weapon arms, buried in ash to the elbows. Two Warhounds lay sprawled on their bellies, their canopies cracked open and wounded skitarii frantically digging to reach the crew.

The Terminators killed them without breaking pace.

The real fight was coming to them.

The Imperator Titan was on the move.

In the wake of the Ullanor campaign, Aximand had spoken at length to the warriors of the Ultramarines. It had been a tense time between the XVI and the XIII Legions. Together with the White Scars, the Ultramarines had acted as Lupercal’s unwitting decoy in force while the Luna Wolves struck straight to the heart of the greenskin empire.

Neither Guilliman’s nor the Khan’s warriors took kindly to being used as bait while the glory went to others. Many fanciful stories grew out of that campaign; some aggrandising it, some belittling it, but all agreed on the spectacular nature of the victory, with Horus and the Emperor fighting back to back. Aximand wondered if that particular story would ever be retold in years to come.

Ezekyle had been merciless in his not-so-gentle mockery of the laggardly Ultramarines.

‘Always late for the fight,’ Ezekyle had roared, strutting like a peacock. The challenge had come from a sword-champion named Lamiad, and Ezekyle had accepted. He had a head of height on the slender Ultramarine, but Lamiad had him on his back in under a minute.

‘If you must fight an Ultramarine, you have to kill him quickly,’ Lamiad warned Ezekyle. ‘If he is still alive, then you are dead.’

Sound advice, though until now, Aximand had never realised just how sound. The Ultramarines had seen the threat of the Silence of Death and withdrawn to positions prepared for just such an eventuality. Practical, indeed.

Now three hundred warriors in the blue of open skies came at the scattered warriors of the XVI Legion with hatred in their hearts. Aximand had somewhere in the region of four hundred, but they were scattered and spread through the ruins. At best, he had a hundred, maybe a hundred and twenty immediately to hand.

The odds favoured the Ultramarines.

But since when had that ever mattered to the Sons of Horus.

‘Lupercal!’ shouted Aximand, swinging Mourn-it-all from its shoulder harness. The blade gleamed in the murder-light of battle. The runic script worked into the fuller shone with anticipation.

The Sons of Horus rallied to the Warmaster’s name as Aximand swung his blade up to his shoulder and charged the Ultramarines. Bolter shells filled the rapidly diminishing space between them. Armour cracked open, bodies fell. Not enough to halt the tides.

Aximand picked his target, a sergeant with a notched sword that struck him as being the very antithesis of all the XIII Legion stood for. He would be doing Primarch Guilliman a favour by killing this legionary – what sort of example was he setting his warriors?

The ocean green and cobalt-blue slammed together in a shattering crack of plate and blades. Pistols blazed, swords crashed and armour sundered. Aximand split the Ultramarines sergeant from clavicle to pelvis with one stroke. No photonic edge was ever sharper. He backswung and hacked through a legionary’s waist. The hosts became entangled, a heaving, grunting press of armoured bodies. Too close and cramped for sword work. Aximand slammed the hilt against a warrior’s visor. It cracked and spit sparks. A pistol shot blew it out.

Yade Durso’s sword had broken. He spun through the melee with two pistols. He took shots of opportunity, heads, spines and throats. Like a pistol master of the Scout Auxilia, he never stopped moving.

The fight was brutal. The blue had the better of it, fighting in ordered ranks, like a living threshing machine. Their blades and guns worked tirelessly, as though the Ultramarines fought to the unheard recitation of an unseen combat master.

It was war without heroics, without art.

But it was winning.

Already outnumbered, the Sons of Horus were fighting on their own, each warrior the hero in his own battle. But heroes could not win on their own, they needed battle-brothers. Aximand saw that ego had hamstrung them. They had come to Molech expecting an easy fight. It had made them forget themselves, and the XIII Legion were punishing them for that complacency.

Aximand roared and swung Mourn-it-all in a wide arc, clearing space. Ultramarines fell back from his unnaturally keen edge.

‘Sons of Horus, close ranks!’ shouted Aximand. ‘Show these eastern dogs how the mongrel bastards of Cthonia fight!’

Warriors gathered around him. Not enough to keep them from being pushed from the field, step after backward step.

A warrior of the XIII Legion came at Aximand with a long-bladed polearm. The leaf-shaped blade shimmered with power. It gave him reach. Aximand jumped back as the golden blade stabbed for him. The warrior was a vexillary, Aximand now saw, the long-shafted weapon he bore having once borne a flag. Its burned remains hung limply from corded red fasteners.

‘You lost the standard,’ said Aximand. ‘You ought to impale yourself on that spike of yours.’

‘You will all die here,’ said the Ultramarine.

Aximand turned the polearm aside with Mourn-it-all’s blade. He spun inside its reach. His elbow smashed the Ultramarine’s face.

The warrior staggered, but didn’t fall. ‘If you must fight an Ultrama–’

Aximand plunged Mourn-it-all through the vexillary’s breastplate until the quillons struck the glittering Ultima on his plastron.

‘I know,’ said Aximand. ‘Make sure you kill him.’

From the fire-warmed heat of his war tent, Horus watched a hololithic representation of the battle unfolding. With each update fed into the cogitator by the kneeling ranks of calculus logi, Horus barked manoeuvre orders to Scout Auxilia runners who carried them to the vox-tents.

Beyond the war tent, hundreds of Rhinos, Land Raiders and Thunderhawks waited to carry thousands of Sons of Horus into battle. The remaining Titans of Vulcanum, Mortis and Vulpa were spread through the legionaries. A force capable of utter destruction, but they too waited.

Maloghurst stood at his side, but had said little since the battle’s opening shots. Horus sensed his confusion at giving battle with a full third of the army yet to engage. Horus did not explain. His reasons would become clear soon enough.

‘Ezekyle’s Justaerin are pushing hard for the centre,’ said Maloghurst. ‘The destruction of Iron Fist Mountain has blown the left flank wide open.’

They’d felt the monstrous shock waves of the orbital barrage from Var Zerba like the rumblings of a distant earthquake. Fire-streaked smoke spread like embers on the horizon. It would rain ash for weeks, turning the entire agri-belt into a benighted wasteland.

‘Ezekyle will need support if he’s not going to be annihilated by Paragon of Terra.’

‘He’ll have it, Mal,’ Horus assured him.

‘From where, sir?’ said Maloghurst. ‘The Red Angel was supposed to drive the Blood Angels into madness, to break the centre for our Army forces to exploit. But the sons of Sanguinius are dead, and our centre has yet to make any significant impact. They’re dying in droves out there.’

Horus gestured over the hololithic display, already knowing what he would see. The Imperial guns were decimating his Army units at the heart of the advance. The fields before the ridge line were a killing ground of burning wrecks and corpses. Thousands were dead, thousands more still would die.

It irked Horus that the Cruor Angelus had not made good on its promise to turn the Blood Angels. Given that he had upset the schemes of Erebus to prevent that very thing on Signus, the irony was not lost on him.

‘And Aximand is bogged down on the right against forces from the Thirteenth Legion,’ continued Maloghurst. ‘It’s going to take a Sons of Horus speartip to get through that line. You need to deploy the rest of the Legion and Titan forces.’

‘Mal, are you telling me my business?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Good,’ said Horus. ‘Because I see the complexity of war differently to other men. Killing on this scale isn’t only about numbers and movement on a battlefield. Just by observing them I shape them and bend them to my will. Can you imagine any of my brothers mastering so chaotic an endeavour as war as I do?’

‘No, sir.’

Horus waved an admonishing finger. ‘Come on, Mal, you’re better than that. Stop sounding like a sycophant. Answer honestly.’

Maloghurst bowed and said, ‘Perhaps Guilliman.’

‘Too obvious,’ said Horus. ‘Some think he has no heart for war, that all he cares about are grand plans and stratagems. They’re wrong. He knows war as well as I do, he just wishes he didn’t.’

‘Then perhaps Dorn?’

‘No, too hidebound,’ said Horus. ‘Nor the Lion or Vulkan. And not the Khan, though he and I are so very close in alignment.’

‘Then who?’

‘Ferrus,’ answered Horus, tapping the lid of the ornately wrought box of lacquered wood and iron that sat next to him.

‘If he was so capable, then why is he dead?’

‘I didn’t say he was perfect,’ said Horus, leaning forward as the hololith hazed with static as it updated. ‘But he knew war like no other. Terra would already be ours if he had joined us, if my Phoenician brother had handled the approach with a modicum of subtlety.’

‘Subtlety was never Fulgrim’s strong suit,’ said Maloghurst.

‘No, but that lack has played in our favour here.’

‘It has?’

‘The power Fulgrim so willingly embraced has whispered honey in the dreams of Molech’s rulers for many years,’ said Horus. ‘Those dreams are about to become reality. And when they do, trust me, Mal, you’ll be glad we kept so far away.’

A stone lintel cracked and slammed down, blocking further progress along the trench. A firestorm raged overhead and Abaddon pressed himself flat against the vitrified stone wall as flames roared along its length. Fire was little threat to Terminator armour, but this was weaponised plasma from a Titan’s weapon.

An Imperator Titan.

Paragon of Terra’s guns were ripping the world apart.

Missiles, explosive shells, hurricanes of bolter fire, laser fire and killing beams from volcano cannon. What little was left of the trenches and strongpoints of this flank were being reduced to shot-blasted powder.

The Justaerin could survive a great deal, more than any other living thing on the battlefield, but the damned Imperator was going to kill them all. The walls of the trench blew inwards with the shock wave of another weapon system. Abaddon pushed away chunks of hot stone and metal.

A veteran hauled Abaddon clear with his one remaining arm. The other ended at the shoulder where the pressure wave of a passing gatling shell had ripped it away. Another weapon fired overhead, something with solid rounds, though Abaddon could no longer pick one weapon’s fire from another. The overpressure of the cycling rounds battered his armour like an army of aggrieved forge-smiths.

Everything merged into one continuous thunder of explosions, percussive hammer blows on the ground and searing thunderstorms of impossibly bright light that burned everything they touched.

The trenches had provided some cover, but they were no match for the holocaust-level destruction an Imperator could unleash. He doubted half his warriors had survived this far. Another few minutes and they would all be dead.

‘What was the Warmaster thinking sending us into this?’ yelled Kibre, stumbling from a blockhouse of adamantium made soft as butter by the plasma fire. Abaddon saw the corpses of at least a dozen Justaerin within. More filled the trench system around him, but he couldn’t see them. Too many red icons to know how many were dead, how many alive.

More dead than he’d ever thought to see among the Justaerin.

‘How are we supposed to get past that Imperator?’

Abaddon had no answer for the Widowmaker, and set off down the trench. Movement was their only ally. To remain static was to die.

More explosions shook the trenches. The ground split and vomited earth and smoke. It felt like the very bedrock of Molech was breaking apart. Abaddon half expected to see lakes of magma ooze up from the cracks in the earth. Hundreds of las-blasts roared overhead, a horizontal rain of killing light. More explosions, more fire, more detonations, more death.

His one-armed rescuer died as three spinning pieces of rebar sliced through his chest, pinning him to the rock. Two plunged into the ground less than half a metre from Kibre. Abaddon grinned and shook his head.

A world-shaking impact burst the walls of the trench. Fire-fused glass cracked and fell to the ground. Burned earth poured in from above. Ruptured bodies came with it, threatening to bury them alive with the men they had killed.

‘Now what?’ demanded Kibre, pushing along the corpse-choked trench behind Abaddon. Explosions chased them. Debris rained and the sky turned to fire.

Abaddon paused.

‘That wasn’t a weapon,’ he said.

‘Then what in the nine hells was it?’

‘A footstep,’ said Abaddon. ‘It’s the Imperator. It’s coming to crush us.’

The End Times had come to Molech. This was to be the last ride of the Stormlord, a final sally into the jaws of death. His noble vajra knights rode with him as they faced the daemon beast and the world’s ending.

It towered over everything, a mountain-sized creature of darkness that was swallowing the world with its every breath. The black and white of its scales was only eclipsed by the fire surrounding it.

Fire from its daemonic breath and fire from its sorcerous fists.

It was unmaking the world, and though it would surely cost him his life, he knew he had to try and stop it. His steed bucked beneath him, its animal brain understandably reluctant to ride into the fire of its doom.

He quelled it with a sharp thought.

But on the back of that thought came another, a treacherous and unbecoming one. A mortal thought.

This is not real, it said, this is fantasy...

The voice grew louder until it was screaming in his skull. The Stormlord tried to shut it out, but it only grew more intense. And for a moment the towering form of the dragon wavered. Its outline blurred and Albard saw just what he was charging towards.

Albard? Yes, Albard...

He was the Stormlord.

No, he was Albard Devine. Firstborn Scion of Cyprian Devine, Knight Seneschal of Molech, Imperial commander in the Imperium of Man. This was his world.

A poison veil fell from Albard’s fevered eyes and he saw the interior of the Banelash’s canopy through the mist of his one remaining eye. He reclined in a fluid place of unnatural angles and billowing musks. Of silks and gold and gems. The interior was no longer machine-smoothed metal, but possessed the fleshy, furred texture of a pleasure palace.

Where before he had interfaced with the Knight’s operation via the spinal implants, now his wasted body was a mass of writhing, serpentine ropes that oozed from the warped interior. Their ends were puckered with lamprey-like mouths. Tiny needle teeth buried in the meat of his limbs as they fed on him and filled his veins with their scented toxins.

‘No!’ screamed Albard, but laughter was his only answer.

One brother rejects me and tries to kill me – do you think I will let another do the same?

‘I am Albard Devine!’ he cried, holding onto his sense of self as blissful ecstasies filled his mind with pleasure. ‘I am...’

His protests died as the fronds caressing his limbs withdrew and he saw what he had become. Beneath the mouths of the mass of snake-like feelers, he was naked, but he was not the ravaged specimen of wretchedness he’d expected.

Albard wept to see strong thighs with well-defined quadriceps. His belly was flat and cut with abdominal muscles. His pectorals were the very epitome of sculpted perfection. He was a god among men, as perfect as the gilded statues of the Emperor’s sons that flanked the approach to the Sanctuary.

The years since his failed Becoming were wiped away and all that he could have been was revealed. This was what he should have been, this was what Raeven and Lyx had stolen from him.

This was what the Serpent Gods had offered Raeven and what he had selfishly thrown back in their faces. He would not make that mistake. Albard would live up to the promise of all he had been raised to expect. His would be a life of glory lived for the Serpent Gods.

What they offered was everything he had been denied.

The broken psyche that was Albard Devine had no chance against such blandishments and the force of his own ambitions.

‘I am yours...’ he whispered, and the lamprey-like mouths of the snake fronds fastened on his limbs once again. The pain of their teeth upon his perfect body was a welcome pain. He convulsed as the heady mix of daemonic elixirs coursed around his body. The sensation of bliss was unstoppable, matched only by his horror at the crippled thing he had once been.

Albard blinked and the interior of the pilot’s canopy was wiped from his sight.

The Stormlord’s warhorse rode towards the towering beast of black and white as it turned its killing fire on a host of brave foot knights making a last stand by a flame-belching crater where once had stood a mighty fortress.

‘Vajras!’ he bellowed. ‘Ride with me to victory!’

In the end, it wasn’t natural Cthonian ferocity or hot-as-hell-in-the-heart resilience that saved Aximand’s Sons of Horus. Nor was it any small-unit tactics of uncommon brilliance or heroic leadership from a charismatic officer.

In the end it was Titans that saved them.

Mourn-it-all had reaped a fearsome tally, its edge as sharp as the day the Warmaster had restored it. But a sharp sword and an arm to swing it weren’t enough. The Sons of Horus fought a desperate retreat through the maze of shattered blocks that was all that remained of the flanking wall, harried at every turn by vengeful Ultramarines.

Hundreds of warriors grappled and stabbed and shot one another in the fog of explosions and burning propellant. Wrecked vehicles lay strewn in the rubble. Random rounds cooked off and crackled in the flames. Mortal soldiers unlucky enough to be caught in the middle were killed within moments, crushed in the fray, hacked open or shredded in withering crossfire.

This was Legion war. Mortals had no place in it.

Bolter shells caromed off Aximand’s armour, swords gouged the bonded ceramite and explosions battered him with debris. All semblance of purpose and control among the combatants was eroded in the smoking, flame-lit nightmare. Even in the chaos, Aximand knew the Ultramarines held the upper hand. With every hacking sweep, every snatched pistol shot, the Sons of Horus were a step closer to defeat.

Aximand had killed seventeen Ultramarines.

An admirable ratio, but not without its cost.

Aximand’s right shoulder guard was gone, torn away by the heavy blast of an emplaced autocannon. The flesh beneath was burned black and every movement of the arm brought a hiss of pain to his lips. His plastron was cracked and the coolant pipes crossing underneath spewed chemicals down his legs in oily sheets. Regrown vertebrae protested at his sudden movements, the grafted bone not yet fully bedded in.

But the fight wasn’t lost.

For all their damned practical, for all that they held the upper hand, the Ultramarines couldn’t put the Sons of Horus to rout. Almost any other foe would have broken in the face of such a relentless killing machine of war, but the Sons of Horus were weaned on blood. They gave ground only in blood.

And that had earned them a reprieve.

Unimaginably powerful weapons discharged behind Aximand. The kind that would kill you without you even knowing it, the kind that would atomise every molecule of your body before the brain even registered the muzzle flash.

Now that weaponry was turned on the warriors of the XIII Legion.

A column of incandescent light erupted in the heart of the blue-armoured warriors. Plasma washed up like a geyser as the white heat of a blastgun turned its heat on the enemy infantry.

A one-armed Warhound climbed to the top of the rubble, its hull pitted with stubber impacts. Void shield haze clung to its ripped carapace like corposant, and oily blood streamed from its underside.

Bloodveil.

Its remaining arm unleashed a withering fan of turbo fire. Ultramarines were hollowed out, sliced open and boiled within their armour. Killing light speared through the ruins. Five metre spurts of vapour and fragmented armour stitched through the rubble. Two dozen warriors were cut down in the blink of an eye.

The white-heat of the laser weapon’s discharge burned the fog and Aximand punched the air like the old days when he saw the limping giant, Silence of Death, approaching. The Reaver had been taken apart, its armour in tatters and both its arms destroyed. The Knights had almost brought the Reaver down, but going head to head with a Battle Titan, any hope of victory had always been slender.

The Reaver’s apocalypse launcher filled the sky with dozens of missiles. Then a dozen more. Streaking darts of light arced overhead and slashed down in a hammering series of explosions that merged into one continuous roar of detonation.

Atop the rubble, Bloodveil threw back its head and loosed an ululating blast of its warhorn. A bellow of victory or a paean of loss? Aximand couldn’t tell.

Silence of Death crashed down onto its knees, its upper carapace swaying as flames erupted from the princeps canopy. The Interfector engine had turned the fight around, but it would take no further part in the battle.

The thunder of explosions shook the earth and Aximand gripped a bent iron girder jutting from the ruins to take a breath.

In the precious moment he had, Aximand reloaded his bolter.

Last magazine.

Then he saw he wouldn’t need it.

Withdrawing in good order from battle was one of the most difficult manoeuvres a formation could make. Doing it under fire made it next to impossible.

Yet that was what the Ultramarines had done.

Yade Durso staggered through the smoke, looking as though he’d gone toe-to-toe with the Knights himself.

‘You made it,’ said Aximand.

‘Lupercal helped me,’ said Durso, holding up his hand.

The golden Eye of Horus that Durso had carried was melted into his palm, forever to be part of his gauntlet. Its outline was heat softened, but still clearly recognisable.

‘I was bolter dry and sword broken,’ said Durso. ‘A Thirteenth Legion bastard had me dead to rights.’

‘So what happened?’

Durso clenched his fist. ‘I had to punch his damn head off.’

The hololith filled with multiple inloads coming from orbital survey tracks. A wealth of data filled the slate. New icons, new force vectors. Unknown contacts.

Unknown to the battle cogitators, corrected Horus.

Not unknown to me.

‘You are a wonder, my indomitable brother,’ said Horus. He stood and his presence filled the pavilion with bellicose intent.

Maloghurst bent to the slate, his eyes darting between the multiple inloads.

‘Send word to the Legion,’ said Horus, lifting Worldbreaker from the nearest weapon rack. ‘Full advance. It’s time to end this.’

‘Is that...?’ began Maloghurst, his finger tracing a line of sigils advancing from the south.

‘It is,’ said Horus. ‘Right where I need him to be and just when I need him.’

‘How could you know he would arrive right at this moment?’

‘I’m the Warmaster,’ said Horus. ‘It’s not just a pretty title.’

Tyana Kourion fought the Battle of Lupercalia from the interior of her Stormhammer. Even protected by many centimetres of layered adamantium and steel plating, the sturm und drang of the apocalyptic conflict was still a symphony of thunder and hammer blows on the side of the superheavy.

The roar of its engine and the world-shaking crash of its multiple weapon systems made ear-defenders a necessity. It was cramped, deafening and stank of oil and sweat and fear. Each second this battle raged, hundreds of her soldiers were dying. It was her job to win this battle quickly.

Half a dozen data-slates parsed inloading information from vox-reports, pict-capture, auspex feeds and visual tagging.

No battle ever went according to plan, and today was no exception. The loss of the Blood Angels had horrified her, but their suicidal charge had bowed the enemy line, giving her guns more chance to savage the advance.

Was that worth the deaths of a hundred Legion warriors?

No, but better to make use of it than lament it.

The fighting had evolved naturally into a shifting tide of heady charges, strategic withdrawals, outright routs and flowing thrusts. Imperial and traitor tanks duelled in their own miniature battlefields, each one a tiny piece of a greater whole; hooking flanking manoeuvres, pincer traps and staggered echelons.

The Titans of Gryphonicus and Crucius waged war on a plane far removed from that of the mortals fighting in their colossal shadows. They fought with weapons whose venting could burn an entire company to death. It was war on a scale where ejected shells could crush a squadron of armoured transports and a misplaced step could destroy an entire battalion.

Sensible commanders avoided being anywhere near engines at war, but sometimes there was no escaping their monstrous presence. Like giants among ants, the Titans crashed and battered one another and their deaths took hundreds of warriors on both sides with them.

Gryphonicus’s complement of Titans was primarily Warhounds, and they had harried the flanks. At least four were gone, either buried in the mountain’s ruin or surrounded and gunned down by Legio Vulcanum’s more numerous Reavers.

The enemy Titans had started the day with the numerical advantage, but Paragon of Terra had steadily eroded that advantage to the point where the engine forces were more or less at parity. At the current rate of attrition, the Imperial engines would soon outnumber those of the Warmaster.

‘More Chimeras and mass-transit carriers coming through on the right,’ observed Naylor. ‘We can’t ignore it any longer. Soon they’ll have enough massed to pose a serious threat there.’

‘Crucius and Gryphonicus aren’t stopping them?’ asked Kourion.

‘They’re wreaking bloody murder on the Mechanicum war machines and their superheavies, but they’re ignoring a lot of the infantry carriers.’

‘They’re beneath them,’ replied Kourion.

‘They’ll be right on bloody top of us unless we push them back before they’ve enough numbers to threaten that flank.’

‘Agreed,’ said Kourion, pulling the battle-inload from the right flank to her main slate. Her eyes scanned the dozens of icons there, quickly assessing their worth and combat effectiveness.

Nothing left alive there with the strength to mount an effective counterattack. She haptically swept up the centre and reserves.

One force icon stood out above all others.

‘There,’ she said, jabbing a finger. ‘That’s our best chance to throw them back. Get them in the damn fight.’

Naylor nodded. ‘Good choice. No combat degradation and perfectly positioned to support the Titans.’

‘Send the orders,’ said Kourion, turning her attention to the confusing haze of gross-displacement weapon discharges on the left where Castor Alcade’s Ultramarines were deployed. She didn’t know what was happening there and that was unacceptable.

Naylor dialed into the local vox-net.

‘Lord Devine,’ said Naylor, exloading a series of engagement vectors. ‘You and your knights are ordered to immediately engage the enemy at the following grid-sectors.’

Vox-static hissed in reply.

The multi-tiered command bridge of Paragon of Terra smelled of oil and incense, hot circuitry and anger. Two hundred calculus logi, servitors and deck crew were plugged into tactica-engines and command consoles, reviewing encrypted vox from every element of Tyana Kourion’s battle-net. A constant drone of low-level binary and hushed voices blended with hot, grainy static and clicking prayers. Heat bled into every system, the anger of the Titan’s machine-spirit rendering every system with a red haze.

Angled slates projected news from all over Molech, hanging in drifting entoptic veils of light. Each one only served to stoke the nuclear heart of the Titan’s rage.

An Imperator Titan was a land-bound starship, as powerful and as demanding a mistress as any void craft. Crewed by thousands throughout its towering height, it was as complex a machine as had ever been built by the hands of man. Only the secret designs of the Ark Mechanicum dared approach the complexity of an Imperator.

To give life to so immense a machine and set it to motion was an entirely different thing to setting a ship in space. Zero gravity forgave a great many things that planetary environments did not.

Its Manifold was a proud, regal thing. An apex predator without rivals, a lord of battle with fangs no other could match and a fury equalled only by its commander.

Princeps Kalonice stood at the jutting prow of the strategium, hands braced on her hips as she drank in the data inloads feeding into the Manifold. She swiped a mechanical hand through the various projections, parting them like smoke and inloading them instantaneously.

Encased in the body-carapace of a Lorica Thallax, all that remained of Etana Kalonice was her skull and spine, fused within the mechanised body of meticulous construction. With reverse-jointed piston legs and wheezing, clicking mechanical joints, she was a robot in all but consciousness.

Contoured plates of porcelain-white armour encased her organic material, and hair-fine copper mind impulse unit cabling allowed her to interface with the fiendishly intricate mechanisms of Paragon of Terra without a gel-filled casket. To be so bound to a machine body was exquisite agony, but Kalonice would rather face a lifetime of pain than permanent entombment.

<Mister Sular,> she said. <Assessment?>

Algorithmic resonators translated synaptic activity into sounds and allowed Kalonice’s voice to sound virtually human. It almost took away the edge of pain, but not quite.

A flurry of topographical images bloomed at her senior moderati’s station. Maps, threat vectors, combat prognoses. Paragon of Terra’s preferred targets jostled for his attention, but Sular suppressed them in favour of answering his princeps.

‘The Warmaster has fatally underestimated the resistance he would face, ma’am,’ said Sular, a torso with mechanised arms fused with the battle-logister. ‘The Imperial line has collapsed in a number of places, but not enough for a breakthrough. A good defence in depth and numerous flanking sallies have allowed General Kourion’s reserve forces to meet each breakthrough and contain it.’

<Except this one,> said Kalonice.

‘With respect to General Kourion, the destruction of Iron Fist Mountain was unthinkable.’

<The Warmaster thought it,> she said, feeling the spike of the Imperator’s desire for revenge through her spine like a shank.

The Legio Crucius fortress was gone, reduced to a seething, volcanic ruin by orbital fury. All their history, all their connections to their sister Legios gone. In one fell swoop, the Warmaster had brought Legio Crucius to the edge of extinction.

‘And we’ll make them pay for that,’ said Carthal Ashur, pacing the deck like a man on a crowded stage with no role to play.

<That we will, Mister Ashur, but please sit down. You are distracting me, and I do not need distractions now.>

‘Apologies ma’am,’ said Ashur, forcing himself onto a vacant supplicant’s bench.

She’d met Carthal Ashur many years ago, had even once bedded him when there was still enough of her to make such a prospect tenable. He’d been a disappointment, but his talent with words and mortals had persuaded her to keep him around as Calator Martialis.

‘Multiple targets inbound,’ reported Moderati Sular. ‘Two dozen main battle tanks. Six superheavies. Supporting infantry, battalion strength.’

‘Any Titan killers?’ asked Ashur.

Kalonice could taste his sweat over the scented oils of the bridge, a mix of eagerness and unfamiliarity. He’d been part of Legio Crucius for decades, but this was only his third time aboard a Battle Titan. His first in battle.

Moderati Sular looked to Kalonice, and she nodded her assent for him to answer Ashur’s question.

‘Shadowswords, aye,’ said Sular, sweeping the data over to the strategium. ‘Some traitor Mechanicum elements too. Highlighting.’

The local area around the Imperator was rendered in cascades of binary, illuminating forces both friendly and enemy. Tanks, infantry, Knights, artillery.

Each of the enemy icons already had a target solution plotted, the Mechanicum elements and superheavies assigned kill-priority.

Paragon of Terra was anticipating her, and Kalonice let it.

Ten Shadowswords with volcano cannons. Unidentified Mechanicum battle-engines – a mix of Ordinatus and Titan, each armed with weapons capable of wreaking great harm on her.

If they could be brought to bear.

<Ready the hellstorm,> she ordered. <Magos Surann? How long until the annihilator is ready?>

‘Information – five seconds,’ answered Magos Surann from the raised gallery behind her, where plugged Mechanicum adepts sat in rows like a binary choir.

<Perfect,> said Kalonice, bunching a fist at her side as readiness icons flashed up from the multiple weapon systems atop the battlements at the Titan’s shoulders. Her Thallax body was limber and agile, but the sensory weight of the Imperator was immense. At times like this, she could accept there were some benefits to being held weightless within amniotic gels.

She felt stabbing prickles all across her body. Her void shields were taking hits, scrappy and uncoordinated, but hits nonetheless. The infantry she’d stepped over had heavy weapons. Nothing individually capable of harming her or taking out a void shield, but irritating nonetheless.

The Shadowswords were firing, the bright spears of their volcano cannons bursting shields and overloading the pylons.

‘The voids are taking hits,’ said Ashur, as though she wouldn’t already know that.

<I said no distractions,> said Kalonice, issuing an engagement order to every weapon section. <Open fire.>

Kalonice let each of her weapons systems have its head, allowing the moderati and techs to wreak their own devastation. They all deserved a measure of the spoils of vengeance. The recoil from so many vast weapon systems was dampened by multiple suspensor webs and pneumatic compensators, but still shook the command bridge with the force of so many discharges.

Enemy icons vanished from the Manifold, dozens at a time.

But she kept the plasma annihilator for herself, zeroing in on a towering engine of bronze and brass worked with skulls and lurching towards her on spiked wheels. A corrupted engine of the Mechanicum, a hateful reminder of treachery within her own order.

Kalonice drew power from the boiling reactor core at her heart. The heat was immense, and she drew and drew from the well of plasma fire until the screaming agony in her right fist was almost too much to bear.

<You’re mine,> she said, but even as the algorithmic resonator formed the words, Kalonice felt an icy cold knife slide into her lower back. Illusory, but no less painful for that.

The pain broke her hold on the plasma fury encased in her fist and the arm vanished in a furious supernova of white fire that rocked the Imperator back on its heels. Kalonice screamed, the resonators having no problem rendering the depths of her agony.

Her Thallax body fell to the deck, bio-feedback bathing her machine-wrapped spinal column in pain signals. The pain was overwhelming, all-consuming. Kalonice fought to shut herself off to the sensations, but Paragon of Terra’s pain was hers now. The reactor at her heart convulsed. Armour plating buckled, atomic bleed-off vented explosively from cycling louvres on the Titan’s rear quarters.

Alarms blared. Binaric horns screamed their agonies into the command bridge. Damage controls blew out in overload and the red light of anger became a blood light of horrifying pain. Kalonice struggled to hold on, to not let the loss of her arm break her grip on the Manifold. She heard the machine-spirit of the Titan howling, an animal vocalisation of impossible pain.

‘Etana!’ cried a voice. A flesh voice. One she knew.

<Carthal?> she gasped.

‘It’s me,’ he said, hauling her to her feet. She looked down at her right arm, expecting to see it as a mangled, molten mess. But, of course, it was undamaged. Paragon of Terra had borne the hurt, but she had felt it. Oh, how she had felt it!

<What happened?>

‘They hit us,’ said Ashur. ‘The bastards hit us hard.’

<How?> she said, gradually inloading jagged shards of data. <We still have voids in place.>

‘It came from inside the voids,’ said Ashur, flinching as the Imperator rocked with the force of impacts.

Kalonice felt the impacts. Searing, stabbing blades plunging into her machine body.

‘It’s House Devine!’ said Ashur.

<House Devine? Clarify.>

‘The bastards have betrayed us,’ hissed Ashur.

The dragon was screaming. It bled smoke and light from its wounds, and the Stormlord closed for the kill. He rammed his lance into the beast’s flanks, hearing the splinter of bones and the hiss of slicing flesh. His other arm was a crackling whip, useless against such a towering beast, but lethal to the tiny, scurrying things that spilled from its legs.

He circled around again, bringing his lance to bear as a storm of spines blasted from the beast’s carapace. A knight fell, pierced through by one such barb and he came apart in an explosion of blood and horsemeat.

The towering beast staggered. Their sudden attack had caught it off guard and almost brought it to its knees. But he had not thought to humble it with one strike. Already it was reacting to them, but the Stormlord had not earned himself that name without good reason.

He wheeled around the crashing footfall of the beast. The thunderous impact shook the ground for kilometres in all directions. His horse reared in panic, but he quelled it with the force of his will.

His knights circled back and forth, closing in time and again to deliver thrusts of their lances and stabbing cuts from their reapers. They were hurting it, but it was too big to be brought down by such wounds.

He looked up and saw the beast’s wounded heart, a pulsing shimmer of light where the source of its power lay. Thick scales of draconic armour protected its heart from a frontal attack, but from behind...

From behind it was vulnerable. Even more so now. The Stormlord’s first thrust had hurt the beast and exposed its greatest weakness.

‘Warriors of Molech!’ shouted the Stormlord. ‘No one lance can pierce this beast’s armour. We must be as one in our ardour, as one in our thrust into its heart.’

A breath of fire incinerated another of his vajras. If the killing blow was not struck soon, the beast would overwhelm them. It was already turning its wounded heart away.

‘Your lances!’ screamed the Stormlord. ‘Unite them with mine!’

His knights formed up around him as they rode with all possible speed to chase the dragon’s wounded heart. It bled light and steam, the exhalations of a monster the world needed slain.

The Stormlord laughed as he felt the strength of his knights fill him. Their lance arms were now his. What he stabbed, they stabbed. What he killed, they would kill.

The leavings of the beast still streamed from its gigantic legs. Ants and bacterium shed from a desperate creature that knew its ending was at hand, but still clung to life. Hundreds of them, thousands perhaps. The vajras fought and killed them with their battle blades alone, for their lance arms were now his to command.

His armour shuddered with impacts, his shield arm was just as strong as his lance arm. He felt the heat of the conjoined lances in his fingers, the potency of a weapon on the brink of release.

The dragon knew what he was doing.

It knew he had the power to kill it.

He was too fast for it, the fleetness of his steed more than a match for its cumbersome power. No matter how fast it tried to turn, he would be quicker. It spat a breath of fire to the ground, incinerating a host of its own defenders in its desperation. The Stormlord felt one of his vajras die, and cried out as he felt the righteous fury of the knight fill him.

The spirits of the dead flowed into him, filling his skull with their death screams. Any other man would have been driven mad by now, but he was the Stormlord. He was the hero, the saviour of Molech and he would end this beast.

And then he saw it exposed, the beast’s one weakness.

The Stormlord thrust his lance deep into the exposed heart of his prey.

And where he stabbed, so too did his warriors.

What remained of the XIII Legion forces followed pre-prepared evacuation routes down the Untar Mesas. Three Rhinos with little of the cobalt-blue of Ultramar left on their structure after the devastating barrages of plasma fire.

Barely a handful had survived the slaughter. The Sons of Horus had the left flank, and were pouring in heavy armour. Army units of artillery were racing to occupy the high ground and more Interfector engines were pushing to complete the flank’s collapse.

The slate before Arcadon Kyro completed its auspex sweep, but came up empty. No Ultramarines armour locators that weren’t already aboard the withdrawing Rhinos.

‘Are there any more?’ asked Castor Alcade, and the desperate hope Kyro heard was a whip to an already bloodied back.

‘No, sir,’ he replied, his voice strained and hoarse. A breath of superheated air had scalded the inside of his lungs. If he survived this battle, they’d need replacing. ‘This is it.’

‘Three damn squads!’ hissed Alcade, slamming a fist against the buckled interior of the Rhino. ‘How can that be all that’s left?’

‘We were hit by Titans,’ said Kyro. ‘We’re Thirteenth Legion, but even we can’t soak up that kind of firepower.’

‘Keep looking,’ insisted Alcade.

‘If anyone else made it out, I’d know by now,’ said Kyro.

‘Keep looking, damn you. I want more of my men found.’

‘Sir, there’s no one left,’ said Kyro. ‘It’s just us.’

Alcade sagged and Kyro hated that he had to be the bearer of yet another turn of fate that saw his legate further humiliated.

He’d lost his helmet in the fighting, and his armour was blackened all over where a backwash of plasma had caught him. He’d suffered burns to most of his exposed flesh, and could feel the puckering tightness of wounds that would never heal.

Hot winds rammed into the Rhino through a gaping wound in the glacis. Virtually the entire frontal section had been sheared off in an explosion, leaving the driver’s compartment exposed. Instead of seeing the battlefield through external pict-feeds or a slender vision block, Kyro had a gaping hole large enough for two legionaries to climb through abreast of one another.

‘Any word from Salicar?’ asked Alcade. ‘We should link with the Blood Angels, pool our resources.’

Kyro didn’t answer, his attention snared by the hideous sight far across the battlefield. Even the intervening smoke of battle couldn’t obscure the horror of what he was seeing.

‘What in Guilliman’s name is going on over there?’ said Alcade.

Kyro shook his head. What it looked like was impossible.

The Knights of House Devine were attacking Paragon of Terra. Something had already wounded it. One arm was missing, and it staggered with shrieking feedback agonies. It bled corrosive fogs and fire. It had been hurt badly.

The Knights’ battle cannon punched craters in its legs. Their reapers were cutting down the skitarii and Army troops stationed in its leg bastions by the hundred. They darted in to fire thermal lances into its upper sections, peeling back its rear armour like foil paper.

‘What do they think they’re doing?’ demanded Alcade.

‘They’re traitors,’ hissed Kyro, unwilling to believe it, despite the evidence of his own eyes. ‘Raeven Devine has been with Horus this whole time!’

‘Then his life is mine,’ said Alcade.

Kyro ignored the legate’s bombasts, and fixed his attention on the lead Knight. A red gold machine with a golden banner streaming from its carapace and a crackling energy lash whipping at its side. He knew it as Banelash.

It skidded to a halt behind the Imperator and braced its legs.

‘They can’t hurt it can they?’ said Alcade. ‘They’re too small, surely. An Imperator’s far too big to–’

Raeven Devine’s Knight unleashed a stream of white-hot fire from his thermal lance. And for a fleeting second, Arcadon Kyro believed his legate might be correct.

Then that hope was dashed as every Knight of House Devine combined their lance fire into one incandescent beam of killing light. Combined to hideous effect, the lance fire punched through the weakened armour of Paragon of Terra.

Kyro’s senses were enhanced. He saw in spectra beyond those of unaugmented mortals, and knew immediately that the Imperator was doomed. He read the breaching of the vast reactor at the heart of Paragon of Terra as clear as the slate before him. Soaring temperature increases, coupled with spewing gouts of radioactive fire throughout the Titan’s superstructure told a cascading tale of the Imperator’s death.

The Knights knew it too and were already fleeing from their murder. Banelash led the Knights of House Devine towards the rear of the Imperial army, sprinting for all they were worth.

Paragon of Terra stood unmoving, and Kyro wept to see so magnificent an icon of mankind’s mastery of technology brought low.

‘Come on, come on,’ he hissed, willing the Mechanicum adepts and their servitors to vent the reactor, to eject what they could and save the rest, even though he already knew it was too late.

The thermal auspex blew out in a haze of sparks.

Kyro turned away and his auto-senses dimmed in response.

‘Don’t look at it,’ he warned.

Castor Alcade was more or less correct when he surmised that the Knights were far too insignificant to do more than inconvenience an Imperator. Their uncannily concentrated fire had caused a cascading series of reactor breaches within the engineering decks, but even that damage could have been contained.

As the adepts aboard Paragon of Terra initiated damage aversion protocols to avert a catastrophic reactor breach they were betrayed from within as well as without. Many of the Sacristans they had been forced to employ within the reactor spaces were those belonging to the Knight Households.

And by some considerable margin, the majority of these men had come from House Devine.

Quiet sabotage of venting systems, disabling of the coolant mechanisms and, in the end, the brutal murder of senior adepts, made an apocalyptic reactor breach inevitable.

The reactor empowering a Titan was a caged star.

Not a tamed one, never that.

And the reactor at the heart of an Imperator was orders of magnitude greater than all others.

The breach vaporised the entirety of Paragon of Terra in the blink of an eye and a seething eruption of plasma blew out in a cloud of expanding white heat.

The flash blinded all who looked upon it, burning the eyes from their skulls. Everything within a fifteen hundred metre radius of the Imperator simply vanished, incinerated to ash or reduced to molten metal in the blink of an eye.

Nightmarish temperatures and pressures at the point of detonation turned the earth to glass and blasted hot gaseous residue from the centre of the explosion at ferocious velocities. Contained within a dense hydrodynamic front, the explosion was a hammering piston compressing the surrounding air and smashing apart everything it struck. A hemispherically expanding blast wave raced after the roaring plasmic fireball, but quickly eclipsed its blazing fury.

The overpressure at ground zero was enormous, gouging a crater deep into the surface of Molech and hurling even the largest of war machines through the air like grains of wheat blown from a farmer’s palm.

In the first instant of detonation, the death toll on both sides was in the tens of thousands. It rose exponentially in the following seconds. Mere mortals within four kilometres of the explosion were killed almost instantly, pulped by the overpressure as it rolled outwards.

Beyond that, those soldiers in cover or within reinforced blockhouses survived a few seconds longer until thunderous blast waves hammered down. Every strongpoint and trench system collapsed, and only the very fortunate or heavily armoured survived this stage of the explosion.

Towards the flanks, the seismic force swatted soldiers to the ground and halted the fighting as the enormity of what had just happened hit home.

A smoke-hazed mushroom cloud of plasma bled into the sky, reaching up to a height of thirteen kilometres and surrounded by ever-expanding coronas of blue-hot fire. Searing winds roared across the agri-plains north of Lupercalia, searing them of vegetation and life.

Those that survived would have plasma burns to rival any mark earned on other worlds torn apart by war. The centre of the Imperial line was gone, but thousands of soldiers and armoured vehicles remained to fight.

The destruction of Paragon of Terra was only the beginning of the end for Molech.

To the north and south, just beyond the farthest extent of the blast wave, dust clouds hazed the horizon as fresh forces were drawn to the vortex of battle.

Castor Alcade gripped tight to the battered flank of his Rhino, disbelief warring with horror at the sight of the Imperator’s destruction. The field of battle was in disarray, men and women crawling from the wreckage and trying to make sense of what had just happened.

Virtually the entire muster of Imperial war engines had fought in the shadow of Paragon of Terra, and were little more than smouldering wrecks, barely enough of them remaining to identify which engine was which.

‘It’s over,’ said Didacus Theron, stepping down from his Rhino.

‘No,’ said Alcade, pointing to where scattered command sections struggled to impose a semblance of order on what was left of their forces. ‘We march for Molech.’

‘But we don’t have to die for it,’ said Theron.

‘Hold your damn tongue,’ said Kyro.

‘And remember your place,’ snapped Theron, coming over to stand beside Alcade. ‘Legate, we don’t have to die here, not when Ultramar is at war and the Avenging Son needs us at his side.’

Alcade said nothing, for once in his life at a loss of what to do. Theoretical was everything, but what was the theoretical when every practical ended in death?

Amid the raging fire-swept wasteland below, Alcade saw the enemy had not been spared the horror of the explosion either. Their numbers were just as devastated. Only the enemy Titans had survived the blast intact, though even they had suffered heinous damage.

They stalked as shadows through the wall of dust and smoke thrown up by the explosion. Giant killers with nothing to oppose them. Even if the Imperial commanders below could rally their troops, what weapon did they have remaining that could fight traitor war engines?

‘We need to go back to Lupercalia,’ said Theron.

‘And then what?’ demanded Kyro.

‘We leave Molech,’ said Theron.

‘How? We have no ship.’

‘Then we take one from the enemy by force,’ said Theron. ‘We find an isolated vessel and storm it. Then we blast out-system and get back to the Five Hundred Worlds.’

‘You already censured a dozen legionaries that dared to voice that sentiment, Theron,’ said Kyro. ‘I see a few red helmets among our pitiful survivors.’

‘That was before the war was ended at a single stroke,’ countered Theron, turning his attention back to Alcade. ‘Sir, we can’t stay here. Dying on Molech will achieve nothing. There’s no practical to it. We need to go home and fight in a battle we can actually win.’

‘We have a duty to Molech, Theron,’ said Kyro. ‘We’re oathed to its defence, bound by the word of the Emperor.’

Castor Alcade let his subordinate’s words wash over him, knowing both were right, and both dead wrong. He rubbed a hand over his face, wiping away the grit and blood of battle. He blinked at yet another black mark against his name, another failure to add to the tally of near-misses and also-rans.

‘Sir, what are your orders?’ asked Kyro.

Alcade turned and put one foot up on the running board of the scorched Rhino, sparing a last look at the hell unleashed below. On the horizon were the unmistakable dust clouds of advancing armour. Lots of armour.

‘Get us to Lupercalia,’ said Castor Alcade.

‘Sir–’ began Kyro, but Alcade held up his hand.

‘That is my order,’ said Alcade. ‘It’s to Lupercalia.’

Tyana Kourion crawled from the wreckage of her Stormhammer, half blinded and burned. Her dress greens were black with oil and stiff with blood pulsing steadily from her stomach. Some ribs were broken, and she doubted her left leg would ever bear her weight again. Her right hand was a fused mess of blackened stumps. It didn’t hurt yet. It would hurt later, assuming she lived long enough for there to be a later.

The superheavy lay on its side, one half black and folded in on itself like a plastek model left too close to the fire. The rubber of its joints and cupolas dribbled like wax and she saw the skeletal remains of her crew that had been flung from the explosion.

She didn’t know where they were.

Her ears were ringing with detonation and concussion. Sticky fluid leaked from each one. She could hear, but everything was muted and subdued, as though filtered through water. Dust gritted her eyes, but she saw flashes of the nightmare through lifting clouds of smoke, as though the rogue thermals knew enough not to haunt her with too many scenes of horror in too short a time.

She heard howls of wounded soldiers. Ammunition cooking off. Fuel tanks ablaze and thudding footfalls that could only be enemy war engines on the hunt. Bloodstained soldiers sometimes wandered through her blurred field of vision. Men and women with missing limbs and shattered, glazed looks on their faces. Some turned at the sight of her, but if they recognised their commanding officer, they gave no sign.

Her army was gone. Destroyed in a heartbeat of Devine treachery.

She’d heard the last snatches of vox-intercept from Paragon of Terra, but hadn’t understood them until she’d reversed the Stormhammer to face the Imperator. She’d only just turned away from the pict-slate when the explosion came.

How long ago had that been? Not long surely.

Her tank was nowhere near where it had been dug in, swatted hundreds of metres by the force of the blast. She should be dead, and didn’t like to think what horrendous forces had been exerted on the Stormhammer’s hull. The impact of landing had crushed pretty much everyone in her tank but her.

Right about now, it felt like she’d gotten the raw deal.

Kourion propped herself up against the underside of the Stormhammer. Blood pooled in her lap. She knew a mortal wound when she saw one. She fumbled for her pistol with her left hand. She’d never bothered to procure a fancy sidearm, and had no family heirlooms like some of the more stuck up regimental commanders. This was just a standard, Mars-pattern laspistol. Full charge, textured grip and iron sights. Functional, but without embellishment.

Just like her.

It would have to do. It was the only weapon she had left, and she’d read somewhere that it was good for a soldier to die holding a weapon.

A shadow moved in front of her. Something with a living being’s bulk and fluidity. Something that shouldn’t be here. A huge monster covered in grey-furred scales lumbered past her, its arms and shoulders corded with inhuman musculature.

She struggled to remember the local name for the beast.

Mallahgra. Yes, that was it.

What the hell was a mallahgra doing this far north? Weren’t they all confined to the mountains and jungles? Then she saw it wasn’t alone. Dozens of identical beasts rampaged through the bloodied survivors of her army, mauling and feasting with abandon. Their speed was prodigious and they swept injured soldiers with clawed arms and tore them apart before feeding them into their meat-grinder mouths.

Giant feline predators the size of cavalry mounts bounded across the battlefield. Uniformed bodies hung limp in their jaws. Packs fought for spoils of flesh as though starved. Flocks of loping bird-like creatures with long necks stampeded over the battlefield. Their snapping jaws snatched up fleeing soldiers and bit them in half. Only a few hours ago, this had been Kourion’s grand army. The noise of the beasts receded, replaced with the rumble of engines and the tramp of heavy, booted feet.

Shapes moved in the smoke and dust, humanoid, but bulkier and taller than even the abhuman migou. Armoured in filthy plates of ivory, they ploughed through the fog as though born to it, led by a giant in rags and plate who bore a towering reaper blade.

And marching towards him, with arms open, was a warrior of equal stature, shrouded in shadows, but upon whose breast burned an amber eye. He hadn’t even deigned to draw the great maul slung across his shoulders.

Words passed between the giants, words of a battle fought and a world conquered. Blood poured out of Kourion, and she fought to hear what the giants said, knowing now who spoke. She should despise these traitors, these godlike beings who had slaughtered her army, but hated that she felt only awe.

Her vision began to fade.

Spots of grey grew in her peripheral vision.

The Warmaster took Mortarion’s hand in the old way, wrist to wrist. A way that in an earlier epoch had been born of mistrust, but which now stood as the grip of honourable warriors.

‘Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, brother,’ said Mortarion, ‘and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.’

Horus looked around him at the devastation, the dead bodies, the ruined weapons of war and the bellowing monsters. He grinned.

‘In war, they will kill some of us,’ said Horus. ‘But we shall destroy all of them.’

The last thing Tyana Kourion saw was the two primarchs coming together in a clatter of plate, embracing as dearest brothers.

Embracing in victory.

TWENTY-ONE

Hope to die
The man next to you
Legacy of Cortez

The streets of Lupercalia were crowded with people flocking towards the transit platforms. Alivia watched them through the vision blocks of the Galenus as it rumbled towards the upper reaches of the valley. Men, women and children were carrying everything they could on their backs or in overloaded groundcars.

Near the top of the valley she saw vapour trails of packed shuttles, lighters and supply barges struggling to get airborne.

‘What do you see?’ asked Jeph from farther back in the Galenus.

‘I see a lot of frightened faces,’ she answered.

Alivia knew they were right to be frightened.

None stood better than a one in hundred chance of getting off-world. Yet for all the fear she saw in the crowds pushing uphill, they still allowed the Galenus through. Some deep-rooted respect for the symbol of the Medicae made them get out of the way, and Alivia hated the fact that she considered her need greater than theirs.

After all, who was she to judge who should get off Molech and who should remain behind? And for the briefest moment she resented the one who had put her here and charged her with keeping watch over his secret.

She glanced down the length of the medicae vehicle, where Jeph, Vivyen and Miska sat with Noama Calver and Kjell. Five people she needed to get off-world. Five people whose escape would deny five others a chance of life. It was a trade off Alivia was more than willing to make.

But that didn’t make it sit any easier in her heart.

The vox-caster crackled, repeating the same message it had been transmitting for the last two hours. The speaker was concise, direct and eloquent in the way only career military men could be.

She’d suspected a trap, of course. False hope dangled for the sake of spite or some other malicious reason, but as she listened to the message, she’d heard the gloss of unvarnished truth.

There was a way off Molech.

An Imperial ship had survived the void war and found refuge in the asteroid belt. Repaired and rearmed, its captain had brought his ship back in an act of supreme courage.

Molech’s Enlightenment stood ready to evacuate refugees and survivors of the Warmaster’s invasion. The window of opportunity was narrow and shortening by the minute. Enemy ships would even now be lighting their reactors to break orbit and intercept it.

If Molech’s Enlightenment didn’t get away soon, it never would.

‘Coming up on the Windward Platforms,’ said Anson from the driver’s compartment. Alivia heard the anxiety in his voice. He wanted nothing more than to halt the Galenus and go get his girl, but Alivia didn’t have time to indulge him.

The Warmaster’s army would be here soon and she was already risking far too much by coming here first. But mission be damned, she wasn’t going to let her children die on Molech.

She smiled. Her children.

‘Don’t worry, Anson,’ said Alivia, clouding his anxieties and imparting a sense of wellbeing to him. ‘I’m sure Fiaa’s waiting for you here. She wouldn’t leave without you.’

‘No, she wouldn’t,’ said Anson, sounding relieved.

She justified the lie by telling herself it would keep him alive.

The Galenus rumbled to a halt and Alivia hauled open the side door of the vehicle. The smell of the city hit her first, warm spices and metallic smoke coming down from the fires burning beneath Mount Torger.

That and the smell of the thousands of shouting people mobbed before the gates to the landing platforms. The mood was ugly and ranked units of Dawn Guard were doing their best to keep a riot at bay. The mix of emotions was potent. Alivia did her best to shut them out, but there was only so much she could do.

She stifled a sob and leaned back into the Galenus.

‘Jeph, bring the girls,’ she said. ‘Noama, Kjell, time for you to get out too.’

She banged the driver’s door with her palm.

‘Anson, get out,’ she said. ‘I need you too.’

Jeph clambered out of the Galenus, his mouth dropping open in wonder at the scale of the city around him. Noama Calver and Kjell helped the girls down and kept them close as the press of nearby bodies closed in.

‘What about us?’ asked one of the wounded soldiers who’d hitched a ride with them back to Lupercalia.

‘You all stay put,’ she said, adding an emphatic push to her words. ‘I’m going to need you all. You, what’s your name?’

‘Valance. Corporal Arcadii Volunteers.’

‘Ever driven a Galenus before?’

‘No, ma’am, but I put some time in on a Trojan,’ said Valance. ‘Won’t be that much different.’

‘Good, get up front and keep the engine running. When I’m done here, we’re going to have to move fast to get to the Sanctuary. Are we clear?’

The man nodded and went forward into the driver’s compartment.

Alivia turned to the others and said, ‘Hold hands, and don’t let go for anything. Not for anything, you understand?’

They nodded, and she felt their fear. They linked hands and Alivia held hers out. Vivyen took one hand, Miska the other and with the adults trailing behind her in a narrow V, she pushed into the crowd.

The gates to the landing fields was perhaps a hundred metres away, and with every roar of struggling engines lifting off the mood of the crowd was souring further. She didn’t know what criteria the Dawn Guard were using for deciding who got through and who didn’t, but she guessed that most of the people here wouldn’t meet it.

Hostile stares and curses met her as she pushed forward, but she turned them all aside. The effort was draining. She’d never found this sort of thing as easy as John seemed to. Her talents lay towards empathic, less overt, means of manipulation. It took real effort and each calming touch took more out of her than the last.

But it was working, the crowds were moving aside for her.

She had her Ferlach serpenta loaded and tucked in the inside pocket of her coat should things get really ugly. She didn’t want to think what might happen to the girls if things got that bad.

Angry voices came from the gates. Querulous demands, pleading entreaties and desperate attempts at persuasion. Most were falling on deaf ears, but the occasional clang and clatter of a postern told her that at least some were getting through.

Alivia pushed her way to the front. A man in a richly-embroidered frock coat turned to berate her, but stepped aside with a puzzled expression.

‘No, after you, miss,’ he said.

Alivia nodded and turned her attention to the gate guards. She’d have to work fast. The man beside her might be accommodating enough to let her past, but the people behind him wouldn’t be so understanding.

The guard through the gate had a slung rifle and held out a data-slate and stylus. A list of approved personnel, quotas? It didn’t matter, it was her passport into the landing fields.

‘We need to get through,’ said Alivia, using a blunter form of persuasion than she would normally employ. ‘We’re on the list.’

‘Name?’

‘Alivia Sureka,’ she said, turning to push the others to the front and giving the guard their names. His face furrowed as his eyes scanned the slate. Alivia struggled to alter the perceptual centres of his brain. He was Munitorum. Unimaginative. A man born to live his life by lists.

‘Look, there,’ she said, reaching through the gate to put her hand on his wrist. ‘We’re on that list.’

The man shook his head, but Alivia conjured the image of her family’s names and those of Kjell and Noama into his mind.

‘I’m not seeing your... ah, wait, here they are,’ he said, nodding to the squad of soldiers at the gate controls. ‘Five coming in.’

The gate was a turnstile affair, unlocked to allow the requisite number of people through. The kind of gate that couldn’t easily be stormed once it was open.

Kjell and Anson went first, only too happy at this unexpected chance to get off-world. Noama went to follow them, but Alivia pulled her into a tight embrace before she went through.

‘Look after them for me,’ whispered Alivia.

Noama nodded and said, ‘I would have done anyway. You don’t need to do whatever it is you’ve done to the guard to me.’

‘Sorry,’ said Alivia with a flush of guilt. ‘I know you will.’

‘Take care,’ said Noama. ‘And whatever it is you’re going to do, be quick about it. These girls need you.’

Alivia nodded as Jeph steered the girls towards the gate. She put her arms around him and said ‘Be safe, and take care of our beautiful girls.’

He smiled. Then the import of her words hit him.

‘Wait, what? You’re staying?’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I have to.’

‘You’re not coming with us?’ said Vivyen, her eyes brimming with tears. Alivia knelt beside the girl and took her in her arms.

‘There’s something I still need to do here,’ she said.

Miska put her arms around her. ‘Come with us, Liv. Please.’

Alivia hugged them tightly and just for a moment she considered just going through the gate. Getting on a shuttle and heading up to Molech’s Enlightenment. Who would blame her? What could she do against the might of an entire army?

The moment passed, but the thought of never seeing the girls again was a cold knife in her heart. Tears ran down her face as she held Vivyen and Miska tight.

‘I’m sorry, but I can’t come with you.’

‘Why not?’ sobbed Vivyen. ‘Please, don’t leave us.’

‘You’ve got your father,’ said Alivia. ‘And Noama and Kjell will look after you. I’ve got something I need to do here, so I can’t leave. Not yet. I made a promise a long time ago, and I can’t break it. As much as I want to.’

‘Come with us,’ said Miska. ‘Please, I love you and I don’t want you to die.’

‘I’m not going to die,’ said Alivia. ‘And once I get done I’ll come and join you.’

‘You promise?’ said Vivyen.

‘Hope to die,’ said Alivia, knowing she’d never make good on that promise. She’d broken a lot of promises over the years, but this one hurt worst of all.

She eased the girls’ fears with a gentle push.

‘Listen, you’ve got to go now. There’s a shuttle that’s going to take you to a starship, and that’s going to be the biggest adventure you’ve ever had. And once I get done here, I’ll see you on board. We’ll share the adventure together, yeah?’

They nodded, and the belief she saw in their faces almost broke her heart. Alivia wanted nothing more than to get on that shuttle with them, to turn her back on Molech forever, but that earlier promise had a stronger hold on her.

She reached into her coat and pulled out the battered storybook. It had been with her for longer than she could remember, but it wouldn’t do any good where she was going. She didn’t like the thought of the book ending its days lost forever beneath the surface of Molech and pressed it into Vivyen’s hands.

She closed the girl’s fingers around the book’s spine.

‘I want you to look after this for me, Viv,’ said Alivia. ‘It’s a very special book, and the stories in it will keep you from getting scared.’

Vivyen nodded and clutched the book to her chest.

‘Is everything going to be okay?’ asked Miska.

‘Yeah,’ said Alivia through her tears. ‘It’s going to be okay.’

Old breath sighed across his neck, chill and sharp despite the insulation of his armour. Loken moved slowly, trying to fix on the backplate of Ares Voitek’s armour. Three of the servo-arms were drawn in tight, a fourth with a passive auspex monitoring the surrounding spaces.

This high in the Vengeful Spirit, there were internal security surveyors, and each time Voitek raised a palm, they would stop and Tubal Cayne would develop a workaround. Often these would take them to places worthy of marking, and Bror’s futharc symbols became ever more elaborate in their directions.

‘What if one of the Sons of Horus sees these?’ asked Varren.

‘They won’t,’ said Bror. ‘And if they do, so what?’

‘Well, won’t they just erase them?’

Loken had wondered the same thing, but Bror just shrugged. ‘They will or they won’t. No use worrying about it.’

Loken heard a sound, like a palm slapping on pipework. He halted and dropped to one knee with a fist in the air.

‘What is it?’ hissed Nohai.

‘Thought I heard something.’

‘Severian? Anything ahead?’

The vox chirruped with burbling static. There’d been a lot of that the closer they’d moved to the vessel’s prow. Voitek said it was the increased density of machine-spirits, but Loken wasn’t so sure, though he couldn’t have named what he thought it might be.

‘Don’t you think I’d have said so?’ answered Severian.

‘Is that a no?’

‘Yes, it’s a no. Now shut up and let me work.’

They passed into the forward galleries, taking one of the service tunnels that ran the length of the ship. Following Cayne’s plotter towards the prow, Loken realised that this portion of the ship was one he had seen before.

Or, more accurately, it felt like somewhere he’d visited.

He paused to make sure he wasn’t mistaken.

No, this was one of the places, a lonely forgotten pocket within the ship’s layered superstructure. Dark now as it had been then, brackish water drizzled from conduits bolted to the roof. The remains of burned down tapers floated in oily puddles.

‘Something wrong?’ asked Varren.

‘I can’t say,’ replied Loken.

Varren grunted and moved ahead. Loken let Nohai and Tyrfingr pass him. Rubio paused at his side.

‘You’ll tell me if you start hearing things, yes?’

‘Of course,’ said Loken.

They moved on, entering, as Loken had known they would, a stagnant, vaulted space of old echoes and drifting flakes of ash. Iron bars framed the interior and numerous empty oil drums lay scattered throughout, spilling grey mulch over the deck.

The pathfinders circled around Severian and Cayne, who knelt in the centre of the space, conferring softly over a map hastily scrawled in the ash.

‘Where are we?’ asked Nohai. ‘This doesn’t look like anything worth marking. I thought the plan was to seek out places of importance.’

‘This place is important,’ said Loken. ‘More than you know.’

‘It’s just a hold,’ said Rubio, wrinkling his nose. ‘It stinks.’

‘This is where they first met, isn’t it?’ asked Qruze.

Loken nodded.

‘Where who met?’ asked Voitek.

‘The quiet order,’ said Loken.

‘The what?’

‘A warrior lodge,’ said Rubio, circling the chamber. Scaffolding still clung to the walls, ribbing them like steel bones. Discarded dust sheets hung like unpainted banners, as though a host of craftsmen might return at any moment. ‘This is where it began, the corruption.’

‘No,’ said Loken. ‘It began long before this place, but here’s where it took root.’

‘Were you a member?’ asked Severian.

‘No. You?’

Severian shook his head. ‘After my time. What about you, old man?’

Qruze pulled his shoulders back, as though offended by the notion. ‘I most certainly was not. When Erebus brought it to the Legion I didn’t know why we needed such a thing. Said so then, and I say so now.’

Loken moved through the space, thinking back to the time he’d attended a meeting with Torgaddon at his side.

‘I came here once,’ said Loken. ‘Not this space exactly, but one just like it.’

‘I thought you said you weren’t a member,’ said Bror.

‘I wasn’t. Torgaddon brought me here, thinking I might want to become part of the order.’

‘So why didn’t you?’ asked Varren.

‘I went along to see what sort of things the order did,’ said Loken. ‘A warrior of my company had... died. He’d been a member and I wanted to see if the order had anything to do with his death.’

‘Did it?’

‘Not directly, no, but even after I’d seen that it looked like nothing more than a harmless gathering of warriors, I felt there was something off about it. They’d gotten too good at keeping secrets, and I couldn’t bring myself to entirely trust any group that shrouded itself in that much secrecy.’

‘Good instincts,’ said Rubio.

Loken nodded, but before he could answer, Rama Karayan dropped from the scaffolding lining the walls. A Space Marine in full armour was a considerable weight, but he managed to land almost soundlessly.

‘Get into cover,’ said Karayan. ‘Someone approaches.’

They came in groups of three or four, mortal men in masks and heavy, hooded robes. Loken watched them assemble around what he’d at first assumed to be a defunct conduit hub. Roped down tarpaulin covered it, but when the first intruders to the chamber cut the ropes and pulled the covering away, Loken saw how wrong he’d been.

This wasn’t a lodge space, at least, not any more.

He groped for the word.

Temple. Fane.

An altar lay beneath the tarpaulin, a blocky plinth of dusty, baked ochre clay that looked oddly familiar. It took him a moment to recall where he’d seen stone just like it.

‘Davin,’ he whispered. ‘That altar stone, it came from Davin.’

Severian looked up as he spoke, shaking his head and placing a finger to his lips. The devotees continued to arrive, silently and reverently, until the space was filled with over a hundred bodies.

No words were spoken, as though they were about some solemn business. Some knelt before the altar, while others righted the toppled oil drums and relit the fires with rags, sheafs of paper and vials of viscous oils.

The fuel took hold swiftly and the heat of the flames soon warmed the chamber. Shadows swayed on the walls, cut and sliced by the bodies moving in time to some unheard music.

At last a group of eight appeared, marching a partially naked figure towards the altar. His physique was clearly transhuman, bulked out with muscle and sub-dermal bone sheaths. A long chasuble of purple cloth draped his shoulders and hung to just below his waist.

Severian tapped two fingers against his eyes and then pointed them towards the naked figure with his eyebrows raised.

Loken shook his head. No, he didn’t recognise him.

The figure was led to the altar, where he was bound with chains to the deck. The chasuble fell from his shoulders, and only then did Loken see the Ultima tattoo on the legionary’s scapula.

The warrior was of the XIII Legion.

Loken looked across the space to where Rubio was hidden. He couldn’t see him, but a barely perceptible movement in the darkness showed that he too had seen the warrior’s tattoo.

‘Why doesn’t he fight?’ whispered Loken, and this time Severian answered.

‘Drugged maybe? Look at his movements.’

Loken did and saw Severian was most likely correct. The warrior had the slack features of a sleepwalker. His arms were loose at his sides and his head sagged over his chest.

With the Ultramarine bound to the deck, the robed figures began a droning chant of garbled syllables, a collision of unsounds that Loken’s auto-senses registered as piercing static like insect bites.

At the height of the chant, another figure entered the chamber, this one just as genhanced as the bound warrior. He too was robed and hooded, but Loken instantly recognised him by his purposeful stride and swaying shoulders.

‘Serghar Targost,’ he said. ‘The lodge master.’

Loken’s fingers curled around the hilt of his chainsword, but Severian reached down and clamped his hand around its pommel. He shook his head.

‘He has to die,’ said Loken, as Targost scooped a handful of ash from a blazing drum and pressed it against the bound warrior’s chest.

‘Not now,’ said Severian.

‘Then when?’

Targost lifted a short bladed sword from beneath his robes, a gladius with a hemispherical pommel. The Sons of Horus did not favour the gladius. Too short and too mechanical. More suited to warriors who fought as one entity.

Its blade glittered dully as though sheened with coal dust, and Targost used it to cut radial grooves in the captive’s flesh. The Ultramarine did not cry out, whether due to his own fortitude or an induced fugue state, Loken couldn’t tell.

‘When?’ demanded Loken. Too loud. Heads turned upwards, searching the darkness. They were invisible, but Loken held his breath as the lodge master continued his ritual mutilations.

Severian’s eyes blazed with anger, then flicked over to the highest point of the scaffolding across the chamber. Loken could see nothing, just a confluence of girder and roof. A place the flames cast no shadow where they ought to.

‘Karayan?’

Severian nodded. ‘Let him take the shot.’

It irked Loken that someone not from the XVI Legion would get to kill Targost, but Severian’s logic was sound. He released the sword hilt and opened his fingers to show assent.

‘Be ready with that blade,’ said Severian. ‘No one gets out.’

Severian looked up to the shadows and tapped a finger against the centre of his helmet, right between the eye lenses.

He held up three fingers. Two. One.

A muted muzzle flash lit the shadows and Rama Karayan’s outline flickered against the roof. Loken paused just long enough to see Targost fall before pushing himself out from hiding.

He dropped seven metres and landed with a booming thud that buckled the deck plate. His sword roared from its sheath as he waded into the cultists. The blade’s teeth ripped them up, chewing meat and bone and robes with every slash and downward cut.

Loken raced to the arched entrance through which they’d entered and stood like a mythical sentinel barring a hero’s passage onwards. But these were no heroes, these were the scum of humanity, flotsam and jetsam swept up by the promise of easy gain offered by the corrupt powers at work within the Legion.

Unfit for war, all they could do was chant and pray and spill more worthy blood to corrupting alien powers. They came at him in a rush, with curved blades or clubs sourced from debris around the ship’s degenerating interior.

He let them come and cut them down without mercy.

The other pathfinders dropped into the midst of the cultists. Varren’s chainaxe hacked a bloody path. Voitek’s servo-arms lifted men from the deck and pulled them apart like a cruel child with a captive insect. Tyrfingr fought with his bare fists, roaring as though raucously brawling with trusted comrades.

Loken lost count of how many he killed.

Not enough, but eventually there were no more to slay.

He was blooded from head to foot. Through the entirety of his killing fury, he felt the presence of another at his shoulder, like a fencing master guiding his every strike. The sound in his helmet was hoarse, echoing, though he was not out of breath.

He blinked away the seconds the slaughter had taken.

Rubio stood amid a pile of corpses, his fists wreathed in killing fire. Cayne’s axe was dripping with gore, and Severian cleaned his combat blade on the robes of a headless corpse. Bror Tyrfingr spat blood not his own and wiped an elbow over his smeared chin.

Qruze and Cayne warily approached Serghar Targost, but Loken ignored the fallen lodge master. Instead, he went to help Ares Voitek and Nohai with the captive Ultramarine. While Voitek’s servo-arms cut through the chains binding him to the deck, Nohai knelt beside him, lifting his head and pressing a hand to the side of his neck.

‘What have they done to you, my friend?’ asked Rubio, tearing off his helmet. The light no longer danced in the crystalline matrix around his head, but the fire in his eyes was banked high.

‘You know him?’ said Loken, seeing recognition in Rubio’s eyes.

‘Proximo Tarchon,’ said Rubio. ‘An officer of the Twenty-Fifth Company. We marched with them on Arrigata, when Erikon Gaius led us.’

Loken recalled that blood-soaked world all too well. He glanced up at Varren and saw he too remembered it. But now was not the time for past regrets.

‘How in the Throne’s name did he end up here?’ asked Loken.

Rubio knelt beside the swaying captive and said, ‘How do any of us end up where we are? Chance, bad luck? The Sons of Horus must have taken him in battle.’

‘So Ultramarines are letting themselves get captured now, are they?’ said Varren, picking the blood from his axe-teeth.

Rubio shot him an angry glare, but didn’t waste words with the former World Eater. Instead, he turned to Altan Nohai.

‘What have they done to him?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ said Nohai, sliding a data-slug into the threaded sockets cored into Proximo Tarchon’s body. ‘Powerful drugs most likely, but I’ll know more soon. Don’t worry, we’ll get him back.’

Rubio’s fingertip followed the cuts made in Tarchon’s flesh, and Loken felt distinctly queasy at their precise nature.

‘You recognise these?’ asked Loken.

‘I have seen similar markings in primitive tribal cultures the Thirteenth Legion were forced to eradicate during the early years of the Crusade,’ said Rubio, his fists clenched and his voice betraying the depths of his fury. Cold fire shimmered at his hood, and Loken’s breath misted.

‘What are they?’ he asked.

‘Precursors to evocation.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means maleficarum,’ said Bror Tyrfingr, jerking a red thumb back towards Targost. ‘The dead one was trying to raise a wight of the Underverse and clothe it in this one’s flesh.’

‘A simplistic way of putting it,’ said Rubio, holding up a hand to forestall Bror’s rising choler, ‘but essentially correct.’

‘And this isn’t his first time,’ growled Bror. ‘Look at the cut lines. No hesitation, no mistakes. He’s cut them before. On too many other bodies, many other times. Lucky for this one we were here.’

Loken left them to it and returned to where Qruze and Cayne knelt beside the body of Serghar Targost.

The lodge master lay on his back, his hood ripped away by the passage of Karayan’s custom shell. What was left of his head was a splintered mass of leaking brain matter and bent metal fasteners. Bone hooks dangled from flaps of skin and skull fragments. One eye was a pulped scrap of exploded tissue, the other a blood-filled orb that wept red tears.

‘Too easy an end for you,’ said Loken.

‘Samus is here,’ said Targost and sat up.

Qruze fell back on his haunches as the lodge master’s fist punched into Cayne’s throat, tearing through the gorget seals with his bare hands. The former Iron Warrior didn’t have breath to cry out as the ruined, dead thing ripped out the ropy, meat-pipes of his throat.

The blood spray was catastrophic. Life ending.

Cayne fell back, vainly trying to stem the flood as Targost got to his feet. A black flame in the vague outline of a skull filled the ruined space where Targost’s head once sat.

‘Samus is the man next to you,’ he said.

Sabaen Queen burned fiercely, pillars of thick black smoke boiling from the Stormbird’s gutted interior and drawn up to the cavern hangar’s roof. The other gunships were just as useless. Melta bombs had turned their engine cores to slag and handfuls of kraks and frags smashed every control mechanism in their cockpits to scrap metal.

The thirty Ultramarines who’d survived the slaughter watched their escape from Molech’s surface burn to ruin. Their Rhinos idled behind them, engines coughing and retching as they too died.

Arcadon Kyro stood defiantly before the inferno of his own making and planted an Ultima vexil of the XIII Legion next to him, the one thing he had saved from Sabaen Queen’s interior after emptying it of weapons and ammunition.

His helmet was mag-locked at his waist and the ribbed arms of his experimental servo-harness were folded at his shoulders.

Tears streaked his ash-smeared features.

‘What did you do?’ said Castor Alcade in disbelief.

‘What I had to,’ replied Kyro. ‘I did it because you wouldn’t.’

Didacus Theron marched towards the unrepentant Techmarine, but Alcade held him back. Bad enough that legionary was fighting legionary, but for Ultramarine to fight Ultramarine? Unthinkable, even in a time when such thoughts were the norm.

‘You’ve killed us all,’ said Theron. ‘You’ve dug our graves on this miserable rock.’

‘A miserable rock entrusted to us by the Emperor,’ Kyro reminded him. ‘Or have you forgotten the oath we swore?’

‘I have forgotten nothing,’ said Theron.

‘You’ve forgotten where the power of your oath comes from.’

‘Then remind me.’

‘That by making it you ask the Emperor to bear witness to the promises you make with an expectation of being held accountable for how you honour them.’

Theron wrapped his hand around the hilt of his sword. Alcade knew that with but a moment’s provocation, he would draw it and strike Kyro down. Theron was Calth born and bred. Rough and ready, but with a nobility of heart that was all that kept him from killing Kyro where he stood.

‘My home world is burning,’ said Theron. ‘But Ultramar can still be saved. This world is lost. What will it achieve if we all die here? How does that serve the Emperor, Kyro? We are His Angels of Death, and this war against Horus has upset the board.’

Theron reached up to the scorched oath paper fluttering at his shoulder guard where a melted seal of wax affixed it to the curved plate. He tore it off and threw it aside.

‘An oath to die in vain is no oath at all,’ he said. ‘Calth needs us and you have kept me from her.’

‘Trying times don’t negate our duty to keep an oath,’ said Kyro. ‘They demand it, even more than when it’s easy to keep.’

Theron drew his sword, knuckles white.

Alcade took a breath. This had gone on long enough.

‘Centurion!’

Theron turned, his face ruddy with anger.

Alcade knew that anger. He felt it too, but with the horror of the massacre in the north behind them, cold practicality reasserted itself.

‘Leave him be, Didacus, he’s right,’ said Alcade, letting out a long, resigned breath. ‘An oath is not an oath if it can be set aside when it suits our desires. We swore to defend Molech, and that’s what we’re going to do.’

‘We can still get off-world, legate,’ said Theron, his anger undiminished, but bleeding out of him with every word. ‘We can seize another orbital craft. Capture a warp-capable ship and fight on. We can still make a difference. Thirty Ultramarines is not a force to be easily dismissed.’

‘I have made my decision,’ said Alcade. ‘The matter is closed. We march for Molech.’

Theron mustered his arguments, but Alcade cut him off before he could argue any more.

‘I said the matter is closed.’

For a moment he wondered if Theron might attack him, but decades of devotion to duty crushed any thought of disobedience.

‘As you say, legate,’ said Theron. ‘We march for Molech.’

Alcade waved his warriors towards the piled crates of ammunition and weaponry Kyro had removed from the gunships.

‘Gather up all the guns and blades you need,’ he said.

He marched to stand before Kyro and said, ‘On any other day I’d have you bear the red of censure, but I need every bolter I can muster. Rejoin the ranks, and bring that vexil with you. If we’re going to die here, we’re going to do it under the Ultima.’

Movement at the mouth of the hangar drew Alcade’s attention.

A wide-base Army vehicle lurched into the cavern, and thirty bolters snapped to face it. Automated weapon systems tracked it, but Kyro swiftly issued an override command at the sight of the red caduceus emblazoned on its glacis.

A heavy door rolled back on its side and a slender woman in a bloodstained coat and hard-wearing fatigues several sizes too big for her jumped down. Five men emerged behind her. Army by their bearing. Each was armed, but they were no threat.

‘Who the hell are you?’ he demanded.

The woman smiled in relief.

‘Legate Alcade,’ she said. ‘My name is Alivia Sureka and I very much need your help.’

TWENTY-TWO

Not Ullanor
This is fear
Hellgate

In contrast to Alivia Sureka’s arrival, Lupercalia felt deserted when the Warmaster entered the city. Columns of Legiones Astartes came first, marching beneath wolf-headed vexils and tribal runes of Barbarus as the sun dipped towards dusk.

Aximand’s company bore bloody trophies taken from the vanquished XIII Legion, while Ezekyle’s Justaerin dragged scorched Legio Crucius banners behind them for others to trample.

Tyana Kourion’s body was nailed to a Contemptor’s sarcophagus.

Smoke-blackened tanks and the striding engines of Vulpa, Interfector, Vulcanum and Mortis came after the infantry, their warhorns braying in triumph.

Those citizens who had not already fled to the surrounding countryside or risked travelling to the upper transit platforms in the hope of securing passage off-world huddled fearfully in their homes. Farther ahead, a last few shuttles blasted skyward.

Suspicious eyes watched the arrival of his army from the cover of parapets and shutters. Behind the curiosity, behind the masochistic need to see their conquerors, Horus recognised bone-deep fear.

‘The last time I entered this city, I was parading in glorious triumph with Jaghatai and the Lion,’ said Horus. ‘I marched at father’s right hand, and the people cheered my name.’

Mortarion grunted with grim amusement. ‘Aye, not exactly Ullanor, is it?’

Horus turned to address the three members of the Mournival who marched behind him. They were a sorry looking group, scarred and burned by war, but victorious nonetheless. Ezekyle in particular was looking the worse for wear, his eyes downcast and his mien truculent.

‘What do you think, my sons?’ he asked as they passed beneath the towering arch of the second wall.

‘About what?’ asked Aximand.

‘Why do these people not welcome our arrival?’

‘Aside from the fact that we killed their army?’ said Kibre.

Horus waved that trifling objection aside.

‘They’re afraid,’ said Aximand.

‘Of what, that I’ll have them all put to death?’

‘Perhaps, but more likely they fear change. Right now, most of these people are wondering what our arrival will mean for them. Will they be enslaved or freed? Richer or poorer? Like all tiny cogs in a great machine, they know that it matters little whose hand is at the crank, only that it turns.’

‘Give it time,’ said Horus. ‘They’ll be cheering my name again when I bring them the crown of Terra.’

‘A crown is it now?’ said Mortarion. ‘Being made Warmaster wasn’t enough, so now you’re going to be king?’

‘Have you forgotten already?’ said Horus as the citadel’s rearing towers and gilded domes came into view.

‘Forgotten what?’

‘I’m not going to be king, nor even Emperor,’ said Horus. ‘I’m going to be a god.’

Targost, or the thing within Targost, reached for Iacton Qruze. The flesh of its face was bubbling like the surface of a muddy swamp. The stench was appalling. Qruze scrambled away on his backside, fumbling for his pistol.

Bror Tyrfingr charged the Samus-thing, but it was like trying to tackle the leg of a Warlord Titan. Samus slapped the Fenrisian away, like a man swatting an irritating fly. Bror landed on a flaming drum and rolled, spilling its contents in a shower of embers.

The creature’s jaw cracked wide open and oozing black ichor boiled up from the interior of its skull. Serrated triangular teeth pushed out from the stump of its neck and a host of lashing, vertical tongues emerged, rough and forked. A multitude of glowing eyes formed in the roiling, glutinous mass of its phantom skull.

Its form stretched upwards, diseased roots sprouting from its lower limbs and infesting the deck like oily ropes.

‘I’m Samus...’ it gurgled with mucus-thick breath, and the name struck a dreadful chord in Loken’s heart. The air tasted of static and biting on metal. Shadows moved on the wall, independent of the firelight.

Samus, he knew that name. He knew it from a world made compliant a long time ago in another life. He’d heard it over the vox and in the air of Sixty-Three Nineteen. He’d heard it spoken by Xaver Jubal just before he’d opened fire on his brothers.

The Whisperheads.

Loken was there again, in that glistening cave, fighting his fellow legionary as the foundations of his world came apart.

He had a sword in his hand, but he couldn’t raise it.

This is fear.

This was what mortals dealt with every day of their lives. Fear of the alien, fear of war, fear of pain, of disease. Fear of failing those who trusted them.

How could anyone live like this?

Loken was paralysed, his limbs leaden at his sides.

Varren charged, burying the smile of his axe in the Samus-thing’s belly. Sawing teeth bit deep. It bent over and plucked Varren from the ground, its circular mouth fastening on his shoulder. Blood sprayed and Varren’s arm spasmed, releasing the axe grip.

Voitek’s arms hacked at its flanks, as Severian sliced through gristle-like fronds whipping from Targost’s transforming flesh. A shot from above punched through its wraith skull.

Karayan.

Qruze finally had his pistol out and was pumping shot after shot into the creature’s chest. The mass-reactives were swallowed whole without effect.

The Samus-thing laughed and tossed Varren aside. He landed forty metres away beside the altar of Davinite stone. Bror Tyrfingr picked himself up, shouted something to Qruze and Severian. Loken heard Altan Nohai shout something in return, sounding surprised.

Loken’s armour registered a sudden drop in temperature.

Then Rubio was there.

The former Codicier threw himself at the Samus-thing, his sword a sliver of flame-wreathed bluesteel. Varren’s axe had achieved little, but Rubio’s blade sliced deep into the meat of the thing. The fire leapt from his weapon onto Samus, and the remains of Targost’s robes went up in flames with a roaring whoosh of ignition.

It screamed, finally hurting.

Loken felt something grip his leg and looked down to see Tubal Cayne’s hand scrabbling at his armour.

The other hand was clamped around his own neck. Blood welled between his fingers, pumping enthusiastically from the awful chasm in his throat. He’d ripped his helmet off and his eyes took Loken’s in an iron grip. Anger, vindication and something Loken couldn’t identify poured out of Tubal Cayne. Flickering reflections of Rubio’s white fire shimmered in his widening pupils. The dying warrior tried to speak, but only wet, liquid gurgles emerged.

Loken watched his eyes turn to glass and knew that he was dead.

And the fear that held him rigid vanished.

He’d fought Samus before.

He and Vipus had killed it.

Loken brought his sword up and charged.

Rama Karayan tracked the battle below through his bolter’s scope. Something was affecting it. The thing his brothers faced wasn’t registering. He could see Bror, Macer and the others, but not the thing they fought.

But prey could be hunted by its absences as much as by its leavings.

His hunter’s eye had been honed as a youngster in the darkened mine workings of Lycaeus. The lords of the Ravenspire had recognised his gift and developed it. Not invisible enough for the Shadowmasters, but perfect for the silent killers of the Seeker squads.

His auto-senses were linked directly with the scope of his modified bolter, and he took a breath, innately interpolating the locus of his brother’s attacks. Peripheral sight picked out the pellucid white flames of Rubio’s sword.

He found his centre and drew in a breath.

Held it.

He fired. A spent casing dropped to the scaffold boards.

It bounced, slower than should be possible. A web of frosted lines crazed its surface in a pale web.

Strange shadows moved on the walls. Impossible shadows. They were all around him, like stalking wolves in a twilit winter forest or the dust devils of Deliverance’s ash wastes.

Karayan felt grave-cold air and the hard, sharp edge of a blade at his throat.

‘Nice rifle,’ said a rasping voice. ‘I think I’ll take it.’

Karayan moved. Not fast enough.

The blade sliced deep, cutting back to bone.

Loken’s sword tore through the Samus-thing’s scorched belly. Bubbling laughter spilled from its smoking skull. Ash and greasy meat cinders billowed around it. Furnace-red light shone through wounds torn in its charred flesh.

Targost’s arms reached for him, stretching and cracking like timbers splitting in a fire. Loken put a bolt-round into its chest and hacked the hand from the arm. Another writhing appendage squirmed into existence at the stump, but it was a twisted, malformed thing.

‘It’s vulnerable!’ cried Rubio. ‘Its link to the warp is fraying.’

The pathfinders surrounded the daemon-thing, hacking and shooting it. Even in such desperate straits, each shot was carefully aimed, each strike precisely placed.

‘I know you, Garviel Loken,’ it hissed, looming over Loken. ‘I claimed your brother’s soul in that mountain cave. He screams in torment still.’

‘Don’t listen to it,’ shouted Rubio, blocking a whipping appendage of glistening dark flesh. The Librarian’s hood blazed with blue white fire.

‘Silence, witcher!’ bellowed the Samus-thing. The force of its words drove Rubio to his knees. It spat a torrent of black fire from its writhing, toothed gullet. Rubio threw up a shimmering wall of witchfire and the flames guttered and died.

Severian closed and slashed his blade into the daemon’s back, tearing upwards. Loken hadn’t even seen him move. Looping coils of what might once have been guts, but were now mouldering loops of dead meat spilled out.

The beast spun around and clubbed Severian to the deck with unnatural speed. It hurled Voitek and Qruze away with a scream of pure force and slammed Loken to the deck with slithering arms like blistered snakes.

Loken saw the gladius Targost had used to mutilate the Ultramarine prisoner. The ivory Ultima on its pommel glittered in the firelight. Its blade was dark, yet sheened with starlight. He reached for it, but a hand of scabbed knuckles and bruised fingers picked it up first.

‘This is mine,’ said Proximo Tarchon.

Loken sprang to his feet as the carved warrior of Ultramar threw himself forward. He rolled beneath the Samus-thing’s writhing arms and thrust his gladius up into its belly.

The effect was instantaneous and devastating.

Targost’s body fell apart, as though every single molecular bond within its flesh was instantly sundered. Its form turned to liquid and collapsed in a stinking pool of rancid matter.

The pathfinders scattered. Severian dragged Cayne’s body away from the spreading lake of smoking fluid. Loken lowered his sword and let out a shuddering breath that felt like it had been held within him for decades.

Altan Nohai rushed to Cayne and knelt beside him.

‘There’s nothing you can do for him,’ said Loken.

‘He that is dead, take from him the Legion’s due,’ said Nohai as the reductor portion of his gauntlet slid into place.

Loken registered the muted crack of the gunshot a fraction of a second before the faceplate of Nohai’s helmet exploded outwards.

The Apothecary slumped over Cayne’s body, a smoking entry wound drilled through the back of his helmet.

Armoured warriors dropped to the deck from the upper reaches of the chamber. Sons of Horus. Two dozen at least, armoured in blackened plate the colour of night. Their helm lenses flickered with dead light, as though cold flames seethed behind them.

Most were armed with bolters. He saw a plasma gun. A melta too.

Loken fought the urge to reach for his own weapons.

‘Raise a single weapon and you all die,’ said a warrior without a helmet. Loken didn’t recognise him, but saw the planed features of what they’d once called a true son.

‘Noctua? Grael Noctua of the Warlocked?’ said Severian.

Loken’s head snapped around.

Severian shrugged. ‘He was Twenty-Fifth Company, same as me.’

‘Severian?’ said Noctua, his shock evident. ‘When the Warmaster said two faithless cowards had returned with the prodigal son, I had no idea he meant you. And Iacton Qruze? Your name has been a curse ever since you deserted the Legion at the moment of its greatest triumph.’

Qruze flinched at Noctua’s words, but he squared his shoulders and said, ‘You mean the moment my Legion died.’

Loken had never respected Iacton Qruze more.

The pathfinders reluctantly divested themselves of their weapons as the black-armoured Sons of Horus closed the noose on them. Now that he looked closely, Loken saw their proportions were subtly wrong, asymmetric and out of true, as though the warriors within were not legionaries at all, but things ill-formed and unnatural.

Or that was what they were becoming.

‘And you, Thirteenth Legion’ said Noctua. ‘Especially you.’

Proximo Tarchon slowly laid down his gladius, and Loken saw a depth of calculating hatred in his clear eyes like nothing he’d ever seen before. The blood had hardened to scabs on the ritual cuts, and the smeared ash would mark the scars forever.

‘When I hold this again, it will be to put it through your heart,’ said the Ultramarines warrior.

Noctua smiled at that, but didn’t reply.

‘Grael Noctua, you little bastard,’ said Severian, setting his blade down. ‘Did you know I advised against your advancement three times when your name came up? I always said you were too sly, too eager to please. Not good qualities in a leader.’

‘Looks like you were wrong,’ said Noctua.

‘No,’ said Severian. ‘I wasn’t.’

‘I think you were, I’m Mournival now.’

Loken’s heart skipped a beat at the mention of the Mournival, that confraternity to which he and Torgaddon had once belonged. A brotherhood as close to the Warmaster as it was possible to be.

‘Did someone say Mournival?’

The speaker dropped from the roof spaces, and Loken groaned as he saw the modified bolter he carried. Rama Karayan’s weapon. Blood dripped from the breech and muzzle.

‘I remember the Mournival,’ the warrior said.

Like the others surrounding them, his armour was black and non-reflective. Like Noctua, he went without a helm, and something in his saturnine, cocksure swagger struck him as hideously familiar.

He retrieved Tarchon’s gladius from the deck and turned the darkly-sheened blade over as though curious at what had been done to it. He shook his head and slid the weapon into an empty shoulder sheath.

‘Poor bloody Samus,’ he said to Loken with a grin. ‘He’d only just earned his return after a warrior as straight up and down as you killed his host flesh on Calth. It’s getting to be a thing.’

‘Who are you?’ said Loken.

‘No one remembers me,’ said the warrior. He grinned, exposing perfect white teeth. ‘I’d be hurt if I wasn’t already dead.’

‘You’re Ger Gerradon,’ said Qruze. ‘One of Little Horus Aximand’s scrappers.’

‘The body is his, admittedly,’ said Gerradon. ‘But he’s long gone, Iacton. I’m Tarik reborn, he-who-is-now-Tormaggedon.’

Alivia led the Ultramarines and her five soldiers ever downwards along a twisting series of switchback stairs beneath the Sanctuary. The walls were glassy and smooth, cut down through the geomantic roots of Mount Torger by the colossal power of the galaxy’s most singular mind.

No light shone this deep, and only the Ultramarines suit lights pierced the darkness. If felt like nobody came here precisely because nobody ever came here.

‘How much deeper is this gate, mamzel?’ asked Castor Alcade. The smell of plasmic fire still clung to his armour, and his breath had the hot flavour of burned stone to it.

‘It’s not far,’ she said, though distance would become a somewhat subjective quantity the deeper they went.

‘And how is it that you know of it?’

Alivia struggled to think of a way to answer that without sounding like a lunatic.

‘I came here a very long time ago,’ she said.

‘You’re being evasive,’ said Alcade.

‘Yes.’

‘So why should I put my trust you?’

‘You already have, legate,’ said Alivia, turning and giving him her most winning smile. ‘You wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t.’

She’d told them of what lay beneath the Sanctuary, a gate closed in ages past by the Emperor and which Horus planned to open. She told them that beyond the gate lay a source of monstrously dangerous power, and thankfully that was enough for them.

She’d not relished the prospect of trying to exert her empathic influences over the legionaries of the XIII Legion, but as things turned out there hadn’t been any need to apply pressure to the legate’s psyche.

It wasn’t hard to see why.

She’d offered him a last lifeline to achieve something worthwhile, and he’d seized it with both hands.

‘Thirty men facing the might of two Legions sounds grand in the honour rolls,’ he’d said after she’d told him what she wanted of him and his men. ‘But last stands are just the sorts of theoreticals we’ve trained our entire lives to avoid.’

‘This isn’t a fight we’ll walk away from either,’ she’d warned.

‘Better to fight for something than die for nothing.’

He’d said it with such a straight face too. She hadn’t the heart to tell him that sentiments like that were what had kept men fighting one another for millennia.

They’d found the citadel filled with refugees. Most had ignored them, but some begged for protection until Didacus Theron fired a warning shot over their heads.

The Sanctuary and its secret levels, the really interesting levels that not even the Sacristans or Mechanicum knew about, were beneath the deserted Vault Transcendent. Alivia took every confounding turn through the catacombs and located every hidden door as though she’d walked here only yesterday.

The last time Alivia had climbed these particular steps, her legs were like rubber and fear sweat coated her back like a layer of frost. She’d helped him come back to the world; her arm around his waist, his across her shoulder. She’d tried to keep his thoughts – normally so impenetrable – from reaching into her, but he was too powerful, too raw and too damaged from what lay beyond the gate to keep everything inside.

She’d seen things she wished she hadn’t. Futures she’d seen in her nightmares ever since or inked in the pages of a forgotten storybook. Abominable things that were now intruding on the waking world, invited in by those who hadn’t the faintest clue of what a terrible mistake they were making.

‘Do these steps ever bloody end?’ asked Theron.

‘They do, but it’ll seem like they won’t,’ answered Alivia. ‘It’s kind of a side effect of being so close to a scar in the space-time fabric of the world. Or part of the gate’s defence mechanisms, I forget which. It’s amazing how many people just give up, thinking they’re getting nowhere.’

‘I’ve been mapping our route,’ said a Techmarine called Kyro with a superior tone that suggested he was equal to anything this place could throw at him.

‘You haven’t,’ said Alivia, tapping a finger to the side of her head. ‘Trust me.’

Kyro flipped up a portion of his gauntlet and a rotating holographic appeared. A three-dimensional mapping tool. Right away, Kyro frowned in consternation as multiple routes and divergent pathways that didn’t exist filled the grainy image.

‘Told you,’ said Alivia.

‘But do they ever end?’ asked Alcade.

Alivia didn’t answer, but stepped out onto a wide hallway that she knew every one of the Ultramarines would swear hadn’t been there moments ago. Like everything else here it had a smooth, volcanic quality, but light shone here, glittering within the rock like moonlight on the surface of an ocean.

Wide enough for six legionaries to walk comfortably abreast, the hallway was long and opened into a rough-hewn chamber of chiselled umber brick. The Emperor never told her how this chamber had come to be or how He’d known of it, save that it had been here before geological forces of an earlier epoch raised the mountain above.

Ancient hands had cut the stone bricks here, but Alivia never liked looking too closely at the proportions of the blocks or their subtly wrong arrangement. It always left her strangely unsettled and feeling that those hands had not belonged to any species known by the galaxy’s current inhabitants.

The Ultramarines spread out, muscle memory and ingrained practical pushing them into a workable defensive pattern. Alivia’s human allies, Valance especially, kept close to her like a bodyguard.

‘Is that it?’ asked Alcade, unable to keep the disappointment from his voice. ‘This is the Hellgate you spoke of?’

‘That’s it,’ agreed Alivia with a smirk. ‘What did you expect? The Eternity Gate?’

She’d told them something of what lay beyond the gate, but Alivia had to agree it didn’t exactly look like the most secure means of keeping something so hideously dangerous out. Irregular chunks of dark stone veined with white formed a tall archway in the darker red of the mountain’s foundations.

The space between the arch was mirror-smooth black stone, like a slab of obsidian cut from a perfectly flat lava bed. Nothing within the chamber was reflected in its surface.

‘We expected something that looked like it would take more than a rock drill or a demo charge to breach,’ said Kyro.

‘Trust me,’ said Alivia. ‘There’s nothing you or the Mechanicum could bring that would get that open.’

‘So how does Horus plan to open it?’

‘He’s blood of the Emperor’s blood,’ she said. ‘That’ll be enough unless I can seal it.’

‘You said the Emperor sealed it,’ said Theron.

‘No, I said He closed it,’ said Alivia. ‘That’s not same thing.’

Alcade looked at her strangely, as though now seeing something of the truth of what she was.

‘And how is it you know how to seal it?’ he asked.

‘He showed me how.’

Kyro tapped the black wall with one of his servo-arms. It made no sound whatsoever. At least in this world. ‘If what’s beyond here is so terrible, why didn’t the Emperor seal it Himself?’

‘Because He couldn’t, not then, maybe not ever,’ said Alivia, remembering the gaunt, aged face she’d seen beyond the glamours. He’d been gone no more than a heartbeat to her, but she saw centuries carved into the face she’d watched go into the gate.

‘The Emperor couldn’t seal it, but you can?’ said Kyro. ‘You’ll forgive me, Mamzel Sureka, if I find that hard to believe.’

‘I don’t give a damn what you find hard to believe,’ snapped Alivia. ‘There are things a god can do and things He can’t. That’s why sometimes they need mortals to do their dirty work. The Emperor left armies to guard against obvious intruders, but He needed someone to keep out the lone madmen, the seekers of dark knowledge or anyone who accidentally stumbled on the truth. Since I’ve been on Molech, I’ve killed one hundred and thirteen people who’ve been drawn here by the whispered poisons that seep from beyond this gate. So don’t you dare doubt what I can do!’

She took a calming breath and shrugged off her coat, tucking the loaded Ferlach serpenta into the waistband of her fatigues. She felt foolish for losing her temper, but every emotion was heightened in this place.

‘How old are you, Mamzel Sureka?’ asked Alcade.

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ said Alivia, though she knew exactly where he was going with this.

‘The Emperor was last on Molech over a century ago,’ said Alcade. ‘And even with juvenat treatments, you’re nowhere near old enough to have been at His side.’

Alivia laughed, a bitter, desperate sound. ‘You don’t know how old I am, Castor Alcade. And, right now, I wish I didn’t either.’

Loken felt as though every cubic centimetre of air had been crushed from his lungs. He wanted to deny what the thing wearing Gerradon’s face had said, but the voice, the posture... everything, told him it was true.

When you see me, kill me.

The words he’d heard whispered in the shadows of his quarters on the Tarnhelm returned to him. No, that wasn’t right. They weren’t a memory, it was like he’d heard them again. As if some fragment of what had once been his friend was still speaking to him.

Loken’s sword and bolter lay on the ground before him. It would be easy to sweep them up, but could he put a bolt through Gerradon before the others gunned him down? Did that even matter?

He forced down the killing urge.

‘Tarik?’ he said, the name forced through gritted teeth.

‘No,’ said Gerradon with an exasperated sigh. ‘Weren’t you listening? I’m Tormaggedon. I was waiting in the warp when Little Horus cut off Tarik’s head and plucked the bright bauble of his soul before any of the warp whelps could feast on it. He screams and begs like a whipped dog, you know. Fulgrim did the same, and he was a primarch. Just imagine how bad it is for Tarik.’

‘Don’t listen to it, Loken,’ warned Rubio. ‘Warp spawn feast on the pain their lies cause.’

Grael Noctua kicked the back of Rubio’s knee, driving the psyker to the deck. The butt of a boltgun sent him sprawling. Bror Tyrfingr snarled at Noctua, but Severian shook his head.

Loken knew sorrow. He’d grieved at the death of Nero Vipus and had mourned battle-brothers he’d lost along the way. Tarik’s death on Isstvan had all but broken him and driven him into an abyss of madness he wasn’t sure he’d ever really escaped.

Until now.

He lifted his head and the fists he’d made unclenched.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Tarik would never beg. Even in death he’d be stronger than that. You say he’s screaming? I believe you. But he’s not screaming in pain, he’s screaming at me to kill you.’

‘I am the first of the Luperci,’ said Gerradon. ‘The Brothers of the Wolf. And you can’t kill me.’

Loken rubbed a hand across his chin and tipped his head back. When he next looked at Ger Gerradon, he was smiling.

‘You know, if you’d just let him die, I wouldn’t be here,’ said Loken, now able to admit out loud to the sights and sounds that had plagued him since the visitation on the edge of the Mare Tranquillitatis.

‘I’ve seen and heard Tarik Torgaddon at every step of this journey,’ said Loken. ‘He’s long dead, but he brought me back to the Vengeful Spirit. He brought me back to kill you and set him free.’

Gerradon tossed Karayan’s rifle to one of the dead-eyed legionaries and took a step towards Loken with his arms open.

‘Then take your best shot,’ said Gerradon.

‘Stand down,’ said Grael Noctua. ‘He can’t kill you? Well you can’t kill him, either. The Warmaster wants him alive.’

Gerradon grinned and gestured to the transformed warriors in black, those he had called the Luperci.

‘Take a good look, Garvi,’ said Gerradon. ‘You’re going to be just like them. I’m going to put a daemon in you.’

TWENTY-THREE

Blood price
Obsidian Way
A god amongst men

‘So this is the best defence our father could muster?’ said Mortarion as bolter shells punched the walls of glassy rock beside him. The Death Lord snapped off a pair of eye-wateringly bright shots from the Lantern.

Aximand didn’t see if they hit, but it was safe to assume the XIII Legion were two warriors fewer.

‘A few petty cantrips and a handful of legionaries?’

Aximand heard the Death Lord’s disdain, decades in the making, but even in the heat of battle, he couldn’t let the comment go unremarked.

Not after the blood he had shed.

Not after so many warriors under his command had died.

‘That’s not all he left,’ snapped Aximand as a grenade thrown back along the passageway detonated with a compressed bang. ‘He left millions of men and tanks. He left armies the Sons of Horus fought and crushed. What did the Death Guard do? Razed a jungle and massacred a defeated enemy.’

Mortarion regarded Aximand with the scrutiny a man might give an upstart child. His fingers tightened on Silence. Those Deathshroud who weren’t shooting along the passageway took a step towards Aximand until Mortarion waved them back.

‘You might once have been a true son, Little Horus,’ said Mortarion, his voice a low, rasping growl, ‘but look in a mirror. You’re no Sejanus anymore.’

Aximand leaned out to shoot. A blue helm vanished in a fan of ceramite and blood. ‘What has that to do with anything?’

The Death Lord leaned in close, his words for Aximand alone. ‘It means that you think you’re special? You’re nothing. It means that, Mournival or not, I’ll end you if you speak that way again.’

‘Lupercal would kill you.’

‘My brother would be displeased at your death, but he would forgive me. You’d still be dead though.’

Horus appeared at Aximand’s side with a feral grin of anticipation making him seem younger and more vital than ever. He leaned out into the passageway and unleashed a roaring blaze of fire from his gauntlet-mounted bolters.

‘There will be others,’ said Horus ducking back into cover as an interlocking pair of bipod-mounted heavy bolters raked the passageway. ‘Father wouldn’t rely on mortals to keep his secret. He’ll have a failsafe of some kind.’

‘All the more reason for you to let me send Grulgor up there,’ said Mortarion over the hammering impacts and detonations of explosive munitions. ‘He’ll end this quickly.’

Horus shook his head. ‘No, we do this my way. So close to the gate, Grulgor could kill us all.’

Grulgor?

Aximand knew the name, he’d read it in casualty lists. He looked back to where the Justaerin were locking their boarding shields into position. Aximand was not surprised to see Abaddon and Kibre holding flanking positions. Their shields were splashed with blood in bladed radial patterns that were not accidental.

‘Ready, Ezekyle?’ asked Horus of his First Captain.

Abaddon slammed his shield on the floor and slotted his combi-bolter into the firing notch by way of answer.

‘All yours, brother,’ said Horus, moving back and taking up position at the head of the Justaerin’s formation. One of the Terminators locked a shield onto Lupercal’s armoured forearm. Against his mighty frame it looked woefully inadequate protection.

Mortarion waved forward two warriors armed with rotary missile launchers.

Horus nodded and a hammering salvo of bolter shells filled the passageway. The two Death Guard stepped forward and ripped out a volley of missiles. Warheads streaked down the passageway. Aximand heard the metallic cough detonations. Shroud bombs and frags.

One warrior dropped to his knees with the back of his helmet blown out. The other staggered with most of his ribcage detonated from the inside by penetrating mass-reactives.

‘Lupercal!’ shouted Abaddon as Horus led the Justaerin forward.

Shields braced, marching in relentless lockstep. Boots like mechanised pistons as they pushed into the passage. Heads down, shields out, they filled its width. Gunfire pummelled them.

Not enough to stop them.

Nowhere near enough to stop them.

Alivia traced the patterns she’d memorised all those years ago over the surface of the gate. Each movement sent a rippling shiver of painful disgust through her.

She knew what lay beyond the gate better than most.

She knew how it hungered for what lay on this side.

A closed gate was better than no gate, and the howling, mad, devouring things on the other side weren’t about to give up even this tenuous hold without a fight.

Alivia’s empathic gift was now a curse. This close to the gate, every hateful thought she’d ever had was magnified. She relived the pain of every lover who’d betrayed her, every attacker who’d wounded her and every person she’d abandoned.

And not just hers. Valance and his four men knelt beside her with their rifles shouldered. They were soldiers, and had a lot of bad memories. All of them crowded her thoughts. Tears streamed down her face and wracking sobs spasmed in her chest.

Not for the first time, she cursed in a dead language that she had been left to do this. She knew that he couldn’t do it. After what he had taken from the realm beyond, it would be suicide for him to draw so near to those whose power he’d stolen.

Every mantra she whispered was faltering, every line she drew in lunar caustic was fading before she could empower it. She couldn’t focus. All the years she’d spent waiting in readiness for this moment and she couldn’t bloody concentrate.

Hardly surprising, really.

The sound of battle was incredible. Bolters and other, heavier weapons were filling the passageway with explosive rounds, but she knew it wouldn’t be enough to stop the Warmaster.

She had known that Horus would find this place eventually, but he had found it quicker than she’d hoped. She’d never agreed with the decision to obscure the existence and nature of the warp, but if Alivia’s long life had taught her anything, it was that finger-pointing after the fact was beyond futile.

Four Ultramarines stood with her and her bodyguards, a living shieldwall of flesh and ceramite. This was the only place mortals could survive – being without armour in the midst of a Legion firefight was a sure-fire way to end up dead.

Castor Alcade oathed the warriors protecting her little band to fight as though the Emperor Himself stood behind them.

These men would die for her.

They weren’t the first to do so, but she dearly hoped they’d be the last.

An explosion shook the chamber and she coughed on the acrid propellant fumes. She could taste aerosolised blood misting the air. Not good. Especially with the aggression flaring from every man in the chamber. Ultramarines were all about their practical, but they had sacrificed too much to fight clinically with the cause of their hurt so close.

Alivia breathed deeply, picturing Vivyen and Miska. Even Jeph, with his sad, hangdog eyes and absurd belief that he had to protect her. She missed them, and hoped Molech’s Enlightenment was already accelerating towards the system’s Mandeville point.

No, that wasn’t helping. She needed something more, something cherished. She remembered when the auspex of a trans-loader from Ophir had failed and it ran into a submerged mine in Larsa’s harbour. She hadn’t been on the ship, but had seen it go down with all hands. Only when she returned home did she find out that Vivyen and Miska thought she’d been aboard, and they’d wept for hours believing that she was dead.

She remembered her arms wrapped around them both when they finally succumbed to sleep. Their warm breath and the smell of their hair reminded Alivia of a time long gone, of a life now ended, when she’d been blissfully ignorant of her true nature and the doom approaching Arcadia.

She had been happy then, and she used that to push down the violent thoughts intruding on her psyche. Alivia pictured the symbols she’d been shown: precise arrangements of intersecting lines that couldn’t possibly intersect; curves that broke every established rule of calculus; the geometry of the insane.

She spoke the words that weren’t words, pouring every inch of her desire to see this gate sealed into what she was doing. Her hands described the motions she pictured, moving across the surface of the smooth black barrier.

It looked and felt like a solid barrier, but it wasn’t.

It was a scab over a hole that should never have been torn open, an impossible object that existed in an infinite number of possible existences. It was neither real nor unreal.

A doorway to hell Alivia now attempted to unmake.

Her surroundings faded to grey, a monochrome facsimile of the world where she was the only splash of colour. She heard gunfire, screams of pain and explosions. All were muted and dulled, as though coming from a distant battlefield.

Her hands were radiant, leaving echoes of warp light in their wake. A pattern began to emerge, disjointed knowledge seeded throughout her psyche coming together in a multi-dimensional lattice that was part unbreakable seal, part demo charge.

She smiled, seeing the cunning that had gone into its design, the care it had taken to hide within her. So intricate was its construction, she almost didn’t mind being used like this.

She certainly didn’t mind that its completion would kill her.

A spray of blood drenched Alivia and she cried out as one of her protectors dropped with a hole blown through the cobalt-blue of his breastplate. A concussive pressure wave hit her and slammed her to the ground. A spinning fragment of hot metal sliced across her shoulder. Pain blazed as blood ran down her back.

Her surroundings bled back into her awareness. The noise, the fear and the choking clouds of smoke. She heard heavy footfalls, all thudding in unison. Short, tramping steps and the scrape of iron on stone. Alivia rolled onto her side, blinking away tears of pain from her shoulder.

Her left arm felt useless and the stink of burned meat filled her senses. Valance lay on his back next to her. He’d taken the brunt of the blast that had knocked her to the ground. What was left of him was only recognisable by the half of his head that remained.

She looked up in time to see a ridged line of interlocking shields barge its way into the chamber. Sons of Horus with breacher’s shields. The Ultramarines couldn’t hope to hold their position, scattered by the missile explosions and overwhelmed by suppressive volleys.

Concentrated bursts of fire took them down in twos and threes.

The shield line widened as the chamber opened up. Sons of Horus warriors following behind pushed the line out and brought yet more guns to bear.

Arcadon Kyro put a hole in the shield line with coordinated blasts from the plasma one-shots on his mechanised arms. Each bolt impacted at precisely the same time, and blew apart one of the shields and the warrior behind it.

Massed bolter fire brought him down, a ridiculous amount of overkill that shredded his flesh unrecognisable and thoroughly dismantled his mechanical augmentations. Didacus Theron and Castor Alcade pushed into the gap Kyro had opened, looking to tear it wider.

Theron’s power sword cleaved through a shield and the arm holding it. His bolt pistol fired point-blank into the face of a Terminator. Such hulking war-monstrosities all but eliminated the need for mortal flesh entirely. The bolts detonated on impact, but left the warrior beneath unharmed.

The Terminator’s crackling energy-fist pistoned out and rammed through the centurion’s body. He came apart in an explosion of disembodied limbs and shattered plate.

Alivia tried to drag herself back to the gate, pushing along the floor on her backside with her heels.

Her work was almost done. Just a little more and her obligation would be over. No more long, wearying years, no more lies and isolation. No more anything.

A towering figure broke free of the shield line.

A giant, a demigod, a beautiful avatar of all that humanity could achieve in greatness. She’d heard all these epithets and more used to describe the Warmaster, but they’d been coined by those viewing him at peace.

Seeing him in battle was something entirely different.

Horus Lupercal was a monster. A daemon of war and ruin made flesh. He was a destroyer, an unmaker and the face of all humanity ought to have turned its back on millennia ago.

His was the face of uttermost evil...

And he didn’t even know it.

It was the worst thing Alivia had ever seen.

Castor Alcade vaulted away from the Terminator bearing down on him and ran to put himself between her and the Warmaster. There was no way Alcade could defeat the Warmaster, no hope of even a fair contest.

Alcade was dead the moment he moved, but he did it anyway.

It was the best thing Alivia had ever seen.

The legate of the XIII Legion thrust with his gladius.

It snapped on the amber eye at Horus’s breast.

The Warmaster’s titanic maul swept out and Castor Alcade was obliterated as though he had never existed.

Alivia pushed onto her feet and threw herself at the gate, her hands slippery with blood. She traced the final lines and opened her mouth to speak the last of the apotropaic words.

All that came out was a scream of pain.

Alivia looked down and saw four parallel blades jutting from her chest. They pinned her to the black wall and her blood ran down the blades and into the gate.

‘I don’t know who you are, but I need that open,’ said the Warmaster.

‘Please,’ said Alivia as the pain finally caught up to her.

Horus snapped the talons of his gauntlet from Alivia’s body. She fell, and it felt like she fell for a very long time before she hit the floor.

She looked up into the Warmaster’s face.

She saw no pity, no mercy. But, curiously, she saw regret.

Alivia struggled to speak, and the Warmaster knelt to hear her valediction as the life bled out of her.

‘Even... souls ensnared by evil... maintain a small... bridgehead of good,’ she said. ‘I want... you... to remember that. At the end.’

Horus looked puzzled for a moment, then smiled. And for a moment, Alivia forgot that he was the enemy of humanity.

‘You shouldn’t put your faith in saints, mamzel,’ said Horus.

Alivia didn’t reply, looking over the Warmaster’s shoulder.

The gateway of black obsidian was bleeding.

Horus stood from the body of the dead woman.

He wished she hadn’t died so he could ask her how she had come to be here. But she had stood against him and tried to stop him from achieving his destiny. And that was a death sentence.

‘Who was she?’ asked Mortarion.

‘I don’t know, but I felt the touch of father upon her.’

‘She met Him?’

‘Yes,’ said Horus, ‘but a long time ago I think.’

Mortarion looked up at the gate, clearly unimpressed. Horus saw his brother’s expression and put a hand on his shoulder.

‘Don’t underestimate what our father did here,’ said Horus. ‘He broke through into another realm, a realm no other being has breached and lived. Such a journey would make the climb to your first father’s hall seem like a pleasant stroll.’

Mortarion shrugged. ‘I don’t much care what He did,’ he said. He tapped the butt of Silence against the body of the woman. ‘She was here to seal the gate. Do you think she succeeded?’

Horus reached out and laid his palm flat against the black wall. He felt micro-tremors in its surface, too faint to be perceived by anyone save a primarch.

‘Only one way to find out,’ said Horus, unsnapping the seals across his breastplate. ‘Take that reaper of yours and cut me.’

‘Cut you?’

Horus shed his armour, letting each plate fall to the ground until he stood clad only in a grey bodysuit.

‘I was told this gate can only open in blood,’ said Horus. ‘So cut me and don’t spare the edge.’

‘Sir,’ said Kibre coming forward. ‘Don’t. Let one of us do it. Spill my blood, use as much as it takes, even if it kills me.’

Little Horus and Ezekyle joined their voices in opposition to his desire for Mortarion to cut him deep.

Horus folded his arms and said, ‘Thank you, my sons, but if I’ve learned anything from Lorgar, it’s that somebody else’s blood won’t do for something like this. It has to be mine.’

‘Then let’s get this done,’ said Mortarion, hefting Silence and readying its blade. Where some of Horus’s brothers might balk at the thought of wounding him, Mortarion had no such qualms. If his brother sought to usurp him, this was his chance.

Horus locked his gaze with his brother.

‘Do it.’

Mortarion spun Silence around his body.

The blade flashed.

Horus howled as the Death Lord’s reaper cut him from clavicle to pelvis. The pain was ferocious. Its savagery took him all the way back to Davin’s moon, and Eugan Temba’s stolen blade.

Blood jetted from the wound and sprayed the black wall.

Through eyes wet with pain, Horus saw unfinished sigils and arrangements of arcane significance. Their brightness was dying, washed away by the tide of his blood.

The gouges his talons had torn were bleeding.

His blood and the woman’s mingled, and Horus saw hair-fine cracks spreading from where he’d marked the wall.

He grinned through the pain. Worldbreaker swung to his shoulder.

‘Time to earn your name,’ he said.

The Emperor’s gift swung round in a sledgehammer arc.

And smashed the wall to shards.

Absolute darkness spilled into the chamber like a physical thing, as though an ocean of dark matter filled the mountain above and was now pouring out.

Horus felt hurricane winds tear at him, yet was unmoved.

He felt the cold of space, a soul-deep chill that enveloped him in ice. He was alone, floating in an empty void.

No stars illuminated him.

He had no memory of passing through the gate, then berated himself for so literal an interpretation. The gate beneath the mountain was not a literal portal separating one space from another, but an allegorical one. Just by spilling his blood upon stone that was not stone he had passed through. By enacting his desire with Worldbreaker, he had hurled himself heedless into the domain of gods and monsters.

A realm he knew of only in myth and the ravings of lunatics put down in proscribed texts and lurid works passed off as fiction. This was a place unconstrained by the limits of the physical world. The laws governing existence in the material world held no sway here and were endlessly flouted.

Even as he came to that understanding, the void surrounding him conspired to refute that notion. A world faded up, a terrible place of bone white sands and blood-red mountains and orange skies lit by global fires.

The air tasted of ash and regret, of sorrow and fecundity.

Horus heard the clash of swords, but no battle. The plaintive cries of lovers, but no flesh. Whispers surrounded him, plotting and scheming as he felt the cyclic entropy of his flesh. Old cells dying, new ones born to replace them.

He blinked away the heat of the sky, now seeing it wasn’t the orange of a reflected blaze, but the blaze itself.

The heavens were on fire from horizon to horizon.

A firestorm blazed over distant mountains, swollen by forks of ruby red lightning rippling upwards from their summits.

Horus felt the ground beneath him become more solid, and looked down to see that he stood within a circle of flagstones fashioned from obsidian. Eight radiating arms vanished into the far distance, and the landscape twisted in hideous ways along each of the pathways.

Acres of wire grew with the moaning bodies of his closest sons hung upon barbed spikes. Flickering lights skimmed desolate bogs that burped and hissed with the decay of rotting corpses. Silken deserts of serpentine fogbanks of perfumed musks. Labyrinthine forests of claw-branched trees clung to a series of rounded hills, each with eight doors set around their circumferences.

‘I’ve travelled realms like this before,’ said Horus, though there was no one to hear. No one obvious, at least.

Each of the four cardinal paths ended at a mountaintop fortress to rival that of the Emperor’s palace. Their walls were brass and gold, bone and earth. They glimmered in the ruddy light of the firestorm. Screams issued from each of them and booming laughter of mad gods rolled down from the peaks.

‘They are mocking you,’ said a voice behind him.

Horus turned, knowing what he would see.

The Cruor Angelus was the red of a battlefield sunset, its armour no longer splintered and broken, its face no longer a charred nightmare of agony. The chains encircling its body were gone, but the light of extinguished suns still burned in its dead eyes.

‘Why are you here?’ said Horus.

‘I am home,’ said the Red Angel. ‘I am unbound. The cold iron Erebus hung on me has no power here, nor do the warding oaths cut into my skin. Here I am the sum of all horror, the thirster after blood and the devourer of souls.’

Horus ignored its grandstanding. ‘So why are they mocking me?’

‘You are a mortal in a realm of gods. You are an insect to the Pantheon. Insignificant and unworthy of notice, a fragment of dust in the cosmic wind.’

Horus sighed. ‘Noctua was right, all you warp things are ridiculously overwrought.’

Razored bone talons ripped from its gauntlets. Curling horns tore from its brow. ‘You are in my realm, where you will see only what we wish you to see. I can snuff you out like a candle flame, Warmaster.’

‘If you’re trying to intimidate me, you’re doing a poor job of it,’ said Horus, taking a step towards the daemon. ‘Let me tell you what I know. You exist in both realms, but if I destroy your body, your time in my world is over.’

The Angel laughed and stepped to meet his advance.

‘Daemons never die,’ it said.

‘No, but they do get incredibly tiresome,’ said Horus, reaching up to wrap his hand around the Red Angel’s throat. He lifted it from the ground and squeezed. It spat black ichor and the fire in its eyes blazed.

‘Release me!’ it roared, clawing at his arms. Blood welled from the cuts and splashed the mirror-black flagstones. Black veins of disintegrating blood vessels spread down Horus’s arm at the daemon’s touch. He felt the internal mechanisms of his body decaying, but only crushed the daemon’s neck harder.

‘You will die for this!’ spat the daemon.

‘One day perhaps,’ said Horus. ‘But not today. You weren’t sent here to kill me.’

Horus nodded to the vast citadels in the mountains. ‘You’re here to guide me. Your masters need me, so take me to their fortresses, speak my name and tell them the galaxy’s new master would treat with them.’

Horus dropped the Red Angel and for a moment he thought it might fly at him in a rage. Booming thunder rolled down from the mountains, bellows of anger, squeals of delight and more sibilant whispers. A million voices swept the nightmarish landscape, and the Red Angel’s claws retreated into its gauntlet.

‘Very well, I will take you to the Ruinous Powers,’ it said with a hiss of venom that curdled the air. ‘The Obsidian Way is the eternal road. It is perilous for flesh and soul. It is not for mortals to walk, for its dangers are–’

‘Shut up,’ said Horus. ‘Just shut the hell up.’

Aximand cried out at the awful sensation of blindness. His helmet’s auto-senses had failed the instant the Warmaster’s hammer struck the black wall. He tore his helmet off, but was still in the dark. Not just a darkened space, but a place of utter absence, as though the very idea of light had yet to become real.

‘Ezekyle!’ he yelled. ‘Falkus! Sound off!’

No response.

What had happened? Had they failed? Had Lupercal inadvertently unleashed some hideous apocalypse on them? Aximand felt as though his entire body was enveloped in viscous glue. Every breath was laden with toxins, with bile and with sweet, cloying tastes that sickened him to the core.

‘Ezekyle!’ he yelled again. ‘Falkus! Sound off! Anyone!’

And almost as soon as it had begun it was over.

Aximand blinked as the world came back again. He spun around, seeing the same confusion in the faces of his brothers. Even Mortarion appeared discomfited. The Deathshroud gathered close to their master as the Justaerin looked around for someone to protect.

‘Where is he?’ demanded Abaddon, though Aximand wasn’t sure who he was addressing. ‘Where is he?’

‘Exactly where he intended,’ said Mortarion, looking at the black gate. It had previously appeared to be a slab of polished obsidian, but now it was a vertical pool of black oil. Rippling concentric rings spread over its surface, as though raindrops were falling on it from the other side.

‘Do we go in after him?’ asked Kibre.

‘Do you want to die?’ said Mortarion, rounding on the Widowmaker. ‘Only one other being has passed into the warp and lived. Are you the equal of the Emperor, little man?’

‘How long has it been since he went in?’ said Abaddon.

‘Not long,’ said Aximand. ‘Moments at most.’

‘How do you know that?’

Aximand pointed to the ruby droplets running down the Death Lord’s reaper. ‘His blood is still wet on the blade.’

Abaddon appeared to accept his logic and nodded. He stood before the portal, as though trying to drag Lupercal back with the sheer power of his will.

Kibre stood with him, Abaddon’s man to the last.

Aximand took a breath of deep-earth air. Not even the horror of Davin could have prepared him for this moment. The Warmaster was gone and Aximand didn’t know if he would ever see him again.

A cold shard of ice entered his heart and all the light and colour bled from the world. Was this what the Iron Tenth had felt when Ferrus Manus died?

Aximand felt utterly alone. No matter that his closest brothers stood with him. No matter that they had just won a great victory and fulfilled the Warmaster’s ambitions for this world.

What would they do without the Warmaster?

No use denying that such a thing could ever happen. Fulgrim’s slaying of Manus proved a primarch could die.

Who else but the Warmaster had the strength of will to lead the Sons of Horus? Who among the true sons could achieve what Horus had failed to achieve?

Horus is weak. Horus is a fool.

The words struck him like a blow. They were without source, yet Aximand knew they had issued from beyond the black gate. Delivered straight to the heart of his skull like an executioner’s dagger.

He blinked and saw a time a long time ago or yet to pass, an echoing empty wasteland of a world. He imagined a death. Alone, far away from everything he had once held dear, dying with a former brother at his feet whose cruel wounds bled out onto the dust of a nameless rock.

Breath sounded in his ear. Cold and measured, the breath of nightmares he’d thought banished with the ghost of Garviel Loken.

A fist of iron took Aximand’s heart and crushed it within his chest. He couldn’t breathe. Transhuman dread. He’d felt it briefly on Dwell, and now it all but overpowered him.

The feeling passed as a bitter wind blew from the gateway.

‘Stand to!’ yelled Abaddon. ‘Something’s happening.’

Every weapon in the chamber snapped to aim at the portal. Its surface no longer rippled with the gentle fall of raindrops, but the violence of an ocean tempest.

Horus Lupercal fell through the oil-black surface of the gate and crashed to his knees before Abaddon and Kibre. Behind him, the darkness of the gate vanished with a bang of displaced air. Only a solid wall of mountain rock remained, as though the gate had never existed.

Aximand rushed forward to help them as the Warmaster held himself upright on all fours. His back heaved with breath, like a man trapped in a vacuum suddenly returned to atmosphere.

‘Sir,’ said Abaddon. ‘Sir, are you all right?’

Even through his gauntlets, Aximand felt the glacial ice of the Warmaster’s flesh.

‘You’re still here?’ said Horus without looking up, his voice little better than a parched whisper. ‘You waited for me... after all this time...’

‘Of course we waited,’ said Aximand. ‘You’ve only been gone moments.’

‘Moments...?’ said Horus, with a fragile, almost frantic edge to his words. ‘Then everything... everything’s still to be done.’

Aximand looked over at Abaddon, seeing the same lingering doubt in the face of the First Captain. None of them had the faintest clue as to what might happen beyond the gate or what the consequences of venturing into such an alien environment might be.

They had let their lord and master walk into the unknown and not one of them had known what to expect.

That lack of forethought now horrified Aximand.

‘Brother,’ said Mortarion, cutting through Aximand’s self-recrimination. ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’

Horus stood to his full height and Aximand’s eyes widened at the sight of him.

The Warmaster had aged.

Cthonia had shaped him, moulded him into a warrior of flint-hard lines and cruel beauty. Two centuries of war had left no mark upon him, but moments beyond the gate had done what the passage of time could not.

Silver streaked the stubble upon his scalp, and the grooves at the corners of his eyes were deeper and more pronounced.

The face Aximand had devoted his life to serving was now that of an ancient warrior who had fought for longer than he could ever have imagined, who had seen too much horror and whose campaigning days had bled him dry.

Yet the fire and purpose in his eyes was brighter than ever.

Nor was that fire simply confined to his eyes.

What Aximand had taken to be cold flesh was the power of the empyrean distilled and honed within the body of an immortal being. Horus stood taller, fuller and more powerfully than before. Lupercal had always found Warmaster to be an awkward fit, a term never fully bedded in or taken as read.

Now he owned the title, as though it had been his long before there was any such office to take. He was now, naturally, and without equivocation, the Warmaster.

Aximand, Abaddon and Kibre backed away from Horus, each of them dropping to their knees in wonder as the power filling the primarch bloomed in the material world.

Even Mortarion, that most truculent of primarchs, bent the knee to Horus in a way he had never done for the Emperor.

Horus grinned and all trace of the war-weary ancient was banished in the blink of an eye. In his place was a mortal god, brighter and more dangerous than ever. Filled with a power that only one other being in all existence had wielded before.

‘Yes,’ said Horus. ‘I found exactly what I was looking for.’

TWENTY-FOUR

Leaving Lupercalia
Ill met by moonlight
Hunter’s eye

Lupercalia was burning.

The Sons of Horus had not lit the fires, but Aximand watched them spread through the knotted streets of the lower valley as the Warmaster’s Stormbird cleared the citadel’s walls. The Knights of House Devine stalked the streets of their city like vengeful predators, burning and killing with wanton abandon.

One machine, a burn-scarred thing with a lashing whip weapon danced in the light of the revel fires, its warhorn hooting as though its pilot were drunk.

Aximand forgot the Knights as the angle of the gunship’s ascent became steeper and a number of Thunderhawks took up station on either wing.

‘It’s strange to be leaving a world so soon after arriving,’ said Falkus Kibre, scrolling through a data-slate bearing a force disposition assay. ‘Especially when there’s still armies to fight.’

‘No one worth fighting,’ grunted Abaddon from farther along the compartment. He’d said little since they’d emerged from the catacombs beneath the citadel. ‘The fight before Lupercalia destroyed the best of them.’

Kibre shook his head. ‘Orbital surveys say there’s tens of thousands of soldiers and dozens of armoured regiments have fled across the mountains on the edges of the southern steppe.’

Abaddon said nothing. Aximand knew Ezekyle better than most and knew when to leave well alone.

This was one such moment.

‘The Kushite Eastings and Northern Oceanic were largely wiped out at Lupercalia and Avadon,’ continued Kibre who, as Abaddon’s second, should have known not to press the issue. ‘But van Valkenberg and Malbek are still unaccounted for.’

‘Then you go down and bloody finish them!’ snapped Abaddon.

Kibre took Abaddon’s outburst stoically and replaced the slate in its niche.

‘Ezekyle,’ said Kibre. ‘We fought the hardest down there, you and I.’

Aximand scowled at that. The Fifth Company had fought their way through the XIII Legion to break the line, and they’d done it without the support of an orbital weapons platform.

‘We faced a bloody Imperator and lived,’ continued the Widowmaker, ‘So don’t make me come up there and slap you for being unmindful of what we did.’

Aximand revised his assumption that he knew Ezekyle better than most when, instead of killing Kibre, Abaddon grunted in laughter.

‘You’re right, Falkus,’ said Abaddon. ‘It does feel somehow... unfinished.’

That at least, Aximand understood. Like all true fighting men down through the ages, he hated to abandon a mission before it was finished. But Ezekyle had things wrong.

‘It is finished,’ he said.

Abaddon and Kibre looked back down the fuselage at him.

‘We came here for Lupercal,’ he said. ‘This was his mission, not ours. And it’s done.’

‘We’re just going to have to fight those men again on the walls of Terra,’ said Kibre.

‘You’re wrong,’ said the Warmaster, emerging from the pilot’s compartment and sitting on the dropmaster’s seat. ‘Those men will be dead soon. Mortarion and Grulgor will see to that.’

Horus had always been a demi-god among men, but looking into the Warmaster’s eyes now was like looking into the heart of a star on the verge of becoming a self-immolating supernova.

‘We’re leaving the Fourteenth Legion to finish the job?’ said Kibre.

Horus nodded, shifting his bulk on the seat. It was patently too small for him, more so now that his natural presence was enhanced by his journey across the dimensions.

‘Molech now belongs to Mortarion and Fulgrim.’

‘Fulgrim?’ said Aximand. ‘Why does the Phoenician get a share of the spoils?’

‘He played his part,’ said Horus. ‘Though I doubt he’ll remember his time here fondly. Plasmic fire to the face tends to be an unpleasant experience. Or so Lorgar told me from Armatura.’

‘What was Fulgrim doing?’ asked Aximand.

Horus didn’t answer immediately and Aximand took a moment to study the chiselled lines of the Warmaster’s face. The extended age Aximand saw in his gene-father still unnerved him. He dearly wanted to ask Lupercal what he’d found, what wonders he’d seen and how far along the road he’d travelled.

One day, perhaps, but not today.

‘Fulgrim reaped a crop sown here many years ago,’ said Horus. ‘But enough of my brother, let’s savour the moment ahead.’

‘What moment?’ said Kibre.

‘A reunion of sorts,’ said Horus. ‘The confraternity of the old Mournival is about to be remade.’

Lupercal’s Court. The dark jewel in the crown of Peeter Egon Momus.

If Loken’s return to the Vengeful Spirit had been hard before, moving stealthily through its hidden corridors and secret niches, being within Lupercal’s Court was an exquisite torture. Loken had stood at the Warmaster’s side when they had planned the Isstvan campaign.

He’d been proud then, prouder even than the day he’d been chosen to be one of the XVI Legion. All he felt now was confusion.

Gerradon and Noctua had dragged them through the ship, marching them onto a pneu-train bound for the prow. At first, he’d thought they were heading to the strategium, but after debarking at the Museum of Conquest, he’d realised exactly where they were going.

The high ceiling was still hung with uncommon banners, some fresh, some mouldering and dusty. Shadows clung to the thick pillars, making it impossible to tell if they were alone. The twenty-three Luperci – he’d counted them as they passed through the Museum of Conquest – spread out and marched them towards the towering basalt throne at the far end of the chamber.

‘Kneel,’ said Gerradon, and there was little to do but obey.

Iacton, Bror and Severian were to Loken’s left, Varren, Tarchon, Rubio and Voitek to his right. The Luperci surrounded them like executioners. They knelt facing the throne, looking out into the vastness of space through the one addition to the chamber, a cathedral-like window of stained glass.

Pinpricks of light from distant stars glittered at unimaginable distances, and Molech’s moons painted the floor in lozenges of milky radiance.

‘Nice throne,’ said Varren. ‘The traitor still thinks he’s a king, then. Should have seen this coming long before.’

Ger Gerradon kicked the former World Eater in the back. Varren sprawled, and bared his teeth, reaching for an axe that wasn’t there. Four Luperci kept their bolters trained on him as others hauled him back to his knees.

‘A king?’ said Gerradon with a grin Loken wanted to split wide open. ‘You World Eaters always did think small. Horus Lupercal doesn’t think he’s a king. Haven’t you felt it? He’s a god now.’

Severian laughed and Grael Noctua backhanded a bolter across his face. Still laughing, Severian rolled onto his side and picked himself up. Loken wanted to mock Gerradon’s theatrics, but he could barely take a breath. That he would soon be face to face with the Warmaster was sending his sense memory into overdrive.

The corners of Lupercal’s Court were shadowed ruins where the dead of Isstvan gathered, hungry for flesh. The moonlight painting the floor was the flash of atomic firestorms, and the breath at his ear was that of his killer.

‘Loken,’ said Qruze.

He didn’t answer, keeping his gaze fixed on the black throne.

‘Garviel!’

Loken blinked and lifted his head.

The great iron doors to Lupercal’s Court were opening.

And there he was, looking right at Loken with paternal pride.

His gene-father, his Warmaster.

Horus Lupercal.

The Warmaster had always been the mightiest of the primarchs, a fact acknowledged by all Sons of Horus, though hotly debated by legionaries from most other Legions.

To see him now would surely end that debate.

Horus was possessed of a powerful dynamism, a charge that passed from him to those he beheld. To be in his presence was to know that gods walked among men. A hyperbolic sentiment, but one borne out by those fortunate enough to have met him. That power, that essence was magnified now.

It was magnified a hundredfold, and it all but emptied Loken’s reservoir of hate to keep from throwing himself at the Warmaster’s feet and begging for forgiveness.

His feet, look at his feet.

A piece of advice he’d been given when Lupercal still served the Emperor. As true now as it was then. Loken kept his eyes down. He took a breath and held it. His heart thundered, a hammer beating on the fused bone shield of his ribcage.

His mouth was dry, like the eve of his first battle.

‘Look at me, Garviel,’ said Horus, and every pain Loken had suffered since the first bombs had fallen on Isstvan was washed away in that moment of recognition.

He couldn’t help but obey.

The Warmaster was an all-conquering hero, clad in armour as black as wilderness space. The volcanic eye on his chest was slitted and veined with black, his claws unsheathed like a jungle predator closing on a kill.

His face was as heroically self-aware as Loken remembered.

Loken knew other warriors accompanied Horus, but they were as ghosts in the obscuring corona of the Warmaster’s presence. He heard their shocked voices and understood that he knew them, and they him, but he could not tear his gaze from his former commander-in-chief.

The urge to remain kneeling through fealty rather than captivity was overwhelming.

Horus said, ‘Stand. All of you.’

Loken did so, and told himself it was because he chose to.

None of the other pathfinders followed his example. He faced the Warmaster alone. Just as he’d always known he would. However this ended, now or in years to come, it would come down to just two warriors locked in a fight to the death.

The figures surrounding the Warmaster emerged from his shadow, and Loken felt his choler flare at the sight of his former Mournival brothers.

Ezekyle, scarred and bellicose, hatred etched on his eyes.

Horus Aximand, pale and wide-eyed, his face pressed onto his skull like badly set clay. He looked at Loken, not with hatred, but with... fear?

Was it possible for Little Horus to fear anything?

Falkus Kibre, hulking and unsubtle. Following Abaddon’s lead.

Nothing new there.

Grael Noctua took his place with them, and Loken immediately understood the skewed dynamic between them. A reborn Mournival, but one with its humours grotesquely out of balance.

‘I never thought to see you again, Garviel,’ said Horus.

‘Why would you?’ said Loken, mustering his reserves of defiance to speak with clarity and strength. ‘I died when you betrayed everything the Luna Wolves ever stood for. When you murdered Isstvan Three and the loyal sons of four Legions.’

Horus nodded slowly. ‘And despite all that, you come back to the Vengeful Spirit. Why is that?’

‘To stop you.’

‘Is that what you told Malcador?’ said Horus, before turning to regard the rest of the pathfinders. ‘Is it what he told you?’

‘It’s the truth,’ said Loken. ‘You have to be stopped.’

‘With what, a squad?’ said Horus, cocking an eyebrow. ‘I don’t think so. The galaxy isn’t a sterile place without a love of melodrama, Garviel. You know as well as I that this doesn’t end with kill teams or assassins or a pre-emptive strike thousands of light years from Terra. It ends with me looking into my father’s eyes, my hands around His neck, and showing Him everything he loves burned to ash by His lies.’

‘You’re insane,’ said Bror Tyrfingr. ‘The Wolf King will stop you, he’ll carve his name on your heart and give your bones to the wyrd to tell the future for eternity.’

Horus snapped his fingers and said, ‘Russ? Ah, so that’s what this is.’

Loken willed Bror to shut up, but the damage was already done.

‘Leman didn’t slake his thirst for blood on Prospero?’ continued Horus with a rueful shake of his head. ‘I wonder, does the Emperor even know you’re here or did the Wolf King set this up himself? He always was eager to spill his brothers’ blood. Did he convince Malcador that sending you here was the only way to end the war before it got to Terra?’

‘Russ stands on Terra’s walls a loyal son,’ said Qruze. ‘Walls the Master of Stone has strengthened beyond your power to breach.’

‘Perturabo assures me differently,’ said Horus. He bent to take Qruze’s chin in his hand. ‘Ah, Iacton. Of all my sons, you were the one I never expected to turn from me. You were old guard, a warrior with roots on both Terra and Cthonia. You were the best of us, but your time is over. Tell me, how did you even get aboard?’

Loken kept his face neutral and hoped Qruze could do the same.

He doesn’t know about Rassuah or the Tarnhelm.

‘We came here to mark the Vengeful Spirit for Russ,’ said Loken, hoping a measure of truth might divert the Warmaster from Rassuah.

‘Yes, Grael told me he saw some futharc scraped on the walls.’

‘Bloody Svessl,’ hissed Bror. ‘Is there anyone he didn’t tell?’

Horus moved on and walked a slow circuit of the remnants of the pathfinders towards his throne.

‘Marking a route for Russ,’ he said. ‘That sounds plausible, but come on, Garviel, you and I both know that’s not the only reason you’re here. There’s more to your return than you’re telling.’

‘You’re right,’ answered Loken, turning to face Ger Gerradon. ‘I came to kill him. To free Tarik’s soul.’

‘Maybe that’s part of it,’ conceded Horus, taking his place upon his throne, ‘but why don’t you tell your comrades why you really came here. And don’t be coy, Garviel. I’ll know if you’re lying.’

Loken tried to speak, but the Warmaster’s gaze pinned him in place, dredging the very worst of his treacherous fears out through his eyes. He tried to repeat what he’d just said, but the words wouldn’t come.

Enthroned in the glow of the moon shining through the stained glass windows, Horus was regal and magnificent, a lord for whom it would be worth laying down a life.

A hundred lives, a thousand. As many as he asked for.

‘I...’

‘It’s all right, Loken, I understand,’ said Horus. ‘You came back because you want to rejoin the Sons of Horus.’

This was the moment Bror Tyrfingr had feared since they’d left Terra. Not death, that moment held no fear for him. He’d considered himself dead the moment he foreswore the frost blue of the Rout and taken Yasu Nagasena’s outstretched hand.

No, death was not his fear.

Loken took a step towards the Warmaster’s throne.

Bror had watched Garviel Loken’s mental dissolution the way an aesthete might lament the slow degradation of a great work of art.

If Loken bent the knee to Horus, Bror was under orders to kill him. He understood why the duty had fallen to him. He was VI Legion, the Executioner’s son, and could be counted on to do the unthinkable, no matter what bonds of brotherhood might be forged in adversity.

He let his breath come slowly.

The warriors gathered around him could be counted on to rally to him, but they were grossly outnumbered. Bror had the positions of the Luperci embedded in his mind. They wouldn’t stop him. They might once have been Legion warriors, but now they were maleficarum.

Bror was unarmed, but a warrior of the Rout needed no weapons.

He could break Loken’s neck without blinking.

And if he died a heartbeat later, so be it.

Bror closed his eyes, feeling the hackles rise on the back of his neck. He’d first felt it in the forests of Fenris, stalked by the great silver wolf the Gothi said would one day kill him.

He’d proven them wrong and taken its pelt for a cloak.

Bror looked up and saw Tylos Rubio staring at him. His eyes were wide and pleading. They flicked over towards Ger Gerradon. No words passed between them, but the meaning was clear.

Be ready.

Loken felt himself moving forward. Step by step towards the Warmaster’s throne. What Horus was saying was ludicrous. He couldn’t go back to the Legion, not after all the blood and betrayal that had passed between them.

And yet...

He wanted it. Deep down, he wanted it.

‘Loken, don’t do this,’ said Qruze, rising to his feet. ‘Don’t listen to him. He’s betrayed us all, made us monsters in the eyes of the very people we were wrought to protect.’

Abaddon’s fist sent Iacton to the deck, streaks of red in his hair like blood on snow.

‘Shut your mouth, Half-heard,’ said Abaddon.

‘Loken!’ cried Qruze, coming forward on his hands and knees.

...he is the Half-heard no longer... his voice will be heard louder than any other in his Legion.

Loken blinked as he heard Mersadie Oliton’s words in his head.

No, they weren’t Mersadie’s words, they were Euphrati Keeler’s.

If you saw the rot, a hint of corruption, would you step out of your regimented life and stand against it? For the greater good of mankind.

He’d heard those words aboard this very ship, on the residential decks once occupied by the remembrancers. Euphrati had reached out to him, scared and alone. She’d tried to warn him of what was coming, but he’d dismissed her fears as groundless.

‘Garviel,’ said Horus, and he turned to see the Warmaster holding out his gauntlet. ‘Don’t hate me for what’s happened.’

‘Why shouldn’t I hate you?’ said Loken. ‘You did the worst thing that anyone can do to another person. You let us believe we were loved and valued, then showed us it was all a lie.’

Horus shook his head, but his hand remained outstretched. Behind him, a crenellated warship passed over the face of the moon. The Eye of Horus adorned its prow, but it was a crude thing, painted on like graffiti.

‘Come back to me, my son. We can rebuild what was lost between us, renew our bonds of fellowship. I want you at my side as I reforge the Imperium anew.’

Loken looked back at the warriors on their knees behind him. Men he’d fought and bled with. Men he’d called brother in the darkest of times. He looked into their eyes, seeing their defiance and more. Rubio’s fists were clenched and the tension in Voitek’s neck was like a straining machine about to throw a gear.

He saw the cold eyes of Bror Tyrfingr upon him and remembered the words he had spoken at their first meeting.

If I think your roots are weak, I’ll kill you myself.

He gave an almost imperceptible nod to his fellows and took a step away from the Warmaster, feeling the threads of loyalty and brotherhood that bound him to this moment pull tight.

Horus rose to his feet as the passing warship completed its transit of the cathedral window.

Dazzling moonlight poured into Lupercal’s Court once more.

It haloed Lupercal, limned him in silver to cast the darkest shadow across the deck. The flared back of the Warmaster’s throne gave that shadow wings, like the faceless daemons from the lurid books Kyril Sindermann had loaned him.

‘Part of me wishes I could, sir,’ said Loken. ‘Believe me, I want the warmth that being part of something greater brings. I want to belong. I had that with the Legion, but you took that away from me when you stabbed us all in the back.’

‘No,’ said Horus. ‘Garviel, no. That’s not–’

But Loken wasn’t about to stop now. ‘Turning my back on everything I knew, being cut off from the Legion that made me who I am? That was the worst moment of my life. It drove me insane. More than Tarik’s death or being buried alive on Isstvan, it was the heartbreak and yawning emptiness that finally broke me.’

‘Then come back to me, Garviel,’ said Horus. ‘Feel that warmth again, don’t you want to be part of the greatest endeavour the galaxy has ever seen?’

‘I already was,’ said Loken, turning his back on Horus. ‘It was called the Great Crusade.’

Rubio nodded and Bror Tyrfingr vaulted across the deck, his hand a hard axe blade. He rammed into Ger Gerradon and barrelled him from his feet. Voitek moved with him. The leader of the Luperci went over backwards, sprawling on the deck in surprise.

Gunfire exploded and the harsh blurt of binaric pain told Bror that Ares Voitek was hit. He smelled lubricant and hot oils.

Qruze and Severian were moving, turning on the Mournival.

Bror hadn’t time to spare for them.

More gunfire. Shouts. He’d taken in the positions of the Luperci, but that was seconds ago, and his situational awareness was now hopelessly outdated.

‘Kill him, Bror!’ shouted Rubio. ‘He’s blocking my powers!’

‘Trying,’ grunted Bror. ‘He’s stronger than he looks.’

Gerradon’s face twisted in rage. For a moment Bror saw the dark flame twisting within him. He slammed his forehead against Gerradon’s face. His cheekbone caved in and foul-smelling blood burst across his split skin.

Even as they struggled, the blood flow stopped and the cut in Gerradon’s cheek sealed itself.

He laughed. ‘You think you can hurt me? You Wolves really are stupid.’

Voitek’s servo-arms pinned one of Gerradon’s, and Bror scrambled to drag the man’s blade from its sheath. Gerradon’s fist thundered into Bror’s belly, cracking the plate and driving the air from him.

Gerradon kicked him away and he lost his grip on the handle.

He staggered as a bolter shell punched him in the back. Another blew out the meat of his thigh. Pain swamped him, but he hurled himself at his enemy again.

Gerradon caught him around the throat with his free hand and slammed him against Ares Voitek. The impact was ferocious. Plate cracked.

Bror saw something glitter at Gerradon’s back. A gleam of moonlight on an ivory Ultima. A stolen weapon jutting from a shoulder scabbard. He reached for it. Too far away. Gerradon’s grip tightened, crushing the life from him. He tensed every muscle in his shoulders and neck, his face purpling with the effort.

Then he saw it.

Proximo Tarchon’s gladius held aloft like a gift from the ancient gods of Asaheim.

Grasped in the manipulator claw of Ares Voitek.

The servo-arm stabbed the blade into Gerradon’s back.

The daemon within Gerradon howled as its hold on the dead man’s mortal flesh slipped. The iron grip on Bror loosened.

Not much, but just enough.

Bror pulled Gerradon’s arm from his neck. He pounced and fastened his sharpened fangs on the Luperci’s flesh.

Their eyes met and Bror relished the sudden fear he saw.

He wrenched his jaw back and ripped out Ger Gerradon’s throat.

Lupercal’s Court was in uproar. The Luperci filled the space with sporadic bolter fire, their outlines wavering as though something bestial sought to escape their flesh. Muzzle flare split the cold glow of moonlight. An arcing sheet of blue lightning from Rubio’s gauntlets hurled six of them back in a coruscating blast.

Their armour clattered to the deck, the monsters within burned to ash. Loken ran towards Aximand, scooping up a fallen chainsword that still smoked with Rubio’s witchfire.

He knew he couldn’t hope to kill Aximand, but was past caring.

He’d faced the Warmaster and rejected him.

None of them were going to leave the Vengeful Spirit alive.

Severian was right. Getting in had been the easy part.

Iacton Qruze had come back to the flagship with one aim in mind and one alone. As gunfire filled the chamber, he dived towards where Ger Gerradon fought to stem the tide of blood from his mauled throat.

The sinews and skin were trying to knit, but the wound was too awful, the blood loss too catastrophic for the daemon’s host to survive. He dragged Gerradon’s sword from its sheath as bolt shells cratered the deck beside him.

A ricochet sliced the skin of his cheek. If he lived he would have a neat scar from jawline to temple.

Loken and Bror were struggling with Little Horus Aximand and Falkus Kibre, a brutal, gouging, bloody brawl they were losing. Kibre was all strength and ferocity, but Bror Tyrfingr was giving as good as he got.

Loken had a chainsword, Aximand a blade with a powered edge. That wasn’t going to end well. Rubio fought Abaddon with a sword wrought from blue lightning and bolts of witchfire. The First Captain was a monster now, a giant with cadaverous features and black, gem-like eyes.

Rubio bled from where Abaddon’s tearing fists had ripped open his armour, its steeldust plates sheeted with red.

The Librarian had ploughed all his powers into attack, sparing nothing for defence. Varren lent what aid he could, but the wounds bound by Altan Nohai were bleeding freely again.

Qruze couldn’t see Severian. Armed once again with his altered gladius, Proximo Tarchon stood sentinel over Ares Voitek, who spilled litres of sticky red-black fluid from half a dozen sword cuts and bolter craters.

An impact smashed into Qruze’s hip, a searing bloom of pain that almost drove him to his knees. He turned as four of the Luperci raced towards him. They carried axes, swords and weapons that looked like they’d been looted from the Museum of Conquest.

‘Come on!’ roared Qruze, mashing the sword’s activation trigger. ‘Let this old dog show you he still has some bite.’

The first swung his axe for Qruze’s neck.

‘Too risky for a first attack,’ he said, ducking low and hacking his chainblade through his opponent’s gut. ‘The beheading cut leaves you far too exposed against a low blow.’

He swayed aside from a sword thrust, bending to snatch the bolt pistol from the downed warrior’s holster. Fully loaded, safety off. Sloppy.

‘Too much weight on your forward foot,’ he grunted. ‘No control to evade a counterstrike.’

He drove the tip of his sword through the Luperci’s spine. He spun and wrenched the sword blade out through its chest.

The last of the Luperci had at least learned from the deaths of their fellows. They split up and circled Qruze warily, swords in the guard position, their footwork cautious.

Qruze shot them both in the face, a classic double-tap. Their helmets exploded as the mass-reactives registered threshold densities for detonation.

‘And if your opponent has a gun when all you have is a sword,’ he said, turning towards the Warmaster upon his basalt throne. ‘You’re going to die.’

With every meeting of their swords, Loken lost teeth – whickering triangular shards flew from his chainsword as Aximand’s shimmer-edged blade bit the unshielded metal.

‘Mourn-it-all is going to kill you,’ said Aximand.

Loken didn’t reply. He’d come to slay Aximand, not waste unnecessary words on him.

‘No words of hate for the life I took on Isstvan?’ said Aximand.

‘Just deeds,’ said Loken, fighting to keep his temper.

An angry swordsman was a dead swordsman.

He cursed as Aximand used his momentary inattention to launch a lightning fast thrust to the groin. Loken swept the blade aside with the flat of his sword, trying to keep the disruptive edge from further damaging his weapon.

‘Tarik always said you were so straight up and down,’ said Aximand, using small wrist movements to move the tip of his sword in tight circles. ‘I never really knew what he meant until now. It’s only when you try to kill a man that you see through to his true character.’

Loken was too experienced a swordsman to fall for so obvious a gambit and kept his eyes fixed on Aximand’s. Alone of his once-proud features, his eyes remained unchanged from how Loken remembered them.

Pale blue, like ice chips under a winter sun.

‘Who gave you the new face?’

Aximand’s reattached dead skin mask twitched.

‘Who was it that beat you?’ asked Loken, ducking a waist-high sweep of Mourn-it-all. He aimed a low cut at Aximand’s knees.

‘A Chogorian named Hibou Khan,’ said Aximand, driving the blade into the deck. It screeched with red sparks. ‘Why do you care?’

‘So I can tell him I finished the job.’

Aximand roared and attacked with relentless fury. Loken blocked as fast as he could, but every killing blow he warded off cut portions from his weapon until it was next to useless.

He tossed the broken blade, looking over Aximand’s shoulder.

‘Now, Macer!’ he shouted.

The former World Eater’s fist crashed into the back of Aximand’s helmet. And had Macer Varren not been horrifically wounded, his strength might have split Aximand’s skull wide open. As it was, he crashed into Loken and the three of them fell to the deck in a thrashing tangle of limbs.

Mourn-it-all skittered away, its edge dimming without its bearer’s grip.

Aximand smashed his elbow into Varren’s face.

Loken kicked Aximand in the gut. They grappled. Fists bludgeoned, elbows cracked and knees slammed. It was an inelegant fight, not one the sagas would speak of in glowing heroic terms.

Even outnumbered two to one, Aximand was having the better of the fight. Loken reeled from a hammering series of bodyblows. Varren stumbled as Aximand thundered his foot against the wounds Altan Nohai had bound.

‘I dreamed of you,’ said Aximand between breaths and sounding more regretful than angry. ‘I dreamed you were alive. Why did you have to be alive?’

Loken rolled upright as Aximand curled his fingers around Mourn-it-all’s leather-wrapped grip.

He brought the sword around. Its blade bit plate and flesh.

Blood rained.

‘No more dreams,’ said Aximand.

Proximo Tarchon was down, sprawled over the body of Ares Voitek with three mass-reactive craters blasted through his body. Ger Gerradon’s legs still kicked weakly, but whether he was still alive or was just twitching in death was open to interpretation.

Severian had a combat blade in one hand, a bolt pistol in the other.

He’d killed a dozen Luperci in as many shots or cuts, moving through the fighting like a ghost. People saw him, but they didn’t see him, didn’t recognise the significance of what they were seeing until it was too late.

Severian never needed more than one cut.

Usually that was enough, but Abaddon had merely staggered at his thrust and kept fighting. At least it had allowed Varren to break from the fight to go to Loken’s aid.

The battle had devolved into individual skirmishes, but it couldn’t go on like that for long. His pistol was empty. He tossed it as dead weight.

Severian saw his target and moved like a displaced shadow towards Grael Noctua.

The sergeant of the Warlocked saw him coming, which was unusual enough in itself. He grinned and took out his own blade.

‘Twenty-Fifth to Twenty-Fifth,’ said Noctua. ‘A battle with a pleasing symmetry to it, yes?’

‘So long as you’re dead at the end, symmetry can go to hell.’

The two of them faced one another as though in the training cages. Crouched low, blade to blade, hands extended, eyes locked.

Noctua made the first move, feinting right. Severian read it easily. He countered the real blow, spun low and stabbed into Noctua’s groin. Forearm block, return elbow smash that hit thin air. Severian trapped Noctua’s arm, slammed his forehead forward.

Noctua threw himself backwards, dragging Severian with him.

They rolled, fighting to free their knife hands.

Severian got his free first. He stabbed into Noctua’s side. The blade scraped free as Noctua rolled with the blow. Severian pushed clear. Noctua’s weapon sliced the side of his neck, a hair’s breadth from opening his throat.

‘I always hated you, Severian,’ said Noctua. ‘Even before ascension.’

‘I never cared enough about you to feel hate.’

They came together again. Thrust, cut, block, spin. Their blades like striking snakes. Both warriors had drawn blood. Both were evenly matched. Much longer and it wouldn’t make any difference.

‘You’re good,’ said Severian.

‘The Twenty-Fifth teaches its warriors well.’

Severian flicked his blade at Noctua’s face. Blood spatter hit his eyes, and Severian slipped into that fraction of a second’s distraction.

He rammed his dagger through the centre of Noctua’s chest, twisting the blade into his heart space.

Noctua’s face contorted in pain.

‘Not as well as Cthonia,’ said Severian.

The pain was incredible, the worst Loken had known.

It filled him and crushed him. It bypassed every bio-engineered suppression mechanism. It kept the pain gate in his spinal column wedged open.

Where Mourn-it-all had cloven his ribs, he felt the toxic afterburn of something vile enter his bloodstream. Had the blade been poisoned?

He fell onto his side, struggling not to curl up and weep.

Aximand stood over him and the script worked along the length of the fuller drew threads of crimson from the edge. Loken turned onto his front, keeping one hand clamped to the rift gouged in his armour. He crawled away, knowing it was useless.

Varren lay moaning in a pool of his own blood. Aximand’s return stroke had taken his right arm at the elbow and split open his chest. Old wounds bled afresh, and his helmet was cracked across the centre.

Loken lifted his head. The air in Lupercal’s Court grew thick, and he saw their last stab at a measure of victory horribly snatched away.

Abaddon had finally put Rubio down and had Bror Tyrfingr pinned to the deck. The Fenrisian was still fighting the First Captain, but even his strength was not the equal of Terminator armour. Voitek’s servo-arms wheezed and clicked, trying and failing to lift him upright. Proximo Tarchon lay unmoving next to him. The Ultramarine still clutched his bloody gladius, but his head hung low over his cratered chest.

Only Severian still stood, but he was surrounded by the Luperci with nowhere to go. The bodies of Ger Gerradon and Grael Noctua lay at his feet, their blood mingling in a spreading lake. Severian’s eyes darted from side to side, seeking a way out, but finding nothing.

Loken heard his name being shouted and blinked.

The gelid quality of the air receded and he took a great sucking draught into his lungs. It burned and the pain stabbed through him from the grievous wound in his side.

He turned to the source of the shout.

But what he saw made no sense.

Iacton Qruze knelt before Lupercal’s throne with his back to Loken. The Warmaster held him clasped to his breast, whispering something in the Half-heard’s ear.

Then Loken saw the Warmaster’s talons jutting from Qruze’s back.

Horus wrenched his arm back and pushed Qruze away.

Iacton crashed to the deck and Loken saw the gaping wound in his chest. Held aloft in the Warmaster’s dripping gauntlet were the twin hearts of Iacton Qruze. Both organs were bright with oxygenated blood and beat one last time.

‘No!’ cried Loken. ‘Throne, no!’

He fought through the screaming fire saturating his body and scrambled over to where Iacton Qruze lay. The Half-heard’s eyes were wide and filled with pain. His jaw worked up and down, trying to speak, trying to make his last words meaningful.

But nothing was coming. The pain was too intense, the shock of his imminent death too much.

Loken held him, helpless to do anything more.

Even had Altan Nohai lived, there would be no saving Qruze.

Lupercal’s Court held its breath. None of the gathered enemies moved. A hero was dying and such a moment was worthy of pause, even in the midst of bitter fratricide.

Loken’s pain was inconsequential in the face of what Qruze was enduring. Loken met Qruze’s gaze and saw an urgent need to communicate in them, a desperate imperative that superseded all other concerns.

Qruze took Loken’s wrist in an iron grip.

His gaze was unflinching. His ruined body spasmed as pain signals overwhelmed his brain. Yet even in the throes of the most agonising death, Qruze still put his duty first.

‘Iacton, I’m sorry...’ said Loken. ‘I’m so very sorry.’

Qruze shook his head. Anger lit his face.

He held his free hand out to Loken. He pressed something into his palm and closed his fingers over it. Loken went to lift it, but Qruze shook his head again, eyes wide. A pleading imperative.

Not now, not here.

Loken nodded and felt Qruze’s grip slacken on his wrist.

The light in the Half-heard’s eyes went out, and he was dead.

Loken laid Qruze down on the blood-soaked deck plate and reached down to a pouch at his waist. He pulled out the two Cthonian mirror-coins Severian had given him in the shadow of the Seven Neverborn and placed them on Iacton Qruze’s eyes.

Loken’s grief was gone, burned away by anger.

He pulled himself to his full height and looked up at Horus.

The Warmaster stood before his throne, Iacton Qruze’s blood still weeping from the long talons of his gauntlet.

‘I didn’t want it to come to this, Garviel,’ said Horus.

Loken ignored the ridiculous platitude and stood taller than he had ever stood before. Prouder than he had ever stood before.

All the uncertainty, all the confusion and every shred of the madness that had kept him wrapped in delusions vanished. All compunction to revere the Warmaster was purged in an instant of loathing.

Iacton Qruze was dead, and the last link with what the Legion had once been was broken.

And with it, any last shred of belief that the Warmaster possessed any nobility or trace of the great man he had once been.

Loken felt the words well up from a depthless reservoir of certainty within him. A valediction and threat all in one.

‘I guarantee that before the sun sets on this war, even if you win, even if I die here, you’ll rue the day you ever turned your back on the Emperor. For every planet you take, the Imperium will exact a fearful tally of Cthonian blood. I guarantee that even if you conquer Terra the fruits of victory will taste like dust in your mouth. I guarantee that if you don’t kill me today, you’ll meet me again. I will stand against you at every outpost, every wall and every gate. I will fight you with every sword at my command, with every bolter and every fist. I will fight you with bare hands. I will fight you with the very rocks of the world you seek to conquer. I will never give up until the Sons of Horus are dead and no more than a bad memory.’

Loken took a breath and saw the Warmaster’s acceptance of his threat. Horus understood that Loken meant every word of what he had just said, that nothing could ever sway him from his course.

‘I wanted you back,’ said Horus. ‘Tormaggedon wanted to make you like him, but I told him you would always be a Son of Horus.’

‘I was never a Son of Horus,’ said Loken. ‘I was and remain a Luna Wolf. A proud son of Cthonia, a loyal servant of the Emperor, beloved by all. I am your enemy.’

Loken heard a chirrup of crackling vox.

He heard it again, coming from the helmet mag-locked to Qruze’s belt. He recognised the voice and despite the body at his feet and all they had lost to get this far, Loken smiled.

He bent and lifted the helmet to his lips as a ghost-shadow moved across the silver orb of the moon through the glass of the great cathedral window.

‘How’s that hunter’s eye, Rassuah?’

‘I have him,’ replied the Tarnhelm’s pilot. ‘Say the word.’

‘Just take the damn shot,’ said Loken.

The window blew out in a blizzard of shards. Sheeting lasers blasted into Lupercal’s Court as the Tarnhelm’s guns filled it with killing fire. The loss of atmosphere was sudden and absolute, over in an instant of ruthless annihilation.

Air blasted into space, along with weapons, bodies and anything not mag-locked to the deck. Spent bolter rounds, stone fragments blasted from the walls and chips of broken ceramite. Glass and debris went too.

Loken let the explosive decompression take him, hurling him from the Vengeful Spirit and into the void of space. Qruze’s body spun away from him.

A crushing sensation of awful solidity seized his chest. His internal organs were shock freezing. Life-support systems in his armour registered the sudden change. It fought to equalise the pressure differential and forced his lungs empty to avoid lethal hyperdistension, but without a helmet it was a losing battle.

Silver light bathed Loken.

Fitting that a Luna Wolf should die by the light of a moon.

Loken’s vision fogged. He felt sudden, shocking cold in his throat, as though his windpipe was filling with liquid helium.

He tried to howl a last curse, but hard vacuum kept him silent.

Loken closed his eyes. He let the moon’s light take him.

And the Vengeful Spirit spun away in the darkness.

TWENTY-FIVE

The road to Terra
Half-heard no more
Okay

Great skeins and shawls and clusters of bright stars winked through the great viewing bay. The light of a galaxy that would soon belong to him.

Horus stood at the farthest prow of the strategium, his hands laced behind his back. He was no longer clad in armour, but a simple training robe of pale cream, belted at the waist with a thick leather belt.

The Sons of Horus fleet was breaking anchor, mustering for the next stage of the march to Terra. Scores of transports still ferried men and machines from Molech’s surface, but Boas Comnenus expected to be ready for system-transit within four hours.

Ezekyle and Kibre wanted to send fast cruisers after the Imperial Cobra-class destroyer, but Horus denied them. His First Captain had railed against that decision, as he had when Horus refused to remove the futharc sigils.

Horus was adamant – Molech’s Enlightenment was to be unharmed.

Let word of this world’s fate fly ahead of the Vengeful Spirit on wings of terror. Despair would be as potent a weapon as tanks and Titans, warriors and warships in the coming years.

Horus turned from the vista of stars and made his way back to the ouslite disc at the heart of the strategium. The Mournival awaited his orders, standing patiently as though the natural order of things would continue as it had before.

He saw them all differently now.

Horus knew them better than they knew themselves, but now he saw the things they kept hidden; the secret doubts, the cancerous thoughts and, deep down, the fear that they had taken a path that could only end badly.

The war on Molech had stoked the fires of Ezekyle’s ambitions. Not for much longer would he be satisfied with a captaincy, even a First Captaincy of the Sons of Horus. Soon he would need something grander to lead. A Legion of his own perhaps? With the power Horus now commanded and the ancient sciences of Terra, the means to create new Legiones Astartes was within his grasp.

Why shouldn’t his greatest warriors become their own masters?

Falkus Kibre... a simple man, one unfettered to grander ambitions. He knew his place and any thoughts of bettering his station were purely in service of the Warmaster. Falkus would be loyal unto death.

After his moment of doubt in the wake of Isstvan V, Aximand had painstakingly rebuilt himself. Even Dwell, with all its painful associations, had served to invigorate Little Horus with the desire to see the war won. The revelation of Garviel Loken’s survival had shaken them all, but it had hit Aximand particularly hard. The melancholy he had so long denied was his ruling characteristic now shrouded him in with the fear that Loken had been right to reject the Warmaster.

Yet it was Grael Noctua who had experienced the most profound change. Horus saw the twin flames burning within him, one darkly gleaming and malevolent, the other bruised and subjugate. The Fenrisian had ruined Gerradon’s flesh, and the daemon that Targost had summoned needed a new body to host its essence.

‘Sire, what are your orders?’ asked Kibre.

Horus smiled at the extra vowel at the end of the honorific. A natural development, given the power that now filled him.

Power that had almost cost him his life to obtain.

Not that to look at him anyone would know that.

The many hurts he had suffered to win Molech had healed years ago it seemed. It was hard to be sure. His sons told him he’d only been gone moments, how could he tell them different?

Molech was a far distant memory to Horus now.

He’d fought wars, slain monsters and defied gods in those moments. He’d wrested the power of those same gods at the heads of vast armies of daemons. He’d fought in battles that would rage unchecked for all eternity.

He’d won a thousand kingdoms within the empyrean, billions of vassals to do with as he pleased, but he’d refused it. Every pleasure and prize was his for the taking, but he’d denied them all. He’d taken the power his father had taken, but he’d done so without deception.

He’d taken it by force of arms and by virtue of his self-belief.

There was no bargain made, no promise to honour.

The power was his and his alone.

Finally, after everything, Horus was a god.

‘Sire, what are your orders?’ said Ezekyle.

Horus stared at the veil of stars, as though he could see all the way from Molech to Terra. He extended a clawed hand, as though already cupping the precious bauble of humanity’s cradle.

‘I am coming for you, father,’ said Horus.

The Tarnhelm had always been a cramped ship, but hidden in the shadow of Molech’s Enlightenment, it now felt obscenely spacious.

Loken sat on his bunk, stripped out of his armour and wearing nothing but a bodyglove, a chest-hugging synth-skin bandage and dermal-regenerative.

Varren was in an induced coma, as were Proximo Tarchon and Ares Voitek. The former Iron Hand’s servo-harness had exercised a hitherto unsuspected level of autonomy to take hold of Proximo Tarchon as Lupercal’s Court vented into space.

Rubio sat alone at the table where they had shared a drink in the company of Rogal Dorn. The empty spaces where their brother pathfinders used to sit weighed heavily on the former Ultramarine.

That any of them were here at all was nothing short of a miracle. Or rather, it was thanks to Rassuah’s preternaturally dextrous hands at Tarnhelm’s electromagnetic tether controls and their armour translocator beacons. She had followed their progress through the Vengeful Spirit and got them back aboard the Tarnhelm within a minute of shooting out the shielded window to Lupercal’s Court.

She’d blasted clear of the Vengeful Spirit, weaving a path back through the gaps in the defensive net she and Tubal Cayne’s device had torn. There’d been no pursuit, which she’d attributed to Tarnhelm’s superior capabilities, but Loken wasn’t so sure.

They’d caught up to the Imperial destroyer as it powered past the system’s fifth planet. Its engines were burning hot, its captain clearly expecting pursuit.

But nothing was coming.

The Warmaster’s fleet was still anchored around Molech.

Loken looked up at a knock on the hatchway.

Severian and Bror Tyrfingr stood at his door, clad in bodygloves and simple knee-length chitons. Loken hadn’t spoken to any of the pathfinders beyond operational or medical necessity since the Vengeful Spirit.

Severian looked as fresh as he had the day they’d set out on their mission, but Bror’s face was bruised and raw from the beating Ezekyle Abaddon had given him.

‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ said Bror.

‘He’s lying,’ said Severian. ‘It’s far worse.’

‘He’s lucky to have walked away from a fight with Ezekyle at all,’ said Loken. ‘Not many people can say that.’

‘I’ll get him next time,’ said Bror. ‘When the Wolf King leads the Rout back to the Vengeful Spirit.’

‘What is it you want?’ asked Loken.

Bror held out a plastic bottle filled with clear liquid. Loken could taste its caustic flavour from the other side of the room.

‘What’s that?’

‘Dzira,’ said Severian, pulling over a stool and producing three cups into which Bror poured them all a measure.

‘I thought we drank it all,’ said Loken. ‘And Voitek can’t possibly be well enough to distil more.’

‘He might be mostly metal, but we’ll be back on Terra before his sedation wears off,’ said Bror, limping over to take a seat. ‘No, I made this. There’s not a lot one of the Vlka Fenryka can’t rustle up after we’ve tasted it.’

Loken took a cup and swallowed a fiery mouthful.

He sucked in a breath as it went down. ‘Tastes just like it. Maybe even stronger.’

‘Aye, well, can’t have folk thinking the Wolves make something weaker than the X Legion,’ said Bror. ‘We’d never hear the end of it.’

‘So what is it you really want?’ said Loken. ‘I’m not much in the mood for company.’

‘Don’t be foolish, man,’ scoffed Bror. ‘Any time you walk away from a fight is just the time to be with your brothers.’

‘Even when I failed?’

Bror leaned forward and aimed his cup at Loken. ‘We didn’t fail,’ he said. ‘We did what we set out to do, we marked the Vengeful Spirit. When the Wolf King comes to fight Horus, he’ll have an easier time of it because of what we did.’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ said Loken not wishing to dwell on broken promises. ‘But Lupercal knows about the futharc sigils.’

Bror sighed. ‘He won’t find them all, and do you think I’d make them all work by being seen. Ah, Loken, you’ve a lot to learn about how clever the Rout really are.’

‘I lost half the men under my command.’

Bror refilled his cup and said, ‘Listen, you didn’t lose them. They died. It happens. But you don’t make sense of deaths in solitude. Mortals might, but we’re not mortals. We’re a brotherhood. A brotherhood of warriors, and that’s what makes us strong. I thought you knew that?’

‘I think maybe I’d forgotten,’ said Loken.

‘Aye, you and this one both,’ said Bror, nodding towards Severian.

‘Alone is where I do my best work,’ said Severian.

‘That’s as maybe, but the rest of us fight best when we fight with our brothers,’ said Bror, knocking back his drink and continuing without pause. ‘It’s fighting for the man next to you. It’s fighting for the man next to him and the one next to him. I heard what you said to Horus, so I know I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. But what you’re after? You already have it. Right here, right now. With us.’

Loken nodded and held his cup out for a refill.

‘Right, enough with the sermonising,’ said Severian. ‘We want to know what Iacton Qruze gave you. Do you still have it?’

‘I do, but I don’t know what to make of it.’

‘Let’s see it then,’ said Bror.

Loken reached up to a small alcove above his bunk and lifted down a metal box. A box very like the one he’d left aboard the Vengeful Spirit, filled with his few keepsakes of war.

He opened it and lifted out the object Qruze had pressed into his palm. A disc of hardened red wax affixed to a long strip of yellowed seal paper.

‘His Oath of Moment?’ said Severian.

‘The one Mersadie Oliton had me give to Iacton.’

Loken turned it around, so that Bror and Severian could see what was written on the oath paper.

They read the word and looked at Loken.

‘What does it mean?’ asked Bror.

‘I don’t know,’ said Loken, staring down at the word.

Its letters were inked in red that had faded to rust brown.

Scratched by something needle-sharp and precise.

Murder.

The corridors of Molech’s Enlightenment were cold and cramped. Vivyen didn’t like it here, there were too many people, and no one seemed to know anything about what was happening. She’d seen lots of soldiers, and daddy told her that meant they were safe.

Vivyen certainly didn’t feel safe.

She huddled in a widened transit corridor, below a ventilation duct that sometimes blew warm air and sometimes blew cold. Her daddy talked in low voices with Noama and Kjell, and they gave her funny looks when she asked if they’d ever see Alivia again.

Miska had her head on Vivyen’s shoulders.

She was sleeping.

Vivyen needed to pee, but didn’t want to wake her sister.

To take her mind off her filling bladder, she pulled out the dog-eared storybook Alivia had given her in the press of bodies at the starport. She couldn’t read the words, they were in some old language Alivia had called Dansk, but she liked looking at the pictures.

She didn’t need to know the words. She’d heard the stories often enough that she could recite them off by heart. And sometimes when she looked at the words, it was like she did understand them, like the story wanted to be read and was unfolding itself in her mind.

The strangeness of that thought didn’t register at all.

It made sense to her and it just… was.

She flipped through the yellowed pages, looking for a picture to conjure the right words into her head.

A page with a young girl sitting at the edge of the ocean caught her eye and she nodded to herself. The girl was very beautiful, but her legs were fused together and ended in the wide tail of a fish. She liked this story; the tale of a young girl who, for the sake of true love, gives up her existence in one realm to earn a place in another.

Someone moved along the corridor. Vivyen waited for them to pass, but they stopped in front of her, blocking the light.

‘I can’t see the words,’ she said.

‘That’s a good story,’ said the person in front of her. ‘Can I read it to you?’

Vivyen looked up in surprise and nodded happily.

‘Didn’t I tell you it was going to be okay?’ said Alivia Sureka.

~ Dramatis Personae ~

The X Legion, ‘Iron Hands’

Durun Atticus, Captain, 111th Clan-Company, commander of the Veritas Ferrum

Aulus, Sergeant, 111th Clan-Company, acting Master of Auspex of the Veritas Ferrum

Anton Galba, Sergeant, 111th Clan-Company

Crevther, Sergeant, 111th Clan-Company

Darras, Sergeant, 111th Clan-Company

Lacertus, Sergeant, 111th Clan-Company

Camnus, Techmarine, 111th Clan-Company

Vektus, Apothecary, 111th Clan-Company

Achaicus, Battle-brother, 111th Clan-Company

Catigernus, Battle-brother, 111th Clan-Company

Ecdurus, Battle-brother, 111th Clan-Company

Ennius, Battle-brother, 111th Clan-Company

Eutropius, Battle-brother, 111th Clan-Company

Venerable Atrax, Contemptor Dreadnought, 111th Clan-Company

Khalybus, Captain

Sabinus, Captain

Plienus, Captain

Rhydia Erephren, Mistress of Astropaths

Bhalif Strassny, Navigator

Jerune Kanshell, Legion serf

Agnes Tanaura, Legion serf

Georg Paert, Legion serf

The XVIII Legion, ‘Salamanders’

Khi’dem, Sergeant, 139th Company

The XIX Legion, ‘Raven Guard’

Inachus Ptero, Veteran

Judex, Battle-brother

The III Legion, ‘Emperor’s Children’

Kleos, Captain, Master of the Callidora

Curval, Ancient

Colonists of Pythos

Tsi Rekh, High Priest

Ske Vris, Priestess-novitiate

The Adeptus Terra

Emil Jeddah, Astropath

Mehya Vogt, Scribe

Helmar Galeen, Administrator

Prologue

The flesh of mercy. The blood of hope. The splintered bones of joy. It would have this feast. It would have the taste in its mouth. Its jaws would chew through gristle. Its claws would feel the sensual, despairing rip of opening wounds. It would revel in all these dark glories, and soon. It knew this.

It had faith.

And what did it mean, for a being such as itself, to have faith? What did it mean for a timeless entity to be in the service of patrons? There was so much opportunity to ponder these questions in the flow of melting time and churning space that was the realm of the gods. So much opportunity to explore their shapes, to tangle in their contradictions, to savour in their perversities.

Too much opportunity.

Because there was always the impatience, the need, the hunger. They were never answered, never satisfied. How could they be? They were the very matter of this maelstrom, the sinew of the monster’s existence. But though the passions were all-consuming, they left room for the questions and speculations, because these were the fuel for the beast’s needs. They were the whetstones for the blade of its intent.

But what did it mean that it had faith? How could the concept have meaning, here where meaning itself was tortured to death, and where the murderous existence of the gods was not a question of belief? The answer was simple in expression, a complex and exquisite agony in its full manifestation.

To have faith was to trust in the promise of the revel. To believe that the time of feeding was drawing near.

The feast would begin on this planet. The barriers to the universe of matter and flesh were thin here, and growing ragged. The entity pushed against them, eagerness and frustration twinning and entwining, becoming a growl. And this growl coiled through the warp to sink into the minds of those keen enough to hear it, bringing them nightmares, bringing them madness. The barriers held, but only just.

The thing’s consciousness seeped out. It moved over the face of the waters, where unthinkable leviathans hunted, and it saw that this world was good. It reached the land, where nature was given over to a carnival of predation, and this, too, it saw was good. It saw a world that knew nothing but fangs, a world where life itself existed only to build death’s great kingdom. It experienced something very like joy. It laughed, and this laugh skittered across the galaxy, through the dreams of the sensitive, and those who began screaming would never stop.

Its mind ranged over the serpent world. It travelled jungles of endless night. It soared over mountain ranges as barren of hope as the light from dead stars. It learned the threats that lived here. It learned the promises that killed here. It saw that there was no difference between the two. It bore witness to a planet that was, in its monstrosity, the worthy image of the warp itself.

The thing amused itself for a day and a night with the concept of home.

Then it grew restless. To look was not enough. To have the material world, the canvas for the artist of pain, so close, yet still out of the reach of claws, was maddening. Where was the promised feast? The planet writhed in the grip of its own horror. It was existence as carnivore, as predator. But the entity was not a guest at the table. It could do nothing but watch. What was more, the planet was a wasted paradise. Where was the sentient life? Without intelligence, there could be no true innocence, no true victims. Without victims, there was no true horror. The world was a massive, unrealised potential. Though the entity had faith, and though it was a loyal servant, it was also impatient. It made to withdraw its mind from the planet.

But it could not.

It struggled briefly, but the powers it served told it no. They held it in place, and understanding dawned. It had been drawn here by something more than a promise. It brushed once more against the frayed veil. It read the currents of the warp, and again it laughed, and again it snarled. It found the necessary patience. The planet was but a stage. No actors strutted upon it yet, but they would not be long in coming. The beast would wait behind the curtain, and its moment would come. It whispered its praise.

All around it came answering whispers, its fellows here to do its bidding, here to worship, here to join in the revel. The moment was coming for all of them. The moment when they would at last be free to spread their slavering truth over the breadth of a shrieking galaxy. They pressed forward, straining to taste the flesh of the real. The whispers built upon one another, desire feeding desire until the immaterium echoed with raging hunger.

The beast called for silence. It sensed something momentous was transpiring. It looked away from the planet. It was like staring up from the depths of a well, for this world had become a prison, the gravitational force of destiny holding the beast here so that it might fulfil a role. It strained the limits of its perceptions of the material world. At the very edge of its knowledge and awareness, there was movement, like a fly touching the outermost strands of a web.

The promise had been kept. The stars were right.

Someone was coming.

One

Scarred
Role models
Cells

‘Scars are a thing of the flesh,’ Durun Atticus had once said. ‘They are the mark of a weak material that tears easily and is repaired imperfectly. If the flesh is scarred, it should be excised, and replaced with a more perfect substance.’

Did he still think so? Anton Galba wondered.

The captain had made this speech, Galba remembered, in the aftermath of the Diasporex campaign, during those last days of illusion, when the shadow of treachery was already falling over the Imperium, but the Iron Hands still believed that when they fought at the side of the Emperor’s Children, they were amongst brothers. There had been many wounds taken in that battle. The Fist of Iron had suffered the worst of the damage, but the strike cruiser Veritas Ferrum had been far from unscathed. An energy weapon salvo had struck the bridge. Critical systems had continued to function, but Atticus, unwavering on the command throne, had been badly burned.

The vessel had been repaired. Atticus had been, also. He had returned, it had seemed, not from the apothecarion, but from the forge. There were no scars on him. And very little flesh. That was when he had made the speech. Galba, who bore plenty of scars on a face that was still mostly flesh, understood that Atticus was speaking in metaphorical terms, indulging in the hyperbole that was one of the rewards of victory. The Fist of Iron also carried its brands from the battle, but they would be expunged in due course. So Atticus had maintained.

So they had all thought.

And then had come the Callinedes campaign. And the betrayal. The crippling of the fleet. The X Legion’s darkest moment.

So they had all thought.

But Callinedes had been nothing more than a prologue. Its name had been supplanted in the pantheon of infamy. Who could brood over Callinedes IV when there was Isstvan V?

Isstvan. The word was a hiss and a blade to the spine. It was a toxic sibilance that would never die. It was a wound that would fester until the galaxy’s last stars flickered out.

It was a scar. Not a surface one that marked what had been healed. It was a deep one, the site of pain that would never be soothed, of rage that would never be quenched. Is this weakness? Galba asked the memory-Atticus. How can we excise this torn flesh? The wound reaches to our souls. He glanced back and up at his captain.

Atticus stood before the command throne, at the front of the lectern, arms folded. He was motionless, his eyes fixed on the forward oculus. His face bore no expression. It had not since the Carollis System and the battle with the Diasporex. Atticus’s augmetic reconstruction had replaced most of his skull. Of all of the 111th Company’s warriors, he was the one who had come closest to a complete conversion to the machine. Inside the captain’s metal shell, Galba knew, blood still flowed and hearts still beat. But the exterior was the same dark grey as the Legion’s armour. The profile was human, but almost without features. Atticus was more iron sculpture than living being now: unyielding, without mercy, without warmth.

But not without passion. As still as the captain was, Galba could sense his rage, and not just because he felt the same fury smouldering in his veins. Atticus’s left eye was organic. Galba did not know why he had kept it. Having lost or replaced so much of the weakling flesh, why keep any trace of it? He had not asked. But that last remnant of the human was all the more expressive for being isolated. It glared at the void, rarely blinking, barely moving. It was rage itself. Galba had seen Atticus in full, molten wrath. But in this moment, the rage was frozen, colder than the void it reflected. It was a rage that went as deep as the wound, and it answered Galba’s question. There was only one way to heal the X Legion: by exterminating the traitors. Every single one.

Galba faced forwards again. His left hand, bionic, was still, impassive, but the fingers of his right curled in frustration. That which would heal the Iron Hands was beyond reach. No amount of discipline or skill in warfare could change that fact. Isstvan had seen to that. Horus had smashed them, as he had the Salamanders and the Raven Guard. They were shadows now, all of them. We are ghosts, Galba thought. We thirst for vengeance, but we have no substance.

He was not being defeatist. He was not being disloyal. He was being truthful. Only fragments remained of the three loyalist Legions that had been on Isstvan. They were scattered. Their forces were small. The Veritas Ferrum’s escape from the Isstvan System was miraculous. To still have an operational strike cruiser was no small thing. But in another sense, it was very insignificant. The Veritas was one ship. What could it do against fleets?

Something, Atticus had promised. We will do something.

‘Captain,’ Auspex Master Aulus called. ‘Navigator Strassny reports we have reached our destination. Mistress Erephren asks that we proceed no further.’

‘Very well,’ Atticus answered. ‘We hold.’

A rocky mass the size of a mountain passed before the oculus. The Veritas’s position was just outside the Pandorax System. The outer edge of the system was marked by an asteroid belt of unusual density. As the planetoid tumbled away into the night, Galba could see another far to port, a moving patch of grey in the reflected light of Pandorax. The Veritas’s sensors were picking up dozens of targets in the near vicinity, all of them massive enough to wreck the cruiser in the event of a collision.

These were not the remnants of an accretion disc. They were not chunks of ice and dust. They were rock and metal. There had once been something else here, Galba deduced. Something huge.

Something grand?

The thought was involuntary, a product of his mood. He realised that it was important he hold on tightly to his anger. It was keeping him from despair. He shoved away dark meditations about destroyed magnificence. But there was still the question of the asteroid belt. He was looking at wreckage. Something had been here, and it had been destroyed.

By what?

To starboard was the dirty brown orb of the planet Gaea. Its orbit was deeply eccentric, at a steep angle to the ecliptic. It crossed the orbit of Kylix, the next planet in, and, over the course of its year, briefly passed beyond the asteroid belt. At this time, it was still within the belt. Its surface was pockmarked by overlapping craters, its thin atmosphere filled with dust from the latest impact. The possibility of a planetary collision crossed Galba’s mind. But no, Gaea could pass for a large moon. Perhaps it had even been one, spinning off on its bizarre path after the destruction of its parent.

There had been a cataclysm here, but its nature was unknown. So was what had been lost. Despite himself, Galba felt the temptation to see omens in the wreckage-strewn doorway to Pandorax. He fought it back. The impulse was dangerously close to superstition, and such an indulgence was a betrayal of what he stood for. There had been more than enough betrayals of late. Do you want to see a lesson here? he asked himself. Then learn this one: what was here has been shattered, but it is still dangerous.

‘Any word from our brothers?’ Atticus asked.

‘The astropathic choir reports none as yet,’ Aulus answered.

The door to the bridge opened. Two warriors entered, neither of them Iron Hands. The armour of one was the dark green of the Salamanders. Khi’dem, a sergeant. The other wore the solemn black and white of the Raven Guard. He was the veteran, Inachus Ptero. At their arrival, the atmosphere on the bridge changed. To the rage, frustration and sorrow was added a thread of resentment.

Atticus turned his head. The movement was so cold, it was as if he had trained a bolter on the two Space Marines. ‘What is it?’ he snapped.

The onyx features of Khi’dem seemed to darken further. ‘The very question we were going to ask you, captain,’ he said. ‘We would like to know what your purpose here is.’

Atticus waited a few seconds before answering, and that beat was concentrated anger. ‘Your rank does not grant you leave to question me, sergeant.’

‘I speak for the Eighteenth Legion as it exists on this vessel,’ Khi’dem answered, calm but firm, ‘as does Veteran Ptero for the Nineteenth Legion. We are therefore owed the courtesy of being informed about the prosecution of the war.’

‘Legions?’ Atticus spat. The sound of emotion being expressed by his bionic larynx was an eerie one. The larynx was capable of variations of intonation and volume, and it sounded not unlike Atticus had when his voice had been entirely his own. Now, though, there was a hint of the uncanny, as though Atticus were mimicking himself and not quite succeeding. ‘Legions,’ he repeated. ‘Combined, your numbers are not much more than a dozen. Those are–’

‘Captain,’ Galba said, preferring the risk of interrupting Atticus to that of his commander speaking words that could never be withdrawn, ‘with your permission.’

‘Yes, sergeant?’ There was no pause before Atticus’s response, but there was a shade less venom, as if he were half-willing to be stopped.

‘Perhaps I can address our brothers’ questions.’

Atticus favoured him with a long look. ‘Elsewhere,’ he said, his voice soft with anger barely and provisionally contained.

Galba nodded. To Khi’dem and Ptero he said, ‘Will you walk with me?’ To his relief, they did without saying anything further.

Galba led the way from the bridge, through corridors of iron and granite, back towards the barracks, where there was so much space. Too much space.

Ptero said, ‘Are you trying to store us away?’

He shook his head. ‘I am trying to keep the peace.’

‘So I noticed,’ Khi’dem said. ‘You interrupted your captain. What was he about to say?’

‘I am not privy to his thoughts.’

‘I can guess,’ Ptero put in. ‘Those are not Legions. Those are ruins.’

Galba winced at the truth. ‘As are we,’ he said. And they were. The Iron Hands numbered in the hundreds on the Veritas instead of the thousands. They were a shadow of their former strength.

‘Your honesty does you honour,’ said Ptero. ‘But we would still like our answers.’

Galba bit back his own exasperation. ‘You will have them once there are answers to give.’

‘There is no campaign plan?’

‘We are here to learn it.’

Ptero sighed. ‘Would it have done your captain an insurmountable injury to tell us that much?’

Galba thought about what he had to say next. There was no easy way of doing it. No diplomatic way, either, though if he was honest with himself, he was not that interested in pursuing one. It was enough that he had moved the discussion away from the bridge. There was much less likelihood of irrevocable violence occurring away from the command throne. ‘Captain Atticus,’ he said, ‘is not inclined to share operational information.’

‘With anyone? Or simply with us?’

There was no escaping this moment. ‘With you.’

‘Why?’ the Salamander asked.

‘Because of Isstvan Five.’ They wanted to know? Good. He would tell them. He would tell them of his own anger. He stopped walking and faced them.

‘What about it?’ Khi’dem asked. ‘We all suffered our tragedies there.’

‘Because you turned your backs on our primarch.’

‘Ferrus Manus led a charge into madness,’ Khi’dem answered. ‘We might as well say that he abandoned us.’

‘He had Horus in full retreat. He could have ended the war there and then.’

Khi’dem was shaking his head slowly. ‘He ran into a trap. We were all caught in it. He just plunged further into its maw and made the rout that much worse.’

‘Together, the three Legions would have been strong enough,’ Galba insisted.

‘If Manus had stayed,’ Ptero said, his voice not angry but sad and surprisingly gentle, ‘do you think we could have taken back the dropsite from four armies fresh to the battlefield?’

Galba wanted to answer in the affirmative. He wanted to insist that victory would have been possible.

‘Three Legions, but against eight,’ Khi’dem said before Galba could answer. ‘With the three caught between hammer and anvil. There was never another possible outcome. The only dishonour lies with the act of treachery.’

Khi’dem’s logic was rigorous. But it was not enough. The anger that was souring Galba’s blood, the anger that he shared with every warrior of the Iron Hands, was as large as the tragedy engulfing the Imperium. It was too deep, too complex to be soothed by a simple recitation of reality. The facts that Khi’dem presented only made things worse. The rage ran up against maddening impotence, built up, and lashed out at ever more targets. Galba knew Khi’dem was right. The Raven Guard and the Salamanders had been badly bloodied by the first phases of the fighting. Their tactics had been sound in seeking the reinforcements at the dropsite. But Ferrus Manus had smashed hard into Horus’s forces. Torture came from the thought that with the additional force of two further Legions, perhaps the blow would have been massive enough to crack open the Warmaster’s plan. And beyond tactics, beyond strategy, there was the principle: the Iron Hands had called out to their brother Legions, and been denied. In the wake of defeat and the loss of their primarch, how could they not see that abandonment as another form of betrayal?

There was only one thing that kept Galba from lashing out at the warriors before him. It was the recognition of the other facet of the anger: self-loathing. The Iron Hands had failed, and for this they could never forgive themselves. They had faced the most crucial test in the history of their Legion, and they had been found wanting. Excise the weakness? Galba wanted to consign his failed flesh to oblivion, replace it with the machinic infallible, and crush the skull of every traitor in his fists. He was conscious of this wish, though, and of its futility, and of its origin. He knew that he was seeing the world through the filter of his self-directed anger. So he did not trust his impulses. He forced himself to wait a beat before any response. He forced himself to think.

But what of Atticus? What of the warrior who had no flesh left to condemn? He felt the anger in all its forms. Of that, Galba was certain. But was Atticus aware of its toxicity? Was he conscious of its shaping nature? The sergeant did not know.

He knew this: as brutalised as the Iron Hands had been on Isstvan V, even fewer Salamanders and Raven Guard had survived. And he knew that if the hope of victory was to survive, it would not be through reaching for the throats of other loyalists. It was possible that the fatal mistakes had been made long before the engagement. His blood chilled when he thought of how the fleet of the X Legion had been divided, the faster ships leaving the Veritas Ferrum and others behind in the race to the Isstvan System. And maybe even that decision had not made the difference. Maybe there had been too many forces arrayed against the Emperor’s faithful. There was talk among the astropaths about agencies other than the traitors at work. So many possibilities, so many errors and coincidences and treacheries becoming the drip, drip, drip of bloody fate.

All that was past. For the future, he knew one more thing: the loyalists, however few they were, must work together.

If he could ensure even that small ember of hope, then he would fan it.

He sighed, exchanging a look with Ptero and Khi’dem. He managed to summon a wry grimace. It was the closest he could come to a smile.

‘What are we doing?’ Ptero asked quietly. The veteran was not talking about strategy.

Galba shook his head in sorrowful agreement. ‘I will keep you briefed,’ he said. ‘In return, will you do me this favour? Approach me rather than my captain.’

Were positions reversed, he thought he might well consider the request a gigantic insult. But Khi’dem nodded in understanding. ‘I can see that would be for the best.’

‘Thank you.’ He started back to the bridge.

Ptero caught his arm. ‘The Iron Hands are not alone,’ he said. ‘Don’t make the mistake of fighting as if you were.’

Jerune Kanshell had just finished cleaning Galba’s arming chamber when he heard the heavy steps of the sergeant approaching. He grabbed his bucket and cloths, hurried out, and stood to one side of the entrance, eyes trained on the floor.

Galba paused in the doorway. ‘A fine job as always, Jerune,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

‘Thank you, lord,’ the serf answered. Galba’s acknowledgement was not unusual. It was what he said every time he returned and Kanshell happened to still be present. Even so, Kanshell felt a rush of pride, less for his work itself than for having been spoken to by his master. His duties here were simple. He was not to touch anything of real importance: armour, weapons, trophies, oaths of moment. It fell to him to clean the armour rack, to mop up the spills of oil from Galba’s own cleaning sessions. They were tasks a servitor could perform. But a servitor could not understand the honour that came with this duty. He did.

Galba drummed a pensive rhythm against the doorway with his fingers. ‘Jerune,’ he said.

Startled by this departure from the norm, Kanshell raised his head. Galba was looking down at him. The sergeant had a metal lower jaw. He was bald, and war had burned and slashed his face until it was a mass of scored, hardened tissue. It was the forbidding face of a being slowly moving further and further away from the human, yet it was not unkind.

‘My lord?’ Kanshell asked.

‘I know that the serf quarters took serious damage during the battle. How are the conditions?’

‘We are making good progress with the repairs, lord.’

‘That isn’t what I asked.’

Kanshell swallowed hard as his throat closed in shame. He should know better than to dissemble before a warrior of the Legiones Astartes. He had spoken from an excess of pride. He wanted the god before him to know that even the humblest inhabitants of the Veritas were fighting the good fight. He wanted to say, We’re doing our part, but could not bring himself to utter words so presumptuous. But he did speak the truth. ‘The conditions are hard,’ he admitted. ‘But we fight on.’

Galba nodded. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Thank you for telling me.’ His upper lip flattened out, and Kanshell realised that was how the sergeant now smiled. ‘And thank you for fighting on.’

Kanshell bowed, his pride now as overwhelming as his shame had been a moment before. He must be glowing, he thought. Surely his skin was shining with the light of renewed purpose and determination granted to him by those simple words from Galba. And indeed, as he made his way back down the decks, it seemed to him that his path was more brightly lit than it had been earlier. He knew the impression was an illusion, but it was a helpful illusion. It gave him strength.

He needed it when he reached the serf quarters.

The humans who cleaned the ship, prepared the food and performed all the miscellaneous tasks too complex, too unpredictable or too varied for servitors, lived on one of the lowest decks of the Veritas Ferrum. There were thousands of them, and their home was something more than barracks, but less than a community. Before the nightmare of Isstvan V, this had been a space of regimental order. A vast, vaulted hall ran the length of the ship’s spine. From it, access to all the other decks was a direct, simple matter, though far from being quick, given the thousands of metres of foot-travel required. The hall was wide enough to support any degree of serf traffic. Over the course of the Great Crusade, because it was the one space where all could be present, it had gradually taken on the qualities of market, feasting hall and meeting place. However, those aspects always gave way before discipline and the efficient movement of personnel, and so there was always a steady, unimpeded flow of serfs cutting through every gathering, meal or trading bazaar. Running off the great hall, on either side, were the living quarters: primarily dormitoria, each sleeping one hundred, but there were also modest private quarters for the more valuable menials.

The culture of Medusa was single-minded in its obsession with strength and condemnation of weakness. The Iron Hands had taken the animating spirit of their home planet to its furthest conclusion, despising the weakness of the flesh to the point that to be human at all seemed a regrettable flaw. Anything that did not contribute to the forging of perfect strength was a pointless distraction. Ferrus Manus had resented the imposition of remembrancers on his 52nd Expeditionary Fleet, and those irritating, unnecessary civilians had been left behind in the Callinedes System as the Iron Hands had rushed to confront Horus. Kanshell had been glad to see the back of them. As humble as his work was, it had a purpose in the great work that was the Iron Hands’ machine of war. But those other citizens of the Imperium who believed the Iron Hands to be without art, or a sense of aesthetics, were wrong. Art must have a clear, forceful purpose, that was all. Kanshell had heard whispers of the marvellous weapons Manus had possessed aboard the Fist of Iron. He believed the stories. The idea of the strongest, deadliest instruments also being the most beautifully wrought was utterly right. It was in line with everything that life on Medusa had taught him about the brutal ways of the universe. Strength of will could be given a physical shape, one that could be used to bring the savage universe to heel.

The idea of Manus’s weapons was also in keeping with the art on the walls of the Veritas Ferrum. And, unlike her sister vessel, the Ferrum, there was art here. Kanshell had been surrounded by majesty for every moment of his existence on the strike cruiser. To move through the great access hall was to pass between relief sculptures of giants. The heroic figures were rendered in simple, bold lines. There was not a single superfluous detail, but there was nothing crude about the representations, either. They were direct. They were colossal. They were inspiring. They struggled and won against mythic beasts that symbolised the unforgiving volcanoes and ice of Medusa. They showed the way to strength. Weakness was foreign to them, and they were the spirit that even the lowest serf was duty-bound to embody.

But this was all memory now. This was all as Kanshell’s world had been before Isstvan V. This was before the terrible shattering. The Veritas Ferrum had been badly damaged in the void war. The shields had gone down on the port flank, towards the stern. Fire had swept through that end of the serf quarters until an entire sector of the ship had been sealed and vented. There had been further torpedo strikes, catastrophic hits to port again just prior to the leap into the empyrean. The greatest wound had been to the upper decks, killing over a hundred legionaries. Even so, there had been further destruction at this level. More collapsing bulkheads, more fire, and then, when the tear in the ship’s flank had become deep enough, more of the terrible absence and cold that quenched fire, ended struggles, and purged the corridors of life.

At least the Geller field had held. At least the voyage through the warp had not bled the ship even more.

The hull had been repaired, but in the interior of the Veritas, entire decks were still strewn with wreckage. Some regions had become entirely inaccessible. Kanshell was glad that there were no wounded in those areas, no desperate survivors waiting for rescues that would never arrive. He had no reason to venture down the blocked paths, so he did not have to think about them. But there were plenty of scars in the serf quarters. Plenty of reminders of failure and defeat.

The stern end of the great hall was still sealed. The serfs whose duties took them to that end of the ship had to travel a maze of byways to reach their posts. Elsewhere in the hall, fire had scorched the walls, defacing the art. Some of the dormitoria chambers had been destroyed, and the lines of the hall had been ruined by buckled and torn metal. The floor was rippled, uneven. Kanshell had to leap over half a dozen fissures as he made his way to the midships region of the hall.

The space was still a thoroughfare, the servants of the Iron Hands still making their way at all hours from one end of the ship to the other, but its character had changed. The transformation was more than simply physical. The spirit of its inhabitants had been altered. The people of Medusa were no strangers to hardship and death. Those were the perpetual facts of existence on that planet. But the coming of Ferrus Manus had been the dawn of something new for the clans of Medusa: hope. It was not a weakling’s hope that a better, easier future lay just over the horizon. It was hope that took the form of belief in the strength to carve out that future. The Iron Hands were the realisation of that hope. Their victories were triumphs, not just in the Emperor’s name, but for Medusa itself.

Now Manus was gone. The X Legion was gutted. The Veritas Ferrum journeyed on, but no one knew to where. Though it was not the serfs’ place to know their destination, Kanshell had heard some whispers that the legionaries did not know their goal either. The whispers were few, and the whisperers were terrified, not angry, and more than a little ashamed to be entertaining such thoughts. No amount of guilt changed the fact that the thoughts had been spoken and now had their own life. Kanshell would not believe the whispers. But having heard them, he could not escape the question.

Kanshell slowed as he approached the centre of the hall. Straight ahead, there was a gathering of a few dozen people. They stood close together, forming a tight circle, their faces towards its centre, their heads bowed. The duty-bound serfs flowed by on either side of the group, like a stream around a stone. Every few moments, one passer-by or another stopped for a moment to join in the communion. Others glanced at the circle with undisguised contempt. Georg Paert, a wall of a man who worked in the enginarium, snorted as he walked past. He grinned at Kanshell when he drew near. ‘Don’t let them put you off your appetite,’ he said.

‘I’ll do my best,’ Kanshell muttered, but Paert had already moved on.

The group was between Kanshell and the mess tables. He thought about hanging back until the meeting was finished, but he was famished, and he was due on a repair detail in a few minutes. He began to move across the width of the hall, cutting across the traffic to make a wide arc around the group. He had only taken a few steps when he heard his name called out. He grimaced and turned around. Agnes Tanaura had moved away from the cluster and was gesturing him over. Kanshell sighed. Might as well get this done. Better meet with her now, when he had a good reason to make this short, then to have her corner him later when he came off his shift.

He joined her at the line-up to the mess service. Heated rations were distributed by a dispensary in the middle of the hall. It was surrounded by long, high iron tables. There were no benches. People ate quickly while standing, then moved on.

‘I saw you watching us, Jerune,’ Tanaura said.

‘You saw me seeing you. There’s a difference.’

‘Just like there’s a difference between looking at something from the outside, and being part of it.’

Kanshell suppressed a groan. Tanaura was hardly being subtle. She was watching him intently, as she always did. Even the most casual conversation with Tanaura felt like an interrogation. Her eyes were a translucent grey, the same shade as her short hair. They shone with a predatory care. She was one of the older serfs on the Veritas Ferrum. Kanshell was not sure of her precise age. The life was a hard one, and used up the body quickly. Kanshell had friends he had grown up with, but they had drawn duties of such rigour that they looked more like his parents than his peers. Tanaura came by her leathered skin honestly. As far as Kanshell and anyone of his acquaintance knew, she had always been here. She had taken on the role of collective mother, whether her uncountable foster children welcomed her attentions or not.

‘Agnes,’ Kanshell said, ‘we’ve already had this conversation.’

She clasped his upper arm. ‘And we’ll keep having it. You need it, even if you don’t think so.’

He gently removed her hand. ‘What I need now is some food, and then I need to be about my duties.’

‘Yes, there is much work to do. There is so much to rebuild. Not all of it can be forged by tools and hands. Our strength needs to be rebuilt, too.’

Kanshell grunted. His temper was slipping. After his encounter with Galba, he had little patience for Tanaura, and he felt strong enough to confront her. He took his tray of food: a slab of processed protein and a square of compressed vegetable matter. The basic necessities to keep the human mechanism viable and contributing, in its turn, to the X Legion’s war machine. Kanshell moved to a table and put his tray down with a clatter. He began to tear the rations into strips. ‘Do you see what I’m doing?’ he said. He chewed and swallowed. ‘I’m rebuilding my strength.’ He met Tanaura’s gaze and, pleased with his fortitude, refused to blink first. ‘My true, valuable strength. Turning to superstition is a weakness.’

‘You’re so wrong. Realising that we have limits, and that we have weaknesses, takes courage. It takes strength. We have to accept that we must turn to the Father of Mankind for his aid. The Lectitio Divinitatus teaches us–’

‘To go against the very teachings of the Emperor, even as it purports to worship him. The logic is ridiculous, and it is forbidden.’

‘You don’t understand. The Emperor’s denial of His divinity is a test. It reminds us to reject all false gods. But when we have done so, casting down all the idols who claim to be divine, the one true god remains. We have to see through the paradox he has given us. When you reach the other side, there is such comfort.’

‘I am not looking for comfort,’ Kanshell spat. ‘None of us should. That is unworthy of who we are.’

‘You really don’t understand. If I could show you the strength needed to commit to faith, you would see how wrong you are.’

Kanshell finished eating. ‘That isn’t about to happen, is it?’

‘It could.’ From a pocket in her worn tunic, Tanaura produced a worn book. She placed it against Kanshell’s chest. ‘Please read this.’

Kanshell shoved the book away as if burned. ‘Where did you get that?’

‘I’ve had it for years. It was given to me by a serf of the Word Bearers.’

‘Who betrayed us at Isstvan! What are you thinking?’

‘I think it is a tragedy that those who first knew the truth have turned away from it. And I think it would be another tragedy if we did too.’

Kanshell shook his head. ‘No. I won’t have anything to do with this cult, and I want you to leave me alone.’ He glanced back at the circle of worshippers. They were still deep in prayer. ‘Don’t you realise the risk you’re taking, carrying on like this out in the open?’

‘The truth should not be kept to the shadows.’

‘And if any of the legionaries sees this? If Captain Atticus finds out?’ Tanaura was in charge of the upkeep of Atticus’s quarters. Kanshell could not understand why she would jeopardise such an honour. The only reason he could think of why nothing had been done about the growing cult was that the Iron Hands had far more pressing matters to concern themselves with than the off-duty activities of the serfs.

‘We aren’t interfering with necessary work. We don’t speak to anyone who doesn’t want to listen.’

Kanshell gave a short bark of laughter. ‘What do you call this, then?’

That intense gaze, a mix of ecstatic revelation and a determination of steel. ‘Because I can see your need, Jerune. You want to listen.’

He backed away from her, shaking his head. ‘You could not be more wrong. Now please, leave me alone.’

‘Think about what I’ve said.’

‘I will not,’ he shot over his shoulder as he marched away.

He made his way toward the stern. A massive, closed bulkhead sealed off the damage beyond from the rest of the ship. There, Kanshell received his assignment and worked his way into the twisted, fractured corridors to join other serfs and repair servitors in the slow process of restoring rationality, order and mechanical precision to the interior of the Veritas. His group worked to clear a corridor of tangled metal. The passageway had run in a straight line, but now it resembled a fractured bone. There was a sharp cleavage in the floor, with the section running to port now raised half a metre above the rest. There was no way to bring the halves of the corridor back into alignment, but the disfigurement could be alleviated with a ramp.

The work was cramped and stifling. Kanshell had new cuts and burns within minutes. He welcomed the strain. He welcomed the pain. It seared away Tanaura’s superstitious fancies. More importantly, it put her insinuations about him to the torch. She was wrong about him. He did not deny that he needed to draw strength from somewhere outside himself. He knew he had limits, and he knew these dark days had pushed him to them. But he would draw his strength from the object lessons of the legionaries of the Iron Hands.

He vowed unswerving loyalty to the Emperor and to his teachings. One implied the other. It was that simple. Everything he needed to know about strength, he could see for himself in the ceramite-clad giants he served. He had no need for a grubby octavo that sought to undermine everything the Imperium and the Great Crusade had brought about.

And for just a few moments, cocooned in the sweat-box darkness lit only by the painful glare of soldering tools, he was able to hide from the knowledge of what had happened to the Great Crusade, and what was happening to the Imperium.

Then the floor collapsed. Its remaining strength had been a lie. With snaps and shrieks of tortured metal, several metres of decking fell into the lower depths of the vessel. Most of the work detail plunged with it. Kanshell felt the terrifying jerk and give beneath his feet and threw himself backwards. He caught a jagged corner of torn wall with his left hand. His feet scrabbled for purchase and he was suddenly holding almost his full weight with one hand. The metal cut a deep gash into his palm. Blood slicked his fingers. His grip began to slip. He flailed with his right hand, grasping air. His flesh tingled as the chasm before him drew nearer.

Then his heel caught a ridge in the decking. He steadied, and found a hanging pipe on his right. He took a careful step back onto level floor. There was no give, no creak of treacherous metal. He collapsed on all fours, gasping for breath, and crawled away from the hole. In the light of guttering flames and sparking cables, he stared at the hungry darkness, made dizzy by the act of chance that had spared him. His ears were filled with the echoes of settling wreckage, but there were no screams of the injured.

The silence of the dead was deafening.

The hololithic ghosts of his three brothers were fragile. They kept dissolving into jagged flickers, their words disappearing into static. Several times, Atticus had to ask the other three captains to repeat themselves. And given how often he had to do the same for them, his transmission was no better than his reception. There was little of the illusion of presence in the lithocast chamber. As sentences fragmented and faces lost definition, what Atticus felt instead was the reminder of absence. The candle-flame brittleness of the hololiths was the health of his Legion, what was left of its strength.

The Veritas Ferrum’s lithocast system was humble compared to those on the flagships of the Legions. It was also more private. Rather than being integrated into the bridge, it occupied a chamber next to Atticus’s quarters. The lithocast plate was in the centre of the space, surrounded by three-metre-high panels that acted as sound baffles. The lithocast operators’ stations occupied the periphery of the chamber. Atticus’s isolation during the lithocasts was not a matter of secrecy, but of efficiency. The panels were there to keep sound out, allowing the captain to turn his undivided attention to his distant visitors.

The operation of the system was energy intensive. It was not used lightly. The conferences that took place through its agency were always on matters of great import. In the past, they had almost always been initiated by Ferrus Manus himself.

In the past. Atticus suppressed that thought, because behind it lurked a worse one that he refused to countenance: Never again.

‘What are your auspex scans showing?’ Khalybus asked.

‘They aren’t showing anything unusual. We are experiencing the expected erratic behaviour this close to the Maelstrom, and it has been growing worse as we enter the Pandorax System. But they can’t pinpoint a source of interference themselves.’

‘But something else can,’ Sabinus deduced.

Atticus nodded. ‘The mistress of our astropathic choir thinks she can find it.’

Sabinus grunted. ‘Not your Navigator?’

‘I grant this is odd. But no. Though Mistress Erephren is working with Navigator Strassny to translate what she is reading from the empyrean into actual coordinates.’

‘What is she experiencing?’ Plienus asked. It took him three attempts before Atticus could make out what he was saying.

‘She says her perception is reaching a clarity and range she has never known before.’

‘I am surprised,’ Plienus responded. ‘My choirs are finding your messages harder and harder to transcribe.’

The other two captains were nodding in agreement.

‘That appears to be the other facet of the phenomenon,’ Atticus said. ‘The more clearly the choirs receive, the more difficult it is for them to send.’

Khalybus said something that was lost in a scraping whine of interference. When the sound cleared for a moment, he said, ‘Where does this lead, brother? To total awareness and absolute silence?’

‘How can I know? Perhaps.’

‘Are you sure of the wisdom of your course?’

‘Am I sure of the end result of this venture? Of course not. Am I sure of its necessity? Without a doubt.’ Atticus paused for a moment. ‘Brothers, our reality is hard, and we must face truths just as unforgiving. We cannot prosecute this war in our traditional manner, and we cannot reach Terra.’ What he did not add, but they all understood, was that they would not make for Terra even if they could. They would return as a smashed Legion, one to be absorbed, its culture forgotten, into the others. There had been too many humiliations already. There was no reason to willingly submit to this final one. ‘We have agreed,’ he continued, ‘to fight the enemy using what means we have to the fullest. We have no fleet. But we still have ships, and this region favours the individual predator. There remains the question of tracking the prey.’

‘You think you have found a way of doing so?’ Plienus asked.

‘I see the possibility of a great deal of useful intelligence.’

Sabinus was not convinced. ‘That is supposition.’

‘One that I believe is worth acting on.’

All three ghosts dissolved into a flashing phantasmagoria. Sound became a wailing electronic wind. In the midst of the storm, Atticus had a momentary impression of something distinct emerging from the static. It was as if a new voice scraped past his ear, whispering syllables both concrete and incomprehensible. As he tried to listen more intently, the storm passed, and his brothers stood before him again.

‘…you realise?’ Sabinus was saying. When Atticus asked him to repeat himself, he said, ‘I was asking if you are fully aware of what the loss of a single ship now means to the Legion.’

‘Of course I do. Just as I know the vital necessity of any tactical advantage.’

‘There is little point in arguing,’ Khalybus put in. ‘Captain Atticus is correct about the realities we face. Whatever any of us thinks of the wisdom of his strategy, it is his decision to make. By rank and by necessity, we will each be fighting our own war.’

There was a pause. It was a silence without static. Atticus felt a new weight pressing down on him, as he knew it was on his brothers. It was not the responsibility of command. It was something akin to isolation, only much more powerful, much more profound. It was loss. The Iron Hands fought on, but the X Legion was no more. The collective body of which Atticus had been a part for centuries had been dismembered. Atticus refused to believe in the death of Ferrus Manus. Such a monstrous impossibility could not be, not in any universe, no matter how insane. Did iron yet bend in the breeze? No? Then Manus was not dead. Some truths were that simple. They had to be, if there were to be such a thing as truth at all.

But Manus was not here. He was lost to his sons, and the great war machine he had forged had been smashed to a few scattered components.

As if speaking Atticus’s thoughts, Sabinus said, ‘The body of our Legion is gone.’ Of the four, Sabinus was the least transformed. His was the voice that could still express the depths of grief and anger for them all. ‘And our blood is adulterated.’ The Veritas Ferrum was not alone in carrying surviving Salamanders and Raven Guard. The other captains also had to look upon the allies who had failed their Legion.

Atticus held up a hand. He made it into a fist. It was unarmoured, but it could still punch through steel. Sabinus was correct – the collective being of the Legion was shattered, but he could rely on his own force, and that of the legionaries under his command, to crush the skulls of traitors to dust.

‘No,’ he said, and he revelled in the inhuman, fleshless rasp of his own voice. ‘We are its body yet. If we can no longer strike with a hammer blow, we shall erode our enemies like a cancer. We are in their domain. They will think themselves safe here, but they are mistaken. We are too small to find, but we are here. We will harry them, and bleed them, and if they should be lucky enough to destroy one of us, what then? Will that affect the operations of the rest? No. One blow destroyed the greater part of our forces. It will take more blows than the enemy can count to kill the rest. We have a strength, brothers. We have but to recognise it.’

They talked for a few more minutes after that. Atticus heard about the operations that the other captains planned, and how they hoped to track their targets. He listened. He committed the information to memory. But he knew how little that knowledge mattered. The Veritas Ferrum was on her own.

The lithocast ended. The ghosts vanished. Yet for a moment, the isolation vanished too. Atticus was seized by the certainty that if he spun around, he would see something else standing with him on the lithocast plate. He quelled the urge to turn and walked forwards off the plate. The sense of a presence evaporated, as he had known it would. No matter how much of the weak flesh he sacrificed to the Apothecary’s knife, his mind remained human, and subject to its perversities and compulsions to deceive itself. The key was to recognise this vulnerability, and to counter it with the empirical rationality taught by his primarch and his Emperor.

But when he returned to the bridge, and stood in the command lectern, and gave orders that the Veritas Ferrum cross the boundary of the asteroid belt and venture into the Pandorax System, one more thing happened. It was brief, so brief it should have been instantly dismissed. And he did dismiss it. It was faint, so faint he should have been able to ignore it. And he did ignore it.

What he dismissed, what he ignored, was an irrational phantom. It was as trivial as a hair in front of an eye.

It was as precise as a claw caressing the cerebral cortex.

It was a welcome.

Two

Mistress of the song
Age of wonders
A verdant land

Fear was the normal condition when touching the current of the warp. It was also the necessary one. Rhydia Erephren held it close to her being. She made it her constant companion. It was the friend she could count on. She had even trained herself to respond with terror should the fear ever diminish, because that would be the sign she was dropping her guard and in greatest danger.

Erephren believed in the secular universe promulgated by the Emperor. She celebrated the toppling of all gods. The extirpation of the irrational from the human race was a glorious quest, and she believed in its necessity with all of her strength and all of her yearning. Despite her bedrock loyalty to the precepts of the Imperium, or perhaps because of it, she also experienced awe, and knew it in the form of sacred horror. That was the power of the warp. It was everything the Imperium stood against, yet it was the precondition to the spread of the Emperor’s light. It was the impossible given a non-existent reality. It was the denial of place that was also the supreme means of travel. It seduced in order to destroy.

On this day, the warp was seductive as she had never experienced it before, and it was growing more persuasive by the second. It beckoned her with clarity, dropping one veil after another, filling her head with knowledge of the near systems, and promising more. It hinted that omniscience was just over the horizon. It would be hers, if she and the Veritas would come a bit nearer to a certain spot in the Pandorax System. Come to Pythos, it murmured. It promised so many sights to parade for her behind her blind eyes, so many secrets to whisper. As she stood at her pulpit in the chancel, leading the astropathic choir, the growing clarity became a kind of ecstasy. A brilliant dawn was flooding the night of the warp. Turning to find the sun was not difficult. It would have been impossible for her to do otherwise. The challenge came in not losing herself. It would have been easy to let her consciousness drown in the light of knowing.

Discipline held her back. Discipline, fealty and will. She was an astropath of the Iron Hands, and she had a war to wage.

‘This is a rare sight,’ Darras said under his breath as the bridge doors opened.

Galba glanced at the other Tactical squad sergeant, trying to read his tone. That was never easy with Darras. The legionary was forever deadpan. He did not have a bionic voice box like Atticus. He just spoke without expression, machine-like in his soul. His face, Galba had long thought, was that of a corpse, as if it were a flesh mask hanging off a metal skull. He was, like all the other legionaries aboard the Veritas Ferrum, from the Ungavarr clan of northern Medusa. But Darras was more visibly a product of the glaciers than his brothers. He was beyond pale. His skin was sallow, his hair sparse. Were he a non-genhanced human, he would have seemed sickly. But his thick, corded neck and the bunched muscle of his pate said otherwise. He was the death of his enemies, and he looked the part.

He was also the death of the polite lie and the meaningless turn of phrase. For unfortunate emissaries from the Administratum of Terra who crossed his path, he was the death of diplomacy. In the past, Galba had laughed at their discomfiture when Darras had punctured their unctuous patter. On this day, though, given the balancing act in which he was engaging, he was nervous about his friend’s mood.

‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

To Galba’s relief, Darras nodded at the doorway. Rhydia Erephren and Bhalif Strassny had arrived on the bridge together. It was unusual to see either of them away from chancel or out of the nutrient tank while the Veritas Ferrum was on active duty. The two of them present at the same time was unheard of.

Atticus was standing before the primary oculus. ‘Mistress Erephren, Navigator Strassny,’ he said. ‘Please join me.’

The two humans crossed the floor of the bridge. Galba was surprised to see Erephren walk ahead of Strassny, unguided, her step sure. In her left hand, she carried the two-metre-high staff of her office. The haft was of a wood so dark it was black. It was topped with an ornate, bronze astrolabe. Her right hand wielded a cane of silvered steel, its head the Imperial aquila. Its tip was sharp enough that she could have used the cane as a sword. The rhythm as she tapped the decking before her was so subtle, it seemed impossible to Galba that she was using it to find her way. Strassny, two paces behind her, was slumped, and looked like he needed a cane more than she did.

They were both Terran-raised. Strassny was born there, a member of one of the second-tier Houses of the Navis Nobilite. His long hair, pulled back and braided in the helix fashion of his family, was both lank and so fine that stray strands floated around his head like smoke. His features were as fragile as thin porcelain. He was the result of centuries of House Strassny’s intermarriage. The blood that made him a superb Navigator also made him so weak a physical specimen, it took a conscious effort on Galba’s part not to regard him with untempered revulsion.

Erephren was a different case. She had been brought to Terra in a Black Ship while still an infant. No one, herself included, knew the planet of her birth. Her robes bore no family markings, but were rich in the awards of service. A bronze receiving plaque, engraved with the emblem of the Astra Telepathica, was embedded in the top of her bald skull. The soul-binding ritual had robbed her of her sight, and altered her eyes in a manner that Galba had never encountered in any other astropath. He had seen many whose eyes had become clouded, some so milky it was as if they had turned into pearls. But hers were utterly transparent. They were immaculate, crystalline orbs with nothing inside. Viewed face-on, they were invisible; Erephren’s eyelids the open doorways to sunken hollows of tissue and darkness. Blasted by constant exposure to the warp, she appeared to be in her late-seventies, almost twice her real age. Though he was centuries older than she was, Galba found it impossible not to see her as a venerable figure. She had paid for every message received and transmitted with a piece of her life. Strassny’s weakness had been his from birth. Erephren’s infirmity had been acquired in the performance of duty. There was honour in that.

Yet Erephren carried herself as if there were no infirmity. Her posture was pitilessly straight, her stride sure, and her robes the black-and-grey scheme of the Legion she served. She was regal. She deserved Galba’s respect, but she also commanded it.

‘An unusual day,’ Galba said to Darras, agreeing with his first assessment.

‘For you especially,’ Darras said.

Galba kept his face neutral. ‘Yes,’ he said. So Darras had been digging at him after all. He had reached the bridge only a few moments before Erephren and Strassny, and he had not come alone. Khi’dem and Ptero had accompanied him. They now stood at the rear of the bridge, near the entrance. They were out of the way, but they stood with arms folded, their body language asserting their right to be there.

‘Shouldn’t you be keeping your new friends company?’ Darras asked.

‘I’ve come to relieve you.’ Darras had been manning his station, monitoring the scrolling hololiths that tracked the vessel’s health.

‘No need. I believe your services as diplomat are still required.’

‘You do me an injustice.’ Galba managed to keep his voice steady, doing his best to refuse Darras’s bait. Diplomat was a term of immense derision among the Iron Hands.

‘Do I? Then enlighten me, brother. What is it, exactly, that you are doing?’

Galba almost said, Trying to keep the peace. He caught himself. ‘A lack of unity will not help our war effort,’ he said.

Darras snorted. ‘I will not fight alongside them.’

‘Then you’re a fool,’ Galba snapped. ‘You speak as if there were a choice.’

‘There is always a choice.’

‘No, there is not, unless you see failure as a choice. I do not. Our situation is what it is, brother, and if you think we can dispense with allies, then you are refusing to see clearly.’

Darras paused, then nodded, once, in bitter acceptance. ‘These are cursed days,’ he muttered, venom dripping from each clipped syllable.

‘They are.’

‘The captain doesn’t seem to be objecting to the presence of our guests.’

‘He knew I was bringing them.’

Darras opened his mouth slightly. It was what passed for a laugh with him. ‘How did you manage that?’

‘I said much the same things to him as I did to you. I told him that we must not turn from reality.’

‘You didn’t.’

It was Galba’s turn to laugh. He was glad for the familiarity of banter. ‘Not in so many words, perhaps. I did say “reality” at one point. I remember that because it seemed to strike a chord.’

Darras raised an eyebrow. ‘You detected facial expressions in the captain?’

‘No. But after I used the word, he agreed to my request.’

‘Then we are in for a day of wonders.’

Galba turned with him to watch Atticus speak to Erephren and Strassny. The Navigator said little, contenting himself with brief assertions in support of the astropath. Filling the view from the oculus was Pythos, the innermost planet of the Pandorax System.

‘This world is the source of the anomalous warp effect?’ Atticus asked.

‘The source lies on it,’ Erephren corrected.

Atticus contemplated the planet. ‘Could such a thing be natural?’

‘I cannot conceive of how it could be. Why do you ask, captain?’

‘There is no civilisation here.’ The Veritas Ferrum was in orbit above the terminator. The nightside of the planet was utterly dark. There were no lights of cities below. The dayside revealed blue oceans and green landmasses.

Galba was looking at a garden world. He thought about all the planets he had fought on over the centuries of the Great Crusade. They had all borne the disfigurements brought by intelligent life. What turned below was pristine. It did not know the machine, and its order and strength. He knew what all that green meant: organic life in full riot, undisciplined, chaotic. His lip curled in disgust.

‘I cannot explain what you are seeing, captain,’ Erephren said. ‘But what we seek is there. I know this as surely as I breathe.’

Atticus did not move. He had so completely given his physical self to the reign of metal that his stillness was absolute. He stood as a statue, an inanimate thing that would spring to terrifying life if confronted. He faced the sight in the oculus as if it were an opponent. Iron challenged the garden. ‘Can you pinpoint the location more precisely?’

‘I believe I can. The closer we come, the more intensely I experience its effects. If we pass over it, I am convinced that I will know we have done so.’

‘Then, with your guidance, that is what we shall do.’

The Veritas Ferrum began a slow orbit of Pythos, level with the equator, moving with the rotation. Strassny left the bridge, returning to his tank. Erephren remained at the fore, standing beside Atticus, facing the oculus as if she could see the object of her scrutiny. She called out directions with the certainty of someone who could see something, and see it more clearly with every passing second.

The closer the strike cruiser came to the source of the phenomenon she was experiencing, the more it seemed to Galba that she was losing herself. The reserve that had always been her armour crumbled. Her voice grew louder, more ferocious. When the search began, she had simply spoken quietly to Atticus to tell him in which directions the ship should go. But now she gestured with staff and cane as if conducting an invisible orchestra the size of the planet. A rhythm entered her movements. They became hypnotic. Galba had trouble looking away. Her voice changed, too. The furious power was still there, but she was not shouting anymore. She was chanting. Galba was seized by the impression that she held the entire ship in her will, moving its millions of tonnes as she moved her cane. He tried to shake the illusion away, but it was persistent. It clung with the tenacity of something that was perilously close to the truth.

And then, ‘There,’ she gasped. ‘There, there, there.’

‘Full stop!’ Atticus ordered.

‘There.’ Erephren pointed with her cane with such ferocity and precision that surely it was impossible that she was still blind. She was motionless for several seconds, as still as the legionary at her side.

Something immense passed through the bridge. The thinnest of barriers blocked a whisper. There were terrible words that wanted to make themselves heard.

The moment passed. Galba blinked, disturbed that he had allowed himself such an excess of imagination. Erephren lowered her cane and slumped, using the staff now to support herself. She breathed heavily, and there was a rattle in her chest. Then she straightened, once again cladding herself in the armour of her reserve. She shivered once, and then she was calm.

‘Are you well, Mistress Erephren?’ Atticus asked.

‘I am now, captain. Thank you.’ But there was a new strain in her voice. ‘I must tell you, though, that this is a place of incredible temptation for the likes of me.’

‘What kind of temptation?’

‘Every kind.’

Atticus made no comment, and turned back to the oculus. Galba frowned. Erephren’s choice of words was disturbing. There was something of the superstitious about them.

Atticus said, ‘Is it possible to pinpoint the location more precisely?’

‘Take me to the surface.’

Atticus made a gesture of surprise. ‘An astropath in the field?’

‘I will serve in whatever manner is necessary. This is necessary.’

The captain nodded. ‘Master of the Auspex,’ he called. ‘I want a deep scan of the region below us. Whatever is affecting the warp, it has a location, so it must have a physical manifestation. We may be close enough to find something now.’ To Erephren, he said, ‘We may have other means.’

The astropath pursed her lips, doubt on her face.

‘Commencing scan,’ Aulus confirmed.

Several minutes elapsed. The company on the bridge stood by, the only sound the murmuring of cogitators. The spectacle of the Iron Hands waiting was a vista of stillness. Men who had been turned into engines of war paused, inert, until the signal for action would unleash them.

‘All returns negative,’ Aulus reported. ‘Auspex banks find nothing–’ He stopped. ‘One moment. There is an irregularity in this area.’ At his command, a large-scale hololith of Pythos was projected to the centre of the bridge. A point in the northern hemisphere, on the east coast of the continent visible from the oculus, began to flash.

‘Still too wide an area,’ Atticus said. ‘Narrow it down.’

‘Captain.’ Erephren’s tone was a warning.

Aulus leaned closer to his screens. ‘There is something,’ he said. ‘Let me focus the beam to this–’

The lights of the bridge went down. The Pythos hololith vanished. Darras grunted. Galba glanced down, and saw that his readouts had gone dead.

The auspex bank exploded. The framework launched itself at Aulus in a torn ecstasy of metal. A fireball engulfed him, and it was the colour of incandescent flesh. Kaleidoscopic lightning crackled up the walls. Its infection ran down the spine of the vault, jolted open the door and shot down the corridor, spreading an electric howl to the rest of the ship. The Veritas Ferrum shook. The tremor came from the core, a deep, powerful thrum that almost threw Galba off his feet. It was the jerk of the already wounded vessel being stabbed with an assassin’s blade.

Galba and Darras raced to Aulus’s post. Atticus was there first, reaching the stricken legionary just as the fireball dissipated. Flames quivered along the perimeter of the explosion. They did not crackle. Instead, they made a noise that sounded to Galba like sighs. A choir of thousands pressed against a weakening wall with desire and hatred and laughter. And then the flames died, taking with them the sighs and Galba’s belief in what he had heard.

The deck steadied. The bridge’s lumen-strips brightened again. Smoke coiled through the space, filling Galba’s nostrils with the smell of burned graves. Aulus was lying motionless. The savage angles of the auspex frame had plunged through his armour in half a dozen places. It looked as if a metal talon had seized him. One claw had gone all the way through his throat, impaling him to the deck. Another had punched the bridge of his nose out the back of his skull.

Atticus wrenched the twisted framework away from the body. Darras began to say, ‘The Apothecary–’

Atticus cut him off. ‘There is nothing to recover.’

He was right, Galba saw. The wounds had destroyed Aulus’s progenoid glands. There would be no preserving his genetic legacy for the future of the Iron Hands. The shape of the ruined auspex bothered Galba. The talon declared that Aulus had not been the victim of an accident. He had been attacked.

The idea was ludicrous. Galba knew he should not be entertaining it. He was doing an injustice to his fallen brother to engage in irrational fantasies about his demise. Once again, he pushed the impossible away.

He refused to think about how often he was having to keep such ideas at bay.

‘What is the status of the ship?’ Atticus asked.

Galba ran back to his post. With a stuttering flicker, the hololithic display came back to life. He surveyed the readings. ‘No further damage,’ he reported. His words rang false in his ears. There were no fires burning anywhere beyond the bridge. The integrity of the hull had not been compromised. All life support systems were functioning. Shields were up. The auspex was destroyed, and a battle-brother was dead. Otherwise, the ship was unharmed. Only Galba knew this was not true. This was not a matter of irrational intuition. He had witnessed destructive energy arrive and pass through the vessel. It could not have passed without effect. He did not believe that it had. He could feel a difference in the Veritas, even in the deck beneath his feet. The ship had lost something essential, and it had acquired a new, distressing quality: brittleness.

Galba willed his impressions to be false. But when he looked up, and saw the expression on Erephren’s face, he knew, with a sinking in his gut, that they were true.

The Veritas Ferrum moved into a low geosynchronous orbit over Pythos. The ship had been hit. An enemy on Pythos had drawn first blood. And so the strike cruiser unleashed war into the skies of the planet. Retaliation descended to the surface on the wings of Thunderhawks. With the Veritas strategically blind until its Mechanicum adepts could repair the auspex system, Atticus had to rely on pict-captures of the surface. They showed no clear sign of the anomaly, but they did offer a few landing zones in the area Aulus had designated before his death.

Three gunships took part in the planetfall. Two of them, Unbending and Iron Flame, carried Erephren and sixty Iron Hands for a reconnaissance in force. The third was Hammerblow, and it was a Salamander craft. It was one of the two recovered, at terrible cost, from the low orbit of Isstvan V before the savaged Veritas had made its escape from the hopeless void war. Hammerblow and Cindara had been among the very few ships of any kind to survive the massacre on the planet’s surface. Khi’dem’s Salamanders had managed to gather a few Raven Guard during their fighting retreat to the gunships, along with some Iron Hands who had been too badly wounded during the initial phase of the battle to advance with their primarch into the jaws of Horus’s trap.

Seated in Unbending, Darras glanced out the viewing block at Hammerblow as it flew level with them. ‘Well,’ he said to Galba, ‘will they fight with us to the end, do you think?’

Galba shrugged. ‘If you think I find this conversation invigorating, you are mistaken.’

Atticus emerged from the cockpit and opened the side hatch of the Thunderhawk. Wind whipped through the troop compartment. Galba freed himself from his grav-harness and joined the captain. He looked down at the landscape rushing past below. They were flying over a solid canopy of jungle. The wind was thick, hot, a blast of steam. Galba’s neuroglottis parsed a cornucopia of scents and tastes. The sensory flood was dizzying. Pollens from a thousand different species fought with the stench of a loam that must have been metres deep with rotting organic matter. And there was blood. Hidden beneath the green was crimson, streams of crimson, an ocean of crimson. The taste of the blood was a corrupted amasec.

There were too many flavours, too many beings. None of it was human. Unbending was flying above a primordial field of combat. Galba thought about the difference between his home world and what he was rushing towards here. Life was violence on both planets. But on Medusa, life had to struggle simply to exist. Medusa was a world that rejected the organic. It was a test, and only the strongest forms found a purchase on its surface. Pythos, though, was monstrous in its all-encompassing welcome. Life had exploded here. Life piled on life. The only shortage was space, and that was enough to ignite a war of all against all.

Medusa forged unity and steadfastness. Galba was not surprised that no civilisation awaited the Iron Hands on Pythos. There was, he was sure, no order possible in this place of orgiastic growth.

Ahead, not far from the western edge of the target zone, the land rose, and a rocky promontory broke free of the canopy. Atticus pointed. ‘We land there.’

The peak of the promontory was bare and level, about half a kilometre on a side. To the north, west and south, it ended in steep cliffs. To the east, the slope was a gradual descent back to the floor of the jungle. The tree line was about ten metres down from the peak. The Thunderhawks circled the area once, then landed. The assault ramps slammed down, and the legionaries marched onto the surface of Pythos. They spread outwards from the gunships, forming a ceramite barrier to the east.

Galba had been tasked with ensuring the safety of Rhydia Erephren. The members of his squad surrounded her, and they measured their pace. He was surprised by how quickly she moved in completely unknown territory. She stood still for a moment after she walked away from Unbending. She frowned as if listening. Galba saw a vein in her forehead pulse rapidly, the one sign of the strain she was experiencing. Then she turned and made for the eastern line. Her stride was almost as assured as on the Veritas.

Atticus was waiting. ‘Well, Mistress Erephren?’ he asked.

‘The anomaly is already powerful here, captain, but this is not yet the source. I can feel the current of its presence, though, much more sharply defined. It lies in that direction.’ She pointed east.

‘Very well,’ Atticus said. ‘We shall burn our way through the jungle if necessary. I will take point. Mistress, you will remain in the rear lines under the protection of Sergeant Galba. Should we deviate from the correct path, inform us immediately.’

‘As you say, captain.’

The Iron Hands plunged into the jungle. The Salamanders and Raven Guard followed behind, the true rearguard even though Atticus barely acknowledged their presence. Within a hundred metres, the legionaries were deep into a green night. The sky vanished behind the unbroken shield of intertwining branches. The occulobes of the Space Marines compensated for the dim light, and the legionaries marched on as if in broad day. The air grew thicker yet, and Galba wondered how long Erephren would be able to function. Already he could hear a liquid rattle in her breathing, but she did not slow.

The trees were gigantic, rising thirty metres or more. Galba saw a few leafed varieties, but most were conifers with needles like curved claws. Almost as common were growths that turned out not to be trees at all, but immense ferns. Vines twisted from trunk to trunk, their stems thick as cables, the blades of their leaves so sharply angular, Galba found himself thinking of razor wire designed for Dreadnoughts. The lower trunks and jungle floor were covered by carpets of moss. It was so deep and wrinkled that it camouflaged roots, and on several occasions Galba was about to warn Erephren of a hazard at her feet, but she stepped over the obstacle each time.

‘You are sure-footed,’ he told her.

‘Thank you.’

‘How do you sense your surroundings?’

‘You misunderstand my abilities, sergeant. I do not have an image of what is before me, except what my imagination reconstructs after the fact. I am making use of the knowledge that flows to me from the immaterium. I receive the messages sent by my brothers and sisters of the Astra Telepathica, and I have grown accustomed to retrieving other information as well, such as what movements I should make. I do not know why I must move to the right,’ and she did, avoiding the trunk that stood in her way. ‘Perhaps I am sensing the eddies in the warp caused by the physical realm, and this is my new sight. I do know that listening to these promptings serves me well.’

‘Clearly,’ said Galba. He thought for a moment. ‘What happened on the bridge…’ he began.

Erephren gave her head a solemn shake. ‘I know no more than you.’

‘But you tried to warn Captain Atticus.’

‘The barrier to the empyrean is very thin here. The forces at work are very powerful. I felt a surge, but why was it caused by Sergeant Aulus’s scan? And why did it take the form that it did? I have no answers.’

‘I am not just concerned with why it took that form,’ Galba said. ‘I want to understand what that form was. I’ve never witnessed the like.’

‘The warp defies understanding, sergeant. That is its nature. I do not believe we need to look any more deeply than that.’

She made her last sentence very emphatic. It was on the tip of Galba’s tongue to ask if the truth was that she did not want to believe in the need to look more closely. He stopped himself. He could see the strain in her face. The astropath was always linked to the warp. Her consciousness was always divided, her self shaped by two inimical conceptions of existence. He could not begin to understand the risks she ran every second after eternal second. If there were paths that she recoiled from treading, he would respect her wishes.

Then Erephren spoke again, startling Galba with her confiding tone. ‘I have a great admiration for the tenets of this Legion, sergeant,’ she said. ‘I am not a native of your world. I serve the Iron Hands, but I do not flatter myself that I am of your number. But you should know how important what you represent is for me.’ She tapped her leg once with her cane. ‘This body is weak. It is a barely adequate vehicle. That is the cost of my gift and my service. I pay it gladly, and seek my strength elsewhere, where I need it most, in my will and my sense of identity.’ She paused as she negotiated a root almost as high as her knee. ‘The Iron Hands are without compromise. You do not tolerate weakness. You expunge it from yourselves and from others. This rigour means you must make hard choices, and engage in harsh actions.’

‘Harsh?’ He was taken aback. Was she questioning the honour of his Legion? The Iron Hands had never acted with anything less than justice on their side. Any punishment meted out was deserved.

‘You misunderstand me. The word is a term of praise. The galaxy is a harsh place, and must be answered in kind. You are that answer. There have been several occasions, sergeant, during our Great Crusade, when duty has required that you cull the entire human populations of non-compliant worlds.’

‘That is so. Sometimes the xenos taint is too great, the resistance to reason too entrenched.’

‘Do you know what I hear during those purges? Do you realise that those deaths are marked in the warp as they are in the materium?’

‘No.’ He had not known.

‘You cannot imagine the horror,’ she said. ‘But I can stand it, because I know you enforce the Emperor’s will, and if you have the strength to do the hard thing, then it is my duty to find the strength to bear witness to it. You despise the flesh, and become iron. I tell myself that I must do the same. You are models, sergeant, for the mortals who serve you and follow you. We are not as powerful, nor as resilient. But we can aspire to be better than we are, because you are better than we are.’

She paused again, and was silent for so long that Galba began to think she had said her piece. But then she spoke, and he could hear each word chosen with care. ‘This is a difficult time. The Iron Hands are…’

‘We have suffered a defeat, mistress,’ Galba said. ‘Do not disguise the truth.’

‘But you are not defeated. And you must not be.’

‘It seems to me that you wish to turn away from something you fear would have the best of us. Closing one’s eyes to the enemy is not a defence, and it does not speak well of your faith in us.’

‘I do not think that is what I am doing. I believe I am acting for the sake of reason and light. What happened on the bridge was an eruption of the irrational. To investigate its depths invites the sleep of reason. One does not engage in a dialogue with insanity, just as one does not accept a tainted people into the Imperium’s embrace. What is called for is quarantine. And then excision. Do you understand?’

‘I think I do,’ he said. ‘But are you sure this fine reasoning isn’t being shaped by your fear?’

‘No,’ she answered very quietly. ‘I am not sure.’

The jungle became more and more dense the further the legionaries descended the slope. They hacked through the choking vegetation with chainswords. Sometimes, all trace of a path was swallowed up, and a new trail was created with the flamers. Vines and moss burned where touched directly by the promethium, but the humidity was so high that the fires died out within seconds. Galba chafed against the slow progress. He resented any march whose momentum bled away, but one where the only enemy was the landscape was galling. The rest of the reconnaissance force snaked away before him, black-and-steeldust-grey vanishing into the emerald gloom. It was impossible to see more than a dozen metres ahead through the undergrowth. The moss became even thicker. It was so yielding, and went down so far, it was like tramping over deep snow. Galba was startled when one leg sank almost to the knee. His boot rested on a thick root. It felt disconcertingly like standing on a muscle. He hauled himself out of the depression and found firmer ground.

His vox-bead crackled. ‘Clearing ahead,’ Atticus reported. ‘Auspex indicates multiple large contacts.’

Galba and his squad moved forwards with Erephren. Atticus was waiting for them where the path opened into the clearing. The other legionaries had spread out to either side, forming once more the defensive wall they had established at the landing site. ‘What is our course?’ he asked Erephren.

‘Straight ahead.’

‘That is what I thought.’

The clearing was a rough circle about a kilometre in diameter. A small stream ran through the centre, crossing the path of the advance. Gathered not far from it was a large group of quadruped saurians. Galba guessed their numbers at a hundred. They stood about three metres high at the shoulder, and were about twice that in length. Their tails stopped just short of the ground, and ended in twin bony hooks. Rows of forward-curving spikes covered their backs. Their legs were thick, massive trunks, evolved to support weight, not run. Their heads were down, turned away from the Space Marines.

‘A species of grox, do you think?’ Galba asked.

‘They appear to be grazing.’ Khi’dem and his pariahs had arrived.

‘Grazing on what?’ Ptero pointed out. The ground had been trampled into hard clay.

Under the stink of the massive animals, Galba caught the other stench. ‘There’s blood there,’ he said. ‘Lots of it.’

‘Rid my sight of them,’ Atticus ordered.

Even as he spoke, the animals caught the scent of the intruders. They turned from the carcasses they had been devouring. Their heads were massive, boxy, with enormous jaws like power claws. They roared, revealing teeth so jagged and narrow, they seemed to be the weapons of a torturer instead of the tools of a predator.

‘They should be herbivores,’ Ptero said, and Galba thought he heard awe in the Raven Guard’s voice.

Galba raised his bolter and took aim. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The shape of their bodies, their heads. How can they be effective predators? They must be too slow.’

The herd charged. The earth shook. ‘They seem to be managing,’ Galba said, and opened fire.

The line of Iron Hands unleashed a continuous barrage of bolter fire into the saurians. The mass-reactive rounds punched into the hide of the beasts and blew out chunks of flesh and bone. Roars became shrieks of agonised rage. The leading monsters collapsed with the thunder of granite. Galba slammed half a dozen shots into the forelegs of his target. The saurian’s joints exploded, severing the limbs in two. The animal smashed to the ground, rolling and howling. Two others lost interest in the Space Marines and set upon their fallen kin. They tore open its exposed belly with claws and teeth. Within moments, they were covered in fratricidal gore. Their victim was gutted, flaps of skin like fallen sails on either side of its torso. It was still alive, its stumps twitching, hind legs flailing. It was a keening, writhing mass of butchered meat.

A dozen saurians downed. Half again as many fighting over their corpses. And still the avalanche with teeth came on, its momentum unchecked.

Unblinking, the Space Marines kept firing. More of the predators fell, the shorter range making the wounds even more catastrophic. The clearing became a giant’s abattoir. The stench of blood filled Galba’s nostrils. It was hot, clammy and suffocating, a sweat-slicked fist. It was also the smell of falling enemies, the first kills the legionaries of the Veritas Ferrum had claimed since Isstvan V. A low, vibrating rumble came to Galba’s ears over the shattering roar of the saurian assault, and it was a moment before he realised he was hearing his own growls. They were the expression of his fury at betrayal, and they were the primitive satisfaction that came with the release of slaughter. Each recoil of his bolter was another blow struck at the humiliation that had been visited upon the X Legion.

The saurians fell, and fell, and fell. Their numbers were cut in half in the time it took them to close with the Iron Hands. They were still an avalanche. And now they hit.

‘Flank and crush!’ Atticus commanded in the final seconds before impact. The legionaries parted to the left and right, armoured might sprinting up the sides of the herd, and turning to catch the animals in a crossfire. They moved with speed and precision. They were the individual gears of a terrible mechanism, jaws of ceramite and steel that would rend all the flesh that passed between them.

But the saurians were fast, too. The leading beast scooped its head down and snatched one of Darras’s men up in its maw. It bit down, and ceramite cracked like bone. Galba heard the cry of the legionary over the company vox-channel. It was a howl of outrage like those of the beasts, dragged from a perfect killer. The saurian bit harder. This time the snapping was bone. The lower half of the Space Marine fell to the ground. The reptile raised its head and choked the legionary’s head and upper torso down its gullet.

Atticus had not been close enough to aid the fallen man, but he was the first to reach his killer. Still pouring fire into the rampaging beasts, Galba watched, out of the corner of his eye, as the Iron Hands captain leapt at the saurian. He had mag-locked his bolter and was wielding his chainaxe with both hands. Atticus said nothing as he attacked. He swung the axe at the animal’s throat. His movements had a mechanical perfection and grace. The weapon was massive, but in his hands, it seemed to have the weight and speed of a rapier. Its snarling head chewed through the monster’s hide. Machine and animal shrieked, one in high gear, the other grasped by death’s pain. A waterfall of vitae burst from the saurian’s neck, slicking Atticus from head to toe. The animal’s head lolled, half-severed. The body remained standing for a full five seconds after it had died. Then it fell over.

The Iron Hands pressed in, constricting the herd between walls of fire. The mortification they wrought on the flesh at last took its toll. The landscape turned into a panorama of bleeding meat and splintered bone. Their charge broken, the saurians circled in confusion and pain, lashing out at each other as well as the Space Marines.

One lunged clear of the pack, bulk and momentum propelling it through Galba’s bolter-rounds. Galba shoved Erephren further back. Blood pouring from craters in its body, the saurian smashed into him, knocking him onto his back. A massive paw pressed against his chest and crushed him into the clay. His bolter landed a hand’s width away. It might as well have been the next continent over. Erephren could have reached down for it, but she did not know it was there, and she took more steps back from the slavering roars.

The saurian’s rasping, foetid breath washed over Galba. The jaws opened wide, a cave coming to engulf his head. He lashed out with his fist, striking the beast’s lower jaw, shattering it, sending shards of teeth into its palate. The saurian shrieked and staggered to the side. Galba rolled away, snatched his bolter and came up firing. The reptile’s head exploded.

After that, combat ended, replaced by simple butcher’s work as the last of the saurians were cut down. Then it was done, the final krump of the bolters muffled by the surrounding jungle. The ground was slick with blood. The clay had turned to dark, clotted muck. This was no longer a clearing. It was a swamp. Galba rejoined Erephren, and the ground made sucking noises as they made their way over to where the legionaries were mustering.

Ptero was standing over one of the more intact carcasses, his helmet angled down as he stared at the creature. ‘It’s dead,’ Galba said. ‘I shouldn’t let it trouble you any further.’

‘But you must admit this is all wrong,’ the Raven Guard insisted. ‘These animals are built like herbivores. You can see that, can’t you?’

‘Yes, but they aren’t herbivores, and there’s an end to the matter.’

‘I disagree, brother. We would be wrong to dismiss this aberration as insignificant, when this is what we must fight.’

‘And what do you call this aberration, then?’ Darras called. He was standing a few metres closer to the upslope side of the clearing. He, too, was staring downwards, but not at a carcass.

‘What is it?’ Galba asked.

‘Look at the blood.’

Galba did. There were currents in the puddles. The blood was draining away.

It was flowing uphill.

‘Captain,’ Galba voxed, ‘there is something drawing the–’

An earth tremor cut him off. It was shallow but widespread. It was like the movement of muscle beneath skin. Galba flashed on what he had stepped on in the deep moss. He grabbed Erephren by the arm. ‘Quickly,’ he hissed, and he began to run. He already knew that what was coming could not be fought. Ahead of them, the other squads were already moving at forced march speed out of the clearing.

The ground erupted. For a moment, Galba thought tentacles were bursting from the clay. Then he saw that they were roots. Thick as his arm, dozens of metres long, they tangled like a net, and reached out like talons. Clods of earth rained back down as the root system twisted and flexed, blind serpents seeking prey. A tendril struck one of Khi’dem’s Salamanders. It coiled around his arm. The roots whipped to the legionary’s location. In moments, he was cocooned and immobilised. He fell. Khi’dem and another of the Salamanders tore at the roots, but more came faster.

Galba hesitated. The rest of the Salamanders were rushing to help, but he was closer. He cursed, then left Erephren with the rest of his squad. ‘Keep her safe,’ he said to Vektus, his Apothecary, and ran back.

Khi’dem’s other squadmate was caught now, too. A root looped around Khi’dem’s gauntlet, but he yanked and tore the tendril, then sidestepped the others that came hunting for him.

Galba revved his chainsword and turned its teeth against the roots enveloping the first victim. As he did, Atticus’s voice crackled over the vox-channel. ‘Leave them.’

‘Brother-captain?’

‘Now.’

He hesitated, the first of the monstrous roots just beginning to part beneath his blade. And then the entire spiral around the Salamander contracted with a jerk. The movement was so violent that Galba stumbled back a step. Blood, under immense pressure, spurted from between the coils of the roots. It was as if a fist had crushed an egg. A second later, as the other Salamanders reached his position, the other cocoon underwent the same traumatic constriction. More blood, an aggressive spray, and nothing more than a brief grunt of terminal pain from the legionary as a force of unimaginable pressure smashed ceramite to bits and a body to pulp. The root system twitched and thrummed. It was feeding, and Galba had the ghastly impression of satisfaction radiating from the vegetation.

And then the thing being fed by the roots invaded. It rushed in from the upslope tree line. First there was green flesh racing along the roots, but this was only a harbinger. Behind it came a green wave, a writhing tide three metres high. It was the moss, Galba saw, swollen with blood and frenzied with the thirst for more. It was growing, spreading like a plague, but with the speed and relentless advance of a storm surge. It was also moving, dragged forwards by the tangling, swelling roots.

It was hunger given being. It wanted the world.

Three

Six seconds
Unnatural selection
The call in the wild

Fewer than five seconds had elapsed since Atticus’s order. Galba’s delay was already unforgivable. It might yet be fatal. There was nothing to shoot here, nothing to stab, nothing to fight. Perhaps the moss could burn, and two of the Salamanders were bringing flamers to bear. But the ravening moss was a wall as wide as the clearing. It would take a heavy flamer mounted on a Land Raider to stop it.

‘Leave it!’ Galba yelled.

Another second passed. He saw the frustrated rage in Khi’dem’s posture. The idea of flight from so mindless a foe, and with the death of battle-brothers unavenged, was obscene. But any other action was insane.

‘Retreat, brothers,’ Khi’dem voxed, and every toxic syllable was choked with bitterness.

They ran, and Galba shared the Salamanders’ fury. They were Legiones Astartes, and retreat was unthinkable, but they ran, and behind them, an emerald storm raged. The wave grew higher yet. A shadow filled the clearing. It stretched over the jungle ahead. The sound was more terrible than all the predator roars that had preceded it. It was the sibilant, monster exhalation, a hhhhssssssiiiiihhhhhhhhh of a hurricane-tossed forest, but there was no wind. The air moved, though. There was the breath of a monster, a displacement caused by the march of the jungle floor itself. Immensity heaved, and there was eagerness – a blind, mindless, but all-consuming desire, and it reached forwards to smash all flesh and smother all hope. It was called by blood, and it had come, unquenchable, in answer.

The ground rippled beneath Galba’s feet as he left the clearing. He pounded down the slope, hoping the trees would slow the tide of moss, but wondering how large the growth truly was, and whether they were all merely running into its enveloping embrace. The vox chatter coming from the rest of the forces was a chorus of overlapping urgency, but there were no calls of casualties or struggle.

‘Your position, Sergeant Galba?’ came Atticus again, the bionic voice as cold and precise as ever, but its rasp somehow encoding a sharp edge of rage.

‘Approaching rapidly, captain. Can you see what is behind us?’

‘Enough of it. We will continue moving at speed. Catch up.’

They kept running. The way forward was made easier by the passage of the others. Brush was trampled, vines and low-hanging branches chopped away. There was moss here, but it was dormant. The million tiny deaths that were the constant reality of a jungle were not enough to rouse it into frenzy. And now Galba heard the green wave crash into the trees. It was the sound of a massive surf and heavy rock, soft with bodies, strong with serpents. He pictured the moss flowing between the gigantic trunks, the tide turning into a thirsting stream. The hissing, rustling and snapping pursued. But the tremors in the ground diminished. They were putting distance between themselves and the hunger. Its blood-fuelled run was slowing.

Then came the fall once more into quiescence. There could be no true silence in the jungle. There was the perpetual whine of insects. Galba had seen no birds yet, but he could hear the distant snarls and shrieks of hunters and prey. There was the rustle of the unseen. But when the pursuit ceased, the calm that descended was as oppressive as lead.

The hunger subsided back into the earth, unsatisfied. The knowledge of its existence spread over the land. Everywhere Galba looked now, he saw the potential for its re-emergence. He thought with regret of the lethality of Medusa. He longed for the purity of its cold indifference. Pythos was unclean. It was anything but indifferent. It was desire at its most naked and inchoate. Such obscenity of the organic deserved but one thing: flame.

He rejoined the other squads at the bottom of the slope. Underbrush and moss had been burned away. There was nothing but ash between the trees here, a space in the jungle carved on the Iron Hands’ terms. There was a chance now to regroup.

Atticus was waiting at the end of the path. Galba wondered again how absolute stillness could be so expressive. As they approached, the captain pivoted on one foot, as if he were the steel door of a fortress gate opening. He was, Galba thought, formidable enough to be one. He was a colossus of war, a being no more to be moved by thoughts of mercy than a Fellblade tank. Those who passed him did so only on his sufferance. Knowing what was coming, Galba slowed down, letting the Salamanders go first. Khi’dem nodded briefly to the Iron Hands’ commander. Atticus made no response. Galba drew abreast with him and stopped. He opened a private vox-channel. ‘Captain,’ he said.

‘Sergeant.’ No brother. And then silence. At least, Galba thought, he had responded on the same channel. Whatever was about to transpire, it would be between them alone.

The silence continued. Galba found himself counting the seconds. He began to see a painful meaning in their number.

‘Six seconds,’ Atticus said. ‘That is a noticeable period of time, is it not?’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘When I issue an order, I do not simply expect immediate compliance. I demand it.’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘Is there anything I have said that is less than clear? Less than precise? Open to interpretation?’

The last word was especially damning. Interpretation and all the other luxuries of artistic contemplation were the domain of the Emperor’s Children. What had been the subject of playful banter and fraternal jests had, since the Callinedes betrayal, become a symptom of corruption. Interpretation and lies were the same thing. That which had more than one unarguable meaning had clearly been created with deception at its heart.

‘No, brother-captain,’ Galba replied. ‘You are being very clear.’

Atticus turned to go. ‘I do not have the time or resources to waste on disciplinary action,’ he said. ‘But do not fail me again.’ The tenor of the mechanical voice was clear. Galba was not being given a second chance. He was being given an ultimatum.

‘I shall not.’

Atticus looked back at him. ‘I am not in the habit of explaining my orders.’

Galba was taken aback. ‘Nor should you be, my lord.’

‘I shall, however, seek clarity from you on one point. You believe, do you not, that I commanded you to abandon the Salamanders to their fate. You believe that I was motivated by spite, rather than strategy.’

‘No, brother-captain.’ He was shaking his head, horrified. ‘I believe nothing of the kind.’

‘Then why did you hesitate?’

He should have had an answer. He should have had a reason. He should not have met the question with ghastly silence. Galba felt a void gape in his chest, an abyss in which might lurk the most pernicious doubt, and into which he was refusing to gaze. Yet Atticus was forcing him up to its edge. The awful seconds ticked away once more, and Galba had no answer to give. Instead, his captain’s toxic questions bred others, just as poisonous.

Galba looked at the legionary that stood before him, at the being who had exterminated his flesh to the point that there was very little to distinguish the armour from the form beneath it. He thought about that one human eye that still gazed from the metal skull, and it seemed to him, in this moment, that Atticus’s remaining concessions to humanity were nothing more than expressions of scorn. Worming its way out of the dark was a deep question, never articulated before, but expressed perhaps in the moderation of his own bionic enhancements. If the full rejection of the flesh was the goal, why had Ferrus Manus never completed that journey? The primarch’s silver-metal arms had been the limit of his metamorphosis. What did it mean that Atticus had gone so much further?

Six seconds. Galba blinked. He rejected the absurdity of this train of thought. If he continued to follow it, he would be brought to doubt the most fundamental tenets of the Iron Hands. And he did not doubt them. If anything, the disgusting, chaotic explosion of the organic he had just witnessed only reinforced the sane and ordered virtues of the machine. As rationality returned to him, he felt his answer come to him. It was a simple admission of shame.

But before he could express it, Atticus spoke again. ‘Did you accomplish anything in your delay? Was a single warrior, of whatever Legion, saved?’

‘No, my lord.’

‘What purpose was served by anyone remaining on that field for another six seconds?’

‘None.’

‘And what would have been the result if Mistress Erephren had come to harm as a result of your choices?’

‘Disaster.’ He did not try to exculpate himself with the sorry excuse that he had confided her safety to the care of a subordinate. He sought no forgiveness for his past actions. He would seek redemption in his future ones.

Atticus nodded with the smooth up-and-down motion of a turret. ‘None,’ he repeated. ‘I feel no great warmth for our brothers from the other Legions, Galba. But I act for the Emperor. Always. And what I command is what I believe will bring us victory. Always. Am I clear?’

‘Yes, brother-captain.’

‘Good. Then let us see what Mistress Erephren can tell us next about our quest through this obscenity.’

The astropath was standing with Vektus. ‘Our thanks, brother,’ Atticus said.

‘My duty, brother-captain,’ Vektus said, pleased, and withdrew.

Galba was grateful for Atticus’s implication that Vektus had been acting under orders flowing down a unified chain of command. The humane gesture in the captain’s choice of words surprised him, and his surprise shamed him. He hurled his doubts back into the pit, and declared it sealed.

Erephren’s posture was as rigid as ever, but strain had etched deeper furrows into her brow. A narrow trickle of blood fell from her left eye. ‘We are close,’ she said. Her voice was flat. It was not weak, but it was diminished, as though her presence were an illusion, and she was calling to them from a great distance.

‘The warp is taking you from us,’ Atticus said.

‘It is attempting to,’ she agreed. ‘But it will not succeed. Have no fear, captain.’ She smiled, looking like an ancient icon of death. ‘But then, you don’t, do you?’

‘I have full confidence in your strength, mistress,’ Atticus replied, the embodiment of metal addressing the triumph of determination over the flesh. ‘Show us the way.’

She pointed, and Atticus led the way forwards. Due east still, deeper into the jungle. The ground was level. There were no features to distinguish this direction from any other. The trees, even more dense than on the slope, surrounded the Iron Hands in a green prison.

‘Brother Galba,’ Khi’dem voxed. ‘I know the help you tried to give us came at a cost.’

Galba did not answer. He was not interested. The field of blood and green was behind him.

‘I would have you know,’ Khi’dem continued, ‘that though your orders were correct, your actions were, too.’ Then he clicked off, sparing the Iron Hands legionary the need to respond.

Galba wanted to deny Khi’dem’s assertion. He wanted to regard what he had done as a lingering weakness of the flesh, one that he must, in time, shed with all the others.

But he did not.

‘I’m sorry we were not close enough to help,’ Ptero said.

He and Khi’dem were marching together. Their two squads followed behind. Ptero held no official rank over his fellows. But he was a veteran, and in the chaos of Isstvan, his greater experience had made the difference in saving even a few of his battle-brothers. Unit cohesion demanded leadership, and the survivors had deferred to him. Khi’dem wondered if the weight of Ptero’s new responsibility dragged at his shoulder in the same way as his own rank did. To be a sergeant of such a reduced squad was a constant reminder of failure.

He shook his head. ‘No help was possible,’ he told Ptero. ‘We should have retreated more quickly, but…’ He moved his hand in a gesture of tired frustration.

‘No one saw that coming, brother.’

‘That moss, perhaps not, but you sensed something was wrong. Those beasts disturbed you.’

‘They did,’ the Raven Guard agreed. ‘Those animals made no sense. Everything about them, from their herding instinct to their build, announced them as plant-eaters.’

‘Apart from the fact that they were not.’

‘Exactly. Our experience of this planet’s life is still limited, but have you noticed the pattern?’

Khi’dem saw where he was heading. ‘Everything is carnivorous.’

‘Even the plants.’

‘That should not be sustainable.’ He thought about the punishing geological cycles on Nocturne, and of how tenuous life’s grip was on his home world. Nocturne boasted many dangerous species, but there was also a balance between predator and prey. Without it, Nocturne would have no ecosystem at all.

‘It’s worse than that,’ Ptero said. His helmet turned to face Khi’dem. ‘How did this come to be?’

The implication was obvious. ‘Not through natural processes.’

‘No.’

‘You think we might have a sentient enemy on Pythos?’

Ptero had returned his gaze to the jungle. Khi’dem could almost see the wheels turning in the tactician’s mind as he scanned for threats. ‘I do not know,’ Ptero said. ‘Our information is suggestive enough for concern, but too incomplete to be of use. The Iron Hands found no sign of a civilisation, or even of its ruins, so that is encouraging. But it is not conclusive.’

The land began to rise again. The slope was far more gentle than the descent from the promontory had been. It was consistent, though. The elevation increased step by step. The line of Space Marines detoured around a massive fern, its trunk thick as a flagship’s cannon. Its enormous fronds hung low over their heads. They moved back and forth, their blades passing over each other, creating shifting, interlocking patterns. They were the hands of a mesmerist, summoning the gaze, luring the mind. Ptero slashed at them with his lightning claws.

‘Dangerous?’ Khi’dem asked, watching green shreds flutter to the ground.

‘Perhaps,’ Ptero answered. He gave the trunk a parting gouge as they passed.

‘You are frustrated, brother.’

‘I am.’

‘You doubt the wisdom of this mission?’

Ptero’s sigh was a crackle of static over the vox. ‘I hope it succeeds. The potential for valuable intelligence is great, and given the loss we have suffered, we have very few credible means of striking back open to us.’

‘But?’

‘I am troubled by what we are fighting here. The hostility of this planet is something more than feral. There is an enemy here, but I do not know how to fight it.’

‘Neither do I.’ The combat philosophies of the Salamanders and the Raven Guard were poles apart. Neither the unbreakable line nor the lightning strike would serve here, though. When the land itself was hostile, there was no ground to hold, and no terrain to exploit.

As the land continued its slow rise, the jungle unveiled variations in its character. The legionaries passed through areas where the trees had been toppled. Some had been uprooted. The trunks of many others had been snapped in two, or had their top halves sheared away. Khi’dem saw a cluster of conifers that looked as if they had been flattened into splinters, and at least one tree suspended by the branches of others a good ten metres off the ground, as if it had flown there. The clouds were dark, angry bruises visible through the ragged wound in the canopy.

The slope levelled off. The terrain was flat for several hundred metres, then began a descent as gradual as the ascent had been. They had been moving, Khi’dem realised, over a low plateau, its features rounded by erosion and accumulated vegetation. They had descended, he judged, about two-thirds of the way back towards the jungle floor when Atticus spoke on the open vox-channel. ‘Mistress Erephren says we are very close,’ he said.

And Ptero paused, head cocked, and said, ‘We are being hunted.’

Galba could see the sky again. He could also hear the pound of surf. They were less than a kilometre from the coast. The trees ahead were dead. Their branches tangled with each other, creating a web of talons. Light filtered down from above, broken into harsh fragments, like stained glass in a cathedral of predation. The trunks were more spread out here, and there was no underbrush. The ground was covered in desiccated vegetable matter, so brittle it turned to dust under the tread of the legionaries. But then, about fifty metres ahead, there was a cluster of trees that had grown together so closely, they formed a wall. They were dead, too. They were the skeletons of giants, pressing in against each other to hide the secret that had killed them.

Erephren had been walking faster during the last few minutes. Her face was etched by canyons of exhaustion. Her skin, already a bleached, unhealthy pale, had turned the grey of crumbling bones. But she moved as if hauled forward by a terrible gravitational force. When Galba spoke to her, her answers were brief, distracted. It seemed to him that her consciousness had already reached their destination, and now her body was hurrying to catch up.

There was a strip of open ground just before the tree cluster. Atticus ordered a stop at its border. Galba had to restrain Erephren from charging across.

‘It’s there,’ she gasped, pointing and reaching. The empty orbs of her eyes were fixed on the trees. ‘I have to be there.’

‘You will,’ said Atticus. ‘Once I know what those trees conceal.’ He turned to Camnus, the Techmarine. ‘Auspex?’

‘Nothing organic, brother-captain. Nothing sensible, either.’

Then Galba was hearing from Ptero. ‘Sir,’ the sergeant said. ‘We have an attack approaching from the rear lines. Multiple large contacts, moving to surround.’

‘Confirmed!’ said Camnus. ‘Closing in from downslope as well.’

Atticus cursed. ‘Darras, take those trees down. The rest of us, testudo formation.’ He pointed at Erephren. ‘You will be in the centre, and you will find the strength to resist the call, or you will be of no use to this Legion.’ He stood in front of her as he spoke, between her and her goal. Galba knew that Erephren could see neither Atticus nor the trees, but she reacted as if she could. Her near-madness diminished, the drive forwards breaking like surf against the immovable thing of war before her.

‘So ordered,’ she responded.

Darras charged forwards with a demolitions team. While they set explosive charges, the other squads came together in a tight box. They were shoulder to shoulder, guns facing out on all sides. There was no space between them. They were a mass of ceramite, a moving fortress, every bolter a turret to cut down any foe that dared approach. There was a moment of tension, brief but real, over the role of the Salamanders. Khi’dem made no request of Atticus. Even so, with a curt nod, the captain of the Iron Hands indicated they should join the formation. The Raven Guard preferred speed and flexibility, and remained a group apart, moving in parallel with the main force.

In the few seconds that had passed since the warning had been given, the approaching enemy had come close enough to be heard. Snarls echoed in the green darkness. Branches snapped before the passage of heavy bodies. The formation began its advance across the open area to the cluster.

‘Darras,’ Atticus said. ‘Status?’

‘At your command.’

‘Do it.’

A series of explosions blew apart the bases of the trunks. The trees wavered, then, with deafening cracks, pulled away from each other’s embrace and fell. They came down like the hatches of an immense drop pod. From his position on the right flank, Galba watched their descent, not worried that they would fall on the formation. Darras was a master of the physics of demolition. The ground shuddered with the impact of the huge trunks on either side of the legionaries.

The trees had concealed a column of black stone. The colour was deep as obsidian, but there was no sheen, no reflection. It seemed to absorb light, spreading a halo of shadows. It was twisted, curving away from the vertical as it reared up like a striking serpent. Its peak was split into three hook shapes, like an open talon. Its surface was cracked and lined, and it seemed to Galba that there was a pattern there to see. But his gaze kept slipping away. He could not focus on a single spot on the column. At first glance, he had assumed the structure was artificial, but there was also a suggestion of flow to the rock, as if it had erupted molten from the earth and cooled into this shape. His gut told him that somehow both possibilities were wrong and correct.

The Iron Hands were only a few metres from the column when the hunters arrived. They emerged from the jungle on all sides. They hesitated for a moment, sniffing the air and staring at their prey, choosing the angle of their attack.

‘Brother Ptero,’ Galba voxed, ‘I hope you don’t object to the biology of these beasts.’

‘No,’ Ptero replied. ‘Those are flesh-eaters. Without a doubt.’

They were bipedal saurians, perhaps eight metres tall. For creatures that size, their build was surprisingly lithe. Their forearms were long, and ended in five-fingered hands whose thumbs were blade-shaped claws the size of chainswords. Their necks were long and sinuous, accounting for almost a third of their height. Their jaws, filled with gladius-sized teeth, hung open as they panted. They looked like they were smiling.

Galba counted twenty that were visible. He could hear more in the jungle behind the front lines. The individual merged into a single collective growl that resonated in Galba’s chest. It was a carnivorous song, a choir of animal hate and eagerness. The saurians began to advance.

‘Fire,’ Atticus said. His rasp over the vox was just as predatory.

For the first few seconds, the transhuman hunters controlled the field. Their weapons tore the leading saurians apart, blasting heads, severing limbs and necks, shooting torsos to pieces. Then, with lethal agility, the reptiles retaliated. They could leap. The second line exploded from the tree cover, vaulting over the twitching carcasses of their fallen. Galba’s shots were suddenly too low as a creature soared two metres above the ground, coming straight for him. It landed just in front of him, smashing into the ground with such force that the tremor almost knocked him from his feet.

The beast slashed at him with thumb-blades. He parried with his bolter. The saurian arched its neck over his defences and clamped its jaws over his head. He heard teeth shatter against ceramite, but he also felt others dig into his gorget, stabbing for his throat. He fired blind. The impact from the shells tore the monster away, knocking it back a step. Roaring pain and rage, its ribs visible through the holes in its torso, it lunged at him straight on. He crouched, firing up through the saurian’s jaws, and blew out the top of its skull.

As he straightened, a glancing blow to his left made him stumble. Another reptile had landed full on the brother at his side. The beast was crushing the legionary, tonnes of bone and flesh smashing his armour open like an eggshell. Galba stitched fire up the beast’s flank and through its neck. Its frenzy refused to let it die. Before it fell, it raked its claws through the body of its victim, ripping him open.

Other Iron Hands were slaughtered by the saurians, and the formation contracted, an ever-tighter fist. The warriors adjusted their fire. No longer taken by surprise by the agile leaping of the monsters, they killed more of them at a distance. Yet the saurians kept coming. The blood in the air was calling the hunting packs, and the numbers were growing.

The formation reached the column. ‘Mistress Erephren,’ Atticus said. ‘Do what you must. Brothers, conserve your ammunition. Our journey is only half done.’

Galba switched to his chainsword. The battle turned into a melee. The saurians crowded in, fighting and clawing at each other for a chance at the prey. The Iron Hands were surrounded by a wall of hide and fangs and claws. Galba’s chainsword whined, the blade biting through muscle and bone with every swing. It was impossible to miss, but the attacks were almost as hard to avoid. The blows rained down with massive animal fury.

The column was at his back now. He was no psyker, but he felt something emanating from the stone and seeping into his consciousness. It was vibration, it was heat, it was insinuation. For a moment, he thought he heard laughter, but then a drooling maw was filling his sight, and there was only roaring in his ears, and he answered with his own roars of war and of blade.

Over the vox came Erephren’s gasp. Both hands on his chainsword, reptilian blood cascading over him, Galba kept his gaze forward, surviving second by second. But he knew that the astropath had touched the column. He felt her shock as a jagged cut in the uncanny presence of the stone. He heard grunts of surprise over the vox, and knew that the moment had resonated over the entire formation.

‘Mistress Erephren?’ Atticus said, the strain of combat coming through even his mechanical tones.

‘Yes, captain.’ Erephren’s strain was different in kind and degree. Galba was astonished that she could speak at all. Her voice was brittle as ancient paper, faint as the shadow of hope, its mere existence an act of extraordinary will. ‘We can go,’ she croaked. ‘We must go.’

‘Bolters,’ Atticus ordered. ‘Fire at will.’

Galba brought the chainsword down in a lethal arc, gutting the saurian before him. He mag-locked the chainsword to his side and pulled up his bolter in a single fluid motion. He pulled the trigger at the same moment as his battle-brothers. The blast of point-blank mass-reactive shells hit the saurians like an artillery barrage. The animals screamed, the sound high and gurgling, and cut short. Carcasses blown wide open, they were propelled backwards into their oncoming kin.

‘Punch through,’ said Atticus.

The formation turned into a wedge. With the captain at the front, the Iron Hands and Salamanders broke the line of predators, a blunt arrowhead tearing through the barrier of raging flesh. The Raven Guard had been harrying the rear of the saurian packs, undermining their siege of the larger formation. Now they concentrated their attacks on the reptiles attacking from upslope. The saurians were caught between the two groups of legionaries, and the attack faltered. The wedge picked up speed. The weapons fire was continuous, and at last the numbers of saurians began to drop. No more packs were joining the hunt, and the survivors began to hang back.

By the time the legionaries reached the top of the plateau, the reptiles had given up the pursuit. They contented themselves with the corpses that surrounded the column. Galba could hear them snarl and squabble over the spoils. He knew there were many of their own kind for the reptiles to feast upon. He tried not to think about the other bodies left behind. But then he heard Vektus’s low, steady cursing. The Apothecary was two men up from Galba’s position.

‘Not a one,’ Vektus was saying. ‘Not a solitary one recovered.’ He was furious.

Galba winced. More losses the Iron Hands could not afford. More gene-seed gone forever, and so the future of the Legion impoverished by just that much. More brothers denied the most basic dignity in death.

And now he could not stop thinking about what was being devoured in the shadow of the column.

Four

Foothold
Nothing to fear
Synaesthesia

The base was established at the landing site. It could only be approached by land from the east, but Atticus still ordered walls constructed along the entire perimeter of the promontory’s level peak. Modular fortifications and housing were brought down by lighter from the Veritas Ferrum, along with the construction teams of Legion serfs. Reinforcements came too. By nightfall, a fortress had risen on Pythos. It was an iron riposte to the planet’s savagery. If the jungle had tried to scour the Iron Hands from Pythos’s surface, it had failed. They would be here for as long as they chose to be.

Erephren was aware of the stronghold coming into being around her. Though she could not see it, she felt its weight. She was responsible for the coming of the walls, the command post, the dormitorium, the supply depot and more. The base was, in no small measure, her creation. It was her quest that had driven the legionaries through the jungle, and that had exacted a heavy toll. It was her decision to have the base constructed here, rather than at the site of the column, and she was grateful to have been able to make that choice.

‘Are you certain?’ Atticus had asked her when they had returned to the landing site. ‘We will take the land around the column, if you need that level of proximity.’

‘Captain,’ she had replied, ‘that terrain is indefensible.’ She was still horrified by the thought of the lives necessary to seize and hold that low-lying section of the jungle. She was terrified by the prospect of remaining that close to the column.

‘There is no terrain that cannot be taken,’ Atticus had said. ‘If that is what is required, that is what we shall do.’

‘No, the initial contact was enough, captain. This degree of proximity will suffice. I can do what must be done from here.’

Inside the command block, there was a small, windowless room, barely large enough for her astropath’s throne. Here she sat, and as the construction carried on outside, she opened her mind’s eye to the column, a few thousand metres in the distance.

She had not told Atticus what she had experienced when she touched the column. In that instant, the warp had unfolded before her like a sudden blossom. Revelation upon revelation had poured into her consciousness, vistas of madness and immensities of the impossible cascading over each other. Just before she had pulled away, she had caught a glimpse of things just over the horizon of her knowledge. A palace, a fortress, a maze and a garden. The impressions were ludicrous, she knew. They were merely her interpretation of formlessness, her mind’s need for patterns imposing them where none existed, like seeing shapes in the clouds. That was all they were. They could be nothing else. Yet her terror at the prospect of their unveiling had jolted her hand away from the column.

She did not like to think about what she had witnessed, but she had no choice. It was the singularity nestled at the centre of her mind, and all her thoughts now circled it. She could not escape its pull, but she feared the annihilation of her self if she gave in to its spiralling fascination. That fear, she hoped, along with the physical distance, would give her the strength she needed to read the unfolding of the warp without disappearing into it. And read it she must, because she had caught a glimpse of something else in those moments of contact.

She had seen a fleet.

Night fell on Pythos, and was its own sort of predator. The cloud cover was thick, not to be pierced by star or moon, and so the darkness was complete. It was a smothering obscurity. Jerune Kanshell found it hard to breathe. The too-rich scents of the jungle, carried on a humidity he could almost touch, wrapped themselves around his head and squeezed. It took a real effort not to gasp. If he began that futile struggle for cleaner air, he would not be able to stop. He had already seen several of the other serfs who had come down with him succumbing to hitching, desperate gulps. They found no relief, and he could see panic growing in their eyes. So he kept his breathing steady.

The dark had other weapons, too. The sounds of the jungle seemed to grow louder. Kanshell had not been able to see more than a few metres into the trees when he had arrived in the daylight hours. The walls had been completed before twilight. His duties did not take him to the ramparts, so he no longer saw anything of the jungle, and had not for several hours. But when the last of the light in the sky had faded, the calls and cries of the land had grown in intensity and frequency. He was sure of it. He listened with dread as the overlapping snarls of perpetual war had taken on an awful kinship to a choir. Pythos was singing, and its song was murder.

The serf dormitorium was a large, rectangular structure near the northern wall. His construction shift done, he walked across the compound, his shadow a jagged, angular thing in the harsh arc lighting. He slowed as he approached the doorway. Agnes Tanaura was sitting on the ground beside it. She was staring up into the void of the sky. There was nothing beatific in her face tonight. She seemed worried.

She looked down and saw him. She must have noticed his reluctant pace, because she said, ‘I’m not going to preach to you tonight, Jerune. Not here.’

‘Worried you’ll be caught?’ He was not in a teasing mood. But the weight of the night was oppressive, the cries of the jungle a snapping of jaws against his psyche. Taunting Tanaura was nothing more than bravado.

‘No,’ she answered, not rising to his bait. Either she saw through it, or she did not care. ‘I need all my faith for myself tonight,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’ She was genuinely ashamed.

‘Don’t be,’ he said, feeling the flush of his own shame. ‘Be strong,’ he said, not sure why he did so, but answering a need for solidarity. Confused, nervous, he avoided looking at her as he entered the barracks. The interior was a single open space filled with rows of bunks stacked five high. Kanshell made his way between them, following the dim lumen-strips on the floor to his billet towards the rear. Most of the others were occupied. The dormitorium was quiet, and the silence made his skin crawl. There was no snoring. Every serf he passed was lying still, fully awake. The breathing he heard was shallow, hesitant. He was surrounded by people who were watchful, waiting, straining to hear. The effort was contagious. When he climbed a ladder to his top bunk and lay down, he too began to listen.

He was listening for something he did not want to hear. He did not know what it would be. It was something beyond the growls of beasts. It was something that coiled behind the night. Reality was a membrane. It was too thin, and stretching thinner as it fought to contain what pressed against it.

He pressed his palms against his eyes. Where was he finding these ideas? They were nonsense. They were relics of a dark, superstitious age. They had no place in the enlightened Imperium. Tanaura and her cronies could preach what they wanted about divinity, but he knew the Imperial Truth, and so he also knew what it had to say about these irrational terrors.

‘That’s enough,’ he whispered, barely loud enough to hear his own words. ‘Enough, enough, enough.’ The words were brittle. They crumbled like charred paper, flaking into ash. When they were gone, the false silence in the dark slithered closer. He held himself rigid, tendons popping with the effort of denial. He tried to whisper again. He tried to say, ‘There is nothing there.’ The words died before he could speak them. What if they prevented him from hearing what he feared to hear? What if he did not know it was upon him?

On all sides were row upon row of men and women lying just as still, just as terrified as he was. Anticipation was turning into madness. Within minutes of lying down, Kanshell was no longer trying to talk himself out of his fear. He was consumed by it. And still he heard nothing and saw nothing.

Nothing to hear. Nothing to see. Nothing to fear. Nothing, nothing, nothing. But the nothing was fragile. It would take little to shatter it. And when that happened, what would come? His imagination ran riot at the thought. It could not conjure an answer, so it subjected him to an avalanche of shapeless terrors, malformed deaths and creeping, dreadful intangibility. He was suffocating. His hands curled into claws. He wanted to rip the air so he could breathe again. His chest began to hitch with silent gasps. His mouth opened wide. The scream was silent. Sound was forbidden, because of what it might conceal. And still there was nothing.

Until, like insects at the edge of his vision, there was something.

Darras saw Khi’dem heading towards the rampart. He moved forwards to intercept. ‘Are you looking for something, son of Vulkan?’ he asked. He congratulated himself on keeping his tone polite, but firm. He had not given in to his instinct to open with hostilities. He walked a few steps ahead of the other Space Marine and then stopped, facing him.

Khi’dem did not force the issue. He stopped too. ‘I was going to walk along the wall,’ he said.

‘You think we might have been negligent in our defences?’

‘Not at all.’

‘Then I don’t see why this tour of yours would be necessary.’

‘Are you forbidding me access?’ Khi’dem asked.

Darras was impressed in spite of himself. The Salamander had every right to be in a blind rage, but he was calm. The question sounded more like an honest enquiry than a challenge. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But I am suggesting you go elsewhere.’

‘Why?’

‘Our captain is up there. So is Brother-Sergeant Galba.’

‘I see.’

‘Do you? Do you understand the harm you do Galba in our captain’s eyes whenever you are seen in the sergeant’s presence?’

‘Ah,’ said Khi’dem. ‘I think I do now. Thank you for speaking to me, Sergeant Darras. I will do as you suggest.’

Darras waited while Khi’dem walked away. Go on, he thought. Make yourself useful and stay out of our way. He could see the logic behind Galba’s peacemaking efforts, but he saw nothing to be gained by them. There could be no relying on the Salamanders and the Raven Guard. Galba was giving in to an indulgence if he thought otherwise, one that could hurt his own reliability in the field.

Darras hoped he could make him see sense.

The night tasted wrong.

Galba stood on the eastern rampart of the base, watching the jungle. He had stood there for half an hour, trying to identify what was bothering him. It was more than the darkness that cloaked Pythos’s carnivores. He realised what it was just as he became aware of a looming presence to his right. He turned to see his captain striding his way. Atticus was the rational embodied. What was not genhanced was bionic. His existence was the triumph of science. Illogical thought broke apart as he walked. Atticus demanded discipline of reason as well as strategy, and he would have both.

Even so, the night tasted wrong.

‘Brother-sergeant,’ Atticus greeted him.

‘Captain.’

‘You are watching for something. What is it?’

Galba chose his words carefully, and doing so was duty, not evasion. He would never dissemble from the captain. But nor would he be imprecise, and he was wrestling with a frustrating vagueness. ‘I am not sure,’ he said. ‘There is a taste in the air that I cannot identify.’

‘We are in a jungle, Sergeant Galba. Given the sheer abundance of life, some confusion of scents and tastes would hardly be surprising, even with our senses.’

He had not mentioned scents. ‘You are experiencing something similar, captain?’

‘Nothing I would not expect.’ Atticus spoke without hesitation, as if this was something he had already debated on his own.

Galba hesitated, then decided he could not accept this explanation too readily. ‘There is blood in the air,’ he said.

‘Of course there is. We have seen the feral nature of this planet.’

‘But there is something underneath that taste,’ Galba insisted, ‘and I have never encountered it before.’

Atticus was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘Describe it.’

‘I wish I could.’ He closed his eyes and took a deep breath of the foetid night. He concentrated on the work of his neuroglottis as it analysed the odours at a near-molecular level. ‘The taste makes no sense,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t taste like anything.’ He stopped. That was wrong. What was there beneath, beyond the blood, yet linked to it, did have a taste. It tasted of…

He staggered. He broke through the sensory camouflage and plunged into an abyss of impossibility. ‘It tastes of shadow,’ he gasped, and the shadows filled his throat. He coughed, trying to expel them. But they were known to him now, and he could not shed the knowledge.

‘Brother-sergeant?’ Atticus asked.

Galba could barely hear him. ‘I smell whispers,’ he said. He did not know if he had spoken aloud. The shadows and whispers were the whole world. They were a synaesthetic hell. Gagging on the wet, clinging smoke of the shadows, he could not see what cast them or discern their shape. Because he did not hear the whispers, he could not understand them. He sensed the contours of words, and the malevolent stench of a language that must never be understood by anything sane. Meaning hovered just outside his awareness. It had a shape, a shape that sounded like the laughter of prey and the scream of a star.

Atticus caught him by the arm as his knees began to buckle. A strange noise buzzed and echoed around him. It seemed to be coming from the captain himself. It kept repeating. After an age, Galba realised that it was his name he was hearing. He grabbed on to that handhold of rationality and used it to climb back to steady, logical ground. Reality became solid once more. His senses righted themselves. He straightened.

‘I don’t understand what has happened,’ he said. ‘I am not a psyker.’ He disliked his defensive tone.

Atticus’s remaining organic eye fixed him with a purposeful glare. ‘Remember where we are,’ he said. ‘The barrier between reality and the warp is thin here. We cannot be surprised by effects caused by intrusions of the empyrean. It would be strange if we did not experience some kind of hallucination.’

‘This was more than a hallucination. The whispers–’

Atticus cut him off. ‘They were not whispers. That is how you interpreted what you experienced. I heard nothing.’

Because you chose not to listen, Galba thought. Then he pushed the thought away. Atticus was right. He was reacting as if he had never heard of the Imperial Truth. There had been no whispers. There had been no shadows under his tongue. Most importantly, there had been no brush with a malign intelligence. ‘Neither did I,’ he said, agreeing with the captain and finding that what he said was true. He had heard nothing.

Then someone started screaming.

For a moment, Kanshell thought the screams were his own. His mouth was still wide open. He had his hands pressed against his ears, his eyes shut tight against the moving dark. But still he could sense the rustling flow of a million insects. He could feel the breath of lipless mouths shaping words of obscenity. So of course there was screaming.

But it was not his. His throat was locked tight by the terror of the almost-seen. He felt the visitation pass over him. It was no more substantial than a thought. Perhaps that was all it was. But an idea could be dangerous. It was thoughts and nothing more that had reduced him to paralysis. The thought ran a claw down his flesh. It scraped his heart with ice. And it was not his thought. It was not the thought of any human, yet it had come from something that knew the fears of men and women, knew their every shape and nuance and flavour, knew them as if it were forged of those very fears.

Kanshell’s breath wheezed out of his taut throat with a tiny, high-pitched whine. The idea hovered over him for a moment, and then it moved on. He did not know where it had gone, only that it was no longer trying to tempt him to open his eyes and let the madness take hold.

But someone was looking, because someone was screaming. Someone had looked upon the thing that did not exist, except as a concept, and that had been enough. The voice was male. It was hitting registers more animal than human. The man shrieked without stopping for breath. Then Kanshell heard running feet.

The thought faded. With it went the fear. In its place came a shame that was almost welcome. He lowered his hands and opened his eyes. There was nothing lurking by the ceiling. The dormitorium was as it had been earlier, only now there was stirring in the bunks. The screaming bounced off the walls, tearing at Kanshell with its pain and horror. His shame forced him into action. He jumped down from his billet, landed awkwardly, and stumbled down the aisle. The screams were coming from the mess hall attached to the dormitorium. He ran for the doorway, racing ahead of the shame. His terror of nothing had put a lie to his faith in the Imperial Truth, and he would redeem himself by bringing comfort and reason to the tormented man.

As he reached the entrance to the mess hall, the quality of the screams changed. They became ragged. A terrible wet retching choked them off for a moment, and then they started up again, at a higher pitch. It sounded to Kanshell as if there were two voices now, the screams entwining in a choral helix of despair.

He burst though the plasteel door. Georg Paert stood in the centre of the hall with his back to Kanshell. He was alone. His shoulders were shaking. His arms were up, elbows out, as if his hands were at his face. Both screams were coming from him.

Kanshell made his way between the metal tables towards the enginarium serf. ‘Georg?’ he said, trying to keep his own voice steady and calm, yet loud enough for Paert to hear over his shrieks. As he drew near, he saw that Paert was standing in a spreading pool of blood. ‘Georg?’ he said again. Calm and purpose were deserting him. The terror was returning.

Paert turned around. Kanshell recoiled. The other serf had torn his own throat apart. Flesh and muscle hung like tattered curtains. Blood soaked Paert’s tunic and hands. His mouth hung open, but no sound would ever come from it again.

Yet still there was screaming, still the two voices came from one man, and now the screams formed contrapuntal syllables: MAAAAAAAA, DAAAAAAIIIL. They created a single word, and the word was blood, and it was madness, and it was despair. And it was a prayer.

Paert fell to his knees, his life gushing from his body. He raised his hands to his eyes and plunged his fingers into them. He dug deeply and pulled, as if wrenching choice meat from a carcass. His hands full of jellied ruin, he collapsed.

Kanshell stepped backwards, his vision still filled with the worst horror, which had not been Paert’s suicide. The worst horror latched on to his reason like a cancer.

He heard the tread of ceramite boots behind him, and he turned to see Galba and Atticus. The gods of reason had arrived too late. There would be no reassurance for him now. The awe he had always felt in their presence was drowned by the worst horror. He stared at the Iron Hands, and he gave words to the worst horror.

‘His eyes,’ he croaked. ‘His eyes were screaming.’

Five

The prize
Hamartia
Perfection

‘We knew there would be hallucinations,’ Atticus told his assembled officers. They were standing in the command module of the base. The chamber was a sparse one, reduced to the bare tactical. A vox system occupied one wall, and in the centre of the room was a circular hololith table. That was all. Atticus stood before the table. He had Rhydia Erephren at his side. The hololith projector was powered up, but Atticus had not turned the display on yet. He was disposing of a distraction first.

‘We knew what would come,’ Atticus went on, ‘and it came. This system and this planet are dangerous for the weak-minded.’

‘He means you,’ Darras whispered to Galba. They were positioned near the module’s outer wall.

Galba did not answer. He thought of the ruined corpse, and of the look of surpassing terror on Kanshell’s face. It was a wonder that his serf was still sane.

‘These are the risks and costs of this mission,’ Atticus said. ‘Pythos is hostile to flesh and to reason. These are the simple facts of this terrain. Its wildlife is dangerous, and the warp is close to the surface.’

‘Did we lose many serfs?’ Vektus asked.

‘One dead,’ Atticus told the Apothecary. ‘Four others are demented, their prognosis uncertain. The one who died was unaccompanied when the suicidal fit came upon him. One of his fellows reached him too late. I have therefore issued a standing order forbidding any serf to be alone, for no matter how brief a period. Solitude is fertile ground for madness.’

Galba frowned. Atticus’s response smacked of expediency rather than conviction. It was true that the dead serf had had some time alone. But Kanshell’s account, to the extent that it was coherent, suggested that the victim had been in the dormitorium, far from alone, when reason had deserted him. Galba’s senses still carried the traces of his own experience. He knew that Atticus’s explanation for what had struck him was correct. There was no room, in the galaxy of the Emperor’s singular vision, for any other possibility. He knew this. But he felt the contrary, and this irrational instinct troubled him. It had no place in a legionary of the Iron Hands. But it was powerful enough to assail him with questions he could not answer.

‘There have been sacrifices,’ said Atticus. ‘There will be more. They will not be in vain.’ He turned to the astropath. ‘Enlighten us, Mistress Erephren.’

‘I have been tracking a fleet,’ she said. ‘The ships belong to the Emperor’s Children.’

The sound of hatred could be dead silence. Galba discovered that now. His doubts evaporated. He shared in the rage. Its purity burned away weakness. It forged unforgiving metal.

‘Go on,’ said Atticus. There was more than hate in those two syllables. There was eagerness. The captain of the Veritas Ferrum had prey in his crushing grasp.

‘A smaller squadron has detached itself from the main group. There are three ships. Their destination is here in the Demeter Sector. The Hamartia System.’

‘Tell them the names of the ships,’ Atticus said.

‘The two escorts are the Infinite Sublime and the Golden Mean. There is also a battle-barge, the Callidora.’

Galba’s eyes widened. Beside him, Darras was a study in astonishment. It was impossible that Erephren should know such detailed information. Yet she spoke with unwavering authority. And the Callidora… Now he truly understood the fire in Atticus’s organic eye. The Veritas Ferrum had followed the battle-barge on joint missions between the III and X Legion. It was a ship all present knew well. It had once lit the void with the jewelled glow of brotherhood.

It had fired upon them in the void war over Isstvan V.

‘Do you know when they’ll reach their destination?’ Darras asked.

‘I do.’

‘We will be there first,’ said Atticus.

‘Captain,’ Galba spoke up. ‘My faith in the Veritas Ferrum is unwavering. But it is wounded. It would be outnumbered…’

‘And what madness would possess us to assault a battle-barge?’ Atticus finished for him.

‘I would not have said madness.’ Though he might have thought it, and hoped to be proven wrong. He watched the captain closely. Galba would have sworn the expressionless face was smiling.

‘Brother-sergeant Galba is right to voice his doubts,’ Atticus announced to the assembled legionaries. ‘Without the knowledge Mistress Erephren has acquired, what I propose would be worse than insanity. It would be criminal. But we know the enemy. We know his disposition. We know where he will be and when. He knows nothing of us. And he shall remain ignorant, until he feels our blade in his hearts.’

The Hamartia System was made for ambushes. Its only inhabited planet, and its innermost, was Tydeus. The forge world was a small, dense furnace of a place. Hab-domed manufactorae covered its surface like fungi. Beyond Tydeus was nothing but a series of gas giants. The largest, Polynices, was also the furthest from the star, and its gravitational force had a long reach. The outer bodies of the crowded scattered disc suffered under its tyranny. Orbits were wildly eccentric. Planetoids and chunks of frozen volatiles were in constant collision. The zone was a disordered web of shifting trajectories. For helmsmen and navigators, it was a foul place.

It was also the location of Hamartia’s Mandeville point.

This was where ships travelling the empyrean would transition into the system. The point was a difficult one to negotiate. Many inexperienced pilots, and more than one veteran, had exited the warp only to drive their vessels into a chunk of ice the size of a city. No such accident could befall a ship of the Legiones Astartes, but even their crews had to proceed with caution. Their focus would be on the known natural hazards of the system. They would not, Atticus had said, be expecting, or be ready for, an attack. Not here, so deep within their own lines.

On the bridge of the Veritas Ferrum, Atticus stood in the command pulpit and revealed to his legionaries the mechanics of the coming war. Opaque shielding covered the forward oculus, shutting out the toxic sight of the empyrean as the strike cruiser travelled its currents, making for Hamartia. The warp was in storm. Turbulence and navigational anomalies were to be expected this close to the Maelstrom, but the degree of violence was unprecedented. There was also the disturbing news about the Astronomican. Locating it was difficult. Navigating by it was impossible. But Bhalif Strassny had found an alternative, and was guiding the Veritas Ferrum with assurance. The anomaly on Pythos was so strong, it was as powerful a beacon for the Demeter Sector as the Astronomican was for the galaxy.

The implications were dark. Atticus ignored them. Their contemplation would not help him with the mission.

Atticus touched the control panel before him, and the oculus acted as a giant screen, projecting the schematics of the Callidora, the Infinite Sublime and the Golden Mean. Camnus had retrieved the information from the massive databanks of the Veritas’s cogitators. The Iron Hands’ prey appeared before them with every secret exposed. Camnus and his fellow Techmarines had analysed the schematics, and their work now displayed something more vital than secrets: weaknesses.

‘There is where we will strike them,’ Atticus said. ‘The escorts must be eliminated in the opening moments of the operation. When we remove them from the battlefield, the Callidora will be ours.’ He spoke in certainties. He had no doubts about this engagement. He did not pretend to himself that he was approaching it with dispassion. Though his tone was measured, there was a searing heat in his chest, and it had a name: vengeance. He wanted to find himself knee-deep in the blood of the Emperor’s Children. Beneath his boots, he would hear the crunch of the skulls of those aesthetes. There would be nothing but fury in the war he was bringing to the traitors. But he had gone over the plan of attack with a cold, unforgiving eye for flaws. He exacted the same discipline from himself as he did from the men under his command.

He knew no plan was perfect.

He knew his primarch had gone down to defeat while consumed by the need for vengeance above all things.

He also knew that he would succeed. The data that Erephren had given him was so detailed, so precise, that only the worst fool could fail with it in hand. And this, too, Atticus knew: he was no fool.

He changed the display to a map of the region around Hamartia’s Mandeville point. ‘And this,’ he said, ‘is how we shall strike them.’

He could already taste the blood.

The Emperor’s Children squadron translated out of the warp a full twenty-four hours after the Veritas Ferrum had reached the same Mandeville point. There was no delay between the arrival of the traitor forces and the launching of the Iron Hands’ strike. With a shriek of cancerous colours, a bleeding emanation from the immaterium where there had been only the void, there were three ships. The sudden presence of their enormous masses triggered the minefield that had been waiting for them. The trap was primitive in its simplicity. The usual configuration of a minefield was designed to interdict a wide area with the risk of a lethal collision, the mines a lurking possibility. But Atticus knew where his enemy would be. His mines were not a barrier. They were his closing fist. The passive auspex of each mine reacted to the ships and the explosives flew towards the monuments of iron and steel that had arrived in their midst. They descended on the ships like swarms of terrible insects. Their stings lit the void with dozens of flashes. Fireballs rippled along the lengths of hulls.

The Infinite Sublime was hit by a cluster of mines amidships. Blast built upon blast. The void shields collapsed, their energy sparking over the ship like jagged aurora. The blows continued, punching through the starboard plating, reaching into the core of the ship, snapping its spine. The Infinite Sublime’s ammunition depots felt the kiss of flame and erupted. The ship broke in half. It hung there for a moment, its shape bisected but still distinct, the pride of its spires and the challenge of its prow untouched, as if the memory of centuries of victories would knit the vessel back together. Then it was swallowed by its death, a raging, squalling newborn sun bursting from the heart of its engines. Burning plasma bathed the eternal night of Hamartia’s cold frontier. It washed over the rest of the squadron.

Flame followed the pressure wave, overwhelming the reeling defences of the Golden Mean. The other escort ship had begun a turn as soon as the mines had struck. It had been hit by almost as many as the Infinite Sublime, but they were less concentrated, spreading their wounds like a plague of boils over the full length of the ship’s body. When the death cry of the Infinite Sublime hit it, the Golden Mean shuddered, and its engine flare died. Its turn continued, the movement clumsy and slow, the stagger of a wounded animal.

The stagger took it broadside before the sights of the waiting Veritas Ferrum. The strike cruiser announced its presence. Its lance turrets and batteries opened up. Energy beams shot across the void. They annihilated the Golden Mean’s weakening void shields. They cut the ship open, slicing through its plating. Then the shells arrived, delivering devastating blows of high explosives. The barrage was continuous. It was a judgement late in coming, an answer for the humiliation of Isstvan.

Hell came to the corridors of the escort. A wall of purging flame raced down their lengths, consuming legionary, helot and servitor. All were reduced to ash. The Golden Mean never returned fire. An iron fist smashed it into submission, into silence, into oblivion. Its death was not an exultation of fire. It was a fall to ruin. Within minutes, the only light on the ship was from the dying flames. A battered hulk sank into eternal night. It shed wreckage as it drifted off in a slow, tumbling spin, just another dead chunk of flotsam entering its wandering orbit around distant Hamartia.

That left the Callidora. The battle-barge was a leviathan. It was so covered in weaponry it resembled a spined creature of the oceans. But it was also a brilliant, crystalline city. It was a violet jewel, malevolent, illuminating the void with an arrogance of light. It was a celebration of excess. Its superabundance of guns was matched by a baroque profusion of ornamentation. The line between weapon and art was erased. Statues reached out to embrace the stars with arms that were cannons. Lances were incorporated into non-representational sculptures that resembled frozen explosions, or embodied the concepts of ecstasy, of extremity, of sensation.

The mines struck the Callidora too. The battle-barge rode out the attack. Its titanic silhouette shrugged off the damage. Four times larger than its escorts, twice the size of the Veritas Ferrum, it would not be humbled by such petty means. The Iron Hands vessel bombarded it, but that would not be enough, either. The Callidora could be hurt, but it could not be killed by the weaponry available to the Veritas. Not before its own retaliatory fire reduced the strike cruiser to scrap.

Atticus did not expect the mines or lance fire to kill his prey. He did not expect the battle-barge to be crippled. He did not even hope for a serious blow. He planned on a moment of blindness, of distraction. There was one way the forces of the weaker, smaller, battered Veritas Ferrum could kill the Callidora.

Decapitation.

At the moment of the squadron’s translation, the Veritas launched another barrage. This one travelled more slowly. It was still some distance from its target as the death of the Infinite Sublime broke over the Callidora. It approached from the starboard side of the bow, in the lee of the battle-barge as the great ship was rocked by the incinerating wave. On the port side, the bristling spines were sheared away by the blast. Energy surged over the hull. The jewel flashed a greater brilliance, then flickered, menaced by eclipse. Its void shields did not die, but they faltered, creating the opening for Atticus’s strike.

The swarm of projectiles closed with the Callidora. They were boarding torpedoes. Dozens. They crossed the void like metal sharks. They were the dark, blunt, direct violence against the shining, exuberant glory of the Emperor’s Children. They were Atticus’s message to the traitors who had once been the Iron Hands’ closest brothers. They were justice, and they were vengeance, but they were also a lesson. He was about to repay humiliation with humiliation, and do so with interest. The traitors had triumphed on Isstvan V through the agency of surprise and vastly greater numbers. Atticus would show them the fatal truth that was the Iron Hands’ way of war. It had none of the ostentation practiced by the Emperor’s Children. It was not a display, but it was no less precise, no less finely crafted an art.

The Callidora’s long-distance ordnance roared in answer to the Veritas Ferrum. The strike cruiser began to take damage, but it was already in retreat. It maintained its attack, drawing the rage of the Callidora. The battle-barge pursued, bringing it closer to the rain of boarding torpedoes.

Bringing it within range of another move in Atticus’s lesson.

The orbits of the scattered disc objects were a study in lethal chance and unpredictable intersections. Travel from the Mandeville point was dangerous for any ship until reaching the frontier cleared of debris by the immense gravity of Polynices. There were too many bodies, too many trajectories that might change through random collisions. There was always the risk of catastrophe.

Sometimes, risk could be turned into a certainty.

Wandering though the battlefield was a chunk of ice the size of a mountain. Of irregular shape, and several thousand metres wide, it was large enough to be a threat to ships, but it was also highly visible, even in this dark quarter, shining a dull blue-white in the cold light of the sun. Its journey was also angling it away from the void war. The Callidora passed it on the starboard side in pursuit of the Veritas Ferrum.

Aboard one of the leading torpedoes, Atticus looked through the forward viewing block. He saw the blinding amethyst of the Callidora put the dim pearl of the debris to shame. He thought, Now.

As if obeying the order, the fusion charges planted on the ice chunk went off. Searing light flashed. The explosion broke the body in half. One piece went spinning off into the black. The other was propelled towards the Callidora. The frozen fist was a third of the ship’s size. The battle-barge’s engines flared with the urgency of its manoeuvre. The bow lifted as the vessel tried to climb out of the threat’s path. The starboard weapons were brought to bear, stabbing at the oncoming mountain with lance and cannon and torpedo. The ferocity of the bombardment punched craters into the ice and boiled the surface. Debris and vapour streamed off it in a tail. A ship would have been destroyed, its crew incinerated. But there was no crew, and this was a solid mass. Its course was unalterable. The Callidora did nothing except turn it into a comet.

The comet struck the bow. The hit was not direct, and the ship was strong. Even so, the ice crumpled the forward plating like parchment. It crushed the prow, obliterating the golden-winged emblem. Weapons systems vomited arced plasma auroras as they died. The explosions engulfed a thousand metres of the ship’s length. A hundred spires disintegrated. For a few moments, the battle-barge resembled a torch, driving into its own flame. The Callidora went into a forced spin. The surge from the engines only pushed it further out of control. The lights flickered. For the length of a full revolution, the glittering arrogance of the Emperor’s Children went dark.

The boarding torpedoes were on final approach. Atticus watched the Callidora’s slow tumble. The ship was so huge, its helplessness seemed impossible. It was like seeing a continent knocked adrift. He drank in the view of his enemy turned briefly into dead metal framed by the glow of its pain. One full turn, bereft of all power and control. Then the power returned. The void was lit once more by the Callidora’s pride. The ship arrested its spin. It came around to its pursuit heading. It was wounded. It was still trembling with secondary explosions. It was also angry, and it was seeking the target of its fury.

The torpedoes passed over the shattered, smouldering bow. They flew over the length of the battle-barge. Below them was a jewelled city of towers, an artist’s tools of destruction. Ahead was the command island, a massive, crowned structure built up over the stern. And now, only now, the veil was lifted from the eyes of the Emperor’s Children, and they realised the true threat. Turrets changed orientation. Cannons trained their fire on the boarding torpedoes. Some were hit. Atticus saw fireballs he knew to be the pyres of legionaries. But he did not see many. The attack ripped through a paltry defensive net.

In the last seconds before impact, Atticus spoke over the vox to all the torpedoes. ‘The Emperor’s Children worship perfection. Let them behold our gift to them, brothers. We are bringing these traitors the perfection of war.’

Six

Philosophy in the abattoir
Decapitation
Creon

The boarding torpedoes hit the command island and bored their way into it. They were multiple stab wounds, gladius jabs into the throat of the Callidora. Atticus’s decapitation strategy called for the torpedoes to strike the upper quadrant of the structure in what amounted to a cluster. They would overwhelm the defences by hitting the Emperor’s Children with too many attack vectors. And they would be close enough to each other that the squads could link up quickly. Atticus was not interested in the seizing of the enginarium or the hangars. He wanted the bridge. The goals of the mission were simplicity itself, which was its own form of perfection: kill everyone, destroy everything.

Galba’s torpedo chewed its way through the Callidora’s plate one level below most of the others. Its hatch hissed open and, past the drill head heated almost to incandescence by the violence it had inflicted, the Iron Hands poured out. With them were Khi’dem and Ptero. Atticus had bent this far to allow the Salamanders and Raven Guard a measure of restored honour. But no further: only one representative of each Legion had been granted passage to the field of vengeance.

The space that Galba led the way through was a gallery. It was lit with the same amethyst glow as the exterior of the ship. Now that he was surrounded by the light, it seemed to him that the hue was less that of a precious stone, and more that of a bruise. The marble of the decking was carpeted, and the material felt strange beneath Galba’s feet. There was something wrong with the texture.

The gallery ran to port. It was twenty metres wide and over a thousand long. It was designed to hold visitors by the hundreds, that the wonders on display should be seen by as many eyes as possible. Two massive bronze doors, four times the height of a Space Marine, stood at the far end. The squad moved towards them, passing beneath banners hanging from the ceiling and tapestries draped on the walls. Focused on the doors, alert for incoming threats, Galba gave the art only the smallest splinter of his attention. He registered its presence, nothing more. The Emperor’s Children’s mania for painting, sculpture, music, theatre and literature did not interest him. In the days of brotherhood with the III Legion – how long ago? Weeks? An eternity? – Galba had spent some time aboard the vessels of Fulgrim’s legionaries. He had always found the opulence suffocating. Everywhere he had looked, there had been some masterpiece calling for his attention. It had been too much, a clamouring of sensations that was a threat to the clarity of thought. It was on those occasions that he had come closest to understanding Atticus’s systematic stripping away of all that made him human. There was a purity to the machinic. It was a bracing tonic against the indulgence of the Emperor’s Children.

In those days, Galba had thought of the difference as little more than an aesthetic parting of the ways. Now he felt an instinctive distaste for the art around him, and he refused it notice.

But the carpet still felt wrong.

‘Brother-sergeant,’ Vektus said. ‘Do you see what the traitors have wrought?’

So he looked. He saw. He had supposed the banners to be commemorations of battlefield triumphs. They were emblems of a kind, but there were no flags, coats of arms or symbols of any kind that he recognised. Runes proliferated, their shapes and angles alien to him, their meaning beyond comprehension, yet squirming just beneath the thin ice of reason and denial. Two configurations kept repeating. One resembled a group of spears crossing to form an eight-pointed star. The other resembled a pendulum crowned by sickle blades. It made Galba grimace in distaste. He could not put aside the sensation that the symbol was smiling at him, and doing so with the most obscene eagerness. It was an abstraction of perversity, and all flesh that fell beneath the curve of its grin was soiled. Galba was seized by the wish to purge all that he still possessed of the organic. Only then would he be rid of the taint that tried to creep deeper into his being.

He ripped his gaze away from the banners. Still moving forwards, he took in the truth of the rest of the art. The Iron Hands were running down a gallery devoted to corruption, delirium, torture and the most exquisite artistry. The tapestries were narratives of butchery rendered as the luxury of the senses. Figures that might once have had a relation to the human sank fingers into the organs of their victims, and into their own. They devoured living skulls. They bathed in blood as though it were love itself. Worse than what the tapestries portrayed was what they were. They were silk and skin interwoven. They were the very crimes they celebrated. They were hundreds of victims turned into the illustrations of their own deaths.

And now Galba understood why the carpet felt wrong. It was a kindred atrocity to the tapestries. Flesh, muscle, sinew and tendons had been turned, by a hand as gifted as it was monstrous, into textile. The pile was deep. What should have felt like tanned leather had been rendered, thanks to the addition of hair, so fine that it had the soft give of cotton, yet it retained the wet-silk smoothness of tissue. Its pattern was abstract, its shades and flows suggesting music that was the origin of all screams. It was the work of many hands, and Galba had no doubt that the owners of those hands had been, one by one, incorporated into their work. Their bodies had become the ultimate signature. These artists would be forever present with their masterpiece.

Surely the dead could not feel pain. So why did it seem, as the Iron Hands thundered along the length of the gallery, that the carpet writhed? It was the material, Galba told himself. It was the terrible genius of the craftsmanship. Any other explanation was impossible, a sign of reason being contaminated by fantasy. He would give the traitors and their ship no such victory.

Instead, he brought annihilation. He and his brothers would end this violence with another: the cleansing, pure violence of the machine. His bionic arm felt like a bulwark against a plague of insanity. His bolter was more than an extension of his body. It was the lodestone of his journey, pulling him towards becoming the most perfect weapon of war.

For his Emperor, for his primarch, his every act on board this ship would be the promise of that perfection. A clean perfection, untouched by the insanity of the flesh around him. A perfection that would destroy the illusion worshipped by the Emperor’s Children.

‘What happened to this Legion?’ Vektus wondered.

‘Nothing compared to what we are about to do to it,’ Galba answered.

‘We cannot ignore this,’ Khi’dem put in. ‘I have never seen such madness. There is more than simple treachery at work.’

‘There is nothing simple about treachery,’ Galba snapped. ‘And there is no greater crime.’

‘What I mean,’ Khi’dem said, ‘is that there are terrible implications in what we are seeing. Your brother is right to ask what happened. Something did. We turn from that question at our peril.’

‘Once we have killed them all, there will be all the time you would like for questions,’ Galba said. His answer rang hollow and insufficient in his ears.

They were now only a few hundred metres from the bronze doors. The relief work was coming into focus. Even from this distance, it was clear that it was composed of bodies that had been covered in molten metal. From the other side of the doors came the sounds of battle: the deep drumming of bolter fire, the bone-sawing shriek and growl of chainblades, and the cries of rage of clashing legionaries. Rising above the white noise of shouts came a louder, hectoring voice, though its words were still indistinct. Then the volume of the roar rose like a cresting wave, and the doors opened with a deafening boom. The Emperor’s Children rushed through the doorway. They were here to repel the transgressors of their domain.

They ran headlong into Galba’s welcome.

The sergeant was at the head of the arrowhead rush. The gallery was wide enough for the entire squad to spread out, giving every battle-brother a clear field of fire. They opened up with their bolters before the doors had finished opening. The Emperor’s Children charged. They were not wearing helmets; whether through arrogance or surprise, Galba neither knew nor cared. The skulls of the front-rank warriors exploded like overripe fruit when hit by the mass-reactive shells. The legionaries who followed on had their own weapons up. They returned fire, breaking the momentum of the Iron Hands’ advance.

‘Evade,’ Galba voxed. ‘But keep closing.’ There was no cover. The only way to avoid a slaughter was to reach with the enemy and smash him in close quarters.

The wedge lost its clean symmetry as the legionaries began to zigzag at random. They ran forwards still, jerking left and right to deny the enemy a clean shot. They fired to suppress. There was no way of targeting with any precision in these conditions. But the spray of rounds was still deadly. Galba saw another enemy choke as his throat disappeared.

The Iron Hands’ fire bought them a few precious seconds and several more metres. They were that much closer to the foe when the return fire began in earnest. But the Emperor’s Children seemed just as eager for the violence of melee. They did not stop to aim. They charged, and their voices were raised in shouts of delight as much as they were in howls of rage.

The two forces closed with each other, and Galba could see the faces of the traitors more clearly. The transformation his former brothers had undergone was at least as disturbing as the art they now celebrated. They had attacked their own flesh. Galba saw runes made of wounds. He saw scalps turned into flaps, pulled away from skulls by metal armatures. Spikes, barbed wire, twisted bits of sculpture and other painful detritus of a depraved imagination disfigured the legionaries. They were laughing at their own pain.

Rushing towards Galba was a grim mockery of his own Legion’s fusion with the inorganic. Where the Iron Hands replaced the weak flesh with the strength of metal, the Emperor’s Children used each to ruin the other. The Iron Hands sought purity. These creatures were lost in a hellish revel. There was no reason here. There was only sensation, more and more and more sensation. To resort to these mutilations, to exult in agony, could only mean a hunger that could never be appeased. The Emperor’s Children now worshipped sensation, and its absolute condition tormented them by remaining just out of reach.

These thoughts flickered through Galba’s mind as he stormed towards the killing. They were not conscious reflections. They were instinctive, recoiling knowledge, an atavistic response that the appearance of the Emperor’s Children summoned from depths that an earlier, benighted time would have called his soul. To the rage of betrayal was added disgust. Honour demanded the slaughter of the traitors. Something less rational needed all trace of them expunged.

For a few more seconds, bolter fire criss-crossed the space between the two forces. Legionaries on either side staggered. Galba saw two more of the Emperor’s Children fall to head-shots. All of his own brothers were still at his side, the fist of vengeance unbroken. Then the warriors of the two Legions met. They were two waves smashing into each other. The gallery resounded with thunder built of armour against armour, blade against blade, fist against bone, and the throat-tearing roars of giants at war.

In the last moment before the collision, Galba mag-locked his bolter to his thigh and took up his chainsword. He swung it over his head with both hands, bringing it down with all the momentum of his charge. The nearest of Fulgrim’s sons tried to counter the attack. Too caught up in the ecstasy of the rush to battle, he had not yet switched to a melee weapon. His bolter was a poor defence against the force of Galba’s blow. The teeth of the chain whined as the sword swatted the barrel aside. The chunk of the blade digging into the skull of the traitor was wet, grinding, satisfying. Galba drew his first blood of the war. The debt had been owed him since the Callinedes betrayal. At last he could strike with his own hands in the name of his fallen primarch.

He saw his enemy’s eyes widen in agony. But they also shone with excitement at the extremity of the experience as Galba sawed the legionary’s head in two. Then the eyes dulled with death, and that was all that truly mattered. Galba yanked his chainsword free of the corpse and parried a strike by the Space Marine who leapt over his fallen comrade’s body, swinging his own revving blade for Galba’s throat. Galba ducked low and barrelled into the traitor, knocking him off balance. Galba followed up with the chainsword against the foe’s cuirass, cutting deep.

Iron Hands and Emperor’s Children tore at each other. Galba was submerged in a maelstrom of clashing ceramite and gouting blood. His consciousness shrank to the scale of mere seconds. He knew nothing except the need of each moment. He moved forwards step by step, kill by kill. His armour was gouged by dozens of blows, but he shrugged them off and struck home again and again. He pulverised faces to slurry. He hacked his way through armour and reinforced ribcages to black, beating hearts, and he silenced them.

A new noise grew in volume, cutting through the thunder, demanding his attention. It was a voice, amplified by vox-caster to deafening levels. The voice was that of a machine. There was nothing human in its rigid, unchanging inflection, yet it was preaching, and its words conveyed a ghastly passion.

‘There are no limits,’ it declared. ‘Live the truth of the senses. Their reach must be infinite. Extend your own grasp, brothers. Plunge it deep into the perverse. All sensation is the fuel of perfection. The more extreme the sensation, the closer we come to perfection. The more debased the act, the greater the sensation. What is the command? That everything is permitted? No! Everything is compulsory!’ The volume spiked on the last word. ‘What the pallid would forbid, we must embrace to the end. Live the words of the prophet Saad! The only good is excess! The only true knowledge lies in sensation!’ The voice launched into a litany of obscenities. It seemed to be reaching for the greatest atrocity that could be committed by words alone. It drew closer, and so did a steady, hammering beat of a great weight slamming against the deck. When he heard the boom, boom, boom closing in, Galba realised what was coming.

A Dreadnought.

Galba had been confused by the voice’s preaching. There was a hunger in the words, an extolling of the flesh in all the worst contortions that he would never have imagined a Dreadnought uttering. The voice went on and on, urging itself to ever deeper abysses of depravity. With his physical self all but annihilated, the Dreadnought had only language and thought as the means by which he could join his brothers’ frenzy, and so he ranted as if he might articulate the ultimate perfection of violation, and so find the supreme, transcendent experience.

The press of Emperor’s Children suddenly diminished. Their ranks parted. Galba knew better than to press forwards. Ahead, the doorway was filled by a colossal shape. The Dreadnought had arrived. He advanced with words to damage the mind. For the flesh, he had many more tools. There was the weight of his tread, the grasp of his claw and the final illumination of his twin lascannons. The Ancient moved down the gallery towards the Iron Hands, never pausing in his black gospel. Gold filigree had spread over the violet of his armour like a disease. Its arabesques threatened meaning. They twisted into shapes whose trailing ends seemed to move with the pulsing of veins.

Even with the new, grotesque ornamentation, Galba recognised the figure. Ancient Curval. He had once been a philosopher of the war, one who spoke of perfection and loss in equal measure. Now his vox-casters greeted the Iron Hands with grating, monotone hunger. He had become a walking altar, an icon of demented worship. ‘I seek the boon of your extremity,’ he said, and fired.

The crush of the melee had pushed the Iron Hands close together again. They all saw the danger as soon as it appeared, and threw themselves to either side. The squad escaped extinction by lascannon barrage, but on the command display of Galba’s helmet lenses, the runes of three brothers flashed red and vanished.

Flanked by his fellow legionaries, Curval marched forwards. He strafed the gallery left to right to left with a steady fire. The foul tapestries and carpet vanished, seared to ash. Galba dropped and rolled, the barrage passing just over him, charring the top of his power pack. Another battle-brother was incinerated.

They did not have the numbers or the weapons to fight Curval head-on. Galba had to remove him from the battlefield. From his belt clip, he grabbed a melta charge and hurled it at the Dreadnought’s feet. ‘Drop him,’ he voxed.

The squad responded before he had finished his order. The warriors of his command had seen what he was doing, and understood. They were all the lethal components of a single engine of war. Four more grenades landed before Curval within a second of Galba’s. The Dreadnought slowed, trying to arrest his next step. He paused with one foot suspended in the air. Shutters dropped before Galba’s eyes as the grenades went off. The flare was a light so bright it made everything vanish for an instant. The heat was so intense, it made the deck vanish forever. Stone and steel turned molten, and a gap two metres wide opened in front of Curval.

The Dreadnought fought gravity and momentum. He lost. His foot came down over nothing. He pitched forwards and vanished, dropping twenty metres to the deck below. He landed with the crash of a meteor. His howl of rage had the same flat tone as his sermon. A handful of the Emperor’s Children fell with him.

‘The flesh is weak!’ Galba roared as he rose to his feet and charged. The battle-cry of the Iron Hands was a riposte to the debased ecstasies of the foe. Galba’s squad raced forwards to either side of the hole. Curval was firing wildly upwards, blasting further chunks out of the deck. As they passed the gap, Ptero dropped another melta charge. In the hissing blast that followed, Curval’s raging cut off with an electronic squeal. His firing became even more erratic, the lashing out of a wounded beast.

The Emperor’s Children tried to regroup. Their lines were broken, and they could not maintain a defensive position with the random destruction slashing upward through the gallery from their tormented Ancient. The Iron Hands had speed with them. It became force. They reforged the wedge on the other side of the gap and rammed their way through the ragged defence of the traitors. Galba tore into the foe. Warriors fell before him. Corrupt as they had become, they were still Legiones Astartes in form and strength. But Galba’s arm struck with the might of justice, of vengeance. The purity of the machine devastated the monstrosity of the flesh.

Battered, reduced, defiant, his squad punched through and emerged from the gallery. Beyond it was a wide space, a radial node for half a dozen other major arterial passages through the battle-barge. At the centre was a wide spiral staircase. There was more marble here, veined with the purple of the Emperor’s Children. It made Galba think of rotten, aristocratic blood showing through pale skin. Legionaries battled up and down its upper half. The Callidora’s defenders were attempting to reach the next level to repel the invaders gathered there.

Galba led his warriors up, taking the steps three at a time. With their brothers above, they trapped the Emperor’s Children in a vice. The staircase was wide enough for two legionaries to stand abreast. Galba stopped a few steps away from the enemy. He and Vektus crouched out of the line of fire of the warriors behind them. Their bolters hammered the enemy with concentrated hell.

The vice closed.

Most of the boarding torpedoes had drilled into the deck immediately beneath the bridge. Galba’s squad was one of the last to join up with the gathered force. By then, the demolition charges had been set. As the siege of the bridge began, the explosives went off. Corridors and stairwells collapsed, sealing off the top decks, buying time for the Iron Hands. For the moment, they had the numerical superiority. Throughout the ship, there were many hundreds more of the Emperor’s Children. But if the reinforcements’ access could be blocked, even temporarily, the numbers would become irrelevant.

After the blasts, the boarding torpedo that had carried Galba and his brothers was inaccessible. So were three others. Those numbers, too, the Iron Hands knew, were irrelevant. The grinding truth of war was its power to cull. Many legionaries had already been lost. There would be more than enough room in the torpedoes that were still reachable.

While two squads remained to guard the exit point, the door to the bridge was breached. Galba joined in the push to the interior. There was no time for anything except a great storm of an assault. As the Emperor’s Children had rushed the gallery, so the Iron Hands took the bridge. Theirs was the greater fury, and they attacked with the largest part of their forces.

The vital heart of the Callidora was well defended. The Emperor’s Children fought hard. They fought with skill. They fought with desperation, knowing what defeat here would mean. And their struggle was futile. Atticus had come to kill their ship. They could not stop him. Nothing could. He was an engine of fate.

As Galba fought, emptying his bolter clip into the traitors before him, he saw Atticus take the upper level of the bridge. The captain moved with lethal economy. He swung his chainaxe with a grace that should have been foreign to the weapon. In Atticus’s hands, the blade was not the messy butcher’s tool of the World Eaters. The master of the Veritas Ferrum carved the air as if he were conducting an orchestra. Swing and blow flowed into one another. Chain snarling, the weapon never paused. Even when it was cutting through armour and bone, it did not seem to stutter in its graceful arc from kill to kill. It was an extension of the machine-warrior who wielded it, as much a part of his arm as his hands. And though there was the perfection of art in its death-dealing, there was not a single superfluous movement. There was no display. There was the murderous regularity of a piston. Atticus destroyed in the name of his primarch. He fought as iron, and flesh was in eclipse.

The captain of the Callidora met Atticus at the pulpit. Galba’s peripheral vision caught flashes of the duel. The captain was named Kleos. The noble warrior of refined tastes now had, draped over his armour, robes of human silk. His face was an intricate cross-hatching of burns and deep cuts held open so they would not heal. He attacked Atticus with a charnabal sabre. The weapon was art transmuted into pure, press-folded steel. In Kleos’s hands, it could almost draw blood from the air. The captain struck with such speed, the blade was invisible.

Atticus did not block it. It sliced through the seam of his armour beneath his left arm. Kleos paused for a moment before the lack of blood. His blow had been for a being of flesh, but this foe was metal and war. Atticus turned into the cut, forcing the blade deeper, trapping the sabre against his ribcage. Kleos tried to tug the sword free. Atticus brought the chainaxe down on his skull.

The slaughter on the bridge lasted less than five minutes. The Iron Hands fell upon the Emperor’s Children like a moving wall and crushed them. When the last of the traitors fell, there was a moment of silence. Galba let himself savour the humiliation of the enemy. Then the next phase of the execution began. Atticus mounted to the command pulpit. With a snarl, he smashed its ornamentation. ‘Get me the coordinates,’ he ordered.

While Techmarine Camnus took the helm, Galba consulted the vox. ‘A message has been sent,’ he reported.

‘A cry for help, no doubt,’ said Atticus. ‘Has there been a response?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then we will not tarry. Brother Camnus?’

‘It will be visible in a moment, captain.’

Galba looked out through the forward oculus. The debris of the scattered disc floated past, the larger chunks of ice a faint grey in the void, the closer pieces picking up the violet glow of the Callidora.

‘There,’ Camnus said.

In the centre of the oculus, there was a sphere of concentrated darkness.

‘Good.’ The single syllable was the toll of a bell.

Camnus needed no further orders. Galba watched the ball of night begin to grow closer. He was seeing one of the few rocky planetoids of the scattered disc. It was large enough to have a name: Creon. Barely a thousand kilometres in diameter, it was an airless world of eternal night. It was a tomb. And it awaited its charge.

The deck vibrated as the Callidora’s engines surged.

‘Full ahead,’ Camnus announced. ‘Coordinates locked.’

‘Good.’ Atticus said again. ‘Now, brothers, put an end to this obscene vessel.’

They turned their weapons on the consoles, screens, cogitators and controls of the ship. In seconds, the bridge was in ruins. The Callidora’s fate was unalterable.

‘Do you feel that, brothers?’ Atticus asked as he descended from the shattered pulpit. ‘There is a stillness beneath the vibration of the engines. It is death. This ship is already dead, and our enemy knows it.’

There was nothing the Emperor’s Children could do to prevent what was coming. But they tried. Atticus led his legionaries back to the boarding torpedoes, and as they passed the interdicted tunnels, they could hear the frantic sounds of the traitors trying to break through. The first of the torpedoes drew into sight, its drill projecting through the hull and deep into the accessway, when the warriors of the Callidora resorted to desperate measures.

The breacher charge was powerful. It vaporised the metal blocking one of the primary arteries leading to the bridge. It was directly behind the Iron Hands. It was as if a solar flare filled the accessway. A heat beyond flame incinerated the rearguard. They fell to the twisted deck, their armour changed into blackened, molten sarcophagi. Galba was near the front of the line, and he was still thrown against the inner wall by the force of the blast. His auto-senses lenses lit up with warning runes. He kept moving, but he could feel his armour’s actuators catch and hesitate, breaking the cadence of his run. He heard Vektus cursing. They were having to abandon still more bodies of their brothers, their progenoid glands unrecovered.

The roar of the explosion faded. Now came the sound of boots. An army was in pursuit.

The instinct to stop and fight was strong. Then Atticus spoke over the vox. ‘There is no need to confront the enemy,’ he said. ‘The traitors have already lost. They are already dead. Humiliate them by leaving here alive.’

The Iron Hands obeyed, and they ran. They were racing with their own victory, Galba now realised. The doomed masses of the Emperor’s Children were in futile pursuit, still unaware of the executioner’s blade descending upon them.

The warriors of the X Legion boarded the torpedoes. Engines pulled the vehicles out of the flesh of the Callidora. They left gaping holes behind. Atmosphere rushed into the void, the gale carrying traitors with it until bulkheads sealed. The hull breaches were neutralised. The lives of those aboard were preserved for another minute.

But not much more.

Atticus watched the battle-barge as the boarding torpedoes moved away. The departure was slow. The torpedoes’ propulsion systems were not designed for speed. They served to manoeuvre the vessels to a recovery point, and little more. The torpedoes could not perform evasive action, and they were vulnerable to the Callidora’s armaments. Their presence was no secret now. The Callidora had hundreds of cannons, turrets and missile launchers. Most of its crew was still alive. The damage to the ship was minimal. The Emperor’s Children could have vaporised the torpedoes, erasing the blemish from the perfection of the void.

But for the first moments of the retreat from the Callidora, the Iron Hands still had the benefit of surprise. They had sown disorder on the ship. The enemy was scrambling to catch up. And when the surprise was no longer a factor, the Iron Hands were no longer of interest to the Emperor’s Children.

Creon was.

The Callidora approached the planetoid, bringing light to its darkness. Its course was direct, and it would not be changed. Every weapon on the battle-barge fired at Creon. Bombardment cannons pummelled the crust with magma bombs. That was an act of defiance, a defacing of an uncaring enemy whose trajectory would not be changed even by so devastating a weapon. Every turret, torpedo bay and lance was also unleashed. These were acts of desperation. They could add nothing to the blows of the cannons.

Then the Emperor’s Children launched cyclonic torpedoes, and this was an act of madness. What were they dreaming? Atticus wondered. Did they imagine the planetoid vaporising before them, with the Callidora sailing safely through a cloud of debris? Had the traitors really fallen that far into utter dementia?

What they thought did not matter, he decided. In this moment, the only action that mattered was his own. Everything now happening was a consequence of his will, and there was nothing that could alter its edict. The Callidora poured destruction upon Creon, and all it was doing was stoking the fires of its destined hell.

The Callidora’s bow was trained on the centre of the planetoid. Creon’s surface turned molten under the fury of the bombardment. The epicentre of destruction glowed white, a terrible eye opening in the rock.

The incandescence spread wider. It became a maelstrom of flowing stone hundreds of kilometres in diameter. The planetoid convulsed. The dead world of cold and darkness screamed, illuminated by pain. After billions of years of quiescence, Creon underwent a tectonic awakening. Fountains of lava shot up to celebrate the arrival of the Callidora. The ship did not slow, and its course did not falter. It flew on the strength of Atticus’s will into the heart of the fire. Its bow plunged into brilliance.

The Callidora was still accelerating when it hit Creon. It vanished from Atticus’s sight, an arrogant violet tear swallowed by the inferno. Moments later, the cores of the plasma drives were breached. The flash filled the void with day. The shock wave raced around Creon, and it killed the planetoid. It split in two. The halves tumbled away from each other and the rage of destruction, falling back into frozen night.

‘Perfection,’ Atticus muttered.

Seven

The spirit of the age
The abandoned hall
Journey’s solitude

‘We have plenty of mines left,’ Darras said.

‘And they have plenty of ships,’ Galba countered.

Atticus stood above them in the command pulpit of the Veritas Ferrum. The clean, impersonal lines of the bridge were soothing after the ornate perversities of the Callidora. Erephren, called away once again from the rest of the astropathic choir, was just behind him.

‘Mistress?’ Atticus asked.

Erephren shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, captain. The clarity of my sight is a product of my proximity to the anomaly. I can tell you the size of the fleet that I saw before our journey here. As to how many of those ships are on their way here...’ She raised her left hand, palm up, knowledge flying away from her grasp. ‘I cannot say.’

‘But something is coming.’

‘Disturbances in the warp suggest as much.’

‘How much time do we have?’

‘That too, I cannot say.’

‘Brother-captain,’ Galba and Darras began together.

Atticus held up a hand. ‘You are both correct,’ he told his sergeants. The icy metal face looked at Darras. ‘Do not think I am unmindful of our strategic advantages here. I know that this victory has only sharpened our thirst for revenge. But we have our limits. Though we do not like to admit this truth, if it were not so, we would have triumphed on Isstvan Five. We will quit the field.’ He leaned forwards. ‘I make you a promise, brother-sergeant,’ he said. His voice box struggled to convey his tone. His voice rasped over the bridge. It sounded to Galba like the angry hiss of a great, electronic serpent. Its promise of doom filled him with joy. ‘We will learn more on Pythos. We will strike again. And again. We will awaken the Emperor’s Children to the idea of fear. We will teach them to have nightmares.’ He swivelled his head to look at Galba. ‘You are correct, sergeant. We must choose our battles. And I choose to leave the foe one more gift before we depart. One more lesson.’

The Veritas Ferrum did not have unlimited supplies. Her stores had not been replenished since before the Callinedes pacification. The Iron Hands might find raw materials on Pythos, but eventually the ship’s manufacturing plants would no longer be able to churn out ordnance. Unless the tide of fortune changed, the time would come when the Veritas would no longer be able to wage war.

That time had not yet come. And mines were plentiful.

The Veritas Ferrum crossed and recrossed the close neighbourhood of the Mandeville point. It left a trail of mines behind it. Its route was a gradual weaving as helmsman Eutropius guided the ship past the scattered disc debris. Not all of the dead bodies were ice and rock now. There were small traces of the Infinite Sublime, larger ones of the Golden Mean. They were the tears of defeat, Galba thought.

The strike cruiser passed a number of larger bodies. Some were big enough to damage a vessel. Others could smash a capital ship to dust. Galba glanced back and forth between the oculus and the captain. Atticus watched the major debris go by. The only sign of his hunger was a slight shifting of his grip on the pulpit.

Darras picked up on it, too. ‘Captain,’ he began.

‘I know, brother-sergeant. I know. I’ll thank you not to tempt me. There is no time.’

The trap with the mined ice chunk had worked before because the Veritas Ferrum had been there to control the moment of detonation and use the body as a missile. Its continued presence now was tactical madness. The Iron Hands would have to rely on chance to inflict harm on the arriving fleet. They could help chance along with the mines, but they had no alchemy that could transmute the chance into a certainty. The randomness was an offence to the Legion’s philosophy of war. The promise of the machine was the promise of the reproducible, the understandable, the unbending. It was the promise of control.

But they were a different Legion now. Their control of the battlefield was doomed to be a transitory thing. Strike and fade, strike and fade. Was that, Galba wondered, to be the new piston movement of the Iron Fists’ war machine?

If it kept them in the fight, and it hurt the enemy, then he could accept it, he decided. The limits of the strategy were the evidence of his Legion’s great wound. But he could adapt. He glanced again at Atticus. The captain had returned to his preternatural stillness. The iron statue was impossible to read. How was he adapting to this reality? Was he? Again he wondered whether Atticus had shed too much of the human.

That he should think along these lines rattled Galba. The flesh is weak: that was a foundational tenet of the Iron Hands. Once more, he thought of how little Ferrus Manus had changed. Perhaps it was Galba’s own limited journey to the purity of the machine that lay at the root of these doubts. Perhaps doubt was inherent to the flesh itself.

But perhaps so was adaptability.

He wanted to hurt the Emperor’s Children as much as any legionary aboard the ship. He looked forward to the next time their craven blood slicked his armour. He also believed that foolish risks would bring an end to vengeance. Perhaps the mine-laying was a managed risk. He just was not sure how much the hope of accomplishing something was real, and how much the action was a flare of anger. How many ships could they kill this way? How many future actions of real worth were they risking by tarrying here?

‘You disapprove, Sergeant Galba,’ Atticus said.

Galba turned and looked up. ‘It is not my place to question your orders, captain.’

‘And yet you do. I can see it in the way you are standing. Your displeasure is obvious.’

‘I apologise, my lord. I mean no disrespect.’

‘I am acting on a balance of probabilities,’ Atticus told him.

‘You do not need to justify–’

Atticus raised a finger, silencing him. ‘We are more likely to cause injury than we are to be injured. Is that not so?’

Galba nodded. He was not sure that it was, but he could not prove the contrary.

‘This is an act of reason, sergeant. Everything we do in this new war will have an element of desperate risk that is unpleasantly novel to us. We have always been strong. We still are. What we are no longer is an overwhelming force. We are assassins. We are saboteurs. We must think like them.’

Then we should have melted away. Galba said nothing. He tried to shift his stance to something more neutral, but he did not know what that would be. Atticus watched him a few seconds longer. There was a cold glint in his unblinking human eye.

Unwelcome revelation crept up on Galba: that glint was the light of Atticus’s rage. The fury had been kindled over Callinedes IV. It had been stoked to a holocaust in the Isstvan System. Perhaps Atticus believed he had damped it to a controlled, imperious anger. But his eye betrayed him as Galba’s body language had. Atticus had not mastered his rage. It had mastered him. It did more than distort his thoughts: it shaped his reason. It determined his existence.

Atticus had, over time, removed all but the most vestigial traces of humanity from his being. He was a weapon, only a weapon, and a weapon directed by the master passion of rage.

It occurred to Galba that Atticus might agree with this judgement. He might even take a certain pride in it, should the rage grant the pride room enough to exist. He would consider himself a gun, aimed at the heart of the enemy.

But bombs were weapons too.

Galba felt sick. He wanted to look away. He wanted to deny his insight. He wanted to scrape the human from his own identity, the human that was responding to its near-total lack in the massive warrior looming above. What good was this epiphany? None. Yet it filled his consciousness. He had no choice but to accept it, just as he had to accept how pointless it was. There was nothing to be done.

He had his own share of Atticus’s rage.

The captain straightened, returning his attention to the oculus. Galba faced forwards again. He looked at his battle-brothers. He saw the rage in all of them. It was a freezing passion. It took hope, compassion, the dream of a just galaxy, and even the desire for such a thing. It made them brittle, fragile. It turned them into the thinnest of ice, then shattered them. Galba’s gaze settled on Darras. There was more of the human in his face. It revealed more of what the immobile impassivity of Atticus’s features concealed. It showed the rage-fashioned hunger.

The destruction of the Callidora had done nothing to appease that hunger. It had given the Iron Hands their first taste of revenge. It was a sensation as new to the Legion as defeat. Born of that defeat, the hunger was as ineradicable as the anger, the shame, the hatred. It was more than a symptom. It was more than a developing character trait. Galba knew what it was, and he wished he did not. He wished to be wrong. He wished that he was still capable of wanting something more than the brutal deaths of the betrayers of the Imperium.

He could not. He was not wrong.

This thing that permeated the air of the bridge, and threaded through his hearts and bones, and thrummed in the decks and walls of the ship, this rage, it was the new spirit of the Legion. This, Galba thought, is who we are now. He was human enough to feel regret. He was distant enough from the human condition to know the feeling would pass.

When two hundred mines had been sown in the night of Hamartia, Atticus declared the mission complete. ‘Take us down the safe channel,’ he told Eutropius. ‘Get us up to speed for the translation.’

‘So ordered,’ said the helmsman.

The Veritas Ferrum accelerated. The warp engines powered up. When the urgent signal came from the astropathic choir, Galba was not surprised. Neither, he suspected, was Atticus.

No one was.

‘Captain,’ Erephren’s voice emerged from the primary vox-caster in the centre of the bridge. ‘There is a massive displacement in the warp. It is very near.’

‘Thank you,’ Atticus said. ‘Navigator, we are in your hands. As interesting an experiment as a mid-translation collision would be, I would prefer not to subject my ship to it.’

‘Understood, captain,’ Strassny broadcast. He was floating in his tank of nutrients, deprived of all sensory input, in a blister at the peak of the strike cruiser’s command island. The black plasteel dome that covered him was shaped like an echo of his psychic eye. So long attuned to the Astronomican, that eye would be seeking the anchor of the Pythos anomaly. Right now, its quest was an entry into the nexus of the Mandeville point that was not about to disgorge an enemy fleet.

Eutropius responded to the coordinates relayed by Strassny. The Veritas Ferrum picked up speed, leaving the minefield at its stern.

‘Wait for my word,’ Atticus said. The hololithic screens on either side of the command pulpit displayed the void on the ship’s flanks. ‘Sergeant Darras, I want to know the moment you receive sign of the enemy’s presence.’

‘Understood, captain.’ Darras did not look up from the repaired auspex bank.

I think we’ll all know, Galba mused.

He was right. The flesh of the void tore open not far to port of the bow. Nightmare unlight flashed from the rent. Colours that were sounds and ideas that were blood poured out. Behind them came the ships. The translation was endless. Vessel after vessel entered the system. The violet of the Emperor’s Children spread in all directions, a miasma of excess, as though the ships were forming their own diseased sun.

‘Go,’ said Atticus.

The deck vibrated with the familiar rumble of the warp drive energies building to the critical point. The jump tocsins sounded. The forward elements of the fleet began to turn in the direction of the Iron Hands, but they would travel many lengths yet before they could complete the turn and engage in pursuit. By then, they would be in the minefield.

‘I regret that we cannot linger to see the fruits of our labour,’ Atticus said. Then a second wound opened, reality’s agony filling the span of the oculus, and the Veritas Ferrum plunged into the empyrean.

‘The question,’ Inachus Ptero said, ‘is not whether the Emperor’s Children have followed us. Of course they have. The question is whether they will be able to keep tracking us.’

Khi’dem grunted. They were walking the length of a reviewing hall. It had been built to hold thousands: the full complement of the company along with any visiting squads from other Legions. It had not been used since Callinedes. Khi’dem doubted it ever would be again. The Veritas Ferrum had lost too much of its complement – first all of its veterans and senior officers to Ferrus Manus as he raced off with the elite of every company to the confrontation with Horus, then to catastrophic damage and the venting of entire sections of the ship during the battle in the Isstvan System. Any gathering in this space would be dwarfed by the vastness and rendered solemn by the echoes of absence. According to the ship’s horologs, it had only been a few weeks since the disaster of Isstvan V, but the hall already had the staleness of disuse. The steel chandeliers descending from the vaulted ceiling were extinguished. The only light was from parallel lumen-strips forming a wide alley down the length of the marble floor. The banners of triumphs hung in shadows. Soon after their arrival on the Veritas, the two legionaries had found that they and the rest of the handful of their surviving battle-brothers could walk and converse here at their leisure. Khi’dem had not seen a single one of the Iron Hands set foot in the hall.

‘Sergeant Galba tells me that the Navigator has plotted a convoluted route through the immaterium,’ Khi’dem told the Raven Guard. His voice bounced around the walls, the sound hollow. ‘Unless the enemy is also using the anomaly as a guide, which seems unlikely, we should lose them.’

Ptero thought about this for a moment, then said, ‘The tactic seems sound.’

‘Agreed. But that is not the only question, is it?’

‘No. We remained in-system too long, and without good reason.’

‘We did not,’ Khi’dem corrected. ‘They chose to do so. You and I are barely tolerated passengers.’

Ptero uttered a short, bitter laugh. ‘Do you think our participation on this raid was intended as a favour or an insult?’

‘Both, I suspect. It would depend on the moment you asked Captain Atticus.’

‘You don’t believe he knows his own mind.’

Khi’dem deliberated for a dozen strides before answering. ‘I’m not sure what I believe on that count,’ he said.

‘Nor do I,’ Ptero said softly. He continued, ‘Regardless of the success in evading pursuit, I am troubled by the decision to lay the mines. That tactic was unsound. Atticus is right about the strategic advantage of Pythos. He risked losing something of paramount importance in order to engage in the trivial.’

‘His need for revenge is strong. It is for all of the Iron Hands.’

‘Ours isn’t?’ Ptero demanded. Even in the dim light, Khi’dem could see his face turning red. ‘Have we not lost as much as they have?’

Khi’dem remained calm. ‘I did not mean that,’ he said.

They reached one end of the hall and turned around. They moved down the centre of the floor, the walls so distant that they seemed insubstantial.

Ptero mastered his temper. ‘Forgive me, brother,’ he said. ‘You are not the source of my frustration.’

Khi’dem waved off the apology. ‘Your anger reassures me,’ he said. ‘It tells me that your worries are mine.’

‘And they are?’

‘That the Iron Hands have changed at a fundamental level. The death of their primarch has done something dangerous to them.’ He allowed himself a sorrowful smile. ‘Perhaps we flatter ourselves that we would not have made the same reckless decision. I don’t think we would have.’

‘Their anger is becoming toxic.’

‘Yes. To them.’

‘And to us?’ Ptero asked.

‘Our fates are slaved to theirs,’ Khi’dem said.

‘They are,’ Ptero agreed. They walked in silence for a short while. In the centre of the hall, where they were most isolated by gloom and space, the Raven Guard spoke again. ‘So the true question is what we should do.’

‘I would welcome your thoughts.’

Ptero laughed again, with no more humour than the last time. ‘And I yours. Our options are quite limited, it seems to me. The decisions that will govern this campaign are not ours to make, but we are subject to them. And we can hardly depose Captain Atticus.’

Khi’dem gave Ptero a cold stare. ‘I know you are joking, brother. But I will not have even the idea of treachery discussed in my presence.’

Ptero sighed. He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. For a moment, Khi’dem saw his own exhaustion reflected in the Raven Guard. ‘I’m sorry,’ Ptero said. ‘I spoke without thinking. I was wrong.’ He looked up. ‘We are living in strange times, though, brother. We have witnessed the impossible. We have been its victims, in no small part because what happened on Isstvan Five was, until that very moment, unimaginable.’ He lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘We cannot afford to view anything as impossible. We must imagine everything, including the worst. Especially the worst.’

Khi’dem raised his eyes to the ceiling. The gloom was almost physical. It clung to the banners, obscuring the victories, casting them into a meaningless past. They seemed to hang limply, made heavy by the weight of tragedy. He found himself thinking of the monstrous gallery on the Callidora. It had been the perversion of the Emperor’s Children made physical. This space, he realised, was just as metonymic of the damage to the Iron Hands’ psyche. Something dire had happened to the X Legion, something that went far beyond a military defeat, beyond grief, beyond loss. He knew those emotions. He lived with them. They had been the painful bedrock of his existence since the massacre. Not knowing the fate of Vulkan had him trapped in an eternal pendulum swing between hope and mourning.

What was happening to the Iron Hands was wholly other. It was a change. It was also, he worried, permanent.

He faced Ptero again. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘Where does that leave us?’

‘We watch. Closely.’

‘Do you think Atticus’s strategy is madness?’

‘Do you?’

Khi’dem shook his head. ‘It is risky, certainly. I do not agree with all of his decisions.’ He shrugged. ‘But it is not mad.’

‘Not yet.’

‘Not yet. So it falls to us to try to be the voice of sanity?’

‘I fear so.’

Now Khi’dem laughed. It was either that or despair. ‘And who will hear our voices?’

‘Sergeant Galba for one, I think.’

‘He may well be the only one.’

‘Better than none.’

Khi’dem sighed. He had not trained for this kind of war. He knew senior officers who had an instinct for the political. He had never possessed it. War was war, though. Whatever mission lay before him, he would not shy from it. ‘Atticus might not listen, but he will hear me,’ he said. ‘I will see to it that he has no choice.’

Ptero nodded. ‘We are agreed, then.’

They started walking again, heading for the great archway of the hall’s entrance. Still fifty metres from the doors, Khi’dem came to a sudden halt. He felt breathless, a sensation he had not experienced since his elevation to the Legiones Astartes.

‘Brother?’ Ptero asked. ‘What is it?’

The feeling passed. His skin prickled in its wake. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing.’ It could not be anything. The Imperial Truth forbade any other possibility.

There was no such thing as a premonition.

The Veritas Ferrum followed a route that twisted through the empyrean. The ship raced down currents of dementia, shifting from one tributary to another, never staying with one flow for long. There was no reason to its movements. In the realm where directions had no meaning, the strike cruiser fled as if panicked and lost.

It was neither. The beacon on Pythos called it back. The anomaly was insistent. It would not tolerate an escape. For Bhalif Strassny, it was as clear a marker as the Astronomican had ever been. But rather than a lighthouse beam, it was present to his psychic eye like a scratch on a retina. He saw through the warp to the anomaly, much as he would the Emperor’s beam. But this was no illumination. It was a stable, jagged slash in the warp. As the endless death of the real and cauldron roil of thought washed over his consciousness, the Navigator experienced one concept after another clinging briefly to the manifestation of the anomaly before being swept away. At one moment he was seeing a trace, and then a crack, and then a fracture. Once, and only once – and for this he was grateful – he saw it as a door. Its meaning was in perpetual flux, for meaning was forbidden by the warp. Its presence, though, was steady, and grew ever stronger.

Rhydia Erephren also knew its growing strength. She experienced it as the returning clarity of her dark sight. She and her choir braced themselves as best they could as the warp unfolded its nature before them. It seemed to her that her vision was growing sharper, and reaching father, than on the ship’s first approach to the Pandorax System. Something like the whisper of serpent tongues caressed her mind. It insinuated the possibility of perfect clarity. It threatened absolute vision. She shuddered. She accepted the knowledge as she sank deeper and deeper into the razored river. She worked on her defences so that she would not drown, so she would not bleed. The duty of mission granted her breath. She spoke to her charges, reassuring as she could, imposing discipline as necessary. In this way she held together a group of fragile, tormented humans. Not all of them were able to grasp the strength she offered. One man died of heart seizure. After the gasps of agony, his final sigh sounded like thanks. Just before the Veritas reached Pandorax, a second man started screaming. He could not stop.

It was necessary to have him shot.

In the serf quarters, Agnes Tanaura sensed this journey through the warp was different. Everyone did. Tanaura had been glad that her duties to the captain meant that she had left Pythos behind. She would have preferred never to return. There was a word for that planet, a word that officially had no place in the Imperium, because it was meaningless. The word was unholy. She was not afraid of using the word. She knew that it had a great deal of meaning. Accepting the divinity of the Emperor meant acknowledging the existence of dark forces. The reality of a god implied the reality of His enemies. If the sacred existed, then there had to be words to describe that which was utterly removed from the light of the Emperor. Unholy was a good word. A strong word. It was not just an epithet. It was a warning.

She had heard the warning on Pythos. She wished the demigods she served had heard it, too.

She had always found the journeys through the warp troubling. No matter how deep in the ship she was, no matter how thoroughly shielded from the madness of the immaterium, she felt its tendrils. Even when there were no storms, there was a latent charge to the ship’s atmosphere.

This time was different. The tendrils reached deeper. They were stronger. She believed something had followed them from Pythos. That, or they had picked up a taint on that world. She knew something was wrong. The voices of the serfs in the great hall were subdued. People spoke quietly, as though they were listening for something. Or they were afraid something would hear them.

Tanaura wanted to hide. She wanted to find a small, safe corner in which to curl up and clutch her faith close. She also knew that her duty lay elsewhere. So she walked into the centre of the hall. She held the Lectitio Divinitatus in her right hand. She spread her arms, lifted her head, and smiled. ‘I have words of hope,’ she said. ‘I have words of courage.’

People gathered to hear.

Floating and twisting in his tank, Strassny called out his guidance. Helmsman Eutropius received the directions, and steered the ship as the Navigator desired. Eutropius could not read the warp. He was suspicious of any being who could. It was a domain that made a mockery of the Emperor’s reason. Linked by mechadendrites to the magnificent machinic existence that was the Veritas Ferrum, he resented the absurdity of the warp, even as he relished the triumph over irrationality represented by the Geller field. Even though the ways of the empyrean were a resented mystery, he could tell that Strassny was taking them down a route bereft of any logical pattern. It was the most labyrinthine journey he had ever taken through the warp. He understood its tactical necessity. He mistrusted the fact that Strassny maintained that they were not lost. He knew the Navigator was not lying. It was the truth itself that he did not like. It had implications that were best ignored. If only they could be.

And in the command pulpit, Atticus stood motionless. He appeared impassive. He was not. He was impatient to reach Pythos. He wanted the knowledge Erephren would find for him, so he could strike again. Frustration gnawed at him, too. He burned to know what damage his minefield had caused the Emperor’s Children. He needed it to have been considerable. He needed confirmation of the validity of his strategy.

He could, at will, sense the condition of any component of his bionic frame. In this moment, through no choice of his own, he was conscious of his human eye and its island of flesh. He could have replaced the eye years ago, and completed his journey to the machine. He had not. He had not felt worthy. The body, he believed, should not outstrip the mind. He kept his last vestige of the flesh to remind himself of its weakness, a weakness that was more than physical. He felt that weakness now. The flesh sat against his skull, itself now mostly metal, like a chink in his power armour.

No, he thought. Like a cancer. That was what the flesh was. It was a cancer that ate at the pure strength of the machine. It introduced doubt through the toxins of the emotions. He did not resent his rage. That was the necessary passion, the only just reaction to the supreme crime of treachery. It was the servant of war. Yet it could cloud judgement, too. He had seen its corrosive work on the World Eaters. That was a Legion whose betrayal, in retrospect, seemed inevitable. Its anger was a madness.

Was his? Was he harming his company by indulging in his wrath?

He was not. They had struck. They had drawn blood. They had done real harm to the Emperor’s Children. The loss of the Callidora alone would sit heavily. And now the Veritas Ferrum was free to strike again. This was all the proof he needed that he was right to follow the rage. If he had his will, his consciousness would be reduced to fury and calculation. The fury would fuel the drive to war. The calculation would produce the tactics to prosecute it.

The stubborn humanity of the flesh would not respond to his will. It tainted the rage with grief and reflexive mistrust. He resented even the awareness that there were members of other Legions aboard. He felt that the Iron Hands could count on no one but themselves. Those who had not betrayed Ferrus Manus had failed him. Those were simple facts. Universal suspicion was the logical, reasoned response. Or so his instincts would have him believe. Yet under the same rules of logic, he could not find anything to condemn in the comportment of the Salamanders and Raven Guard he had rescued. They had fought well on Pythos. And on the Callidora, so had the two he had allowed on the mission.

Contradictions. No distinguishing true reason from what he wished to believe. No way of purging the irrational from belief. And so another poison entered his system: doubt. His evaluation of the other legionaries was suspect. What else might be?

The look on Galba’s face during the mine laying. The uncertain result. The close escape of the Veritas. The ship prolonging its stay in the immaterium in order to evade pursuit.

Where was his judgement now?

Eutropius interrupted his musing. ‘Captain,’ he said. ‘Navigator Strassny informs me that we are about to translate back to real space.’

‘Thank you, helmsman.’ There was the answer he sought. He had followed his anger to a limit his reason had set. The mines had been laid, and they would plague the fleet of the Emperor’s Children. With that concentration of ships, damage was inevitable. The Veritas had escaped. It had returned to safe port.

He had been correct. His judgement was sound. So he was able to purge some of the wasteful doubts.

This was what he told himself.

The shields pulled back from the oculus as the ship returned to the physical plane. At the same moment, the tactical screens flashed red. Threat klaxons began to sound.

‘Battle stations,’ Atticus ordered, swallowing a curse.

There was a fleet in the Pandorax System. A large one.

Eight

Travellers
The price of innocence
Charity

There were over a hundred ships. Auspex readings were translated into a hololithic projection in the centre of the bridge. The image showed the vessels clustered so closely together, they resembled a swarm. Galba stared. The grouping made no sense. Then speed and tonnage data began to arrive. They puzzled him even more.

‘Captain?’ Eutropius asked.

‘Bring us closer. I want a better look at these intruders.’ Atticus sounded baffled. He had already had the klaxons silenced.

‘So ordered,’ the helmsman said. He sounded surprised.

‘Do you intend to engage?’ Galba asked.

‘Those numbers are beyond us,’ said Darras. Even his enthusiasm could not change the hundred-to-one odds.

‘Perhaps not,’ Atticus answered. ‘Silent running,’ he ordered, ‘and there must be no fire except on my command. Am I clear? That is not a formation. It is a conglomeration. There is no order there. I see nothing tactical. The tonnage of these ships is eccentric. They are also moving slowly.’

The Veritas Ferrum moved in from the edge of the system. It closed effortlessly with the trailing ships. The readings became more detailed. Their nature was as varied as their individual masses. Though there were a few Imperial transports, there were no combat vessels of any kind. Most of the ships were civilian, ranging from small traders to ancient, lumbering colonisers. Very few were of recent construction. All of them were limping, patched creatures. Some of the energy blooms indicated engines very close to explosive failure. It was surprising some of the vessels had survived travelling any distance at all. None of them appeared warp-worthy.

‘How did they make it this far?’ Galba wondered.

‘This far from where?’ said Darras.

‘From anywhere. They aren’t from in-system. We know that much. If these are the ships that survived the journey, how many did they lose along the way? It would have taken them a long time to reach Pandorax from the nearest inhabited system.’

Atticus said, ‘That does not interest me half as much as why they are here.’

Galba monitored the vox traffic between the ships. It provided few answers. The communications were primarily routine navigational messages. They showed a marked lack of discipline and form. The pilots were not military. They were not even professional. They had still not detected the Veritas Ferrum. As the fleet drew closer to Pythos, the transmissions became more excited. ‘Their presence here is no accident,’ Galba concluded.

‘Neither is ours,’ said Atticus.

‘You believe they were drawn here too?’

‘This system has precisely one feature capable of drawing attention beyond its boundaries.’

Galba looked over the details of the patchwork fleet again. He could not imagine this ragged group of civilians finding any use for the anomaly. ‘What would they want with it?’

‘That is not my concern.’ The captain’s tone was flat and dark. ‘My concern is that they want it at all.’

Galba exchanged a look with Darras. The other sergeant seemed uneasy, but kept his silence. I am not the captain’s conscience, Galba wanted to shout. Instead, he asked the question he wished had not occurred to him. ‘We cannot attack them, surely?’

A terrible silence ensued. We can’t, Galba repeated to himself. These travellers were clearly non-combatants. They had committed no crime. They were Imperial subjects. No strategic consideration could justify a massacre. No application of even the coldest arithmetic could wash away the moral taint that would fall upon the clan-company if it committed such a crime. That is not who we are, Galba thought. That is not who we are.

We must not become our enemy.

‘No,’ Atticus said at last. ‘That is not who we are.’

Galba started. He had not spoken his thoughts aloud, had he? No. He released the breath he had been holding. He felt the first moment of peace he had experienced since the beginning of the war. With that one sentence, Atticus had reaffirmed that the honour of the X Legion still extended further than a battlefield victory.

‘We follow,’ Atticus ordered. ‘We observe. For now, that is all.’

When the fleet reached Pythos, the largest ships anchored in geostationary orbit above the anomaly. The smaller ones began their descent to the surface. Lighters began to shuttle back and forth, transporting passengers from the ships incapable of making planetfall. There were accidents. The Veritas’s auspex banks picked up the heat signatures of explosions from those landings that ended in disaster. The individual tragedies did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm coming from the ever-more excited vox traffic. Galba heard the word ‘home’ become a refrain. He doubted that most of the ships making a landing would ever be able to leave again.

‘They have come to stay,’ he said.

Atticus made no reply.

The Thunderhawk gunship Iron Flame left the base and flew low over the jungle. The tree canopy was as opaque from above as it was below. At first, there was little of the ground that Atticus and his sergeants could see from the air. Even so, there was still more open to their gaze than during the initial foray. During the construction of the base, flights of Thunderhawks and Storm Eagles dropped dozens of payloads of incendiary bombs along the route from the promontory to the column. The jungle was put to the torch. The way cleared, Vindicators finished the job. Their cannons blasted into bloody mist any saurians who ventured within range. The huge siege shields scraped the smouldering ground raw and flat. There was now a scar twenty metres wide leading to the anomaly. The stream had been bulldozed underground. The swamp was drying mud. The moss was ash.

Already, the jungle was gnawing at the edges of the route, seeking to reclaim its domain. It would be a matter of weeks, Galba thought, before the bombing would have to recommence. He wondered how long the Iron Hands’ store of incendiary munitions would hold out.

The state of the ground route was not the concern of the legionaries in Iron Flame. They had come to see the fate of Pythos’s new arrivals.

The civilians had landed over an area of several square kilometres, with the column at the rough centre. Black, oily smoke billowed skywards from numerous locations. These were the pyres of dead ships. Some had broken up at high altitudes, killed by failing heat shields and weakened hulls. Others had slammed into the ground like meteors. Still others had missed the land entirely, plunging past the dark cliffs and into the restless ocean. There were also those ships whose deaths could not be explained. Whether through human incompetence, structural inadequacy or both, they exploded as they were touching down. While Iron Flame was being prepped for the mission, Galba had watched the last of the orbital descents. He had listened to the engine roars punctuated by the periodic, stuttering thunder of destruction. He wondered how many lives had ended in those few minutes. Many hundreds, certainly. A loss of that number of mortals was insignificant on the battlefield. For an unopposed landing, it was obscene.

Still, for every crash, there were ten successful landings. At least, that was what Galba had guessed from what he could observe from the base. Now, as the gunship reached the landing region, he took in the volume of smoke and frowned. ‘There are too many fires,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’ Atticus asked.

‘There have not been this many crashes.’ The sky over this region was changing from filthy grey to choking black.

‘I see no intact ships at all,’ said Sergeant Crevther.

‘There.’ Darras pointed. ‘At two o’clock.’

The vessel was a mid-sized colony ship. Its design was ancient, far older than the Imperium. That it had left its home berth at all, never mind survived a crossing of the void and a landing on hostile terrain, was miraculous. The last of its passengers were streaming down its disembarkation ramps as Iron Flame hovered overhead. They gathered around the ship, clambering over the trees that the ship had flattened on its descent. The transport was so old, its original name had been eroded away. A new one, Great Calling, was crudely emblazoned on the stubby bow.

The ship shuddered like a struck bell. Fire billowed from the open bay doors. A cascade of explosions at the stern built to a massive fireball that engulfed the engines.

‘They’re dancing,’ Atticus said. He was standing at the open hull door of the troop compartment. The wind roared at him. His feet wide apart, arms folded, he was as steady as if welded to the deck.

The crowd, thousands strong, was capering around the stricken ship as if it were a community bonfire.

‘They’re mad,’ said Darras. ‘If they breached the plasma cores…’

‘They appear to know what they’re doing,’ Atticus said. ‘Otherwise that would have happened to at least one of the ships, and this entire region would be gone. These demolitions are being carried out with care.’

‘But why?’ Sergeant Lacertus demanded.

‘Because they don’t ever plan to leave,’ Galba said. ‘They kept referring to Pythos as “home” in their transmissions. Now it is. They are making it impossible to leave.’ He eyed the burning colony ship, and thought that it had remained true to its first purpose all the way to the end. These people were not just civilians. They were colonists.

‘They want to stay here that badly?’ asked Darras. ‘Then they are ignorant, stupid or mad. All three, I suspect.’

‘They can’t be ignorant,’ said Atticus. ‘Not anymore.’ He pointed.

The saurians had come. The call of abundant, easy prey had gone out to them on the breezes of Pythos, and they had answered. They were arriving in much larger packs than before, and there were many more species. They descended upon the colonists. They tore into them.

The dance ended. The celebrants struggled to defend themselves. They were carrying nothing. They had no firearms. They bunched together, and fought back with punches and kicks. Some of them had swords of some kind. The blades only enraged the animals they struck. The colonists’ defence was a farce of the most tragic kind. The saurians feasted well.

‘Circle around,’ Atticus voxed Brother Catigernus, who was piloting Iron Flame.

The Thunderhawk flew from landing site to landing site. The same scene was repeated at every location. The ships were burning. The clearings created by their descent were filled with crowds defending themselves with poles, improvised clubs, and more of those swords. Now and then, Galba saw a flash of lasfire. He did not think there was more than one rifle for every hundred colonists.

Many people had congregated on the land cleared by the Iron Hands. More and more joined them, fleeing the steaming slaughter of the landing sites. Galba found it hard to gauge numbers. There were people in the tens of thousands, shoulder to shoulder in the space around the column and along the wide trail leading back toward the promontory. They were a giant herd. They were the tragic righting of the ecological imbalance that so troubled Ptero. Pythos finally had its herbivores, and the predators rejoiced. The front lines of the herd fought desperately, protecting those further back. Galba knew he was looking at acts of enormous heroism, but from above, all he saw was the ugliness of the deaths. The edges of the crowd turned into a swamp of bloody mud and mutilated bodies. More reptiles were arriving all the time. Pythos was unveiling the monstrous variety of its fauna.

The outcome of the struggle was preordained. It would take days, but in the end, the road to the column would be a lake of gore.

‘Take us back,’ Atticus told Catigernus.

‘We aren’t going to open fire?’ Galba asked.

‘At what?’ Atticus snapped.

Galba did not answer. Atticus was right. The gunship was a blunt weapon. Its missiles and guns would kill more colonists than saurians. The reptile kills would be a drop in the ocean. The only result would be a speeding up of the inevitable.

‘Do you hear that?’ said Darras, expressing a mixture of disbelief, bafflement and contempt.

‘I do.’ From Atticus, there was only contempt.

Galba heard it now. Rising above the cries of the dying and the roars of the saurians, audible even over the roar of the Thunderhawk’s engines, was the sound of joy. The crowd was singing. The people were a gigantic choir. They gave voice to a triumph. Even as their fellows were being devoured, they were celebrating their arrival. Galba could not make out the words, but the mood was unmistakeable. The tune soared, a crest of victory and strength. Whatever happened to them now, these people felt they had accomplished a great task.

To have travelled to this system in craft that looked rescued from the scrapyards, that was a feat. To have landed most of them was, too. But why such a struggle to reach this death world? Galba suspected he would never know. When the celebration was over, there would be no celebrants left to explain it.

‘Idiots,’ Atticus muttered, dismissing the song. He continued to watch, though, and did not look away from the struggling colonists until they were out of sight.

‘They fight with spirit,’ Galba offered.

‘Their fight is pointless. They cannot win. They are too weak. They came here to die, and I will not admire that.’

Iron Flame returned to the base and the rest of the company. Khi’dem and his fellow Salamanders stood at the edge of the landing pad. They walked forwards as the Iron Hands disembarked from the starboard access hatch. Ptero and the Raven Guard were present, too. They advanced close enough to hear what was said, but remained in the background.

‘What can you tell us, Captain Atticus?’ Khi’dem asked. Tone and words were respectful, Galba noted. Even so, there was an expectation of confrontation in the air.

‘The situation is as anyone would expect.’ Atticus did not answer Khi’dem directly. His voice was raised. He was speaking to the ranks of his legionaries who lined the landed pad. ‘These travellers are essentially unarmed. They will not last long against the saurians.’

‘What do you plan to do?’ Khi’dem was almost whispering now.

Atticus continued to address the wider assembly. ‘Mistress Erephren is reading the immaterium once more. She will find us a target, and we shall strike again.’

‘What do you plan to do about the people of the fleet?’ Khi’dem insisted, as softly as before.

Atticus at last turned his cold gaze on the son of Vulkan. ‘Do?’ he asked. ‘There is nothing to do.’

There was a pause. The warrriors behind Khi’dem stirred. He blinked a few times, but remained calm. ‘I find that hard to believe.’

‘And I find your confusion surprising. Within a few days at most, the situation will be resolved.’

‘Resolved…’ Khi’dem repeated. He was unable to keep the mounting horror from his voice.

‘There will either be some survivors who have learned to fight back, or there will be none.’

‘You do not believe the outcome to be any of our concern?’

‘Why should I?’ It was Atticus’s turn to sound puzzled. ‘Whatever happens, these colonists are not a threat to our position. They have destroyed their means of departure. If there are any survivors, it will be a simple matter to stop any communications they attempt to make with elements outside the system. Though I think that is highly improbable.’

‘I was not thinking about this mission’s integrity,’ Khi’dem said.

‘That is regrettable.’ Atticus’s voice was becoming almost as quiet as Khi’dem’s. The more softly he spoke, the more anger hissed from his vocaliser.

‘I was thinking,’ Khi’dem continued, ‘about our responsibility to the colonists.’

‘We have none.’

‘They are being slaughtered.’

‘I am aware of that, brother. I have seen what is happening. You have not.’

‘Then how can you stand by and do nothing?’

‘They have made their decisions. They are celebrating their chosen path in song as we speak. We are Legiones Astartes. Our duty is to the defence of the Imperium. It is not the policing of mortal stupidity.’

‘Nor is negligence taken to the point of murder.’

Silence descended. It was thick with potential violence. It smothered the sounds of the jungle. Atticus remained motionless. Galba checked his impulse to raise his bolter. A ripple spread through the Iron Hands. A word from Atticus, and the legionaries would avenge the honour of their captain.

He did not give the word. When he spoke, it was as if he were shaping the cold silence into words. ‘Explain yourself, and do it well.’

The warning was given. Feeling sick, Galba braced for combat. Withdraw your insult, he willed Khi’dem. They must be spared the tragedy of bloodshed between loyalist Legions. Withdraw. Withdraw.

Khi’dem did not stand down. ‘What are we, Captain Atticus, if we do not check the annihilation of a population of civilians? What are we defending? If the citizens of the Imperium count for nothing, then what is our purpose?’

‘The Emperor created us to defeat the enemies of mankind. We are weapons, not nursemaids.’

Galba breathed a bit more easily. Atticus was debating Khi’dem. The moment of rage had passed. The sergeant was glad. Khi’dem’s words were eating at his conscience.

‘That is mankind dying out there,’ Khi’dem cried, pointing in the direction of the butchery. ‘Here, now, those animals are the enemy. To what principle are you being loyal, if not that?’

‘They are nature,’ Atticus replied. ‘They are a test. If the colonists are strong, they will survive. These are the lessons of Medusa. Have you forgotten those of Nocturne?’

‘No, I have not. The people of Nocturne do not abandon each other. Do the people of Medusa?’ When Atticus was silent, Khi’dem pressed on. ‘You say that these people have embraced their lot with song. Are they fighting back?’

Atticus’s hesitation was not hostile this time. ‘They are.’

‘They are not suicidal, then. They are in the struggle to the end. Surely that is not dishonourable, even if, in your eyes, they are merely flesh. There are some battles that no amount of will or ability can win. You know this. We all know this, to our cost.’

Silence followed the reference to defeat. Khi’dem paused. Galba wondered if he had overplayed his hand. Galba found that he was hoping the Salamander would sway Atticus. He distrusted his reaction. It was felt rather than reasoned. Perhaps it was another result of his imperfect embrace of the machine. Its origin did not matter. It existed. He was stuck with his unwanted empathy.

Atticus turned his head away from Khi’dem. He looked in the direction the other had pointed. He seemed to be listening for the song.

No, Galba thought. He isn’t. You are.

‘There is also the colonists’ utility to the mission,’ Khi’dem said.

Atticus turned back to him. ‘What utility? All I see is the waste of this company’s time and energy in keeping them alive.’

‘If you do that, think what it will mean. If they manage to make a home here, they will be bringing stability to this region. We do not know how long we will be on this planet. Would not some degree of pacification be useful?’

Atticus grunted. ‘Perhaps. Perhaps not. I do not expect this to be a permanent base of operations.’

‘No,’ Khi’dem admitted. ‘I hope it will not be.’ He began to walk away. ‘But you must do as you see fit. As must I.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘To help.’

Atticus’s bionic larynx made a short burst of electronic noise. It could have been a growl as easily as a laugh. ‘And you, Raven Guard,’ he said to Ptero. ‘You have been silent. Do you let the Salamanders do all your speaking for you?’

‘We have said nothing because we were listening,’ Ptero replied. ‘You judge us, Atticus. You take our measure. As we do yours.’ He and the rest of his reduced squad began following the Salamanders.

Atticus made the noise again. Galba knew now that it was both a growl and a laugh. ‘You seek to shame us!’ he called to the retreating legionaries. ‘You think honour will not permit us to stand aside while you indulge your sentimentality?’

‘They’re right to think so, aren’t they?’ Galba ventured.

‘Yes,’ Atticus answered, the monotone cold again, the emotions unreachable, undetectable, ‘they are.’

Nine

Salvation in iron
Ske Vris
Storms

The battles on Pythos had been skirmishes before. They had not been real wars. The power imbalance on one side or the other had been too great. The saurians had outnumbered the reconnaissance force. The deforestation had been a mechanical exercise. After the airborne immolation, the few remaining saurians had been no threat to the tanks.

This time, the battle was real. It would be a true clash of forces. There was something almost joyous in that, Galba thought.

The initial stage was a lightning advance down the trail from the promontory. The Venerable Atrax, 111th Company’s Contemptor Dreadnought, and two Vindicators, Engine of Fury and Medusan Strength, led the way, the infantry following behind at a run. There was little resistance. The reptiles on the path were blasted apart by the Dreadnought’s twin-linked heavy bolters. Others, too slow to flee, were flattened, then scraped apart by the tanks. The Iron Hands reached the nearest portion of the crowd less than an hour after Khi’dem had carried the day.

The mechanised assault now was twin-pronged. While Atrax continued up the centre of the trail, the Vindicators moved to either side. The jungle barred the vehicles. It was home to shadows and teeth, and protected its mysteries. The tanks did not care. Each blast from their Demolisher cannons smashed trunks to splinters, toppling the giants, crushing whatever stalked beneath. The cannons were designed to batter down fortress walls. They devastated the jungle. As destructive as each shot was, the fire was also precise. Hitting a trunk at the wrong angle might bring the great tree down on the colonists. Overhead, Iron Flame flew in support, saturating the deeper areas of the jungle with incendiaries, strafing the larger concentrations of saurians with its battle cannon and the twin-linked heavy bolters of its sponsons.

Galba was near the front of the left-hand column. His sight down the path was blocked by the massive shape of Engine of Fury. His ears were full of engine growl and the slow doom beat of the cannons. Between each enormous pound of the drum, as its echoes shook the glowering sky, there came splintering crashes and animal screams. Pythos had come to fight, and it was being taught the foolishness of its action.

The din of reptile and artillery was so great, Galba could barely hear the colonists. The song was still there, though, still strong, its triumph untouched by the depredations of the saurians. And now the might of the Legiones Astartes struck the monsters of Pythos, giving truth to the hymn of victory.

The Vindicators drove between the colonists and the predators. More saurians went down under the massive treads. The cannons fired point-blank at the rampaging monsters, drenching the vegetation in red mist. In the wake of the tanks, the Iron Hands raked the jungle with bolter fire, pushing the reptiles further back, where many more fell under the withering attacks of the Thunderhawk.

The shock of the initial attack staggered the saurians. A gap opened between the mortals and the hunters. The Iron Hands rushed to fill it. As the advance moved further towards the anomaly, the legionaries formed a ceramite chain along the sides of the trail. Each Space Marine was a link, holding several metres on either side of him. They created an avenue of sanctuary.

Standing in the hatch of Engine of Fury, Atticus addressed the colonists. He vox-cast his commands on all speakers. When he spoke, he was the machine incarnate, as if Iron Flame and the Vindicators themselves had found their voice.

‘Citizens of the Imperium! Your valour does you honour! But now is the hour of your salvation. Follow the route we have created for you. Down that path lies safety. Move now or die where you stand.’

As he riddled predators with bolter shells, still following the Vindicator, Galba nodded to himself. Atticus’s words were mercy reinforced by discipline and steel. The Iron Hands had come to rescue these people. They would not coddle them. If the colonists wasted the opportunity with foolishness, then they truly were weak and deserved no consideration.

Galba realised he was having a mental debate with Khi’dem. He silenced the internal voices and focused on the killing.

The colonists began to move uphill. Atticus urged them on, and they began to run. They streamed between the legionaries. The Salamanders and Raven Guard ran at the head of the crowd, holding off the saurians that abandoned the packs and tried to follow the fleeing prey.

The mission was the largest planetary deployment of the Veritas Ferrum’s warriors since the Callinedes offensive. Galba glanced back at the unwavering line of legionaries. The 111th Clan-Company of the X Legion was a shadow of its former self. Yet still the company numbered its warriors in the hundreds. Still the fist of Atticus came down with the force of an asteroid strike. The Legion was injured, but the Legion fought on. The Legion was here, now, and its majesty of war was terrible to behold. Galba’s chest swelled with pride. His hearts pumped with the need for combat.

‘Now let this planet know our true measure!’ Atticus called. ‘Let it know that we have come! Let it know our wrath! And so let it know fear!’

The closer the front of the Iron Hands’ advance came to the epicentre of the anomaly, the bigger the crowd grew, and the more ferociously the saurians attacked. As Galba drew near the rock column, the reptilian assault reached such a frenzy that it was as if the jungle had been replaced by a vortex of snapping jaws. Galba was fighting a solid wall of muscle, claws and teeth. Most of the animals were the bipeds that had attacked when the column had first been discovered. But the quadrupeds were here too, as were several other species. There were a few who stood out, hunting as individuals instead of in packs. These were monsters, ten metres tall and twenty metres long. They had long, powerful forelimbs, and a row of bony spikes running from their foreheads, down their spines, and along the length of their arms. They shouldered through their smaller kin, using the massive spikes on their elbows to stab rivals out of the way.

A quadruped charged at Galba, only to shriek and fall writhing to the ground when a spike as long as a chainsword jabbed into its eye. The massive killer made a wide sweep of its arm as it lunged for Galba. He ducked. A row of death passed over his head. The reach of the saurian was so great that the blow connected with the legionary behind Galba. The force of the hit shattered his breastplate. The spikes slammed home through his chest. The warrior gurgled as his lungs and hearts were punctured. The saurian lifted him, impaled, to its mouth. Blunt jaws with teeth the length of Galba’s hand snapped down on the legionary’s torso, severing it in two.

Shouting inarticulate curses, Galba stitched the creature with bolter shells from belly to neck. Blood slicked the saurian’s torso. The animal roared, deep bass thunder mixed with an outraged shriek of agony. It lunged its head forwards. The forehead spike smashed into Galba’s shoulder. Ceramite cracked. Muscle tore. He was thrown to the ground. The monster raised a clawed foot to crush him. He rolled to the side, firing again. The earth trembled as the saurian stamped. Then Galba’s shots punched up through its lower jaw. The front half of the monster’s head disappeared. Galba thought the shriek would tear the clouds from the sky. The saurian staggered, its claws grasping at the air where its jaws had been. Then it collapsed with a resonant crash.

Clambering over its body came more of the smaller bipeds. The monsters had been deprived of their easy, plentiful prey, and they were angry. They were coming to kill the Space Marines, to punish them for daring to invade their territory and thwart their desire. Their insensate fury was so focused, he could almost believe evil was possible in an animal.

The saurians were relentless. As before, their numbers seemed inexhaustible. But the Iron Hands had numbers now, too. And tanks. And a gunship. The incendiaries still fell. The Demolisher cannons boomed. The jungle was shredded and burned. Many reptiles died before they could reach the objects of their hatred. The others were brought down by endless, unwavering bolter fire. The Iron Hands were holding the line. They would do so until the mission was complete.

Or they ran out of munitions.

Galba dropped another saurian and checked his ammo clips. He had learned from his first experience here. They all had. They had brought plenty of rounds. But not an infinite supply. Galba had already used half of his. The battle could not go on indefinitely.

‘Run!’ Atticus commanded the colonists. He spoke even as his stream of fire decapitated two of the long-necked bipeds nearest him. ‘We do not wait upon your pleasure. Run now and live. Wait, and you show yourselves unworthy of our efforts. Earn our help. If you do not, you will die.’

The colonists ran. Galba could feel the size of the crowd at his back diminishing. There was movement happening. They were clearing the thousands away from the column, moving them towards safety. The colonists were still singing. The sound, mixed with the snarling and the butchery and the barking of guns, was grotesque. Galba’s admiration for these people evaporated. Their impermeable joy was insane. Were they stupid? Did they have no respect for the battle-brothers fighting and dying on their behalf?

Who are we saving? he wondered. He stepped back. Massive jaws snapped together a hair’s breadth from the front of his helmet. He shot the quadruped through the eyes. Are these people worth saving?

He could guess what Khi’dem’s answer would be. The Salamander would say that the act had its own value. It did not matter for whom it was done. If they were defenceless, if they needed help, then yes, they were worth saving.

To his right, a brace of quadrupeds descended on a legionary. He did not have time to switch from bolter to chainsword before they brought him down with sheer tonnage. They crushed his skull before Engine of Fury fired, blasting them from existence.

Another brother gone. The loyalist campaign weakened by just that much. In exchange for what? Was there anything these colonists offered in the war that had engulfed the Imperium? How many of their lives warranted one of the Iron Hands?

An inner voice that sounded like his captain’s said, All of them would be insufficient.

Yet Atticus was there, fighting for the lives of the mortals with as much purpose and brutal grace as on the Callidora. He had come to agree with Khi’dem. Agree enough. Agree, at least, that protecting what it meant to be the X Legion was worth the losses.

Back at the base, Galba had been pleased by the decision. But now the song grated. The celebration sounded like mockery. He now preferred the honest savagery of the animals he fought. He channelled his anger through his bolter, into the flesh he destroyed. As he killed another behemoth, he thought of the pride he had felt to see the full might of the company unleashed.

To fight animals, said a bitter truth.

These people. Are they worth it?

Worthy or not, the colonists were herded up the slope. They were too numerous for all of them to take refuge within the base’s walls. The wounded and the weak were protected there, along with the first to arrive. The others gathered on the plateau, their numbers spilling down the slope. But the position was defensible. The Vindicators took up stations below the mortals and pummelled the jungle. Iron Flame flew overwatch. More of the jungle was burned away, and it became possible to hold the upper reaches of the promontory with a relatively small contingent.

Evening fell, and the bombardment continued. The wildlife of Pythos refused to surrender its prize. Individual saurians, feral rage overwhelming self-preservation, attacked every few minutes. They were annihilated. And they kept coming, gradually eating away at the ammunition supplies.

Standing next to the armoury, Kanshell watched Atticus speaking with a small group of colonists. They were standing on the landing pad, visible to all. They appeared to be of a warrior caste. They wore rudimentary armour. It was not quite patchwork. Kanshell could see, on the individuals nearby who wore it, evidence of metalwork in the designs of the shoulder guards. Some of the warriors, men and women, carried spears or swords with elaborate engravings. Perhaps there was an officer class, too. One of the party on the landing pad appeared to be a leader. He was powerfully built, and his armour was more ostentatious.

Kanshell wished that he were close enough to hear the conversation. The crowd before him was too dense to push through. It was mostly made up of Pythos’s new arrivals. There were some Legion serfs mixed in with them, though. Kanshell hoped someone he knew would be close enough to learn what was being decided.

‘He is asking us to leave,’ said a woman at Kanshell’s right shoulder.

The serf twisted, startled.

The woman, like the other colonists, was very tall and wiry. Her hair was dark, unkempt and thick. Her features were flattened, almost simian, but her face was long, and there was an odd grace to her bearing, as if she were dancing while standing still. Her clothing was hide and fur, the traces of the creatures still easy to see. A necklace of animal teeth hung around her neck. It was strange attire to see on someone who had just arrived in-system. The woman seemed like a primitive, Kanshell thought. She did not look like the member of a culture that could operate void ships. She bowed. The movement was liquid. ‘My name is Ske Vris.’

‘Jerune Kanshell.’ He nodded in return. ‘You were mad to come here,’ he said. ‘You should leave.’

The woman smiled. ‘We cannot. Our ships are gone.’ Her smile was beatific.

So the rumours that had raced through the compound were true. ‘Why would you do such a thing?’

‘We no longer had need of them.’

‘But you see what the conditions on this planet are like! You can’t mean to make this your home.’

‘Home,’ Ske Vris repeated. She closed her eyes as she said it again: ‘Home.’ She was savouring the word. She opened her eyes. They shone with a profound joy. Kanshell felt a stab of envy. The woman standing before him had found her life’s mission, and had answered its call. Kanshell had once thought that he was doing the same. But now uncertainty was his companion through disturbing days and sleepless nights. ‘Where is your home?’ Ske Vris asked.

Was it Medusa? No, not any longer. The planet of his birth was too distant a memory. ‘The ship,’ he answered. ‘The Veritas Ferrum.’ When he said the name, he startled himself by pronouncing the words as if he were praying.

‘How would I convince you to abandon it?’

‘You could not.’ The idea was offensive.

‘Precisely.’

‘But you have never been here before,’ Kanshell protested. Then he hesitated. ‘Have you?’ Could this be a lost people returning to its point of departure?

‘No,’ Ske Vris answered. ‘None of my kind has ever set foot here.’

‘Then how can this be home?’

‘It was foretold.’ The smile again. It bespoke a certainty so absolute, it would be more difficult to uproot than a mountain.

‘Why did you not come here before now?’

‘The time was not right. Now it is.’

‘How do you know?’

‘We could not begin our journey until we were forced to. War came to the world where we were living and brought an end to it. So we left, glad to be of the generation to see the prophecy fulfilled.’

Kanshell frowned. Ske Vris’s language of prophecy and foretelling was light years from the orthodoxy of the Imperial Truth. It made him uncomfortable. Partly because he disapproved.

Partly because he wanted the woman’s serenity.

He noticed now, scattered about the crowd, colonists wearing hooded robes. As people milled, they lowered their heads if they crossed paths with one of the robed. There was no doubt in Kanshell’s mind: superstition had an active role in this culture. How isolated had this civilisation been? For how long? Had it never been made compliant? Had the Iron Hands encountered one of humanity’s forgotten tribes just as everything teetered on the brink of collapse?

‘Where did you come from?’ he asked.

‘The world is lost now,’ Ske Vris answered. ‘So is its name. That is well. It was a false home. It did not test us.’

‘You think that is what Pythos is doing?’

Ske Vris nodded, her smile huge. ‘It welcomed us with fury, as we knew it would. We must earn our home here. We will be tested every day. This is right. This is the way of faith.’

Faith. The word haunted him. It rose everywhere Kanshell turned. Since the first night on Pythos, it had become harder for him to dismiss it as he knew he should. Tanaura had offered him its reassurance after the death of Georg Paert. He knew he should accept that he had hallucinated. That was to be expected in a region where the boundary with the immaterium was ragged. But the insistent reality of what he had seen refused to be banished. And in the presence of evil miracles, what recourse was there, Tanaura had asked him, but faith? Did he think the simple application of force, no matter how great, was the solution?

Faith. Here it was again. He looked into the radiant face of Ske Vris. He felt a desperate hunger. This woman had lost hundreds of her fellows over the course of this day, yet she was staring towards the future with something much stronger than hope: confidence. Kanshell wondered what it would take to shake this being.

Nothing, he suspected. He was looking at a woman whose faith was an impervious shield. Perhaps it was even stronger than Tanaura’s. She was frightened, whereas Ske Vris was glowing from the events of the day.

‘Why?’ Kanshell asked. ‘Why is it necessary that you be tested?’

‘To be made strong. We have to be strong to complete our work.’

‘What work is that?’

Ske Vris looked up to the sealed heavens. She raised her arms high in welcome. ‘That revelation is yet to come.’ She paused, basking in the ineffable. She lowered her arms and her eyes were somehow even more joyful than before. ‘It will come here,’ she said. ‘Soon. So my master says.’

‘Your master?’

Ske Vris pointed to one of the robed figures. He was near the landing pad, observing the debate between Atticus and the colonists’ representative. Even in the falling night, he was easy to pick out. He stood at least a head taller than most of his fellows, who kept a respectful distance from him.

‘What is his name?’ Kanshell asked.

‘I have yet to earn the right to speak it.’

Kanshell looked at Ske Vris’s attire again. The woman’s tunic was longer than those worn by most of the other colonists. It also had a short hood. Kanshell saw a link between it and the dark robes. ‘You are a religious apprentice?’ he asked.

‘A novitiate. Yes.’

Kanshell hesitated before speaking. Then he realised that he must. If he did not, he would be admitting the defeat of what he knew to be the truth. ‘You are wrong to stay,’ he said. ‘You have been led here by a delusion. There is nothing to worship. There are no gods.’

Ske Vris’s smile did not falter. ‘You think so? Are you sure?’

‘I am.’

‘How do you come by this certainty?’

‘The Emperor has revealed the truth to all mankind.’ And that includes you, doesn’t it?

‘What is a revealed truth except a gift from the divine?’ Ske Vris asked.

‘No,’ Kanshell stammered. ‘No, that isn’t right. It… I…’ he trailed off. His will to buttress his position leaked away.

‘Yes?’ Ske Vris prompted.

‘Nothing. You’re wrong, though.’ Kanshell could hear how weak his argument sounded.

His distress must have been visible. Ske Vris grasped his shoulder in a gesture of solidarity. ‘I think we will have more to say to one another in the days ahead, my friend.’

‘You really plan to stay.’

Ske Vris laughed. ‘It is not a question of planning. This is home! This is destiny!’

Darras watched the spectacle on the landing pad. This is theatre, he thought, disgusted. The humans were done up for show. They were ragged, but there was pomp and ceremony and pride in their motley. They should have been humble, but though they expressed gratitude, they radiated entitlement, as if the Iron Hands were the ones who had just arrived and were being welcomed as guests to Pythos. The answers he had received to the questions he had put to over a dozen of the refugees only reinforced that impression.

Galba joined him beside Unbending. ‘Any luck?’

Darras gave a short bark of a laugh. ‘I ask who they are, they tell me they’re pilgrims. Pilgrims from where? From lies, coming to truth. From which planet? They have crossed into the realm of the truth, and so the past, like all lies, no longer exists for them. And when I ask how they got here…’

‘They were transported on the wings of faith,’ Galba finished.

‘Exactly.’ Darras snorted. ‘Nonsense.’

‘Nonsense that they appear to believe.’

‘Well, that’s all right, then. We rescued fools instead of liars. I consider the day well spent.’ He waved his arm, taking in the base and the crowded slope beyond. ‘These are your works, too, brother. Look upon them.’

‘I didn’t advocate for this.’

‘No, you didn’t,’ he conceded. ‘But are you disappointed?’ He watched Galba carefully. He was not surprised when the other sergeant shook his head. Galba was being honest with both of them, and that was good. But it bothered Darras how much influence the Raven Guard and the Salamanders, Khi’dem in particular, were having on Galba. His battle-brother was drifting from the machinic path. ‘You think we did the right thing, don’t you?’

‘I do.’

‘Where is the worth in this carnival?’

‘That has yet to be seen. But the honourable choice is not necessarily a utilitarian one.’

‘Nor is it necessarily the right one. I didn’t ask if you thought we had chosen the honourable path. We did, without question. But there is more than one form of honour. Today, we honoured the flesh. Is our Legion in the habit of doing so?’

‘I don’t need to be instructed in our tenets.’

Darras pretended he had not heard. ‘The flesh is weak, brother.’ He left unspoken the fact that so little of Galba’s had been pared away. ‘It makes bad choices. It is corruptible.’

‘I know,’ Galba said softly.

‘I think you are listening to yours too much.’ When Galba said nothing, Darras continued. ‘Strategy and reason are the paths that honour the machine. When reason is abandoned, betrayal follows.’

Galba’s eyes flared with anger. Good. ‘Are you accusing me of something?’

‘No. Just reminding you of who we are.’

She knew who had entered her chamber. The insanity of the warp filled her world to the point that she barely had any awareness of her own body. But the presence that had arrived was powerful. Its hard, unforgiving reality countered the blandishments of the immaterium. ‘Hello, captain,’ Erephren said.

‘Mistress Erephren.’

‘They aren’t leaving, are they?’

‘They are not.’

‘How could they, even if they wanted to?’

‘Some repairs might be possible. The planet Kylix is just capable of supporting life. It is a harsh world, but not a mad one. We could transport them to the empty ships in orbit.’

‘That does not sound like a fit duty for the Iron Hands.’

The electronic grating was eloquent with the captain’s disgust. ‘It does not. Nor is playing nursemaid to these fools. I hope you will provide my salvation.’

‘How?’

‘Give me a target, mistress. Find us a mission.’

She sighed. ‘I wish I could.’

‘Your sight is failing you?’

‘No. The problem is the warp. I have never seen such storms. We cannot travel it. No one can.’

‘When did this begin?’

‘Just after our return. We are trapped here until the storms subside.’

The presence was silent.

‘Lord?’ Erephren asked.

‘I was thinking,’ Atticus said, ‘how much I distrust coincidences.’

‘Can the enemy have the power to cause warp storms?’

‘No. No. That is impossible.’ There was the sound of his heavy bootsteps. ‘Do what you can,’ he said.

‘The moment I see a path for us to take, I will let you know.’

‘I can ask no more.’ The presence began to withdraw, taking its reality away.

‘Captain,’ Erephren called.

‘Yes?’

‘I want to thank you,’ she said. ‘The confidence you place in me is a great honour.’

‘It is only right,’ he answered. ‘We find ourselves in unique circumstances. We must rely upon each other. We are more alike than you realise, mistress.’

‘I do not understand.’

‘We are tools, you and I. We have been moulded. To accomplish our duties to the fullest, we have surrendered almost everything that once made us human. We have become weapons, and nothing more. We are unfit for anything else. That is our price, and that is our great honour.’

‘Thank you,’ she said. Renewed strength of duty flooded her system.

The bombardment was sporadic, but it did not end. The Vindicators lit the jungle with a slow, emphatic beat of fire. Galba found Khi’dem standing beside Medusan Strength. ‘Are you pleased with yourself?’ he asked.

‘I am grateful to your company,’ Khi’dem answered. ‘I am glad the right thing was done. I am not gloating, if that’s what you mean.’

‘I hope you are right that this was necessary.’

‘How can you doubt it?’

‘The cost.’

‘I mourn the losses. I do not take them lightly. Our numbers have been reduced still further as well.’

‘And what has this price bought us?’

‘The right to call ourselves defenders of the Imperium. Brother-sergeant, if you weigh today only by military gain, you are making a mistake.’

Galba laughed softly. ‘I knew you were going to say that.’

‘Then you knew the truth. You felt it.’

‘Perhaps.’ Galba doubted it. The refrain of are they worth it? still troubled him. ‘And what is the new truth? What do we do with these people now that we have saved them?’

‘We are responsible for them.’

‘You are being vague.’

‘I do not command this company.’

‘Don’t you?’ Galba did not try to hide his bitterness. Medusan Strength thundered again. Galba pointed to the sudden glow of destruction in the trees. ‘Look upon your works, brother.’ He was conscious of echoing Darras. Was he shifting blame? Was there blame at all? He did not know. ‘Every expenditure of a shell is in answer to your desire.’

‘No. It is the expression of your choice. The correct one.’

‘Then you are pleased.’

‘I am relieved.’

Galba snorted. ‘As you will. Your relief will no doubt be buttressed by the news I bring.’

‘Which is?’

‘As we are saddled with the responsibility of these mortals, we begin construction of a more permanent settlement tomorrow.’

Khi’dem was silent. After a moment, Galba noticed he was shaking. ‘Is something wrong?’ he asked.

Khi’dem shook his head, then burst into laughter. ‘I’m sorry, brother,’ he gasped out.

‘Do enlighten me.’

Khi’dem mastered himself, but when he spoke, Galba could hear the laugh forcing itself to surface again. ‘I have lived to see the Iron Hands build a village. This is indeed a rare day.’ Then the fit was upon him again.

Galba knew he should be offended. He found he could not summon the indignation. Instead, he saw the irony, and the corner of his mouth began to twitch up. When had there last been laughter in the company? He could not remember. Laughter had been drained from the galaxy. But Khi’dem had summoned it. The noise was defiance hurled into the night, and now Galba joined in, and it felt right.

The reason was unimportant. The worth was in the act itself.

Two more serfs died during the night. One ran into the jungle. His devoured remains were found as the work began. The other lay behind the armoury. He had inserted his hands between his jaws.

He had found the strength to pull his own head apart.

Ten

The touch of the numinous
Not a crusade
Intelligence

The construction began with more destruction. The low plateau near the site of the column was chosen as the site of the settlement. The colonists clamoured for that spot. Atticus agreed that it was the most defensible position. It was also strategically useful. From this location, it would be possible to extend the pacified zone to the anomaly itself.

‘The Salamanders may have been right about stability,’ Darras said to Galba as they organised the work details.

‘They know how to hold ground,’ Galba admitted.

The plateau was cleared by more firebombing by Iron Flame. The bombardment was intense. The fires rose high enough to be visible from the base. They glowed and flickered beneath a cloud of smoke that spread beneath the clouds, turning the grey of Pythos’s sky to a dirty black. The gunship circled the plateau, using cannons and missiles to gouge an encircling trench. A strip of trees was left standing between the trench and the top of the plateau. This narrow, circular forest would be the source of raw material.

When the fires died, the Iron Hands escorted a group of colonists, a few hundred strong, back the way they had come only the day before. The pilgrimage was more organised, less of a pell-mell flight. The group was limited to a size that was easily defended. Even so, there were casualties. Three more battle-brothers and fifteen colonists died on the way there. Another five mortals were taken by predators that dared to venture onto the top of the plateau.

Temporary barricades were brought down from the Veritas Ferrum. They were used to create a secure zone on the west end of the plateau. In that zone, the felling of the trees began. The massive trunks were cut into uniform sections, and the erection of a permanent palisade began.

The Iron Hands provided security. They blasted down the largest of the trees. The construction of the settlement itself was entirely in the hands of the colonists, but a large contingent of serfs was tasked to aid the process. The serfs had the skills needed to build a stronghold quickly. They had the recent experience.

They needed to be kept occupied.

Kanshell was among those sent to the plateau. He had, with Galba’s permission, volunteered. He had been aboard the Veritas in Harmartia. He had been spared several nights on Pythos. The journey back through the warp had been a bad one, filled with nightmares. He had put that down to his fear of returning to the planet. The first night back had been tolerable, perhaps because of the overcrowding on the base. The sheer numbers were a source of reassurance.

And yet the deaths had occurred. Two people had somehow found a way to be alone and meet the terror.

Poor judgement had left them vulnerable to hallucinations, and they had killed themselves. This was clearly explained to all.

Kanshell thought of Georg Paert, and of the eyes that screamed. And he doubted.

Tanaura tried to speak with him. Kanshell brushed her off. He was clinging to the Imperial Truth with all the rational force that remained to him. He did not want her undermining that. So he asked for the work. Back-breaking labour, he hoped, would exhaust him to the point of instant, dreamless sleep come the night.

No sun broke through the clouds. There was nothing by which he could monitor the passing of the day except the gradual tempering of the light. He imagined it was failing faster than it was. He tried to will it to be slower than it was. He threw himself into the work, hauling logs, lashing them together, raising the wall. He worked as if his body would use up the energy his mind needed to worry. He could tell that he was not the only one who had taken this quest. The faces of the other serfs mirrored his determination. Their eyes were haunted. Their jaws were set, the tendons of their necks standing out with tension.

The colonists, by contrast, were celebrating. They had begun singing again as they had during the march from the base. Unlike the day before, there was more than one melody in the air. Kanshell thought the songs were matched to particular activities – for walking, for the hewing of wood, for building. The words were unintelligible, but the tone was clear enough. It was always triumphant. Kanshell suspected the songs were hymns of praise. The colonists were more joyful than was rational. They were being buoyed by the wings of superstitious belief. He disapproved.

He envied.

Along the circumference of the plateau were a number of low mounds. They had been invisible prior to the deforestation. They were set back about twenty metres from the edge and were no more than about four metres high. The tops of the mounds were level, rough circles ten metres in diameter. One was contained within the initial secure zone. The colonists not working on the wall were busy constructing a framework on the top of the mound. The structure went up quickly. It was square, with a peaked roof.

Kanshell paused in his work of hacking a log into a spiked shaft. He watched a colonist clamber up to the top of the building’s roof. In the centre, the woman fixed one of the ornate staffs of the priest caste. Ske Vris stood at the base of the mound, calling encouragement and approval as the woman finished her work. She climbed back down to her applause.

A massive figure passed in front of Kanshell and marched over to Ske Vris. It was Darras. The sergeant towered over the novitiate, who looked up at him with a smile. Kanshell watched them speak. Their words did not reach him over the noise of the construction. Ske Vris listened to the legionary, then shook her head, still smiling. She pointed to the structure, then spoke for a few moments. Her gestures were expansive. She finished with her arms spread wide enough to embrace the world. She bowed, inviting Darras to precede her to the doorway. Darras strode up the rise. He ducked to look inside the door. Then he turned and walked away, his hand gesture to Ske Vris as dismissive as a shrug. The colonist remained at a half bow before Darras’s retreating back.

Kanshell leaned his axe against the log and made his way to Ske Vris. ‘What did Sergeant Darras want?’ he asked.

Ske Vris straightened and clapped Kanshell’s shoulder in welcome. ‘He was asking about the nature of what we have built.’

‘It’s a temple, isn’t it?’ He was stunned by the colonists’ foolishness. The Iron Hands would never permit such a flagrant violation of the Imperial Truth.

Ske Vris chuckled. ‘There are no gods in there,’ she said.

‘Then what is it? A shelter?’

‘We will use it in that way at first, yes. But it is more than that. It is a gathering place. There is where we discuss the concerns of our community. It is where we experience and reaffirm our bonds of fellowship. It is a lodge.’

‘But you don’t deny that you engage in worship.’

‘I will not renounce what I said to you yesterday, no. But we will not offend the great warriors who have given us aid. We take our bonds with them very seriously, too.’

Kanshell grunted. ‘I doubt that they feel the same way about you.’

‘In time, they will. We have a common destiny. Why else would we all find ourselves on this world in these days of war?’ That eternal smile was there still. The woman’s pleasure in the world was hard to dismiss.

The envy tightened Kanshell’s chest.

Ske Vris touched his arm. ‘Come inside, my friend. You labour and are heavily laden. We will give you rest.’

Loyalty to the rationalist creed bade him refuse. But night was coming. So he followed Ske Vris up the slight rise to the entrance. He was not committing to anything, he told himself. He was just curious. There was no harm in taking a look.

He was struck, as he neared the building, by the care that had gone into its construction. The logs that made up its walls had been cut into shape very quickly, and their dimensions were irregular. Even so, the joins looked solid enough to weather years and decades. He noticed that there was no daubing to fill the gaps where the lengths of the logs did not meet. ‘What are you going to use for weatherproofing?’ he asked.

‘Nothing,’ Ske Vris answered.

‘Nothing?’

‘Is the work not beautiful?’

It was. The gaps had a serendipitous pattern to them that gave the simple architecture a complexity that was invisible from afar, but dissolved into individual fragments when too close. ‘This will make a poor shelter from the first wind,’ Kanshell commented.

‘Look inside,’ Ske Vris urged.

Kanshell did. There were no windows, but there was light. The perpetual overcast of Pythos was still enough to shine through the gaps in the walls. The pattern Kanshell had seen outside was multiplied in the interior. It seemed to him that the ambient exterior light was sharpened as it passed through each slit, creating an interlocking overlap of light on light. He tried to see the pattern’s precise contours, but could not. The light was too diffuse. He was not seeing beams crossing each other. Rather, he was experiencing the layering of shades and tonalities. This was a play of light that was felt instead of seen. The effect was extraordinary.

‘How…’ Kanshell began. His sentence trailed off, beset by too many questions. How had the colonists done this work so fast? How had they done it with such crude material? How did they do it at all?

Ske Vris brushed past him and walked to the centre of the space. ‘Join me,’ she said. ‘Come and see the touch of the numinous.’

Kanshell took a step forwards. The lightweb intensified as he entered the lodge. It danced over his nerve endings. His skin broke out in electric gooseflesh. The hair on his arms stood on end. The space did not grow brighter, but he could see more clearly. He was on the verge of making out the details of the pattern. If he joined Ske Vris in the centre of the web, he would surely see it then. There would be clarity. He would understand the meaning of the pattern.

And Ske Vris promised the revelation of the divine.

No. The promise of comfort was great. It would be easy to surrender to his instincts. His mind and his heart were exhausted from the effort of clinging to rationality. But his pride would not yet admit defeat. He wanted to believe that loyalty was urging his steadfastness, but that argument rang hollow. There was no questioning Tanaura’s loyalty. She would tell him to walk forwards.

‘No,’ he said to Ske Vris, to Tanaura, to himself. ‘Thank you, but no. I have to get back to work.’ He backed out of the lodge.

‘Another time, then,’ Ske Vris called after him. ‘There is no door here. Only a doorway. Cross it when you are ready.’

The serfs were returned to the base before nightfall. The colonists kept working. The labour would not cease, they said, until it was done. More of their number had been escorted to the plateau during the day. Close to half their total numbers were now at work on the settlement. The wall was spreading its reach by the hour. Between it and the barriers from the Veritas Ferrum, there was enough protection that only one squad of Iron Hands, under the command of Sergeant Lacertus, stood sentry that night.

‘The morale of these people is high,’ he told Galba and Darras as they were about to head back to the base. ‘It’s sickeningly high.’

The atmosphere was different at the base. There was enough room, now, to shelter the remaining colonists within its walls. The grounds were crowded with them. Most of them were asleep. Those still awake were singing softly. The melody was a low, tenor, background hum, the slow sweep of its phrases like the murmurs of wavelets of a lake at twilight.

‘I think they’ve built a temple,’ Darras said to Galba as they crossed the base’s plasteel gate.

‘That structure does look like one,’ Galba admitted. ‘You made inquiries?’

‘They deny it is any such thing. “There are no gods there.” That’s what I was told. It is only a gathering place.’

‘Were you being lied to?’

Darras hesitated. ‘The curious thing is, I don’t think I was. And yet…’ He gestured, taking in the resting colonists and their song.

‘Yes,’ Galba agreed. ‘Superstition has deep roots in them. It has not been eradicated.’

They found Atticus standing outside the command unit. At first, Galba thought he was surveying the colonists. But as they approached, he saw that the captain’s gaze was elevated. He seemed to be watching for something. ‘Well?’ he asked.

Darras briefed him on the plateau and the lodge.

‘Should we demolish that structure?’ Galba asked.

‘No,’ Atticus said after a moment. ‘Not unless there is a direct violation of Imperial Law. There are a number of pacified worlds whose cultural traditions are very close to the edge of theism, but have, for strategic reasons, been allowed a provisional measure of tolerance. We have taken on more than enough with these wretched mortals already. We are not engaged in a crusade. We are fighting for the life of the Imperium. If the Salamanders wish to spend their time educating the savages, let them. For now, if these people can be of any tactical use to us in stabilising this region, then I would have them do so. I will not spend any more time and resources on them than is absolutely necessary. You say the plateau is becoming secure?’

‘It is,’ Galba confirmed.

‘Is our presence required at all?’

‘Minimally, for now,’ said Darras. ‘They should be able to fend for themselves, properly equipped, within a few days. Some continued losses are to be expected, but…’

‘They have the numbers to sustain that. Good.’

‘Has Mistress Erephren found another target?’ Galba asked. He understood his captain’s frustration. Every day spent on Pythos was another small victory handed to the traitors.

‘No,’ Atticus grated. ‘The warp storms continue to intensify. But I will have us ready to depart the moment action against the enemy becomes possible. Then all this flesh,’ he waved his hand in contempt, ‘can learn its strength or weakness on its own.’

Galba was walking past the serf barracks, heading for the wall, when he saw Kanshell hovering by the door. ‘Lord,’ Kanshell said, bowing low.

‘Hello, Jerune. You should not be alone.’

Kanshell glanced back into the dormitorium. ‘I’m not.’ His voice shook.

‘Were you watching for me?’

The serf nodded. ‘Forgive me for presuming…’ he began.

‘That’s all right. What is it?’

‘Those things I saw the first night–’

‘The hallucinations.’

Kanshell swallowed. He began to tremble. His eyes reflected the arc lights of the base. They were shining with terror. ‘I’m sorry, lord. I tried to believe that I was seeing things. Please believe me. I have tried and tried. But I know it was real.’

Galba shook his head. ‘This is precisely why the warp is so dangerous. Of course it seemed real. It–’

Kanshell fell to his knees, his hands clasped in supplication. ‘But it’s happening again! Now! Right now! Please, oh please, in the name of the Emperor, tell me you can sense it too!’

Galba was so startled that his serf had dared to interrupt that he did not respond immediately. The hesitation was long enough for his own certainty to crumble. The memory of the taste of shadows assailed him with renewed venom, strength and conviction. And then it was more than a memory. The taste was there again. The shadows that were darker than any absence of light reached tendrils into his being. He tried to shake them off. He fought them with reason. He was not immune to the mental depredations of the warp. There was nothing real in what he was experiencing.

The shadows gripped harder, sank deeper. They insisted on their reality. They took Atticus’s declarations of rationalism and shattered them, leaving Galba exposed to their black truth.

Kanshell suddenly put his hands over his ears. ‘No no no no,’ he whimpered. ‘Can you hear? Can you hear them?’

Galba did. Though the shadows were smothering his senses, some perceptions were sharpened. They were the allies of the shadows, more claws of the warp. Barely audible beneath the quiet chanting of the colonists came the sounds from inside the serf barracks. The people inside were murmuring in their sleep. Their words were slurred, inarticulate. The noise was the mumble of stones, the insinuation of breeze, the whisper of the night stream.

‘I can hear them,’ Galba said. His own words were muffled, as if he were speaking through a cloud of lead. But the act of speaking gave him some agency. He moved towards the doorway. More shadows waited there, coiling, ready to spring. ‘How many?’ he asked.

‘All of them,’ said Kanshell.

It was absurd. Every one of the hundreds of mortals asleep in the rows of bunks could not be sleep-talking. Galba stepped inside, leaving Kanshell at the door.

He saw right away that the man was wrong. Not all the serfs were whispering. A few were awake. They were weeping, curled up into balls of terror on their cots. All the others had joined the nocturnal choir. Their words were unintelligible, but Galba could tell that each person was reciting a different litany. The voices came together in a struggle of syncopation and layering. The whispers piled up on top of each other, a different hiss rising to the surface with every passing second. The murmurs ceased to be human. They were no longer the product of lips and vocal cords. They were rasping sound-shapes unto themselves. They coiled around Galba’s hearing. They were serpentine fragments twining into a whole. They summoned the shadows closer. The darkness squeezed. Galba began to choke. The moaning, rattling, snickering choir became more intense, though the volume remained barely above a grave’s silence. The fragments joined and moulded, joined and laughed. As before, Galba felt an unveiling loom over sanity’s horizon. It was not enough that he be assailed by a truth made of butchered minds and desecrated corpses. It was not enough to feel the presence of the truth pressing against his mind like an expanding tumour. He must be shown the nature of the truth. He must hear it speak. He must know what it had to announce.

His vision began to darken. His eyes were being covered by a membrane that was insubstantial, yet it clung, veined red, like muscle. The truth slithered closer. He divined its shape. It was a name. Behind the name, an intelligence lurked. The name took shape behind his eyes, and the shape was Madail. Its rhythm was the beat of a reptilian heart. It forced its way up his throat. It would have him speak it. And then it would claim him as its own.

MADAIL, MADAIL, MADAIL.

Galba roared. He released his anger free of all form, of all words. It was a blast of untainted fury, and it tore through the membrane. It ripped the night in two. The whispering faltered. Galba grabbed his chainsword. He raised it high and let its snarl shred the whispering. ‘Awake!’ he shouted. ‘In the name of the Emperor, awake!’

The whispering stopped. The shadows withdrew. He could breathe again. The serfs were conscious now, sitting up and staring at him. They were frightened, but not of him. They did not look confused. He saw, on their faces, the mark of a collective nightmare.

He turned on his heel and marched out of the barracks. Kanshell was still on his knees. He was limp, whether with exhaustion or relief, Galba was not sure. ‘Keep everyone awake,’ he told the serf. He gave the order so Kanshell would have a purpose. He did not think anyone was likely to sleep now.

The singing of the colonists had stopped. The atmosphere of the base was tense, as though a storm, instead of having passed, was about to break. Galba strode towards the command post. He was not the only one. Many of his battle-brothers were converging on the base’s nerve centre. He felt eyes on him. He had expected that. He had raised an alarm.

Not all the legionaries were looking at him. Their faces, in the hard illumination of the base, were grim. They had the looks of men who knew they were at war, but did not understand the foe. He had not been alone, Galba saw. Some part, at least, of what had attacked him had also touched them.

This was no hallucination. He braced himself for the confrontation with Atticus. The captain would not be receptive to those words. Galba himself did not want to speak them. They raised too many questions. They attacked the foundations of reality. They undermined the regime of truth under which they all lived. But they must be spoken. They must be confronted.

Atticus was outside the command post, as if he had not moved since Galba and Darras had left him there. He stood with his legs spread, his arms folded. He was as immovable as the column of stone. He was not wearing his helmet. His single human eye shone with a flame as cold as the void. He was staring into the night with a pure, machinic hatred. Galba’s words died on his lips as he drew near.

There was nothing to say. Atticus knew.

The captain of 111th Clan-Company, X Legion, turned his terrible gaze on the Iron Hands. ‘We have an enemy on this planet,’ he said. ‘It attacks from the shadows. Bring it into the light.’ He uncrossed his arms, opening hands that had been designed to do nothing but destroy. ‘And I will annihilate it.’

And at dawn, something rose to the surface.

Eleven

The chosen ground
Beneath the surface
The need for comfort

The shadows came for Erephren during the night. The attack was sudden, and took her by surprise. All of her defences were directed towards the empyrean itself. They were the filters through which she looked at the madness. They did nothing to protect her from the power behind the shadows. It had a half-presence on the planet. Its influence was leaking through the barriers. Reality began to suffer distortions. The madness of the warp was acquiring an empirical substance on Pythos. It did not yet walk unfettered on the surface of the planet. But the madness was coming. Its advance guard was already strong.

Erephren was watching, with growing dismay, the course of the warp storms. A sea of perpetual turbulence had roused itself into a gale so monstrous, she risked everything in contemplating it. The source of the tempest was the Maelstrom. Hungry, raging with a sudden influx of power, it spread its reach to infinite horizons. Erephren saw some loyalist ships that had dared to venture into the cauldron. They foundered. Some were destroyed, and she saw every detail of their agony. Others disappeared into the heaving waves of unreality. She did not like to think what would be left of the minds of those on board, should those vessels ever reappear.

She searched in vain for the echoes of the Astronomican. There was no failure in her vision. The waves had submerged the great light.

And it was as she gazed upon the storm that the attack came. It invaded her chamber. She sensed the not-quite-presence as soon as it arrived. She was strong. She was quick. She shut her psychic senses to the warp and withdrew her consciousness from its clutches. She snapped her shield up.

Speed, strength and training did her no good. She was ready even for such horrors as bred in the zones of weak boundaries. But the dangers for which she was prepared were inchoate. They did not have volition. They were not sentient.

The shadows smashed her shield. They laughed, and the laughter was the scrape of razors over her skin. They roared, and they were the voice of a word: damnation. The voice smashed her into oblivion.

When she woke, it was to true blindness for the first time in her life. She gasped, fighting a smothering panic in the absolute winter of her senses. She felt the expansion of her chest, and that gave her back her body. She flexed her fingers. They scratched against a metal floor. So she had fallen from her throne. Her neck and the back of her head were sore; the brass antennae and mechadendrites that helped tune her mind to the warp had been torn from her when she fell.

Bit by bit, she acquired the knowledge of her location and condition. Her senses awoke from their paralysis. She gathered her identity and hugged it close. A terrible shame enveloped her. She had been weak. She had no idea how long she had lain unconscious, derelict in her duties.

Worse was her knowledge of what had happened. She had been attacked. There had been an attacker.

She pushed herself up off the floor. Her awareness of her surroundings returned to her, but imperfectly, as if they were a degraded hololith transmission. She reached for her staff. It was where it should be, resting against the throne. She clutched it, steadied her stance, then braced her mind. Cautiously, she reached out to the warp.

She grunted in pain. Warm tears of blood trickled from the corners of her eyes. Harsh, jagged, silver static disrupted her perception of the empyrean. It stabbed at her mind. It was claws and broken glass, absences in the shape of pain, distortions that were madness layered on madness. She withdrew before she collapsed again.

She wiped the blood from her cheeks. She steadied herself, found her core of strength and left her dark chamber. She had to speak to Atticus. Yesterday, she had assumed the warp storms were the inevitable result of random processes in that realm. The attack changed that. The implications were too immense for her to accept. The direction down which her thoughts were flowing had to be mistaken. But something had attacked her, and that must be reported.

There was very little sound in the command block. Erephren passed a few serfs, but she encountered no presence of the Iron Hands. As she approached the door to Atticus’s quarters, a woman emerged from them. ‘Mistress Erephren,’ the serf said. ‘I’m sorry, but Lord Atticus is not here.’

Erephren sensed the other woman’s deep bow. ‘Where is he?’ she asked.

‘He and a great many of the legionaries have gone to the settlement.’

‘Why?’

There was a hesitation. ‘I do not have the honour of the confidence–’ the woman began.

‘You have enough of the captain’s confidence to be given the duty of caring for his chamber,’ the astropath interrupted. ‘Serfs listen, observe and talk among themselves. Now you will enlighten me. What are the rumours?’

‘They say that something has been found there.’

‘And that is?’

‘I do not know, mistress.’

Erephren thought for a moment. The attack; the interference with her connection to the warp; this discovery, whatever it was, that had summoned away the leadership of the company: these things were linked. She had to inform Atticus about what had happened to her. ‘I need a vox operator,’ she told the woman.

‘I will summon one,’ the serf answered. But she did not leave immediately. Erephren heard an intake of breath, the sound of someone gathering courage to speak again.

‘What is your name?’ Erephren asked.

‘Agnes Tanaura, mistress.’

‘You wish to ask me something, Agnes?’

‘You do not believe that what happened last night was a simple warp effect, do you?’

‘I do not.’

‘Do you know what it was?’

‘No,’ she said. She was about to add that she would not engage in speculation, but then realised that Tanaura did not expect her to have an answer. The serf had one of her own. Whether presumption or courage was pushing the woman to talk, either was impressive enough to make Erephren listen. ‘Do you?’ she asked.

‘Not exactly,’ Tanaura said. ‘What I know is that it was something unholy.’

‘Unholy,’ Erephren repeated, bitterly disappointed. ‘You are risking severe sanction, using such a benighted term.’

‘Forgive me, mistress, but I must speak the truth, and it is the truth. You were touched by this evil in the night. I can see it.’ There was a rustle as Tanaura took a step forwards. ‘We are not alone in our fight, though,’ she said. ‘There is comfort. There is hope. There is a sacred–’

Erephren held up a hand. ‘Stop,’ she said. ‘You are blithering, and I do not have time for nonsense.’

‘The Emperor,’ Tanaura hurried on. ‘In His divinity, He will save us, but we must accept Him before it is too late.’ Erephren felt a tug on her robe. The serf was daring to clutch at her. ‘Please listen to me,’ Tanaura begged. ‘Please listen to what you must know, in your heart, to be true. The legionaries will listen to you. They must. Oh, they must.’ She was on the verge of weeping.

Erephren pulled her robe from Tanaura’s grasp. ‘Must they?’ The flush of contempt she felt was a relief. She was almost grateful to this woman and her forbidden superstition. She was being reminded of her true responsibilities, and jolted away from the temptations of irrationality that had loomed large since the attack. ‘Why is it so important that they listen?’

‘Because we must leave this place,’ Tanaura said, her voice very small.

Erephren snorted. ‘That is the extent of your faith? You believe, against His explicit teachings, that the Emperor is a god, but that He is too weak to be of aid to us?’

‘That… That isn’t what I mean…’

‘Then make yourself clear, and do so quickly.’

‘We may not have chosen the battleground wisely–’

‘We?’ Erephren demanded, enraged by the woman’s arrogance.

Tanaura stumbled backwards. ‘I did not intend to suggest–’

‘As you value your life, I hope you did not!’ Erephren tightened her grip on her staff. She was not cruel. But there were limits before effrontery must be punished.

‘Please understand,’ Tanaura begged. ‘Not all battles can be won. We already know this. Perhaps we face another Isstvan here. Perhaps the true struggle is elsewhere.’

Erephren’s rage subsided as she heard the agonised hope in the serf’s voice. The woman was no coward. She was acting as her conception of her duty dictated. When the astropath spoke again, she kept the threat from her tone. But she remained firm.

‘You may think so. But your worship is a delusion, and it is only by an act of mercy that I do not have you silenced.’ She paused for a moment, letting Tanaura realise her near escape. She went on, ‘And a delusion is not a weapon. It is a weakness. I follow the Emperor’s teachings, and I use the force of reason against our foe. Until such time as Captain Atticus declares otherwise, Pythos is ours. It is the key to the Tenth Legion’s ability to strike back at the traitors, and I will not turn from it, unless our commanding officer so orders.’ She leaned towards Tanaura, and the presence of the serf shrank before her. ‘This is my battle. Here. I will not retreat. I have been attacked, and I will make the enemy, whatever it is, rue the day it crossed my path.’

As she spoke, she felt the truth of her words gather iron. The terror of the night had evaporated, leaving a precipitate of cold rage.

‘Do you understand me?’ she demanded of the serf.

‘I do, mistress.’

‘Now summon the vox operator. There is work to be done.’

Atticus walked the edge of the pit. Galba and Darras followed. A few hundred metres away, Lacertus and his squad mounted guard over a second subsidence. ‘And the colonists have done no work on this?’ the captain asked.

‘They say they have not,’ Galba confirmed. He looked down into the deep chasm. ‘I do not see how they could have.’ The pit had opened up in front of the mound on which the lodge was built. It was forty metres wide and ten across. Its depth was hard to guess. It fell into darkness after about a hundred metres.

‘Though they have been industrious,’ said Darras.

It was true. During the night, the wall had been extended along half the perimeter of the plateau. The secure zone was twice what it had been when Galba and Darras had left the evening before.

‘Hundreds of people working without cease,’ Galba answered. ‘What they accomplished with the wall is well within the possible. This pit is not. And Lacertus saw no sign of explosives being used. The ground collapsed. That is all.’

‘Could the construction of their meeting places have been a factor?’ Darras wondered. A second lodge was nearing completion on the mound before the second pit.

‘No,’ said Atticus. ‘If the ground were that unstable, we would have known. I believe what caused the subsidence is a symptom of our problem, and not the cause.’ He paused, cocking his head to one side as he listened to his ear bead. Then he turned to the sergeants. ‘News from Mistress Erephren,’ he told them. ‘She had her own battle last night, and the attack continues. Her ability to read the warp is being sabotaged.’ He looked into the pit. ‘The subsidence is not our concern,’ he emphasised. ‘That is.’ He pointed at what was revealed in the pit.

Beneath the colonists’ lodge was a massive stone structure. The mound was nothing more than the peak of the squat dome of the building. It appeared to be made of the same sort of stone as the structure at the epicentre of the anomaly. But that column remained an ambiguity, neither clearly natural nor artificial. There was no such ambivalence before them now. Even so, what was visible of the cyclopean structure had a disturbingly seamless quality. Galba could see no joins, no mortar, no hint that the edifice had not been carved from a single mass of black rock. It was as if an entire cliff face had flowed into this shape, and then been buried by the passage of thousands of millennia. A similar structure was visible at the site of the second subsidence.

Galba said, ‘If this is what lies beneath two of the mounds…’

‘Yes,’ Atticus replied, turning around in a slow circle. ‘Is it also true of the other mounds?’

Galba followed Atticus’s example. He realised now how evenly spaced the four mounds were. Diagonal lines connecting them would meet in the centre of the plateau. ‘Why,’ he wondered, ‘has there been no subsidence at the other two locations? It has only happened where the colonists have been building.’

‘There must be a connection,’ said Darras. ‘We just can’t see it yet.’

‘If there is, we shall find it,’ Atticus declared. ‘What is important is that our enemy begins to show his hand, and so becomes vulnerable to counter-attack.’

Galba frowned. ‘How do you mean?’

Atticus pointed to the xenos structure. ‘No saurian built that. It is direct evidence of intelligent life on Pythos.’ He turned his gaze on Galba. ‘No ghost built this, either.’

Galba refused to be cowed. ‘How long would it take for natural processes to bury something like this? What evidence do we have that the race that constructed it is still with us?’

‘The fact of its return is evidence. Who else would have an interest in it? Beyond that, I care little for the nature of our enemy besides the best way to destroy it. The interference Mistress Erephren is experiencing will stymie our war effort. Our foe’s psychological attacks are also proving costly.’

‘What are your orders?’ Darras asked.

Atticus walked to the edge of the chasm. ‘We expose the truth,’ he said. ‘And we descend into the heart of the lie.’

There was more work than ever. There was urgency to it, too. Atticus had commanded that the full extent of the underground structure be revealed. All of the colonists had now been shipped to the plateau. Every serf not essential to the running of the base had been brought here, too. The command was a simple one: dig.

Kanshell did as was commanded. The equipment was limited. The Veritas Ferrum was equipped for destruction, not colonisation. Most of what was available had come with the refugee fleet, and what had been salvaged from the landings before the saurian onslaught was as worn and patchwork as the ships themselves. There were no earthmovers. There were shovels and picks, and many of those had been assembled from bits of wreckage. The task was immense. The means should have made it almost impossible. But the will and the hands were there. The colonists were eager to help. Half their number worked on the wall and held off marauding predators. For the moment, the saurian incursions were an occasional event, easily repulsed. The other half joined the serfs in attacking the ground at the base of the mounds.

Kanshell no longer held the hope of sleep induced by exhaustion. He knew that the night would bring screams, and there was nothing he could do except hope the screams were not his own. He still welcomed the work. It gave him focus during the day. It was something he could pretend was useful. Over vox-horns broadcasting the entire width and breadth of the plateau, Atticus promised that war was about to be brought to the enemy’s home. Kanshell wanted to believe him. But the more he dug, the more that was uncovered, the shakier his faith became.

His faith was shaken because of how quickly the work progressed. The earth seemed eager to give up its secrets. Kanshell, along with dozens of other workers, attacked the edges of the second pit. The ground fell away with every blow, tumbling down into the dark, pebbles and clods striking the face of the black structure. More of it was visible all the time, though its mystery deepened also. The scale of the building became more apparent. Kanshell wondered if it might not encircle the plateau. Atticus had directed other teams to start excavations at a point equidistant between the four mounds. So far, they had nothing but a deep hole to show for their efforts.

His faith was shaken because of the structure’s mystery. As it became exposed to light, it mocked rationality. The façade was a riot of ornate sculpture. There was nothing representational about the artwork. The twisting lines and bulges of the stonework were an abstract language of ghastly majesty. When Kanshell looked at the carvings directly, he saw power frozen into stone, and stone about to explode as power. He could not stare long. The designs hurt his head. They tried to strangle his eyes. His skin crawled so much, it felt like it was sloughing off his bones. When he averted his gaze, the torment changed its nature. His peripheral vision kept picking up movement. Serpentine beckoning called to him. When he looked, of course there was no movement. But the immobility was a mockery, a lie. The terror grew that the next time he looked, the stone would squirm, and that would be the moment of his end.

The colonists sang as they worked. They were as committed to the dig as they were to the wall. They transformed their labour into an act of worship. They showed no fear. Kanshell was sick with envy. On the faces of the other serfs, he saw the reflection of his own terrors. Their eyes jumped and skittered as his did. They were pale, taut from lack of sleep. The energy of their actions was fuelled by desperation. But there were some, frightened though they were, who seemed more composed. They were drawing on a deep reserve of inner strength. Kanshell saw something different in them. They had something in common with the colonists.

They had belief.

Atticus held off the descent until the excavations were well under way. Kanshell watched him march from one work site to another, evaluating. The captain observed with the dispassion of a cogitator. He did not rush his legionaries into the gulfs. He was gathering what intelligence could be gleaned, though Kanshell could not guess what the colossus learned from the gradual exposure. After three hours, though, he prepared to lead a mission into the largest chasm, before the first of the lodges that had been built.

Kanshell paused in his digging to watch the two squads gather at the lip of the drop. They anchored rappelling cables strong enough to support the weight of a Space Marine clad in power armour. A group of the Raven Guard joined them. They were wearing jump packs.

‘You are frightened,’ said a voice. It was deep as a mountain chain. Kanshell turned and looked up. Khi’dem of the Salamanders stood before him. Though the legionary wore his helmet, Kanshell sensed a stern kindness in his eyes. It was something he had never found in any of the Iron Hands, except Galba.

‘I am, lord,’ Kanshell said.

‘You should not be. You should have confidence in the Legiones Astartes. There is no xenos force that can stand before us.’

‘I know.’

Khi’dem cocked his head. ‘My words give you no comfort, do they?’

If any member of the Iron Tenth, even Galba, had asked that question, Kanshell would have answered honestly because, however much he might be reluctant to admit the truth of his weakness, he was more terrified of lying to his machine-like masters. Now, Kanshell felt the truth invited, rather than extracted, from him. ‘No,’ he admitted. ‘I’m sorry, lord, but they do not.’

‘Why is that?’

‘I…’

Had it been night, had he been ringed by the terrors that came with the dark, he would not have hesitated. Though the respite of the day was a weak one, it was enough to hold him back from a criminal admission.

Khi’dem took pity on him, and provided the answer himself. ‘It is because you think this is an enemy of a very different order.’

Kanshell gave the tiniest nod.

‘This belief is becoming commonplace in the ranks of the serfs. It is a mistaken one. Place your belief in your captain. I’m sure what you have experienced is terrifying, but these are attacks. If this were all a manifestation of how thin the barrier to the immaterium is on this planet, there would be little we could do. But an enemy can be fought. It is that simple.’

‘Yes, lord,’ Kanshell answered. No, he thought. It is not that simple.

The son of Vulkan watched him a moment longer, then walked away.

He knows I don’t believe him, Kanshell thought, his face flushing with shame.

He threw himself back into his work. He dislodged more clumps of earth that fell into the dark. The strip of ground on which he stood, between the chasm and the plateau’s slope, felt like thin ice. It was distressing to realise how much beneath his feet was hollow. The dark below was a maw that waited for him.

He kept working out of duty, not belief. He looked up at one point, and saw that the squads had gone into the chasm. Their brothers stood guard over the cables. Kanshell looked away, trying to summon the confidence Khi’dem had said he should feel. He failed.

And then, sooner than he would have wished, his shift ended. Evening was closing its grip on Pythos, and the moment came to return to the base.

There was enough clear landing space at both the base and the settlement for a troop transport to be able to ferry the large numbers of serfs back and forth. When Kanshell alighted from the crowded hold, he went, for the first time in his life, looking for Tanaura.

He spotted her near the landing pad. More supplies were being brought down from the Veritas Ferrum, and she was among those hauling plasteel crates of ammunition to the armoury that occupied the north-east corner of the base. She was looking as grim as he felt. He almost despaired, but he had nowhere else to turn, so he followed her to the armoury, and waited outside its hangar door for her to emerge.

‘Agnes,’ he said.

She turned, surprised. ‘Jerune? What is it?’

‘I need to speak with you.’

She took a trembling breath. She was more than exhausted and scared. She seemed defeated. ‘Why?’ she asked.

Kanshell hesitated. Was her faith no stronger than his, then? The evening’s gathering darkness rushed forward. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing.’ He turned to go.

‘Wait,’ she caught his arm. She held it with the ferocity of sudden, desperate hope. ‘Tell me.’ Her need was at least as great as his.

‘The things that have been happening,’ he began. ‘The things that I’ve seen…’ This was more difficult than he had expected. ‘I don’t…’

Even now, with his old belief structure in ruins, his loyalty made it impossible to speak what he felt. It was too much like betrayal.

Tanaura helped him. ‘The secular universe cannot explain these things.’

‘That’s right,’ he said, grateful. The constriction around his chest lessened. The relief was minute, but it was real.

‘What is it you’re looking for?’ she asked.

‘Strength,’ he answered. ‘Hope.’

She was suddenly possessed by both. ‘There is hope,’ she said. ‘And it will grant you strength.’

‘Will it help me against… against the night?’

‘It will help you face the night.’

‘Is that all?’

‘The Emperor calls on all of us to have courage. And doesn’t it help to know that though the forces of darkness are real, so is the force of light?’

Kanshell thought about that. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, and that admission, that first acceptance of what Tanaura preached, opened a door in his psyche. It opened a door to the sun. Yes, he thought. Yes. He had always had faith in the Emperor, but to know Him as a god was to realise there were no barriers of distance to His power. The Emperor could see him here. The Emperor could reach him here. The warmth that came with the retreat of despair flowed through his veins.

‘Yes,’ he said aloud. He smiled.

‘The Emperor protects,’ Tanaura said.

‘The Emperor protects,’ Kanshell repeated.

That night, he was curled in his bunk, awaiting the horrors that stalked the night. He was terrified. The horrors arrived, walking on dreams of shadow. They made the sleepers gibber and sing. They made the waking scream. But Kanshell clutched a copy of the Lectitio Divinitatus to his heart, and he was comforted.

Twelve

Down
Machine
Flood

The Iron Hands rappelled down the façade. The Raven Guard preceded them using their jump packs. It was the first time that Ptero’s Assault squad had brought its true calling to bear. The two squads from the X Legion were led by Atticus and Galba. Darras had accepted his squad’s posting as guards at the mouth of the pit with ill grace.

‘I mean no disrespect, brother-captain,’ he had said, ‘but why?’

‘Because this is a reconnaissance mission, not an invasion. And because Sergeant Galba has, of all of us, had the most intimate contact with the enemy. If the foe approaches us below, I want as much warning as possible.’

He still believes I am some sort of psyker, Galba thought. He resented the idea, but if Atticus thought he could be useful, so be it. He knew his duty.

He pushed off from the stone wall. Did it twitch beneath his boots? Did his heels sink into it for a moment, as if it were flesh? Did he see the relief work writhe, like a nest of serpents? No, none of these things happened. He could be sure, he hoped, of that. Yet he felt an atavistic disgust as acutely as if they had.

He dropped another dozen metres, pushed off again, and came down on a wide ledge where Atticus and his squad were waiting. Below, the pit fell away into dark silence. The ledge was a kind of terrace outside an opening in the wall.

‘This is the work of unhealthy minds,’ Atticus said, eyeing the entrance. ‘We will be doing the galaxy a service by exterminating them.’

The architecture of the entrance was as disturbing as every other aspect of the façade. Galba did not know if he was facing a window or a doorway. It rose to a pointed arch, but the sides were asymmetrical, curving in and away from each other. Looked at directly, the entrance was a ragged wound in stone flesh. Seen from the corner of the eye, it was a dance. The arch was narrow, and angled slightly off the vertical. It stabbed at the eye, and it took Galba a moment to realise the full extent of its perversion.

‘The sides don’t meet,’ he said, pointing. The arch was an asymptote. The sides closed with each other, then narrowed to a razor line, but they never joined. The arch was a lie.

‘That isn’t possible,’ Techmarine Camnus said, offended. ‘That must be a fissure.’

‘No,’ said Atticus. There was a barely audible whir as his bionic eye moved up the face of the building, adjusting wavelengths to adapt to the lack of light, magnifying the objects of his gaze. ‘Brother Galba is correct. The division becomes part of the ornamentation. It goes all the way up.’

Camnus turned his own artificial eyes on the arch. ‘The building is divided into two?’ he wondered.

‘Worse than that,’ said Galba. He pointed to the left, then right, at other openings. Each had its own particular deformation, as if once finished, the structure had begun to melt. The arches visible in the gloom had the same infinitesimal gap. The façade, which had appeared seamless at first, upon closer inspection was a web of tiny gaps. It was a three-dimensional mosaic.

‘Not possible,’ Camnus said again, only now his denial was an expression of horror.

‘It was built into the hillside, that is all,’ Atticus said. ‘It is being held up by the earth into which it is sunk.’

The ledge was at its widest in front of the centre of the opening. At its edge was a curved, tapering cylinder twice the height of a legionary. It looked like an enormous tusk, projecting into the empty air of the pit. Camnus walked the few steps over to examine it. His servo-arm shone a beam over the black stone. He lit up the same fractal division. What looked like an arabesque of cracks glowed. Nothing prevented the tusk from falling to pieces, unless it was that aesthetics had a gravity of their own.

‘Brother-captain,’ Camnus said, ‘I can think of no plausible explanation for what we are seeing.’

‘It is an effect of the warp,’ Atticus replied. ‘More of the leakage in this region. We should not be surprised by aberrations.’

‘With respect, their existence is not what is troubling,’ Galba put in. ‘It is the organised form in which they appear. Something has moulded the stuff of the warp into this shape.’

‘If it can affect the material world, it can be destroyed by it,’ said Atticus.

The Raven Guard had continued further down, and now returned to the ledge, wounding the darkness with the glare from their jump packs.

‘Well?’ Atticus asked. His acceptance of the other Legions was as grudging as ever. He refused to extend more than the barest courtesy. But he was working with them. Galba was relieved that he was not being called on to play the diplomat.

No, said the unwelcome voice in his head. You are not the diplomat anymore. You are the psyker.

Ptero said, ‘The architecture is much the same as far as this crevasse descends. Some of the structure is still buried, however. We cannot tell how much.’

‘Are there any openings that appear more important than the others?’

‘No. To the contrary…’ Ptero hesitated. ‘Each opening is different in shape from all the others. But I am struck by the impression that they are also copies.’

‘Copies?’

‘I do not want to say that this building was created through replication.’

‘Yet you have just done so.’

‘Unwillingly, as I said.’

Atticus made the electronic grunt that was his equivalent of a snort. ‘These are speculations that might have interested remembrancers. They do nothing to advance our campaign.’ He marched to the opening. The squads fell in behind him.

Crossing the threshold felt like penetrating a membrane. Galba expected to find himself in a narrow tunnel, expected the walls to contract, then spasm, a gag reflex to expel the intruders. Instead, the squads were in a vast chamber. From without, the interior had appeared to be in total darkness. Inside, there was faint illumination. A dull red wash, light from blood, filled the space, overwhelming the feeble glow from the exterior. The ceiling was a distant vault, supported by pillars that all leaned off the vertical. The walls were hundreds of metres away to the left and right. Fifty metres forwards was a blank impassivity. The back wall corresponded with the rise of the plateau. Behind them, the wall was broken up by rows of the twisted arch openings.

‘Auspex,’ said Atticus.

‘Nothing,’ Camnus answered.

‘Energy sources?’

‘None.’

‘Naturally. What can you tell me, Techmarine?’

‘Captain, even this space defies a coherent interpretation. The readings are contradictory and keep shifting.’

Atticus nodded. ‘What was true moments ago is true now. The warp is at work here. What it has created is stable, so we shall navigate it until we find the enemy where he cowers from our advance.’

They moved off. Straight ahead, near the rear wall, a ramp descended to the next level. Its slope was steep. The sharp diagonal took the legionaries down into a chamber identical to the one above. There was a ramp here, too, taking them to another space, another twin. And then another ramp.

The pattern very quickly became dizzying. If it were not for the variations in the angles of the twisted pillars, Galba might have started to think they were descending through the same vast room over and over again. There was an eerie purposefulness to the reproduction of the chambers. There was meaning here, though he could not guess what it was. He was very conscious of the size of the rooms. They were enclosures, yet they were vast, and so they became an incarnation of the idea of space. As they repeated, they gestured towards the infinite. There was nothing functional about them. There was nothing stored in them. But they did mean something. There were voices that had shaped this stone. There was intent that had bathed it in uniform, shadowless crimson.

Atticus was not interested in the voices or what they had to say. His one purpose was to march and kill. He would bring the rational to Pythos in the form of unblinking destruction. Galba was not satisfied. He wanted to understand. If they did not know what they were fighting, how could they hope to destroy it? Perhaps, if he could hear what was being said, he would know how to cast those words into silence.

If he knew what this building meant, he might be able to anticipate its attack.

They reached the bottom level. Several floors up, the exterior openings had begun to be blocked by earth and rock. The squads were now in the still-buried depths of the structure. The glow remained unaltered. This room was the close kin to all the others through which they had passed, but it had no windows at all. Instead, the exterior wall had a single, circular opening, giving onto a stone tunnel leading towards the centre of the plateau. Its shape made Galba think more of a pipe than a passageway. It advanced only about fifteen metres before a cave-in blocked the way. There were no other paths. Their journey ended here.

‘I still have no readings,’ Camnus said before Atticus asked.

The captain said nothing for a moment. His helmet lenses appeared to shine with a brighter red, piercing the ambient glow with his frustration. ‘This ruin was uncovered by means that were not natural. There was a force at work. Its source must be somewhere.’

‘But perhaps not here,’ Camnus suggested. ‘The enemy could be operating at some distance from here.’

‘Where? To what end?’ Atticus did not sound as if he were expecting answers.

Galba looked at the curve of the pipe’s walls. There was something about the design of the stonework that nagged at him. He examined it more closely. It was real brickwork here, not the impossible construction of the main ruins. The seams were almost invisible, the stones meeting in perfect joins without need for mortar. And each stone was carved with the image of a room like the ones in which he had just stood. There were the pillars, the rows of windows, the vast space, so reduced that they were just abstract lines.

Lines that connected.

Like a circuit.

The light dawned. ‘This is a machine,’ Galba said.

‘A machine,’ Atticus repeated, as if Galba had blasphemed.

‘Look.’ He pointed to the walls. ‘We have been seeing so much repetition, and spaces that make no sense on their own. They are meant to work together. Like cells.’

‘To do what?’ Camnus asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Galba admitted. ‘But we can see the energy that is filling them.’

‘I see nothing that cannot be explained by the vagaries of the warp,’ said Atticus. ‘If it is a machine, it is an inert one, and this knowledge is useless to me.’ He strode back down the pipe, towards the chamber. ‘In fact, this entire action has been useless. This structure is dead. We must seek our enemy elsewhere.’

Galba hung back for a moment. He ran a gauntlet over the rubble blocking the way. It crumbled to the touch, looser than he had imagined, though shifting it would still be a major undertaking. He noticed that the Raven Guard were also waiting. ‘Something?’ Ptero asked.

‘No.’

‘You sense nothing?’ Ptero had removed his helmet, and was watching Galba closely.

‘No.’ The other warrior’s focused stare made him uncomfortable. ‘Do you?’

‘I do not.’ The Raven Guard’s answer seemed incomplete.

Galba headed off to rejoin his squad. He took three steps, and Ptero spoke again, completing the response. ‘Doesn’t it seem like we should?’

‘No,’ Galba told him, more quickly, and with more emphasis than he intended. No, he repeated to himself as he picked up his pace. No.

As the squads climbed back up the last ramp, the denial matched the rhythm of the thuds of his boots against stone. It sounded far more hollow. He was not sure what Ptero was implying. He had his suspicions. He rejected them all. Yet he also felt that, at a level neither of them understood, the Raven Guard was correct. Galba should sense something. All of them should. Atticus was wrong. The machine was not inert. It might be dormant. Galba suspected it was poised. There was energy here beyond a sick glow. There had to be. In this he agreed with his captain: the revelation of the structure was itself evidence of great power at work. He and his battle-brothers were moving through its domain. They had not found the enemy they expected. Perhaps they were inside it.

What will you tell the captain? he asked himself. How will you convince him that this is the enemy. Will you tell him it is a form of Titan? Is that what you believe?

He did not know. He was not sure what he believed, but as the Iron Hands entered the first of the cells above the foundation level, he was filled with a terrible sense of urgency. There was a threat here. Atticus had to take it with the utmost seriousness.

He had sensed nothing when Ptero had spoken to him. But he felt it now. It’s coming, the inner voice said. The words were as clear as if they had been spoken aloud. The voice did not sound like his own. Warn them, it said. It was the rasp of rusted hinges, crumbling skulls, and bitter stone. Warn them, it said, and a thing of thoughts and iron murder parted its lips in an anticipatory grin. Galba’s denial evaporated. The sound of his breath became deafening inside his helmet. Festering teeth gnawed at his consciousness. Warn them, said the whisper. It’s coming, said the whisper, and once again he could see it, hovering just behind the crimson glow. The taste of shadows filled his mouth. Look to your right.

He looked. He faced the blocked windows. There was nothing to see.

Warn them.

‘Captain!’ he called. ‘The exterior wall! We are under attack!’

The legionaries rotated as a single unit, bolters ready. There were five rows of arches, ten openings in each row. Gun barrels panned and tilted, trying to cover a huge field of attack. Nothing showed in the red wash. There was no sound.

‘Brother-sergeant?’ Atticus said over the combat channel. ‘What have you detected?’

Galba hesitated. The urgency was still growing. Something was rushing at them like a mag-lev train. ‘I…’ he said, and that was all. He could be no more precise. He could not pinpoint the source of the attack.

The sound arrived. It was a scrabbling crunch of stone and scrape of earth. It was massive, a rogue wave of gravel. The chamber shook with the reverberations. Then rubble burst inward from all the arches. Behind it came the invading force. The creatures resembled maggots. They were pale, the length of a man and as thick as an armoured Space Marine. Though they had no eyes, they had heads of a kind, and above and beneath them were pairs of forcipules, short legs angled towards each other and extending just beyond the circular, saw-toothed mouths. They snapped together with the speed of a fly’s beating wings. Their edges rubbed, creating a noise like thousands of sabres forever being pulled from scabbards.

The maggots were a writhing flood. They cascaded into the chamber, a torrent of hunger the colour of diseased bone. Over the rustling of bodies was the wet, gurgling hiss of the monsters as they flowed over each other. They rushed for the legionaries, who opened fire. For a full second, Iron Hands and Raven Guard poured shells into the storm surge of devouring life. Maggots exploded in showers of blood, but the chamber continued to fill. The onrush of squirming horrors was unending. The legionaries were firing into a rising tide.

‘Up!’ Atticus commanded. The squads pounded up the ramp, sending bursts behind them, fighting to delay the flood by even a few moments. Bringing up the rear, the Raven Guard tossed frag grenades. The explosions were muffled. White, torn muscle flew up in a geyser. The blasts punched craters into the flesh. The gaps filled an instant later. One of Ptero’s brothers was swallowed by the rising tide.

As the squads neared the top of the ramp, they heard the same slithering, crawling roar from above. The maggots were pouring in there too. The legionaries ran straight into the suffocating mass. Firearms were useless. Galba barely had time to swap his bolter for his chainsword before he was engulfed. He fought blind. All light was extinguished by the ocean of flesh. The creatures rose up over and around him like quicksand. Coils wrapped around his legs and torso. Warning runes lit up as the pressure tested the limits of his armour’s strength. Teeth ground against ceramite. His blade tore through the maggots.

He could barely move his arms, but whatever touched the sword was shredded, and that was just enough to allow him to take one step forwards, then another. He was clutched by a fist, one whose fingers tightened, relaxed, and tightened again. Blood coated everything. His chainsword coughed as gore threatened to clog it. The bodies of the maggots on which he trod became slippery. Some burst beneath his weight, and the slick made his footing even more treacherous. If he fell, death would be swift.

There was nothing but the crushing grubs, nothing but the fist and the teeth. Galba butchered, sawed, shredded and moved upwards one gradual step after another. He had no sense of progress. He fought alone. It was impossible to link up with his nearest brothers. The only signs that they still existed were his retinal displays and the constant shouts over the vox.

And there was the presence of Atticus. The captain’s voice was there always. He commanded, he exhorted, he cursed the foe with creative venom, and his tone never varied from the calm of implacable, endless murder. At the head of the advance, he was the first to reach the next level. It fell to him to find the next ramp by feel alone, and call out the directions to the warriors who followed. Galba growled in frustration when that happened, extinguishing the faint hope that the level above was clear of maggots. He growled again, in anger, when he heard a series of sharp, splintering cracks and the identification rune of Brother Ennius pulsed red, then winked out. Three more runes went dark before the squads reached the top of the next ramp.

‘Push on, brothers,’ Atticus ordered. ‘There will be no defeat for us here. There can be no defeat, because we battle the flesh, and the flesh is weak. Behold the flesh at its most base. This is what we have risen above forever. The machine cannot be brought low by this vile excess. Let the monsters come. Let them fill this chasm to the top. They cannot stop us, because they are that which is past, and we are on the journey to the pure strength of the mechanical.’ There were no pauses in his speech. There were no grunts of effort. He spoke with a metronomic tempo. Each syllable was the punctuation of a blow. Every word was the death of another grub. Every sentence was a step closer to victory.

As he listened, even as he slipped on a twisting body and almost fell, Galba was seized by the conviction of the inevitability of victory. For how could such things of flesh possibly overwhelm the will, forged and tempered into a resilience beyond steel, of Atticus? The impossibility of such an event gave him the strength he needed to remain standing, to slice away once more at the crushing fingers of the fist, and to take another step.

Every metre the legionaries climbed was a battle. And every metre was the same. The fist would never let them go.

Until, suddenly, it did.

They reached a level that was not still buried, and that the rising tide of invertebrates had not reached. Galba ripped through another maggot that had wrapped itself around his torso, shoved the blade up through the jaws of another, and then he was out. He could see. He had the freedom of movement. He stayed long enough to help the rest of the rearguard, and then he was racing upwards with the remainder of the squads.

We are victors, he told himself. We are not survivors. We are victors.

Behind them came the maggots, the squirming froth of an overflowing cauldron. The Space Marines were faster. They put distance between themselves and the hungry flesh. As they ran, Galba heard Atticus vox to Darras, ordering him to send down more climb-cables. They reached the top level of the chambers, and re-emerged on the ledge. The cables were not strong enough to support the weight of more than two legionaries at a time, and now the wait began.

‘We shall depart last,’ Ptero said.

Atticus hesitated before answering, visibly galled by the prospect of owing any debt to the other Legion. But the Raven Guard had their jump packs. They could leave at the last second. Atticus gave a curt nod, conceding necessity. He ordered the rest of the legionaries up ahead of him. Galba stood at his side at the threshold to the chamber, also waiting to the last. He stared into the crimson. There was nothing to see yet, but he could hear the rising tide of the maggots. The sound of the obscene excess of life made him regret his own flesh. He envied his captain’s near-total purity. He felt a renewed love of the machine, its order and its logic. The flesh was weakness and disorder. It was a threat, as the maggots were, only through grotesque overabundance.

He had wondered if Atticus had sacrificed too much in his journey towards the absolutely machinic. He had wondered if too much of the human had been cut away. In this moment, his doubts fled. To become the machine was to become order. It was to take a stand against the perverse. The maggots were life as it too often was. Atticus was life as it could be: uncompromising, unbending, precise, free of ambiguity. Atticus was an embodied fragment of the Emperor’s dream. That dream was in danger. Galba did not know if its grand design could be saved, but portions of it could be. There it was, standing invincible in Atticus. His own duty lay before him, crystalline. He must walk the same path. He, too, must be order. He must be the dream.

There might be no other way to defeat the nightmares.

Now Camnus and the last of the Iron Hands were climbing. Another few minutes and it would be time to leave this cursed ground. The squirming hiss and rush of the maggots drew closer. The stone of the chamber began to vibrate.

‘You knew,’ Atticus said.

‘Captain?’

‘You warned us of the attack. Before there was any sign of it. You knew.’

‘I didn’t… That is…’

‘How did you know?’

The whispers. The grin. The voice that commanded. Reveal these things, and then what?

‘I’m not sure,’ he said. That was true, at least.

‘Then be sure,’ Atticus told him.

The maggots arrived. They boiled up the ramp, covering the floor in a heaving mass. Standing just before them, the four remaining Raven Guard sent more frag grenades into the creatures. The explosives landed in a line, creating a barrage. Ptero and his brothers followed the blasts with a stream of fire, stemming the flow for a few seconds.

But only a few. The maggots came on, piling one on top of each other, surging forwards in a gathering wave.

‘Captain Atticus,’ Ptero said. ‘It is time.’

Wordlessly, Atticus turned his head to Galba. The sergeant took a step back and looked up the façade. Camnus and the others were close to the top. He would be adding undue strain to the cable, but Ptero was right. They had stayed as long as possible. He slammed his gauntlets to his chest in the sign of the aquila, and began to climb. He looked down and saw Atticus stride out onto the ledge. He stood beside one of the other cables.

‘You have my thanks, Raven Guard,’ the captain said. ‘Your duties here are at an end.’ He still did not take the cable. Galba paused and watched.

The black-armoured warriors of the XIX Legion shot out of the structure. The exhaust on their jump packs flared as they rose skyward. Only then did Atticus grasp the cable and begin to climb. His feet left the ground just as the wave crashed through the arch. He did not look down, refusing to grant his foe anything but the most sovereign contempt. He climbed hand over hand, and was soon level with Galba. The two legionaries moved up the lines.

Galba did look down. The momentum of the maggots’ rush was such that they plunged from the openings in an obscene cataract. But then the fall slowed bit by bit, and then the grubs began crawling up the façade. ‘They are not done with us,’ he said.

Atticus grunted. ‘Good. Because I am not done with them.’ Then, ‘Sergeant Darras, have flamers ready.’

‘Will we have enough promethium?’ Galba asked.

‘I will use my hands if necessary.’

Before they were halfway up, the strain on the lines eased as the other Iron Hands reached the top. No longer concerned with snapping the cables with sudden jerks and swings, Galba and Atticus climbed faster, gaining a few more seconds on the maggots that now covered the façade like a squirming veil. When they reached the lip of the chasm, Darras and two others were waiting with flamers.

Now Atticus did look down. He leaned over the edge, gauging the movements below. ‘Stand at the edge,’ he ordered. ‘Close together, and remain visible. Be prey. Give them a target. That will keep them concentrated.’

The Iron Hands joined him. He was right, Galba saw. Though they had no eyes, the maggots were somehow aware of their presence, and grouped closer together instead of spreading over the entire face of the structure. They became a rippling, pale wedge.

The twilight of Pythos was falling. The perpetual cloud cover permitted no sunset. There was only the slow death of the day, a layering of shrouds until all was black. During the final breath of light, when the torches that dotted the wall and the infant settlement were lit but did not yet have full night against which to stand out, the maggots reached the surface.

‘Welcome them,’ Atticus said.

The light of the flamers was searing. The stench of the burning creatures was corrosive. Galba did not mind. It was the smell of retribution, of purgation. It was evidence of the corrupted flesh being excised from a universe that demanded order. Darras and his men aimed their flamers at a steep angle, sending the wash of burning promethium over long swaths of the wedge. The maggots burned well, some of them swelling and popping as noxious gases ignited within their bodies. Writhing and hissing, they fell, and set fire to their kin as they dropped. The Iron Hands launched the lethal streams in quick bursts, setting one section of the advance alight, then another, moving the barrels back and forth along an arc, bringing death to the entire width of the undulating mass. The fires spread, moving quickly beyond the range of the flamers. The maggots came on, driven by mindless hunger. They rushed to their doom.

‘A gunship could launch a Hellfury strike into the gap,’ Camnus suggested.

‘We will be done soon enough,’ Atticus said.

In answer to his will, the flames broadened their reach, embracing the vermin. As night fell, the entire façade was a curtain of fire.

‘Purged,’ said Atticus, echoing Galba’s own thoughts. He turned his back on the dying enemy and stepped away from the edge. ‘So we have spectators,’ he muttered.

Galba turned around. A large crowd of the colonists had gathered. Their eyes glittered, reflecting the flames that licked out from the chasm.

‘Do you understand what you see?’ Atticus asked them, his voice a harsh, electronic slash in the night. ‘You are subjects of the Imperium. You are subject to the Emperor’s will. This is the fate of anything, animal, xenos or man, that would defy that will. Work well, fight hard. Earn our protection. Or you will earn our mercy.’

The last word became a hiss. Galba did not blink at the contempt. As he looked at the crowd of mortals, he saw a collection of the flesh. How different were they, in their weakness, from the immolated insects? Was Khi’dem right, in the end, to see them as any real use? Unless they were able to protect this settlement on their own, they were a drain on precious resources. And here they were, watching war from the sidelines. Was that eagerness he saw on their faces? Yes, it was.

‘Do you hear me?’ Atticus demanded. His voice was an electronic whip, his body a motionless silhouette, an angry god of war backlit by the flames of the hell he had called into being.

The people recoiled. But when they cried out that they heard, they did so with more excitement, and less fear, than Galba had expected. He felt the gulf between himself and the mortal variant of humanity widen. The flesh was becoming incomprehensible to him.

But then the face of Kanshell flashed before his mind’s eye. He saw the serf’s undying loyalty, and his mortal terror. His contempt withered. His pity bloomed, even for the sheep before him. He vacillated between hatred of the flesh and the need to protect it, and then realised that Atticus was now looking at him.

‘Are there more?’ the captain asked. His voice was quiet, for Galba’s ears only. His tone was cold.

‘More?’

‘Is there another attack imminent?’

‘Brother-captain, I don’t know.’

‘You knew down below.’

‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘But not why.’

Atticus leaned in towards him. ‘Listen well, brother-sergeant. You will inform me of any such information you acquire, immediately.’

‘Of course, but I–’

‘Remember this, though. No matter what the state of the Imperium, this Legion remains faithful to the Emperor’s commands. I will brook no violation of the Edict of Nikaea. I will tolerate no sorcery in our midst. Do you understand?’

‘I am not a psyker, captain. I am–’

‘Do you hear me?’

‘I do, my lord.’ He heard the voice of the machine-warrior. He wondered what other voices he would hear again, and what they would cost him.

Thirteen

Taking stock
The fires of faith
The dance

‘That was an impressive speech,’ Khi’dem said.

Ptero nodded. ‘Perhaps a telling one, too.’

They stood beneath the palisade, watching the crowd disperse after Atticus’s harangue.

‘He has no love for mortals,’ Khi’dem admitted. ‘That is nothing new. Do you see this as evidence that his antipathy is becoming something more dangerous?’

‘No,’ Ptero said after a moment. ‘Not yet. Do you?’

‘I do not.’ Khi’dem told himself that he was not being foolish in his optimism. He knew what the consequences of ignoring danger signs could be. He also knew how little the remaining Salamanders and Raven Guard would be able to do should the worst occur. There were four of his battle-brothers remaining, one more than Ptero’s contingent. ‘He was explicit in demanding loyalty to the Emperor,’ he went on. ‘I heard contempt. I witnessed a leader who is quite willing to govern his charges through fear. But he is doing nothing criminal. I disagree with his means, but I cannot find fault with the goals.’ He gave Ptero a crooked smile. ‘Please tell me that I am speaking from reason and not from hope.’

Ptero’s laugh was dry and very brief. ‘How will you know that my reassurance has a basis that is any more sound?’

‘Then we are left where we have always been. We must have faith in our brother.’

‘Faith,’ Ptero muttered. ‘The Emperor has taught us to regard that word with suspicion. Perhaps, if we had done so with greater rigour, the Imperium would not have come to this.’

‘He cast down faith in false gods,’ Khi’dem corrected gently. ‘Not faith in each other. Or in the dream of the Imperium. He has shown faith in His children.’

‘And this is how we have repaid it.’ There was no cynicism in Ptero’s words. Only an enormous grief.

‘We will yet prove worthy of it. We must.’

‘Agreed,’ Ptero said, and they watched the dying of the flames in silence for a minute.

Khi’dem cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry for the loss of your brother down there.’

‘Thank you. The life on this planet…’ Ptero shook his head. ‘Its absolute hostility should not surprise me any longer, but it does. It makes no sense at all. I still say it cannot be natural.’

‘If it was engineered, that gives further credence to Atticus’s belief that there is an enemy intelligence working against us.’

‘Of that, I have no doubt.’

Khi’dem chose his words carefully. ‘You have evidence, then, that most of us would be unable to perceive?’

Ptero smiled. ‘Yes, brother, I was once of my Legion’s Librarius. But I have not been acting in violation of Nikaea.’

‘I never thought you were.’

‘I have no wish to conceal what I am. It is, after all, no longer relevant under the Edict. But I did think it… politic… not to trumpet my nature before Atticus.’

‘Mutations do not sit well with his understanding of a proper, regimented universe,’ Khi’dem concurred. ‘I’m sure he sees them as a great failing.’

‘The flesh is unstable. Therefore it is weak.’

‘Quite. I applaud your wisdom. But tell me, your battle against those insects…’

‘I do not believe it was a directed attack. Simply more of this world’s general malignity.’

‘You don’t sound entirely sure.’

Ptero grimaced. ‘Not entirely, no. Our enemy, whoever it is, uses the powers of the immaterium. That much is clear from the attacks on our base. There have been such currents in the warp during the nights… Keeping my abilities in check has been painful. Today, I detected no more than a faint ripple. Not enough to direct an attack on that scale.’

‘But?’

‘But Sergeant Galba warned us of the assault just before it happened. Before there was the slightest sign of the insects’ approach.’

‘Is he…?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘How is this possible?’

‘It should not be.’ Even in the dark, Khi’dem could see how troubled Ptero’s face was. ‘How this came to pass does not worry me as much as why.’

The fire was done. There were no power generators in the settlement, and its only light now came from the torches scattered over the grounds. An oily, putrescent smoke drifted over the plateau from the chasm. It carried the stench of a rancid sea. Khi’dem thought of cancers eating at dreams, hope and brotherhood. ‘All we are doing is watching and waiting,’ he said. ‘If we are not careful, we will watch and wait until doom is inevitable. We both know something is going very wrong here. We must take action.’ Even as he spoke, he thought, Grand words, you poor fool. Go ahead, then. Take action. Oh, and what action would that be, exactly?

But Ptero was nodding. ‘There is sorcery at work. We must counter it.’

‘Careful,’ Khi’dem cautioned.

‘I will not disobey the Emperor’s will. But there is one among us who is a sanctioned psyker, and who might be strong enough to do some good.’

‘The astropath,’ Khi’dem said.

The night was a bad one. Again. So were the ones that followed. Terror had been Kanshell’s shadow since the arrival on Pythos. He could not shake it. It clung to his heels. It capered at his back and stretched its darkness before him. He did catch broken shards of sleep, exhaustion plunging him into unconsciousness, where he wrestled with nightmares that mirrored the ones that slithered through the night of his waking life.

He was not alone in confronting the horrors of the dark, but this was no comfort. The people around him had the same haunted look, the same sunken features, the same taut, nervous energy. They would be running, if only there was a refuge to which they might run. There was no comfort, because when the night came, and reached for them all with its terrors, they could not reach for each other. Kanshell, like all the others, curled into a tighter and tighter ball, as if he might curl into nothingness and so avoid the gaze of the thing that walked behind the dark. There was nowhere to hide. There was no way to fight. There was nothing to do but tremble and whimper and hope that this night was not his turn. Nothing to do but pray that the following morning, he would not be the one found mad or dead.

His prayers were answered, yet each day someone else’s were not. No matter what precautions Atticus ordered, no matter how many guards were posted, or how frequent the security sweeps through the camp, the deaths continued. Always one or two serfs, never more, but also without fail. It was as if the curse that haunted the camp were taunting the captain, dancing a macabre waltz to its own tune and paying no attention to the futile efforts of the Iron Hands.

There was nothing the legionaries could do to stem the slow attrition. And so the fear spread. It grew. It intensified. It was a venom of deep, complex vintage. Its vines grew from the toxic soil of Isstvan V. The fact of defeat formed a rich loam and there festered the anticipation of more terror and grief. The nights did not disappoint. They were the consummation of dark expectation, and each dawn was another forced drink from the poisoned chalice. Day after day, the chalice filled higher. When it overflowed, Kanshell knew, the likes of him would drown in the horror. There would be nothing left of the mortal psyches. The base would become an asylum. Then a sepulchre.

If the Iron Hands were helpless against the cancer, what could its victims do? All Kanshell asked was the chance to fulfil his duty. But there were no actions to take against the terrors. The visitations stalked the shadows on spider limbs. They brought the worst dreams of madness to the surface, and made them real. But the visitor itself was not real, and so could not be fought.

No, not real yet, a slithering promise whispered to the back of Kanshell’s neck. Not quite yet, but oh, how close, how very, very close. A little more effort. A little more patience.

Sometimes, he thought he heard hissing during the day. Sometimes, during the grey noon of Pythos, a chuckle like the scrape of a spade on dry skulls would make him start. He would turn and look, and there would be nothing there.

Not yet. Not quite yet.

There was nothing to do but pray. He had abandoned his faith in the rational. It lay in blackened ruins. It could not stand up to the nights of Pythos. He could draw no strength from it. Hewing to it would be an act of mortal foolishness. He would be hanging on to a lie, rushing headlong into the jaws of the coming evil. He no longer felt any shame in his apostasy. And truly, was it not supremely rational, when confronted by the proof of the daemonic, to turn to the divine for succour?

He attended his first meeting the morning after he spent the night behind the shield of the Lectitio Divinitatus. Tanaura led a group prayer in a corner of the mess, snatching a few moments for communal comfort just before the serfs plunged into their allotted tasks. Kanshell approached the gathering tentatively. He was not sure if there were rituals he should observe, or if the worshippers were even aware of his presence.

He needn’t have worried. ‘Jerune,’ Tanaura said as he came near. ‘Join us.’

The circle parted, then embraced him. He looked at faces as ravaged by terror as his own. They also shone with a desperate hope, one for which they would fight and kill. Their smiles were as tentative as his, but their welcome was fervent. He understood why as he took part in the worship.

Tanaura took them through the prayer. ‘Father of Mankind,’ she said, ‘we seek your guidance. We beseech your protection.’

‘The Emperor protects,’ the other worshippers responded, Kanshell among them.

‘See us safely through this time of trial.’

‘The Emperor protects.’

‘In our despair, we say that surely the darkness shall cover us, and the light about us become night.’

‘Yet even the darkness is no darkness with thee,’ came the answer.

‘And the night is as clear as the day,’ Tanaura finished.

Now the smiles were far less tentative. Kanshell felt stronger. This was the glorious truth he had never known about these meetings. There was power in brotherhood. It gave him comfort during the day, because he was not alone. None of them were. They had each other, and they had the Emperor. That night, there was no less terror, but he had more strength. He was able to face the dying of the light with greater resolution, and though he still trembled, though he still curled into a tight, paralytic knot of fear, he had the strength to withstand the trials. There was hope. And the next morning, with more prayer – and a circle grown a little larger yet – there was the renewal of strength, the flaring of that spark of hope.

These were the only things that sustained him as the nights marched on, and the toll rose.

During the day, he continued to work at the settlement. The labour of serfs and colonists was divided between construction and excavation. The palisade was complete. Yurts were appearing now, scattered about the centre of the plateau. Actual shelter had come to the colonists. They seemed hardly to notice. The yurts were afterthoughts, thrown together only once the lodges were built. There was now one on each of the mounds that marked the buried structures.

The digging carried on at the base of the mounds. The wedges of four deep pits now bit into the plateau. The upper halves of the structures were exposed. The Iron Hands had ventured into the depths three more times. They had found nothing, and there had been no further attacks. Atticus was not satisfied. There was still an enemy present, and he declared that it would be found. Rubble blocked all the tunnels that led towards the interior of the plateau. Atticus ordered it cleared.

The colonists cheered the command. They volunteered by the hundreds. Far more stepped forward than could be put to use. Kanshell was glad. He knew that a monstrous foe stood against the Imperial forces. He did not think it would be found in a den beneath the ground. But he heard about the vast chambers, the twisted pillars and the glow of rotten blood. The ruins were the space of further nightmares. He was visited by enough. He did not need to go looking for more.

On the third day after the discovery of the ruins, he was helping raise another yurt when he heard a scream. It came from the north-west, where a gate had been built into the palisade. Half the construction team was composed of colonists, and they dropped the circular wooden framework of the yurt and went running towards the gate. Kanshell and his fellow serfs followed. The screams continued from the other side of the wall. They were interrupted by reptilian snarls. After a few moments, the shrieks became softer moans of agony, then those, too, died away. The growls became muffled.

Its mouth is full, Kanshell thought, aghast.

There were tearing sounds, and the snapping of bones. Then a brief burst of fire, the unmistakeable deep staccato of a bolter at work.

Silence fell. The group before the gate waited motionless. Kanshell spotted Ske Vris at the fore. A platform ran the length of the palisade, a metre-and-a-half below the tips of the pointed logs that made up the wall. Colonist guards had come running along it, and were now watching the scene below them. One of them signalled, and four colonists stepped forwards to pull open the heavy gate. Khi’dem, his helmet mag-locked to his thigh, passed through it. The corpse he carried was barely recognisable as human. It was a bag of butchered meat. But he handled it with dignity, and turned it over to the men who approached to claim it. Over his shoulder, he carried a lasrifle. He unslung it and passed it to Ske Vris. ‘This is still usable,’ he said.

‘Our thanks, great lord,’ Ske Vris said. She bowed.

Khi’dem snorted. ‘Your people would thank me better by ceasing to engage in such follies. These risks are pointless.’

‘We have traditions to uphold,’ Ske Vris answered. ‘We have duties that are sacred. I am sure that you do, as well.’

‘Be it on your head,’ the legionary answered, and strode off.

The colonists who had opened the gate now went through it themselves, disappearing down the slope of the plateau. Kanshell walked up to Ske Vris. ‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘Why was someone out there?’

‘He was hunting.’

‘Hunting?’ Kanshell’s jaw dropped. Humans could not behave like predators on Pythos. They were only prey, and survival depended on recognising that very basic fact. There were enough supplies in the settlement. The food was rations scavenged from the landing sites. It was not enticing, but it would keep the people alive until the construction was complete and large hunting parties, who might bring individual animals down without suffering massive casualties, could be organised. A lone mortal venturing beyond the wall was suicidal. ‘Hunting for what?’ Kanshell demanded.

Ske Vris looked at him as if he were simple-minded. ‘For the homes, of course.’

Kanshell looked over his shoulder at the yurts, then back at Ske Vris, horrified. Saurian hides were stretched over the wooden frameworks, creating the walls and roofs. There had been no time to tan and cure the hides. They were the flesh of the beasts, cleaned and stretched. The skin was so tough that it served the purpose, though Kanshell found the material unpleasant to handle. It made the homes far too organic, as if they were alive. He would have preferred huts constructed out of sod or logs. There was enough of that raw material lying about, despite the construction needs of the lodges and the palisade. But the colonists insisted on the necessity of this form of shelter. Kanshell had assumed that the hides came from the many saurians killed during the pacification of the plateau. He had been wrong. ‘Are you mad?’ he asked.

Ske Vris smiled. ‘Is it mad to live, and perhaps die, for one’s traditions? For one’s beliefs? Are you unwilling to make such a sacrifice?’

‘Of course not,’ Kanshell answered, heated. ‘But if those beliefs are irrational…’

‘Yours are not?’

He had no answer to that. He was struck, even as he floundered, by the distance that Ske Vris appeared to mark between her traditions and those of the Imperium. Kanshell wondered again if the colonists were a lost people, one who had never received the benefits of the Imperial peace. He pushed the question away. The issue was beyond his station. If Atticus was not concerned with the heterodoxy of the colonists, then he would not be, either.

He kept watch with Ske Vris before the open gate. He was anxious, expecting a saurian to come charging through. He could hear the predators in the jungle beyond the palisade. They grew louder each day. None came, though, and after a minute, the four colonists returned, dragging chunks of the beast that Khi’dem had killed. Ske Vris clapped her hands together once as the gate was closed. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Meat for food, hide for shelter. We have lost, and we have gained.’

‘I’m sorry for the death of your kinsman,’ Kanshell said.

‘He will be commemorated. He will live in our memories and in our walls, and he died in the land of our dreams.’ Ske Vris spread her arms wide in a joyous embrace of the world. ‘What is there to regret?’

Kanshell looked at the open, shining pleasure in the woman’s face. Snatches of the colonists’ songs as they worked drifted to him. These people had no experience of the fear that tormented the base. ‘I envy you,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘How can you be so happy?’

Ske Vris cocked her head. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

The answer came in the form of a hoarse shriek from above. Kanshell and the novitiate both ducked. A flying saurian came in at a sharp angle. Claws extended, it dived straight at one of the wall guards. It had a wingspan of ten metres. Its head was almost all jaw, longer than a man. Confused lasfire rose to meet it. The beast was too fast, the defenders untrained. With a second, mocking, shriek the reptile snatched a guard up in its talons. Khi’dem came charging back, but the monster had already dropped from sight before he could fire.

He lowered his bolter. Ske Vris bowed low. ‘Please accept our thanks once more, lord,’ she called.

Khi’dem looked at the novitiate. His disgust was clear. ‘Why are you smiling? Do you take pleasure in seeing your people devoured?’

‘Not at all, lord. It is simply that we walk the earth of our destiny. Every moment is one of fruition. In the end, we shall all die here, in our home. The hope of centuries has been realised. Our joy is invincible.’

‘Your joy is quite insane,’ Khi’dem muttered, and left.

Kanshell checked the sky for more of the winged hunters. There were none, but he felt no confidence in the men and women patrolling the wall. They handled their rifles like children. Did none of these people have combat experience? He was no soldier, but he could not spend his life on a strike cruiser and not acquire some basic knowledge of military craft. He was surrounded by naïve fools, but the lion’s share of the protection of the settlement fell to them. The Salamanders were few in number. They refused to abandon the people to their fate, but they could not be everywhere at once.

The Iron Hands ignored the settlement. Atticus had his forces mounting guard in the depths of the structure, and protecting the base. The colonists had to earn their survival. Those working in the ruins were of direct use to the Iron Hands, so the legionaries watched over them. Every so often, the muffled, hollow echo of gunfire would rise from the chasms. There were sporadic attacks by maggots, but not on the scale of the initial one. The Iron Hands seemed to have decimated the population of the underground inhabitants. The creatures had swarmed over the invaders of their domain, and been defeated.

But on the surface, the wildlife of Pythos was becoming bolder. It seemed to know that the prey was more vulnerable. By ones and twos, the monsters attacked the wall more and more frequently. Kanshell was grateful no pack had launched a concerted assault, but when he listened to the chorus of snarls in the jungle beyond the palisade, he grew sure that day would not be long in coming.

Ske Vris straightened, still smiling as she watched the departing Space Marine. ‘What do you think, my friend?’ she asked Kanshell. ‘Is our joy insane?’

‘I think you might be. All of you.’

‘We are all on this planet together. We rejoice in our fate. You clearly fear yours. Are you better off for being so “sane”?’

There was a frenzied roar, and the sound of heavy feet pounding the earth. A massive bulk slammed against the palisade. Three guards rushed into position and started shooting. They were laughing. There was something giddy about their joy, as if they were intoxicated by belief. Kanshell winced. Ske Vris looked down on him, her smile unwavering. The las-fire continued until the roars turned into howls, and then silence. The laughter continued.

‘Well?’ Ske Vris prompted.

‘I don’t know,’ Kanshell whispered.

‘You seek strength.’

Kanshell nodded.

‘Strength comes from faith,’ Ske Vris told him.

‘Yes. So I am discovering.’

Ske Vris gripped his arm. ‘That’s wonderful! Perhaps the time has come for us to worship together.’

Kanshell glanced uneasily at the nearest lodge. ‘I’m not sure.’

‘Then be sure. We will be celebrating our fallen comrades shortly. Join us.’

‘Perhaps,’ he conceded.

‘You will be inspired,’ Ske Vris promised.

Kanshell returned to the yurt. The rest of the day passed. The saurian attacks continued. All but one were repulsed without further casualties. As evening fell, one of the guards overbalanced and fell over the wall. His screams were mercifully short. They caused barely a ripple in the delight of the others as they brought down the beast. Kanshell wondered where the line lay between optimism and callousness. Repulsed, he decided he would not attend the service. He would, he told himself, work until the transport back to the base arrived.

He held fast to the resolution until the ritual began. The sound of chanting made him look up from the hides he was helping stitch together. Hundreds of colonists had gathered at the first lodge. They filled the space, and spilled down the mound. The song was as celebratory as any Kanshell had heard from these people. But there was power there, too. The song was triumphant.

He skirted the pit and moved towards the lodge. He listened to the chanting in a way he had not before. It spoke to him. It claimed a bond between them. Until a few days ago, he had looked down on the colonists’ songs. They were the products of superstition. They were a sign of delusional thinking, a denial of the hard, insistent realities of the universe. So he had told himself. Now he thought that the denial had been his. He had refused to hear the truth in this music. He had refused to hear the praise, because he had not wanted to believe there was any being who would hear and receive the praise.

He drew closer. He repented his foolishness. The sound of hundreds of voices lifted in song swirled around him. He was swept up by the need to worship. The melody opened up vistas of infinite possibility. It demanded he accept them. It imposed greatness. His skin tingled with the brush of undiluted sensation. His chest swelled with pride and humility. He took a deep breath, and was startled when it hitched. He raised a hand to his cheek. His fingers came away wet. Though his tears flowed, his vision was clear.

The crowd parted for him as he reached the base of the mound. He walked up the centre as if flowing down a rushing stream. The song had a fragrance: the sharp, sweet tang of apples. It became his world, shutting him off from the mundane. He could no longer feel his legs. He was floating, not walking. He was a consciousness only now, a soul freed from the corporeal vale of tears. Somewhere far below, his body was raising its arms, expecting to float upward, lifted by the strength of the song. He laughed at the body’s presumption, he laughed at the exhilaration of the senses, and he laughed at being free of fear for the first time since Callinedes.

Ske Vris was standing before him. The novitiate took hold of his shoulders. ‘I rejoice to see you here, brother,’ she said.

The words cut through Kanshell’s joyous haze, bringing the world back into focus. He was in and of his body again, though the ecstasy was just as strong. He found that he could remember how to form words. ‘Thank you.’

‘Come forward.’

The lodge was filled to bursting, but somehow the people made room. A path appeared before Kanshell, leading to the centre of the floor. Ske Vris gestured, inviting him to approach the priest who stood there. Kanshell guessed this was Ske Vris’s master, though he had never seen the man’s face. Even now, the priest was hooded. He was dancing. His steps were both sinuous and martial. He was worshipper, and he was warrior. His staff was the sign of his office, and it was the terror of his foes. His robes swirled as he danced, and the tunic beneath them was that of a soldier. Though much smaller than a Space Marine, he was a giant among these people. Other priests surrounded him, echoing his dance. They, too, were robed and hooded. They were almost as tall as the head priest, though they were much thinner. Their dance was the swirl of the melody; his was the force. And it was he who was the focus of the lightweb.

The light.

The extraordinary patterns Kanshell had seen when the lodge was empty were even more pronounced now. He stared in wonder. It was impossible. Outside was deep twilight. Though torches surrounded the lodge, they could not account for the intensity of the illumination. Light shone through the slits in the walls as if the lodge were inside Pandorax itself. As before, the closer Kanshell came to the centre, the more the web assumed definition, the more it came to be a language. It would speak to him, if he let it. It had a message, one that the priest had heard, and he danced, rejoicing. The lightweb interwove with the runes on his robe. Kanshell saw call and response, and he saw a constant exchange of roles. The priest was calling to the numinous at one moment, and answering a divine summons the next.

Now, finally, Kanshell felt he understood the colonists. He understood how they retained unwavering hope no matter how many of them fell to the jaws of Pythos. It was inconceivable that they should do otherwise.

The priest stopped dancing. The light did not move, but such was the complexity of the pattern, Kanshell’s gaze did not stop the dance. It stepped nimbly from point to shaft to nexus, round and round, mesmerising, intoxicating. The priest held out his arms, palms facing Kanshell.

‘You are welcome,’ he said. ‘Stand with me.’ His voice was deep, rough, yet liquid. A glacier whisper.

Kanshell advanced. He had been reluctant before. Now he was eager. He almost stumbled in his joy. He ran towards the priest.

Three steps from the centre, the message crystallising before him, an immense truth on the cusp of revelation, he paused. He blinked, uncertain. His feet were rooted.

‘What troubles you?’ the priest asked.

Kanshell swallowed. His lips were dry. His throat was parched. The apple fragrance was heady, and he so wished he could slake his thirst. But he could not. He mustn’t. He had to wait. ‘Something…’ he croaked. He tried again. ‘Something is missing.’

The priest cocked his head. ‘Yes?’

Kanshell tried to look away. Perhaps if he could close his eyes, he could concentrate and discover what was wrong. ‘I feel…’ He trailed off, helpless.

‘You are not yet at home,’ the priest said.

Kanshell almost sobbed with gratitude. ‘Yes.’ Yes, that was it. He still did not belong here, though that was what he wished, as powerfully as he dreaded the nights on the base.

‘Our song and this space are still unfamiliar. You need reassurance. You need a sign that you are not betraying your own faith by sharing with us.’

‘Yes,’ Kanshell said. The tears were flowing again.

‘And if I said that our faiths were the same?’

‘I want to believe that.’

Though the priest’s face was hidden, Kanshell was sure he smiled. ‘Sometimes, proof is the proper support for faith. You shall have proof. Come to us again, and bring a symbol of your faith. Then you shall know the truth, and we will rejoice together.’

‘Thank you,’ Kanshell whispered.

He tried to back away. His knees had gone weak. If he tried to walk, he would collapse. But then Ske Vris was at his side, taking his arm over a shoulder. Kanshell leaned against her and staggered out of the lodge. As they left it behind, Kanshell noticed a few other serfs at the periphery of the crowd, watching and listening, their faces hungry with envy. The chanting still filling his ears, his heart hammering from its brush with the power of faith unleashed, Kanshell was struck by a vision of what might be. He thought about the strength he gained from the morning prayer circle. He imagined how much greater that strength would be if there were as many worshippers as there were at the lodge. To praise the Emperor as He should be praised, to do so openly, to do so by the hundreds – that would, Kanshell was sure, strike a death-blow to the fear.

And why stop there? The vision soared. He pictured thousands, millions, billions raising their voices to the glories of Emperor. His breath stopped. He was not a violent man. He had never fought. He had cleaned weapons, serviced them, knew their names and uses, but had never fired a single shot. He was Jerune Kanshell, menial serf, an insignificant, eminently replaceable cog in the machine of the X Legion, and nothing more. But in the service of this dream, he felt ready to kill.

The need and the glow of the vision did not leave him as he boarded the transport back to the base. When he disembarked on the landing pad, and heard the noises on the other side of the walls, he lost the glow. The need remained, and he clung to it, and to the promise of strength, even as the fear returned, boasting new claws, new teeth, new ways to murder hope.

The young night echoed with a very different chant. It was the song of the carnivore. Kanshell’s ears rang with another call and response: the roar of alpha predators, and the answers of their packs. There had been a sudden gathering of saurians here. There had been nothing like this cacophony in the morning. Now he could hear countless reptilian voices growling challenges to the walls. The beasts were taunting their prey.

Kanshell walked away from the landing pad. He was in no hurry to reach the dormitorium. He paused in the open between buildings, legs still shaky, the howls in the dark hurting him as if jaws were already closing around his head.

He was still there when Tanaura found him. She looked as haggard as he felt, though the iron was still there in the set of her jaw.

‘How long has this been going on?’ he asked.

Bolter fire from the wall. Roars turning to shrieks and then silence. Echoes of the siege at the settlement. Monsters testing the defences.

‘It started this morning,’ Tanaura said. ‘They’ve been growing more bold all day.’

‘Why?’ he demanded to no one. The saurians’ actions here bothered him more than the assaults on the wooden palisade. Its vulnerability was clear. But the promontory was a strong position. The base’s walls were solid. Its defenders were strong as gods. Why would animals stalk such a target? Why such stubbornness? ‘They can’t hope to break through.’

‘They’re animals,’ Tanaura said. ‘They don’t hope.’

‘Really? Then what is keeping them here?’ These animals can hope, he thought. They hope for our blood.

The crack of snapped branches. The crash of heavy bodies against each other. Snarls of rage and pain. Some of the monsters were tired of waiting, and were fighting each other.

‘I don’t know.’ Tanaura shrugged, trying to be dismissive. ‘Perhaps they hope, but they don’t reason. They won’t get in. The legionaries massacre them as soon as they approach the wall.’

‘And when there are no more munitions?’

‘It won’t come to that.’

‘You sound very sure.’

‘The mission of the Legion will not drag on like that.’ She spoke as if the decision were hers to make. Kanshell almost remarked on her presumption, but then he saw how her eyes burned. Determination, hope, desire, prophecy… They were all combusting in her gaze. So was desperation. ‘This is not where the war should be fought,’ she told Kanshell.

‘But it is being fought here,’ he answered.

Beyond the wall, the roars grew louder. The sound was a rising tide, coming to drown them all. It would never ebb. And inside the wall, the thoughts of the deep night waited, eager to test Kanshell’s faith.

Fourteen

The tightening noose
Shadows against shadows
Mission of the blind

Galba said, ‘The planet is turning against us.’

‘That is an irrational statement,’ Atticus snapped.

‘I did not mean to imply sentience.’

‘You did not? You were not speaking from a hidden spring of knowledge?’

Galba sighed. Unlike the captain, he still had the ability to do so. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Merely from observation.’ He gestured to the jungle beyond the wall, covering the eastward slope of the promontory. The lights of the base illuminated a narrow band of foliage and trunks, bleaching the green to silver. Behind was only hulking black, shaken by the endless, growing rage of the monstrous life within.

‘You do not see those animals as a realistic threat,’ Atticus informed him. The statement had the finality of a direct order.

Galba turned to Darras for help. The other sergeant said nothing. He kept his gaze steady on the jungle. He had spoken little to Galba since the battle in the ruins. Atticus’s suspicion shrouded Galba like a disease. The rumour was running through the ranks of the company – one of its number might be using forbidden arts, powers doubly forbidden for contravening the commands of the Emperor and for violating the spirit of the machine. Intuition was almost as suspect as sorcery. Sorcery itself was beyond the pale.

‘What I see, brother-captain, is a change in a pattern of behaviour. As unthinking as this enemy is, the effect of its actions are the same as if there were a concerted campaign.’

‘I am not unaware of that, sergeant. I am cognisant of everything that plagues our mission. But that,’ he pointed at the jungle, ‘is not our principle threat.’

‘No,’ Galba agreed. ‘It is not.’

They fell silent. Behind them, the sounds of nocturnal terror filtered out of the serf barracks. None of the Iron Hands reacted. The howls of damnation were expected. There was nothing to be done except deal with the casualties come dawn. Even so, Galba could not bring himself to ignore the screams. He knew something of what the mortals were experiencing. He sympathised, though he recognised their suffering as a weakness of the flesh. Atticus, he suspected, heard only a reminder of futility.

Galba tried again. ‘All the same, I do think the saurians are a threat that we should not ignore.’

‘What would you have us do? Burn the jungle down?’

‘No.’ They could no more do that than drain the ocean. The green and its monsters were infinite. But the word burn stuck with him. It rattled around his mind. It suggested something. It was the seed of an idea. Its contours were unclear to him, but if he was patient, they would resolve themselves in time.

Burn, said the thought, the echoing refrain, the nascent obsession. Burn.

Atticus returned to the command block. Darras, maintaining his position on watch, waited for Galba to head off on a patrol. Galba stayed where he was. At length, he said, ‘I am not a psyker.’

Darras turned to face him. ‘I don’t think you’re lying to me, brother, and that is the problem. You’re lying to yourself.’ Galba opened his mouth to answer, but Darras held up a hand, cutting him off. ‘You are not following reason. You are listening to what you want to believe. That is a failing of the flesh.’

‘You don’t trust me.’

‘No, I don’t. You’re denying logic. You’re straying from the path Ferrus Manus showed us, and breaking from the Imperial Truth as surely as if you were deliberately exercising sorcery. So no, I can’t trust you. You shouldn’t trust yourself, or any decision you make.’ He faced the jungle once again. Rejecting his brother was painful, but necessary. The battlefield was unforgiving in its rejection of error.

‘And if I’m not wrong,’ said Galba, ‘what then?’

‘Then the universe is filled with terrible irrationality, and there is no such thing as reason. The madness is yours, brother. Keep it away from me.’

The attacks were more concerted. The disruptions were worse. Erephren fought back. She was on her guard now. She would not be taken by surprise. She still felt the anger from her confrontation with the serf, Tanaura. It was not aimed at the woman herself. It was directed at the surrender her position represented. The X Legion had suffered enough humiliations. She had played a role in restoring its pride. The destruction of the Callidora and its escort was a real victory. She would not let the enemy they had encountered here rob them of further vengeance.

Tanaura had her faith. May it grant her a measure of comfort as the screams of the night began. A delusion could do little more. Erephren had her fury. It drew upon the empirical, insistent, bloody reality of war itself. She needed the anchor to cast her mind into the immaterium and not go mad. She used it now to defend herself against the enemy. The cutting edges of darkness sliced into her consciousness. Laughter and jaws surrounded her. Something that had the very shape of terror tried to form before her. She repulsed it. It retaliated by tearing her perception of the warp apart.

She hissed. Her hands were clumsy and numb, light years away from her mind, but she worked them just well enough to disconnect herself from her throne. She staggered away on legs that were as rigid as death one moment, weak as air the next. Her head was filled with lightning and broken glass. Voices of hell shrieked at her. She defied them. This time, she would not black out. She shut herself off from the warp, choosing blindness instead of being thrust into it. The intensity of the voices diminished, but they were not silenced. Slivers of the unreal followed her. They were gossamer-thin, fragile as a dream at the moment of waking. But they were toxic, serrated, and they clung. They left incandescent scars on her mind. Far in the distance, her lips pulled back in a rictus. Her teeth clacked together. She tried to bite off the pain. She would have torn out the throat of the enemy with her teeth if it had stood before her.

Coward, she thought, embracing rage. I cannot see. I can barely walk. Still you hide. You are nothing. You are not worth my time.

The whispers showed their power by ignoring her taunts. They slithered around her. They teased her perceptions with the threat of sudden reality. When she reached out her hands to find her staff, she twitched away from the brush of the imminent. But her left hand closed around the haft, and her right found her cane. ‘You are not real,’ she told the shadows.

Not yet, they murmured. Coming, they promised.

She sent a dispatch to her arm, and it banged the tip of her cane against the floor. The sound belonged to another world, but it was present. She banged again, again, tapping the beat of her march. She felt her way forward, engulfed in the coils of the dark. They could not hold her back. When her hand touched the door, her heart swelled with triumph. She pushed it open. In the corridor, she sensed a hulking presence. It was massively real, yet cousin to shadows. As much as she had closed herself off, she still sensed warp currents affected by the being ahead of her. She took a step back and raised her cane, braced for a fight. What confronted her was huge, and the fractured, painful chaos of the warp had crippled her. She had no illusions about her ability to win, but at least she would leave the enemy with none about her willingness to fight.

The presence spoke. ‘Mistress Erephren,’ it said. ‘Do not be alarmed.’

She lowered the cane and leaned on it, partly from relief, partly from the pain that crackled down the base of her skull and spine. The voice belonged to the Raven Guard, Ptero. She heard some of her own strain in his tones. ‘You are being attacked, too,’ she said.

‘All of us are. Some more acutely than others.’

‘The psykers.’

‘Yes, we are among the special targets.’

She was startled and honoured by his open admission. It took her a moment to notice his qualification. ‘Among?’

‘There are others, not of our number, who are in the foe’s sights. For what reason, I do not know.’

She straightened up. Ptero was of the Legiones Astartes, and she owed him every respect. But she represented, in this moment, the X Legion, and she would stand tall. The assault did not end, but it became a background siege. Her shields were strong. Her will stronger.

‘You wished to speak to me?’ she said.

‘Yes. You would agree that our foe cannot be defeated by force of arms alone?’

Though the Raven Guard was careful in his wording, Erephren bristled at the implied criticism of Atticus. At the same time, she knew Ptero was correct. ‘I do,’ she said.

‘I believe you have a critical role to play against this enemy.’

‘I am an astropath. Nothing more.’

‘You are an astropath of enormous ability. Your perception of the warp is greater than that of anyone else on this planet. This is a power.’

‘I am bound by the Emperor’s Will.’ She won back a greater awareness of her body, and felt the embrace of the ceremonial manacle on her ankle. It was the symbol of her unbreakable fealty.

‘So are we all,’ Ptero reminded her. ‘But you have already done more than transmit communications.’

This was true. ‘What do you want of me?’

‘The use of your gaze. To look is not a passive act. It is aggressive. It can destroy. The annihilation of the Callidora was as much the work of your hands as it was those of Captain Atticus. The enemy sees us. It knows us. It probes our defences, learns our weaknesses. This siege cannot continue. I agree with your captain’s goal in descending into the ruins. We must seek the enemy out. We must find it on its home ground, and then we shall be the ones besieging. But we need to know where to look, and we need to know how to strike.’

‘Have you spoken to Captain Atticus?’

‘I do not think he would welcome my suggestions. But I know you have his ear.’

She managed a smile. ‘And thus you shape war from the shadows.’

‘We of the Raven Guard flatter ourselves that we do it well.’

Ptero was right. Atticus did listen.

It helped that she had a specific strategy to suggest. With dawn, the enemy retreated, leaving the field to the still-growing number of saurians. Her mind clear, Erephren cautiously opened her senses to the warp. The vista before her was still disordered fragments and pain. The only thing she could see with any precision was the storms. They defied her comprehension. They were so vast, they seemed to merge into a single expression of absolute chaos. The empyrean rose up in waves that dwarfed even the conception of mountains. Lurking behind the tempests was the terrible suggestion of intention. The awful idea formed that here she saw the works of an enemy of inconceivable malice and power. She looked away from the storms before the idea became a conviction. The foe on Pythos was threat enough.

She forced herself to engage with the interference. It shattered any attempt to read the details of the warp. It turned her vision into splinters, shards, jagged energy, all dividing, overlapping, colliding in a frenzy of illogic. It was a torment to consider. Her mind tried to fly apart, but she disciplined it. She stopped trying to see past the distortion. She looked at the distortion itself. You are what I seek, she told it. You are the sign of the foe. You are its trace. Even the pain it caused was evidence. She seized on her own suffering. She made it her guide. She followed it to its source.

Then she spoke to Atticus.

An hour later, she was at the settlement, standing with an escort of Iron Hands at the edge of the first of the pits.

‘You’re sure the interference comes from here?’ Atticus asked.

‘I am.’

She found the effort to speak exhausting. Being this close to the epicentre of the disruption meant weathering a constant assault. She had all but shut herself down again, but the disorder still reached her, striking through the tiny opening she left. That was its mistake. This was how she could reach it. This was how she could strike. The foe would pay for daring to confront her.

‘We have combed the structure,’ said Atticus. ‘There is nothing. No one. There is a region to which we do not yet have access, but there is no way in or out of it.’

‘Nevertheless.’

‘You still insist on descending?’

‘I do.’ She felt his evaluating gaze on her. ‘Captain, I am strong enough for this task. My pride will not permit me to be a burden to you or your men.’

‘I have many burdens,’ Atticus growled, ‘but you are not among them. You found us a target before. Do so again, and I will be forever in your debt.’

‘My duty to the Legion is the only reward I seek.’

‘You speak for us all.’ The voice was Sergeant Galba’s. Though he was addressing her, the remark seemed to be for Atticus’s benefit. Erephren did not like the implication of division within the ranks of the officers, but she placed the worry to one side. It was not her concern. Her mission would require all of her concentration. She could not risk the opening that a distraction or stray worry might give the enemy.

‘This way, then,’ Atticus said.

She followed the sounds of his footsteps. The dull thud his boots made on earth gave way to the hollow knock of wood.

‘Be careful here.’

‘Thank you.’ She stepped onto a narrow platform. If she had still had access to the full scope of her psychic half-vision, she would not have needed Atticus’s caution. She would have sensed the precise dimensions of the platform, known how many steps forwards she could take before plunging over the edge. But the world was no longer conjured by spontaneous knowledge. Now it was tactile. The tap-tap-tap of her cane gave her the contours of reality. She could navigate, but her surroundings were shadowed. There were large blanks of ignorance around her, making her walk more tentatively. She was used to a sovereign authority over the spaces through which she moved, on the material and immaterial planes. Being reduced to mundane human blindness was an affront she would never forgive.

The colonists had built a rough scaffolding against the face of the structure. This pit, at the base of the main lodge, where the earth had first collapsed, was where Atticus had commanded the primary excavation take place. Secondary ones continued in the other three chasms, but with no clear advantage in one location over another, the bulk of the effort was concentrated here. Volunteers made do with lines to climb up and down the façades elsewhere. Here there were steps. They were uneven, crudely hewn, zigzagging down between platforms that were just as rough. But they were sufficient to their task. With the help of her cane, Erephren was able to make her own way down. She could, she thought, indulge her pride to that degree.

The further she descended, the more the blank spaces of the world grew. The disruption intensified. She had to commit almost all her psychic resources into blocking out the damage. She was left with mere traces of energy to keep herself mobile and able to interact with the physical realm. Two things gave her the push she needed to continue: unceasing rage, and the consuming desire to punish.

She was aware of the Iron Hands speaking to each other, but their voices were reduced to impressionist bursts of mental static. There was anger in the tones. Inflections of doubt and suspicion. The thought came to her that here was another sign of the enemy’s campaign: machinic impassivity was being stolen from the Iron Hands. Isstvan V had dealt a blow that was as psychological as it was military, and that trauma was being worked on, deepened, shaped into something profound, something that might outlast the stars. Rage had become the heartbeat of the company, rage sharp as a dagger, yet wide as the galaxy. Rage in response to betrayal, a betrayal so great that it revealed the treachery in all things. She understood, because she had her small, mortal share of that rage. How much more incandescent, how devastating to all around them, would be the anger of the demigods.

She found that she rejoiced at the idea. As long as the rage was not directed inwards.

The anxiety rose, a bubble forming in the cauldron of her psyche. It was without value. It was dangerous. She suppressed it with the greater force of anger, and moved forwards. Downwards. One step at a time.

Ahead of her, the sound of Atticus’s heavy footfalls changed again. Now there was the hard echo of stone. ‘We are about to enter the ruin,’ he told her. He had turned to the right.

She thanked him. She followed his voice, felt the platform give way to the smoothness of the structure itself. Then she was passing through the threshold. It was a stark reality, cutting through the enveloping blankness. She sensed the contours of the arch as clearly as if the disruption had abruptly ceased. But when she was through, the scrambling of her perceptions increased a hundredfold.

Time vanished. The world vanished. There was only disruption. She had stepped inside the assault, and it came in from all sides, overwhelming her barriers. She was drowning in malformed energy.

Something that was not random intruded. It had a shape. It had a purpose. It had an existence in time, and its existence gave her back the succession of moments. The thing became clearer. It was a voice. It was Atticus, speaking her name. She grabbed the fragment of reality and struggled against the stream of madness. She reached a shore, and bit by bit, reclaimed the nature of sounds, of touch, of thought. She was surprised to discover that she was still standing.

Atticus asked, ‘Can you continue?’

‘Yes.’ The word was a victory. Its truth was a greater one. ‘Captain, you said this building was inert. It is not.’

‘We know there is ambient warp energy at work here, but that is all,’ Atticus replied. ‘Auspex?’ he called.

‘No change.’ The speaker was the Techmarine, Camnus. ‘No coherent waveforms.’

‘Yet the attacks are directed,’ Atticus mused, ‘and are growing stronger.’

‘This is a machine,’ said Galba.

Atticus grunted and moved on.

Down, down, deeper. Erephren was spiralling into a searing gale. The taking of a single step was a war in itself. She claimed one hard victory after another, and the greater the pain, the greater her sense that she was closing with the enemy. Time disintegrated again. She existed on the fuel of rage and expectation. When next she was aware of the world outside her struggle, she had stopped moving.

Atticus’s voice penetrated the galvanic haze, a transmission from a distant star. ‘We can go no further.’

Complete your mission, she thought. The effort to speak brought her to the point of collapse. Duty held her upright. ‘We are very close,’ she said. She reached out with her left hand. Her palm brushed against a rock barrier. ‘What is this?’ she asked.

‘The barrier at the end of this tunnel,’ Atticus told her. ‘The excavations here have removed all the collapsed stone, but now this blocks our path. It is too uniform to be natural. It is part of the xenos construction of this site. Its purpose is unclear, and we can find no way around it.’

‘One of the other tunnels, perhaps…’ Darras began.

‘No,’ she said. She ran her fingers over the rock. Its presence filled her mind. ‘The surface has a curve to it,’ she announced. ‘This is a sphere. A very large one.’

‘Brother Camnus?’ said Atticus.

‘Our readings are nonsense, brother-captain. It is impossible to say with certainty. But it is very possible, yes. I think we should trust what Mistress Erephren detects.’

‘Can you tell what is on the other side?’ Atticus asked. ‘If we break through, will we find our enemy?’

She pushed through the torment. She forced herself to look more fully at the disruptions, here in this place that was more warp than reality. She braced for the worst attack yet. She was convinced that she was about to encounter the heart of the disruptive power. Instead, she found nothing. The sphere was hollow. It was a vast emptiness, a void that crackled with potential, but there was no enemy.

‘There is nothing there,’ Erephren said. ‘This sphere…’ A shell? ‘It is the centre of the interference.’

‘The source?’

‘No. The centre.’ She took her hand away. ‘The entire structure is the source.’

‘A machine,’ Galba repeated.

‘The attacks are deliberate,’ Atticus said. ‘They are not just the effect of a mechanism at work. If this is a machine, someone is using it.’

‘Yes.’ Erephren agreed. With nothing more for her to see, she reinforced her barriers. She retreated into the relief of blindness. She could not close off the energy altogether. It was too strong. It leaked in. Her head rang like a cathedral bell. She wished this conversation would wait. ‘But that someone is not here.’

‘Then where?’

Atticus’s question was rhetorical, but the answer loomed before Erephren. It was one she should not believe. It was also one she could not avoid. She waited, though. She wondered if Galba had come to the same unwanted, insane conclusion.

He had. ‘Nowhere on this plane.’

‘Yes,’ she said.

The silence was a heavy one.

‘I will not countenance absurdities,’ Atticus declared, his fury expressed in cold, mechanical syllables. ‘I cannot fight myths.’

‘Captain,’ Erephren said. ‘I will not try to convince you of something that I wish, with all my heart, to be a mistake. But this I can tell you beyond any doubt – this structure is the cause of the interference. If you have any faith in my abilities, believe me now.’

‘Then we must end the interference.’

Galba said, ‘Burn it.’

Fifteen

Refrain
Communion
Defiance

Burn it.

The idea was his, wasn’t it?

Galba brooded over the question on the way back to the surface. He wrestled with it on the Unbending as it flew to the base. Atticus kept his council, perhaps giving Galba time to marshal his arguments or repent his madness. He did not change his mind. The ruins must be destroyed. That was self-evident, surely. They caused the disruption of Erephren’s ability to monitor the warp. Eliminate them, and the problem ended.

That was logical.

But he had been thinking burn it before Erephren’s diagnosis. He tried to justify his conviction. He tried to construct that rational set of observations and conclusions that had led to that idea. And to those very precise words.

Burn it.

He failed. Reasoning became rationalisations, and he discarded them in shame. He was honest with himself. The idea had come to him during the night, and nothing could be trusted in the nights of Pythos.

He found that he could not even trust his dilemma. He was even more uncertain when Atticus took him aside. They spoke in the captain’s quarters, a small prefab chamber attached to the command centre. It was a windowless, almost featureless space. There was nothing on the plasteel walls. In the centre of the room was a table on which were spread star charts and a growing collection of maps of Pythos. Atticus had not given up on the idea of finding an enemy encampment, and had been sending the gunships out on reconnaissance missions, surveying more of the coastal region every time. The results consisted of contour maps of unbroken jungle. The parchments were covered in annotations, almost all of them crossed out. They were the leavings of frustration.

There was nowhere to sit in the room. There was only the table. Atticus shut the door. He removed his helmet, placing it on the table. He began a slow, measured pace around the room, and Galba knew he was seeing how the captain used the chamber. This was the space of restless thought.

Atticus said, ‘So you would have me burn the ruins?’

‘I feel very strongly that you should, brother-captain.’ That was the purest, most honest answer he could give. He hoped the captain would pick up on his choice of words.

He did. ‘You feel this, do you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what do you think we should do?’

‘I’m not sure.’

Atticus stopped pacing. From the other side of the table, he faced Galba. His gaze was cold, precise, anatomising. Galba felt himself being judged by an intellect as inhuman as a cogitator. Just as the left eye was the only visible echo of the flesh left on Atticus, the last emotion to live within his frame was rage. ‘Explain yourself,’ said the monster of war.

‘My primary impulse is to burn the ruins. Destruction would be the inevitable result of this action. But my impulse is to burn. I must take this action, captain. It is all I can think about. But…’

‘But you did not deduce that this was the way to achieve destruction.’

‘That is correct.’

After a few seconds, Atticus mused, ‘The strategy is a rational one. The most effective way of destroying that structure would involve one form of fire or another. Sergeant, when did this desire to burn strike you?’

‘Last night.’

‘I see. You did not come to the conclusion that the ruins were the source of the interference before Mistress Erephren did?’

‘I did not.’

‘What might be the source of your inspiration?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Oh?’

There was little inflection in Atticus’s bionic voice. There were levels of volume, and there was the length that he chose to give his syllables. Those variations were enough to convey a wealth of expression. Galba had no difficulty reading his scepticism in that single word. Even so, the sergeant stood his ground.

‘I do not know what the source is. I do know what it is not. I am not a psyker. How would I have concealed that from you, and from all of our brothers, for so long? Captain,’ he pleaded, ‘have I ever given you any cause to doubt my loyalty?’

Attticus’s head tilted a fraction of a degree to the right. ‘You have not,’ he admitted. ‘But some of your behaviour on this planet has been difficult to explain.’

‘I share your puzzlement.’

The electronic grunt was noncommittal. It was not hostile. Nor was it merciful. ‘Understand me, sergeant. Whatever the nature of the weakness that assails you, the only aspect of it that interests me is what consequences it might have for our tactical situation. Will you hurt or harm the mission? Will you hurt or harm the company?’

‘I would never–’

Atticus held up a hand, cutting him off. ‘If you do not understand what is happening to you, if it is happening despite your will, your intentions are irrelevant. So, therefore, is your loyalty.’

Galba had no answer to that. The logic was unforgiving. It was also unassailable. ‘What do you intend to do with me?’ he asked.

‘I am not sure. I do not like uncertainty, brother-sergeant. I especially despise it in myself. But this is our position. Whatever the source of your knowledge, you were able to warn us about the attack by those vermin in the ruins. That was useful, if inexplicable.’ He tapped a finger against the surface of the table. ‘Describe to me again exactly what happened.’

‘I sensed something coming.’

‘Sensed how? Was it an intuition?’

‘No.’ He paused. ‘I heard whispers.’

‘The night of the first attack, you said you smelled whispers.’

Galba nodded. ‘I did.’

‘My diagnosis was a warp-induced hallucination.’ Tap-tap-tap went the finger. ‘Events point to the inadequacy of that theory. Whispers, you said. Were they coherent?’

‘In the ruins, they were.’

‘What did they say?’

‘“Warn them. It’s coming. Look to your right.”’

The tapping stopped. ‘Very coherent. Were they in your voice?’

‘No,’ he said. He bit the word off with disgust. The memory of that voice – rust, skulls, stone – grated.

‘And now? Have the whispers spoken to you again?’

‘Not as they did then. But the need to burn the ruins is an articulated one. The words “burn it” are in my head.’

Silence. Immobility. The warrior-machine deep in thought. Then, ‘The coherence of these messages is in keeping with the presence of a sentient enemy. The nature of the technology that would permit their transmission is beyond me, but I will set that aside for now. The content of the messages is what must be dealt with. And we were not harmed by those whispers in the ruins. We were aided.’

‘Do you think we have allies as well as enemies here?’ Galba asked. The idea felt wrong.

‘I am growing weary of hearing about invisible entities,’ Atticus said.

‘With respect, captain, you are not half as tired as I am of hearing from them.’

Now the sound that emerged from the expressionless skull was an approximation of amusement. ‘I should imagine,’ Atticus said.

That sentence bridged the gulf that had been growing between the two legionaries. Galba felt his breathing become easier. ‘What action should we take?’ he asked.

Atticus was still again. Then he gave the table a decisive rap with his fist. The surface dented. ‘My misgivings are legion. But the first message in the ruins was valuable. Ignoring the second might be foolish, and its urging does coincide with my own strategic evaluations.’

‘We are going to destroy the structure?’

‘We will burn it.’

Kanshell thought that this might be his last time in the settlement. The excavation operations had been called off. Kanshell did not know what, if anything, had been found in the depths, but it seemed that the X Legion had little reason to maintain a presence here any longer. The word circulating among the serfs was that the time had come for the colonists to stand on their own. The palisade was solid. Enough lasrifles had been distributed for the people to defend themselves. Now they had to show that they were worth the effort to save.

This was the information that floated Kanshell’s way on the currents of conversation during the last few hours of the last day. It was surface chatter. Below were the important flows. The fears of the nights on the base were now tangled with the hopes ignited by the ceremonies held in the settlement. The serfs had been cautious, if fascinated, spectators. Only Kanshell had set foot in one of the lodges. Now there would be one last chance to take part. The currents roiled with unstated confusion, uncertainty, worry. Kanshell suspected that most of the serfs, even followers of the Lectitio Divinatus, would hold back. The fear of so visible a violation of the Imperial Truth’s secularism was too great.

Kanshell knew what Tanaura would do if she were present. He could hear her voice urging the courage to stand by the truth, no matter what censure would follow. He had a spiritual debt to her. She had never given up on him. He could not back down. And if he truly had faith in the God-Emperor, that faith carried responsibilities. He would live up to them.

Evening came. The work details ended, but the transports had not yet arrived. Kanshell could see no legionaries at all. Even the Salamanders had left shortly after the Iron Hands and the astropath had emerged from the depths. The independence of the settlement had begun. The jungle roared as if the saurians knew this and rejoiced. The guards on the walls were more numerous, and seemed to be getting better, if only through sheer concentration of fire, at fending off the beasts. Even so, the occasional flying reptile succeeded in taking off with a shrieking trophy.

The colonists began their ceremonies. The rituals were the largest, most enthusiastic to date. All four lodges were bursting with celebrating crowds. The chants embraced in the air over the settlement. They became a round. Kanshell headed towards the primary lodge. His copy of the Lectitio was inside his work fatigues. On this day, he would advance to the centre of the lightweb. He would accept the welcome. He would engage in the full measure of worship.

In the command centre of the base, Atticus addressed his officers. The Salamanders and Raven Guard were present, too. Khi’dem was not fooled by the courtesy. He knew that this was no consultation. He was present to hear the dictates of the commander of the Iron Hands. A decision had been made. An operation of some scale was about to begin. Khi’dem could not imagine what it was. The war had stagnated. He worried that Atticus’s level of frustration might be reaching the point where he would plunge into action for the sake of action.

He was uneasy, too, about leaving the settlement undefended. He understood that the colonists could not be protected indefinitely. He agreed that they must be responsible for their own survival, once they had the means to do so. And he acknowledged that perhaps they now did. What he did not see was that the tactical situation had changed at all. He would rather fight a useful struggle at the settlement than rot in a holding pattern on the base, waiting for a mission that might never come.

Atticus activated the hololith table that dominated the command centre. A projection of the settlement appeared. Highlighted was a representation of the ruins, based on the observable portions and extrapolations of those regions still inaccessible. A massive underground hemisphere in the centre of the plateau shone with the greatest brilliance. Runes appeared indicating the estimated depth from the surface of the ground to the top of the dome. Khi’dem frowned. Another dig? That did not seem worth this level of briefing. He grew uneasy.

Atticus said, ‘With the help of Mistress Erephren, we have determined that the xenos structure is, in fact, a weapon. Though we have yet to pinpoint our enemy’s location, we know that this is the tool he is using against us. So the time has come to remove it from the field.’ He touched the table’s controls, and a marker of the Veritas Ferrum appeared, indicating its geosynchronous position over the settlement.

Khi’dem’s unease turned into shock.

The welcome was as warm as before. Kanshell was swept up in the ecstasy of worship again. The experience was even more intense, because this time he had come with no hesitation. He had come with his own joy, his own anticipation. And he had come with the object that would mark the event and the place with proper sanctity.

Once again, Ske Vris walked with him towards the centre of the lodge. The woman’s smile was beyond joyful. It seemed to Kanshell he was not the only one for whom the event was charged with greater meaning than before. Ske Vris’s face shone with the triumph of immutable destiny. The chanting was supercharged. This was a night of climax. Perhaps, Kanshell thought, as he surrendered himself to the sensory overload of praise, he was completing something for these people as well as for himself. Perhaps, at some level, they realised that something was missing from their rituals. Now he was bringing the Emperor to them, and their worship would have a true centre.

The tall, hooded priest stood in the same spot. Had he danced again? Kanshell was not sure. The details of reality were slipping away from him, the material falling before the might of the spiritual. He saw the world in fragments. It had become an endlessly shifting kaleidoscope, the fragments spinning away in scintillating bursts of the sublime. He grasped enough to be able to walk – he was walking, wasn’t he? Was he floating? – and he held coherent thoughts just long enough to know what he must do in each of the moments where he was granted some portion of awareness. He moved – flew, walked, floated, swam – forwards, breath by breath, beat by beat, measure by measure. He was almost at the centre, where all the vortices and lattices of light found their nexus. Here was where meaning died and was reborn, renewed.

The priest said, ‘Have you brought an icon?’

Civilisations rose and fell before he found his tongue. ‘Something else.’ He produced the Lectitio Divinitatus.

Silence. The universe paused. Kanshell was suspended in a limbo filled with an infinite potential of meaning. Something immense transpired. Significance towered over Kanshell, its extent lost beyond perception. He vanished in its shadow, and the silence filled him with cold. What had he done? Had he offended? How?

A hand reached into the limbo. The world coalesced around it. Kanshell could see again. Time advanced, but the silence continued. The priest took the offered book. He handled it with reverence. He lifted it towards the ceiling of the lodge. He spoke. ‘The word.’

The silence ended in eruption. It was as powerful as the cry of a volcano, but it was the fullest paroxysm of celebration. Kanshell wept that he had done so well. The effect was beyond his fiercest hope. For the first time in his life, he realised that even he, the most insignificant of menials, had a destiny, and that his role in the Emperor’s plan might well be far more important than his state should permit.

The priest took a step back. He knelt, and placed the Lectitio in the centre of the floor. The book was battered, dog-eared, curling. It was humble. But it was transformed in the nexus. It became more than words, more than teachings, more than a symbol. Kanshell saw it as the product and source of forces beyond his comprehension. The galaxy turned on the axis of that book. What had been, what was now, and what was to come were reflected and shaped there. His sublime joy was mixed with an awe just as sublime, and so there also came terror. He was too small. The meanings were too vast. If he looked closely, if he understood all, then he would be blasted to nothing.

But would that be so terrible? Would that not be the culmination of his life? Was this not the greatest thing he could ever hope to accomplish? Was there any point in living a perpetual anticlimax?

The priest was holding out his hands again, inviting Kanshell to join the book, to know all, to receive the gift of full revelation. Kanshell embraced the moment. He gave himself as an offering to the God-Emperor. He stepped forwards.

Only he did not. His mind sent the commands. The impulses reached his legs. His body had lost the unity of self, and was slow to react. In the gulf between his thought and his act, the shadow fell. The flow of voices was disrupted by the harsh, merciless cacophony of machines. Engines roared. Heavy boots marched. A voice that held not even the echo of humanity gave commands.

The lightweb shattered, went out. The song died. The world clamped back into place around Kanshell. He gasped at the shock. He stumbled, first out of weakness, and then again as the crowd rushed from the lodge, pursued by the anger of a weapon that walked and judged.

‘This superstition is at an end,’ Atticus declared. ‘So is my patience. So is this settlement. It is over. All of it. Now.’

Kanshell fell to all fours. His head rang as running legs struck it. He curled into a ball, trying to ward off the blows. They did not last long. Even the most devoted of the colonists hurried to obey the terrible giant that had come among them. Only the priest and Ske Vris were unhurried. As Kanshell raised his head, he saw the two walk past the looming Atticus. Ske Vris had her head bowed in deference, but the priest, still hooded, stood straight. Then they, too, exited into the night. Kanshell was alone in the lodge with the captain of the Iron Hands.

‘My lord,’ Kanshell whispered. He had done nothing wrong. At the most important level, the spiritual one, he knew this to be true. But in the realm of secular laws, and in the eyes of the coldest of legionaries, he had trespassed. He did not beg forgiveness. He would not betray the truth of his faith.

There were also beings for whom forgiveness was an alien concept.

‘What do you think you’re doing, serf?’ Atticus said. The low electronic voice, barely audible over the rumble of transport engines outside, was terrifying.

Kanshell opened his mouth. Nothing came out. There was nothing to say. No truth, lie or plea would make a difference now. His words would be as well spent trying to stop the fall of night.

Galba entered the lodge and came up behind Atticus. ‘Captain,’ he said, ‘they are gathered. If you want to speak to them…’

Atticus turned to the sergeant. ‘I do not want to speak to these fools,’ he said. ‘But I will tell them where they stand.’ He left. Kanshell was forgotten. He was so far beneath notice that he could not retain the legionary’s attention for more than a few seconds.

Galba remained behind. He looked down. ‘Get up, Jerune,’ he said.

Kanshell struggled to his feet.

‘What were you doing here?’ Galba’s question was not rhetorical menace. He was genuinely puzzled.

Kanshell had not known the true meaning of worship until he had embraced the teachings of the Lectitio Divinitatus. But he had experienced its simulacrum, and the object of that fidelity had been Galba. Of all the Iron Hands of the Veritas Ferrum, he was the one who stooped to see the serfs. He acknowledged the presence of the weak mortals. He was capable of kindness. He seemed, at times, to have an understanding, or at least a form of sympathy, for the pitiful beings that scurried about, fulfilling the menial tasks of the great ship. Futility had stopped Kanshell from answering Atticus. He knew Galba would not be any more receptive to Kanshell’s new truth than the captain. He also knew that he must be open with his master.

‘I was making an offering to the God-Emperor,’ he said.

Galba closed his eyes for a moment. Kanshell was surprised to see that a Space Marine could look tired. When Galba looked at Kanshell again, he wore a pained expression. ‘I should censure you. At the very least, I should explain the absurdity of what you are doing, and point out that you are acting in direct violation of the Emperor’s dictates and His wishes.’

‘Yes, sergeant.’

‘But I imagine that if you are able to surmount the ridiculous paradox of worshipping as a god a being who has forbidden precisely that belief, then I would be wasting my breath to point out your smaller lunacies.’

Kanshell said nothing. He bowed his head in agreement, in humility and in defiance.

‘Has this cult become widespread among the serfs?’

‘It has.’

The sergeant grunted. ‘The nights, I suppose,’ he muttered, more to himself than to Kanshell. ‘Irrational horror breeds irrational hope.’ His laugh was short, soft, grim. ‘Jerune, if you knew how much of the irrational there is to go around…’ He turned to go. ‘I have no interest in punishing you,’ he said. He gestured with his right hand, taking in the space of the lodge. ‘This will all be over with soon enough, anyway.’

‘Sergeant?’ Kanshell asked, but Galba kept walking. He started to follow, then remembered his Lectitio. He ran back to the centre of the lodge. The book was gone.

Gunships and transports idled, ramps down. The Vindicators had arrived at the gates of the settlement. Engine of Fury had advanced inside the palisade, moving between and ahead of the Thunderhawks. The entire population, thousands strong, milled in the centre of the plateau, herded there by the warriors of 111th Company. Galba eyed the scene while Atticus climbed atop Engine of Fury. It occurred to him that the scene looked like an invasion. At a word, the Iron Hands could annihilate the population before them. Atticus’s impatience had found expression in the brutal efficiency of the operation.

Vox-horns on the vehicles sent the captain’s voice out over the crowd. It was a harsh rent in the night air. He did not greet his listeners. He said, ‘We have entered a new stage of the war. A drastic step is required, which makes this plateau unsafe. You will be evacuated back to our base and its vicinity, until we find you a more suitable location. That is all.’ He was about to dismount from the tank, when the head priest approached. The man stopped with the barrel of the Vindicator soaring over his head, pointing towards his flock.

‘This location is most suitable,’ the priest said.

‘Not any longer.’

‘I’m sorry to irritate you, captain, but we disagree. We shall remain here.’

Atticus was motionless. Galba wondered if he might crush the man’s head for his effrontery. He did not. ‘The decision is not yours to make,’ Atticus said. ‘It has been taken. You will be moved now.’

‘No.’

The silence seemed to cut through the noise of the engines.

‘How, exactly, do you think you can defy us?’ Atticus asked.

‘Simply by doing so. We will not go.’

Atticus reached down from the tank, grabbed the front of the priest’s armoured tunic and lifted him high. He held the man at arm’s length. The priest did not struggle. He held his dangling legs still. Galba was impressed by his self-control, even as his revulsion for the turbulent flesh rose afresh. Atticus said, ‘Do you defy me still?’

‘I do.’

‘Yet I can move you as I will. You are leaving.’

‘We are not.’ The priest’s voice was strained, but its pride was untouched. ‘You will have to kill us first.’

‘You will be killed if you remain.’

‘I think not.’

‘You do not know what is coming. You are a fool.’

‘I think not.’

Atticus grunted. ‘No, you really don’t, do you? So be it.’ He dropped the priest. The man fell in a heap, but rose again with a sinuous movement. He stood as he had before, dwarfed by Engine of Fury and the dark colossus. ‘You wish us to leave,’ Atticus proclaimed. ‘So we shall. You do not wish our help. So you shall not have it. You wish to stay. So. You. Shall.’

He pronounced the last three words with the slow beat and terrible emphasis of a tolling bell. ‘You are welcome, of course, to change your minds. Should you choose to flee into the jungle, and throw yourselves upon the tender mercies of the saurians, feel free to do so. We will not stop you. We will not interfere. We will not help. We will not be here. But you will know of us. At dawn, this plateau will cease to exist. The wrath of the Iron Hands will burn it from all living memory.’

The last words of Atticus’s judgement echoed across the settlement. There was no murmur from the crowd. The priest remained where he was. His stillness rivalled the captain’s.

‘Legionaries,’ Atticus said, ‘we are done here.’

The exodus began. As Galba watched the serfs climb into the transports, he caught sight of Kanshell. The man looked much worse than he had a few minutes before. Then he had been frightened, dazed, desperate. Now he looked sick, broken. His face was grey. It sagged with horror. Many of the other menials, Galba now saw, had the same look. Horror, not terror. They were not dreading the night on the base and the fearful thing that would come for some of them. They were shocked by the fate that loomed for their new friends.

Galba felt a flare of sympathy. He crushed it. He had been pushed to the outside of the company. Since he was not a psyker, how had he been vulnerable? He could guess the answer: the flesh. He had not carved away enough of it. Its weakness had opened the door to the enemy. Well, he was back in Atticus’s confidence again. He would not betray that trust. He would not allow sentiment to get in the way of necessary strategy. The serfs lacked the discipline to see the world as it was. The Iron Hands should, he now realised, have been more vigilant and more ready to stamp out the magical thinking that had infected large numbers of the serfs. He should have been more vigilant. He should have been less lax.

Less human.

Burn it.

He looked away from the shocked humans and walked over to Unbending where Atticus now waited. It was true that he had not imagined Atticus would punish the recalcitrance of the colonists with such finality. He could allow himself the luxury of being surprised. But he was wrong to feel shock, too, he told himself. There was no alternative to the current action, he told himself.

And so he struggled to restrain his own mounting horror.

Sixteen

The Wrath

Khi’dem did not restrain his horror at all.

He stormed into the command centre just before dawn. Atticus had barred access to anyone other than his own officers until the last few minutes before the strike. By then, the Veritas Ferrum was in position. Helmsman Eutropius was on the vox, waiting for the command to unleash its wrath. Galba had stood by during all the preparations. He said nothing to sway Atticus from this course of action. He knew he should. He was convinced he should not.

He could not think. Inside the centre, he could not hear the screams and moans of the serfs suffering at the hands of the shadows. He very likely would not have heard them even if he had been standing in the centre of the dormitorium. His head was tolling with the endless command to burn it, burn it, burn it, burn it. The trochaic metre of the urge beat at his mind as if it had taken over the pulse of his hearts. He managed to remain at attention. He was even able to pierce through the battering obsession when his captain spoke to him. He was able to listen. He was able to answer. But within seconds, he could not remember what he had heard or said. There was only the command. He would have ordered the strike in that instant if it had been left to him.

The hour of Pythos’s mournful, grey dawn drew close. Galba greeted it with relief. The compulsion eased, transforming into a grim eagerness. Soon, the Iron Hands would act. Soon, the ruins would be no more, and the machine would be destroyed. Soon, the storm in his skull would cease.

Soon, soon, soon.

And yet, when Khi’dem arrived, his face contorted with fury, his intentions obvious, Galba was glad. The son of Vulkan’s protest was as necessary as the strike. Galba’s lips curled as the contradiction rippled from his temple to his gut. Once more, he blamed his flesh for trapping him in the paradox. He cursed it. He wished it gone.

Soon.

‘This is murder,’ Khi’dem said.

‘It is not,’ Atticus replied, calm and indifferent to the other’s outrage. ‘We offered safety, and were refused. We have not trapped anyone in the target area. They are free to leave. They still have a few minutes to do so.’ He spoke without malice. Or pity.

‘You will be knowingly exterminating a civilian population, when no enemy is present. This is wrong. How can you still claim to be any better than the World Eaters or the Night Lords?’

Galba tensed at the insult. Atticus did not react. ‘Ridiculous,’ was all he said. He seemed to have Khi’dem’s measure. An age ago, over Isstvan V, the situation had been different. Khi’dem had convinced Atticus to pick up the escaping Thunderhawks by appealing to something in the captain that went beyond the cold expediency of war. He was trying again, but his efforts were slamming into a blank wall. He was speaking to something in Atticus that was no longer there.

Atticus leaned over the hololith table. The representation of the Veritas Ferrum was directly above the coordinates for the settlement. The dagger was about to plunge into the heart of the enemy’s campaign. ‘Brother Eutropius,’ Atticus voxed.

‘Your will, captain?’ Eutropius’s voice crackled with static, but it was clearer than surface-to-ship communications had been for days. The warp’s erosion of real space around Pythos could not stop the coming blow.

‘On my mark, the count is five hundred.’

‘So ordered.’

‘Captain Atticus,’ Khi’dem pleaded, ‘please think about–’

‘Mark,’ Atticus said.

‘The count has begun,’ Eutropius reported.

‘Thank you, helmsman.’ Atticus shut the table down. The hololiths vanished with a flicker of harsh snow.

‘What have you done?’ said Khi’dem.

‘Do spare me the sentiment of your Legion. I find it of very little interest.’ Atticus headed for the command centre’s exit. ‘Brothers,’ he said, ‘shall we?’

Galba blinked. The compulsion had left him the moment Atticus had issued the command. His head felt clear for the first time in days. Nothing spoke to him. There were no warnings or refrains. The absences were a boon. The return to clarity was a sign, he thought. The strike was the right move.

He followed Atticus outside. The sky was still dark, but when they climbed the wall and looked over the parapet towards the east, in the direction of the settlement, the contours of the jungle were beginning to distinguish themselves. A glow was slowly filtering in through the cloud cover. The navigation lights of Unbending were visible in the distance. Under Darras’s command, it was flying within sight of the plateau.

All along the parapet, the warriors of the X Legion had gathered to witness the great fire. The Salamanders and Raven Guard were there, too. Atticus nodded to them. Galba saw Khi’dem exchange a look with Ptero. ‘Do you agree with this?’ Khi’dem asked.

‘The structure must be destroyed.’ Ptero answered.

‘At this cost?’

Ptero seemed pained. ‘I don’t know. Is there an alternative? I can’t think of one.’

‘This is a crime,’ Khi’dem insisted.

‘What news, Sergeant Darras,’ Atticus asked over the company vox.

‘There is a gathering,’ the answer came back.

‘At their lodges?’

‘No. They have formed a circle around the target site.’

‘Suicidal idiots,’ Atticus commented. ‘Thank you, brother-sergeant.’

‘What are you going to use?’ Khi’dem asked, his voice dull. ‘Cyclonic torpedoes?’

‘Far too destructive. We must preserve the warp-anomaly. The strike must be very precise. Sergeant Galba’s insight has proven vital.’

‘It has?’ Khi’dem gave Galba a sharp look.

‘The captain gives me too much credit,’ Galba said.

‘You said we must burn it,’ Atticus said to him, then turned back to Khi’dem. ‘So we shall. A concentrated lance salvo, strong enough to punch through the earth and destroy every trace of the structure beneath. We will cauterise the landscape.’

Khi’dem rounded on Galba. ‘This was your idea, then? I thought better of you.’

‘Then you, also, give me too much credit,’ he muttered. He watched the lights of the Thunderhawk, and waited for the great illumination of the strike. He was filled with disgust. It was directed at himself, at the colonists, at the imminent slaughter, and at all the confusing, contradictory, maddening weaknesses of the flesh. He wished the cauterisation would extend to him.

‘The count approaches one hundred,’ Atticus said. ‘Sergeant Darras, let the mortals know. We will do them the courtesy of giving them a final warning.’

‘There is no need, captain,’ Darras responded. ‘They know.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘They are looking up. All of them. They are waiting for it.’

‘Thank you, sergeant. Pull back to a safe distance.’ To Khi’dem, Atticus said, ‘Be at peace, Salamander. This is not murder. It is suicide.’

Khi’dem glared, but did not answer.

Atticus looked up to the sky. The cloud cover was just beginning to be discernible. ‘We are not responsible for the lunacy of the weak. We are sworn and duty-bound to crush the Emperor’s enemies. That is our task. All else is luxury.’ Then he said, ‘Time.’

The wrath pierced the clouds. The lance fire from the Veritas Ferrum slashed down. For several seconds, a pillar of fire linked earth and sky. The thunder of its strike reached the base a few moments after its light. The world shook with the crackle of energy and the deep bass rumble of purified destruction. This was war at one remove: the iron hand of the X Legion reaching from the heavens to smite the weapon of the enemy.

The salvo ended. The fire vanished, leaving a fading glare like a livid scar on the dawn. The thunder, however, did not stop. It built. The sound grew until it was a towering wave. Galba frowned. Was he hearing the sound of the ruins collapsing? No, the sound was too big. And the crackle of energy had not ceased. The air became supercharged with the smell of ozone.

‘Darras?’ Atticus’s voice was clipped, urgent. ‘Report?’

Static from Unbending. Galba could see its lights, though. It was still airborne.

The sound grew louder yet. The wave crashed down. Galba staggered. He wasn’t wearing his helmet, and there was nothing to shield his senses from the overload. Then the light returned.

Burn it.

Fire erupted from the jungle, a return volley from the location of the plateau. It was all the devastating power of the lance strike concentrated, transformed and amplified into the realm of the transcendent. It was a retaliation so immense, it was as if the planet’s molten core had lashed out. As focused and narrow as it was intense, the incandescent scream speared the clouds. The sky glowed ferocious orange. The clouds boiled with exultant anger.

Then, through the cover, another flash, a point of supreme brilliance, the message of a terrible explosion beyond the atmosphere. Galba knew what it was. His frame was wracked by a silent howl of denial, but he knew what he had seen. The thunder continued to crash over the base, and it was now the sound of mockery, the laughter of the burning sky.

Galba knew. He knew. He knew. But no no no, he thought, all the strength of his will pushing back against what had happened, against the sight that was sure to come. Something scratched at his ear, barely perceptible through the roar of the world. At the back of his mind, he registered that it was his vox-bead. There was a voice there, the voice of his captain, calling to the helmsman of the Veritas Ferrum, demanding an answer, demanding a reality other than the one that was upon them. Then there was another voice, Darras, somehow breaking through the static long enough to shout, ‘What have you done?’ The fury there was directed at Galba, and at him alone.

The blast ended, its work done. The rage in the sky dimmed to the red of flaming blood. Then the clouds writhed as an immense shape descended through them. The presence resolved itself into several distinct masses. They carried with them the searing glow of renewed fire.

No no no, Galba still thought, but the iron truth was deaf to his entreaty. The shattered bulk of the great strike cruiser came into view. The Veritas Ferrum dropped like a rain of broken cathedrals. The blasted sections glowed from the heat of re-entry and the mark of the dismembering wounds. The ship had been smashed into chunks hundreds of metres in length. They were so huge, they seemed to float towards the ground. The sight was so powerful in its malevolent grandeur, it paralysed time. Galba had lived through page after page of the 111th Clan-Company’s blackening history, but these moments were the darkest. They were the death of hope. They were the final fate of the company scrawled across the sky in words of metal and fire.

The fragments of the ship struck the earth. None fell on the plateau or on the base, as if tyrant destiny had decreed that all should witness the despair to come. They hit on all sides, the nearest barely a kilometre away. The impacts were the hammer blows of doom, the drumbeat of a judgement beyond the will of any human.

The ground shook, and kept shaking with each cratering strike. Galba crouched and grabbed the top of the plasteel parapet. The world tried to hurl him off his feet. Hurricane winds blew from every direction. They screamed over the base. They warred with each other. Any serf caught outside was battered to the ground. The legionaries kept their feet by tucking low and holding on. Only Atticus remained standing, defying the fury that tried to uproot the base. He was immovable. Even in the grip of cataclysm, he stood against the very idea of defeat.

The strikes, the winds, and now the fires and the dust. A cloud was hurled skyward at each impact site, and the dawn fell back into night. Waves of flame rippled out across the jungle. The promontory was an island rising above a blazing ocean. The death of the Veritas Ferrum thundered on in a shriek of wind and a roar of firestorm. Dust and smoke and ash choked the air, spreading across the sky, killing day forever and slamming down a sarcophagus lid over the land.

And through the raging clash of the end, through gale and rage and holocaust, reaching into Galba’s head with sickle claws, came the laughter, and it was laughter in the shape of damnation, laughter in a shroud of words, laughter that was a repeating, monotonous, cackling chant.

Laughter that would be his eternal companion.

Burn it.

Seventeen

Reckoning
A miracle
The faces of truth

‘We will die here,’ Atticus said.

His words, Galba knew, were not a lament. They were a statement of fact, one that stripped away all useless, comforting illusion. It was a truth that the entire company must process.

The captain stood on the landing platform, before Unbending, which had managed to stay aloft in the blast winds and return to base. His legionaries stood at attention in rows before him. Diminished rows. In the front rank, Galba could still feel the strength of brotherhood, sense the might of the wall of armour. But the memories of the Veritas Ferrum’s full complement were still vivid. He could picture the absent brothers, officers, veterans. Of the Dreadnoughts, only the Venerable Atrax remained. The Iron Father was gone. So many gone. So many hundreds. Their absence was a phantom limb. It ached.

We are still strong, he thought. They were. Then the sight of the shattered Veritas rose before his inner eye. Not strong enough, came the doubt, and he could not blame it on a malign intelligence whispering in his head. The thought was his own.

He shook it away. For whatever needs doing here, we are strong enough.

‘We cannot leave the planet,’ Atticus went on. ‘We cannot communicate with any of our brothers or other Imperial forces outside the system. Even if we could, I would not countenance bringing them here. The risks are too great. The rewards are too little.

‘We will die here. You are of the Legiones Astartes, and you are Iron Hands, and I know that death holds no fear for you. But defeat carries a special dread. We have experienced defeat. We have experienced loss. We would be poor warriors to pretend that we have not suffered attendant consequences. He who claims he has not been injured by the death of our ship has no place in my command. I say this to you so that we look to our destiny with clear, rational eyes.

‘We will die here. Even our gene-seed is lost. Our company will vanish without trace. Our history is at an end. We shall have no legacy. But we will not die in vain. We will find the enemy. We will grind him beneath our boots. Before we are dust, the enemy will be less than a memory.’ Atticus’s voice rose in volume. ‘We will destroy him with such violence that we will tear him from history. His past, along with his present and future, will be no more.’

Could Galba believe what was being said? His hearts swelled. Yes, he could. He had seen Atticus stand unbowed before the worst catastrophe this world could throw at them. Atticus had not mourned the Veritas Ferrum. He had simply become possessed by a rage of chilling rationality. He would not surrender. And now there was truly nothing left to lose. The Iron Hands would march until they had taken their foe into oblivion with them.

‘You will ask how we will hurt an enemy we cannot find,’ Atticus said. ‘You will wonder what madness prompts me to imagine his death, when we stare at the catastrophe of our last attempt. This is my madness – if what we attempted to destroy defended itself with such violence, then its importance is critical. What we could not do from a distance, we will do at close quarters. What reflected energy weapons will succumb to other means, even if I must smash each stone of that xenos abomination with my fists.’ He paused, then, lowering his voice, and asked, ‘Well? Do you share my madness, brothers?’

They did. Galba did. He and his brothers roared. They slammed gauntlet against bolter in unison. Yes, they shared his madness. Yes, they would march with him.

The flesh is weak, Galba thought. Let it be consumed in this manner. Let me give it to the forge of war, that it might be burned to nothing, and leave only the force of the unstoppable machine.

Behind the legionaries, the serfs were massed. They were exhausted, traumatised. Galba was uneasy when he thought of their fate. They did not have the psychological conditioning of the Space Marines. They did have a fear of death, one that had been intensified greatly during the stay on Pythos. With the loss of the ship, they had nothing to look forward to but endless terror until a hideous fate. Galba could hear sobs over the crackling of the jungle fires.

‘Servants of the Tenth Legion,’ Atticus said to them. ‘Your lot has been the most cruel. But you have sworn oaths, and you remain bound by them. I will not release you from your service. In gratitude for your loyalty, I will do something else instead. Something better. I will arm all of you. You will fight alongside us. You will strike back at that which has tormented you. You will wage war as best you can. Your losses have been immense. Your suffering worse. But you shall have honour until the end, and that is no small boon.’ Another pause. ‘Servants of the Tenth Legion! What say you?’

To the snarling metal rasp of the machine-warrior, they cried, ‘We march!’

‘Yes,’ Atticus said, lowering his voice, filling the air with the electronic thrum of vengeance. ‘We march. We march to crush.’

‘You will be marching without me, I imagine,’ Erephren said to Atticus. He had come to speak to her after his exhortation. She had listened to him from the doorway of the command unit, then retreated to her chamber. She stood before her throne, unable to use it, yet reluctant to abandon her post. She wondered if Strassny, at least, had believed he was being useful in the final seconds of his life.

‘You march on a different path,’ Atticus replied. ‘What would you do with a lasrifle?’

‘Nothing very useful,’ she admitted.

‘You are now the company’s sole astropath,’ he reminded her. ‘The choir was lost with the ship.’

‘I am no use to the Legion in that role, either. The interference is worse than ever.’

‘We march for you. We will clear your path.’

To what end now? she wanted to say. She stopped herself. She had no use for self-pity in anyone, least of all herself. To cry helplessness would be to plunge into the worst indulgence. Atticus was right. She had her own march to undertake. The legionaries were heading off to fight an enemy that had yet to be defined. They could well be marching to futility. But they would not be passive in the face of the loss of the Veritas Ferrum. Nor would she. The 111th Clan-Company could not leave Pythos, but she was an astropath. It was her gift and her duty to bridge the void, to make distance meaningless.

‘Thank you, captain,’ she said. ‘March well. I will wage my own campaign.’

‘I know it.’ His respect was clear.

Half the serfs and a third of the legionaries, under Darras’s command, remained to guard the base. The rest moved down towards the settlement. Vindicators at the front, Thunderhawks overhead, it was as large-scale an operation as the taking of the plateau. It was bigger, with the armed serfs following in the wake of the Iron Hands. It was also more vague, its objectives more uncertain. And it was full of desperate rage.

The lasrifle was turning slick in Kanshell’s hands. He had broken into a jogging run to keep up with the pace of the Space Marines, but his sweat was a cold one. He glanced at Tanaura. He was just able to match her pace. He was breathing hard. She, much older, looked as if she could keep up her unwavering gait for the rest of the day. ‘I don’t know if I can use this,’ he said to her.

‘You know very well how to do so. We’ve all been trained.’

‘I’ve never been in combat. Have you?’

She nodded once.

‘I’m afraid I’ll miss.’

‘Take the time to aim before you fire. Anyway, you can’t miss. Not anything on Pythos. Look around.’

He did. The world had been transformed by the fall of the Veritas Ferrum. The holocaust had incinerated the jungle. For kilometres on either side, the landscape had become a vista of scorched earth and smoking stumps. Gone was the oppressive night of green. In its place was a brown-grey day of ash and smoke. The rumbling growls of the saurians were more distant than they had been. The monsters had fled the conflagration. They were slow to emerge from cover and venture onto the blighted terrain. Some of the larger predators, in ones and twos, were testing the ground. They were in the middle distance, moving parallel with the company. They issued the occasional roar of challenge, but did not approach any closer. There was no war here yet. And Tanaura was right. There was no way of missing a beast that was close enough to attack.

The flames had washed up against the plateau, scorching the exterior of the palisade. Beyond the blackening of the wood, the wall was intact. The settlement seemed to be untouched. Kanshell could not see any guards at the top. He wondered if all the colonists were dead. He could not imagine anything in proximity to that blast having survived. He was surprised to see the palisade still standing. And as the Vindicators rolled up the low slope of the plateau, the gate opened.

The company marched into the settlement. As he passed through the gate, Kanshell’s eyes widened. There was no damage. The colonists stood as he had seen the night before, as if they had not moved. There were only two signs of the event. One was the acrid sting of the air. The other was what waited at the centre of the plateau.

At first, Kanshell thought it was a crater. From the gate, all he saw was the circular depression. He drew closer as the company spread out around the hole, and saw that he was wrong. It was a shaft. It was a perfect circle, and its walls were vertical. Even as he processed the shape, he still imagined that it had been created by the lance fire.

That was wrong, too.

Tanaura was praying under her breath. Kanshell discovered that he was, too.

The shaft was artificial. It had not been dug. It had been revealed. There were engravings on the walls. They were huge, abstract designs. Looked at directly, they were loops and jagged lines. They suggested runes, but never quite became them. But in the corners of his eyes, Kanshell kept picking up on movement. Things coiled as serpents and squirmed as insects. Shadows flowed up the shaft, whispering knowledge of the terrible nights. Kanshell squeezed his eyes shut. The engravings reached in through his lids, becoming silver lightning in the dark. They began to laugh. He opened his eyes again. The world beyond the shaft was enough to dim the laughter.

It did not extinguish it.

A ramp spiralled down into the depths of the shaft. It stuck out from the walls, a ribbon of stone wide enough for two Space Marines to walk abreast. The slope of the ramp was steep. Kanshell thought that if he set foot on it, he would hurtle along its path until his legs outran his balance and he pitched over the edge into the gloom. The ramp looked smooth as marble.

Kanshell backed away from the edge. He looked at the colonists, trying to decide how he should understand the miracle of their survival. He saw that a large group had begun to gather once again at the primary lodge. He nudged Tanaura and pointed. ‘They’re going to worship again,’ he said.

‘Why now?’ she asked. ‘It isn’t even midday. You said their services are always held in the evening.’

‘Because we’re here?’ he suggested. ‘Perhaps they are praying for us.’ He glanced at the shaft. ‘Because of where we’re about to go.’

Tanaura was still looking towards the lodge. ‘That is where you took your Lectitio Divinitatus?’

‘Yes.’

‘I wonder why it was taken.’

‘I never said it was. Just that it was gone.’

‘What else could have happened?’ Her face was grim. ‘I would very much like to know what they want with it.’

‘I wish you had seen the ceremony.’

‘So do I.’ She did not sound wistful.

‘You don’t understand,’ Kanshell said. ‘I was in touch with something divine in there. I was closer to the Emperor.’

Tanaura grunted, sceptical.

‘Why do you doubt me?’ he asked.

‘I don’t doubt you, or that you experienced what you said you did. I worry that you misinterpreted what happened.’

‘Why?’

‘Did any of these people actually speak of worshipping the Emperor?’

‘No,’ he admitted. ‘But they should all be dead, and they were spared. Isn’t that a sign of the Emperor’s hand at work?’

Tanaura turned away from the lodge and gave him a significant look. ‘Is it?’ Then her attention was taken by something over his shoulder. She lowered her head in respect. Kanshell spun around. Galba and Atticus had come up behind him. ‘My lords,’ Kanshell said, bowing.

‘You have friends among these people,’ said Atticus.

Kanshell thought of Ske Vris. ‘I believe so.’

‘In the religious caste?’

‘Yes, captain.’

To Galba, Atticus said, ‘I trust your judgement, brother-sergeant. Do as you proposed. Remain in constant communication.’

‘Yes, brother-captain. And thank you.’

Atticus gave his officer a curt nod and moved off towards the top of the spiral ramp. Galba remained. Just behind him were the members of his squad.

‘There is something we would like you to do, Jerune,’ Galba said.

The Thunderhawks overflew the plateau in tight, circular patterns. As Unbending passed beyond the palisade, the Salamanders’ Hammerblow entered the airspace above the settlement. The Vindicator Engine of Fury guarded the gate. Medusan Strength was positioned by the barrier on the other side of the plateau. Atticus did not trust the wooden wall to withstand a truly concerted rush by the saurians. Anything that managed to break through would be blasted to flecks of blood and charred bone.

The Demolisher cannons were facing outwards, but it would be a simple matter to re-orient them, and unleash their monstrous rage on the settlement. Atticus had not left orders covering this contingency. It was understood. None of the Iron Hands trusted the miracle that had preserved the colonists.

Mistrust was useful, but it did not provide intelligence. Standing at the lip of the shaft, Galba had said to Atticus, ‘I don’t think we should leave these people unobserved while we descend.’

The captain had agreed. A day earlier, the idea of a rearguard being necessary would have been laughable. The colonists were mortals, badly armed, and barely competent with the weapons they did have. They could not offer a threat. But a day earlier, the Veritas Ferrum had still been in orbit around Pythos.

Atticus led the bulk of 111th Company down the xenos ramp. The Raven Guard descended too, using their jump packs to drop quickly from level to level of the spiral. Galba stayed at the surface. He had the tanks, the gunships, his squad, the serfs and suspicion.

And Khi’dem. While the rest of his brothers flew overwatch in the Hammerblow, he had chosen to bear witness on the ground. ‘Keep watch on the people you have fought to preserve,’ Atticus had said to him. ‘See to it that they were worthy of your efforts.’

Galba ordered the serfs to arrange themselves along the perimeter of the settlement. Facing inwards. The colonists had split into two groups. One was at the lodge. It was a big crowd, but unlike the last few evenings, all of its members had found room inside the building. The other group, by far the largest, clustered towards the gate. The mortals kept a respectful distance back from the Engine of Fury. They were quiet as they milled about. They were, Galba thought, expectant, as if waiting for their purpose to arrive.

He and his squad headed towards the lodge, an anxious Kanshell walking before them. Khi’dem said, ‘The confidence these people showed in their survival was well founded.’

‘Yes,’ Galba returned. ‘They seem to be the only ones on this planet who are never surprised.’

‘True.’

‘Are you pleased with our good works?’ Galba spat. He still writhed at the thought of how he had been manipulated. He was relieved that Atticus did not appear to have lost all faith in him, perhaps because the enemy had contrived to make the terrible mistake appear the logical course of action. Still, he needed redemption. And Atticus had agreed so quickly to his suggested course of action that he wondered if the captain saw this as a test.

Or perhaps, he thought, he is sending the tainted to deal with the tainted.

He needed to lash out. He cursed the flesh that had withstood the impossible, and so whose very existence was suspect. He cursed his earlier mercy for that flesh, a mercy that Khi’dem and the other Salamanders embodied. He needed an enemy he could kill. They all did.

If the enemy turned out to be these luck-blessed savages, then so be it.

‘I don’t know that I am pleased,’ Khi’dem answered. ‘I remain satisfied that we did the right thing.’

‘Even if we were tricked?’

‘We acted in accordance with what we knew. If we had abandoned these people, we would have demeaned ourselves. We would have acted without honour. There is more at stake in this war than simple military victory.’

Galba snorted. ‘Ridiculous.’

‘Really? Will you do anything to defeat the traitors?’

‘I will.’

‘No matter how debasing? No matter how much it distorts who we are? You saw the same things I saw on the Callidora. Are you willing to become the same sort of abomination as the Emperor’s Children?’

Galba said nothing. They had almost reached the lodge. He had no answer for Khi’dem. No, the Iron Hands would never follow the path of the Emperor’s Children. And yet no, there should be no obstacle to prosecuting the war against the enemy by any means necessary.

Khi’dem was not done. ‘This war is about our very identities. If we give them up, even if we win the battles, what will remain of the Emperor’s dream? Will we recognise what we will have made of the Imperium?’

Galba paused at the base of the rise. Now he had an answer. There was a way out of the impasse of needs. ‘We will embrace the machine,’ he said. He had to raise his voice. The chanting coming from the lodge was deafening in its enthusiasm.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘The Emperor’s Children are slaves to desire. We will expunge desire from our beings. Our decisions will be dispassionate. We will fuse absolute rationalism with absolute war.’

Khi’dem looked mournful rather than horrified. ‘You are justifying my worst surmises. When we met, you did not reject your humanity to the degree that your captain does.’

‘I have learned the error of my ways,’ Galba replied. He put his helmet on. Neural connectors plugged into his cortex, removing him further from the flesh, gifting him with the enhanced vision and senses of the mechanical realm. He looked up at the lodge entrance, and the ritual going on beyond the door. The divine? he thought. If you could see as I do, you might know something about the divine. It occurred to him that the adepts on Mars were connected to something far more sublime than whatever delusion was the object of the colonists’ veneration.

Delusion? Something rattled like bones in a distant wind. It pried at his thoughts. He shook it away and turned to Kanshell. The serf was jittery.

‘You are worried, Jerune,’ Galba said. ‘Don’t be. You have done nothing wrong, and you will be protected.’ Kanshell opened his mouth as if he were about to correct Galba on a point, but he said nothing. ‘They want you to celebrate with them,’ Galba went on. ‘They will give you different answers than they would give us. Go and talk to them. We will hear, and act as necessary.’

Kanshell swallowed. ‘Yes, sergeant.’ He walked up to the entrance.

‘Is it possible that these people are innocent of anything more than false belief?’ Khi’dem wondered. ‘And they had nothing to do with what happened?’

‘They knew,’ Galba replied. That was enough to condemn them.

Kanshell disappeared inside the lodge. It was as if a current pushed him deep into the crowd. Galba waited, his Lyman’s Ear picking out the serf’s voice from the uproar of song. He was trying to speak to someone. His questions kept being cut off. He was moving, closer, Galba guessed, to the centre of the lodge.

The chanting stopped. In the silence, Kanshell whispered, ‘What is happening?’

‘Why, the truth is happening,’ a woman’s voice answered. ‘Revelation.’

‘That’s my book,’ Kanshell said. ‘Why did you take it?’

‘For the truth,’ came the reply, with the cadence of a refrain.

‘Truth,’ the congregation echoed with a massed whisper.

‘That’s what you want, isn’t it?’ asked the first voice.

‘I already know the truth,’ Kanshell protested.

‘You know it without knowing it.’ The new speaker had deeper, harsher tones. Galba recognised the head priest. ‘You swim at the surface. Now you will plunge. All of us will.’

‘All,’ said the woman, and the choir whispered, ‘All.’

‘Bid them come,’ the priest commanded. ‘The truth is theirs, too. And then you will truly worship with us.’

‘I can’t bid them,’ Kanshell protested.

‘Oh, I think you can,’ said the priest.

The silence was broken by the sounds of a struggle.

In three strides, Galba had reached the entrance to the lodge. Followed by his squad, he marched inside. He shouldered through the colonists, sending them flying. He stopped a few steps before the centre. The priest stood there, hooded, facing him. Beside him, the assistant, Ske Vris, had Kanshell’s arms pinned behind his back. Galba blinked rapidly, trying to clear his vision. The light patterns in the structure were toxic fragments, weakening the bedrock of reality. On the floor, at the nexus of the web, sat a worn book.

‘Release him,’ Galba said. He was almost disappointed that the perfidy of the colonists was revealing itself so easily, and in such a mundane fashion.

‘Of course,’ the priest answered. Ske Vris let go of Kanshell, who stumbled to the side.

Galba frowned. The priest held what looked like a ceremonial dagger, but it was pointing to the floor. No weapon had been held on Kanshell. He had been restrained, nothing more.

‘You have come at last,’ the priest said.

‘Not to worship,’ Galba snarled.

The priest cocked his head. Galba sensed a smile within the shadows of the hood. ‘Perhaps not. But to witness, certainly.’

Ske Vris moved to one side, leaving the priest alone. The man was a single step away from the centre of the room. The novitiate went beside Kanshell, and draped an arm around his shoulder, as if reassuring him that all was well. These people had not planned to harm the serf, Galba realised. They wanted his conversion. And they had wanted the presence of the Space Marines.

Galba raised his bolter. Behind him came the chunk-clack of his brothers making ready with their weapons. He scanned the lodge. The priest was the only one armed, and he presented no threat. Even so, Galba felt the tension of imminent combat. There was a threat here, though he could not see it. He kept the muzzle of his gun trained on the priest. ‘Cover all sides,’ Galba spoke over the vox battle channel.

‘I have the exit,’ Khi’dem reported.

‘Anything?’

‘Quiet here. The larger crowd is still concentrated near the gate.’

To the priest, Galba said, ‘And what are we here to witness?’

‘We have already said it. Truth. Revelation.’ He raised his hands to his hood and pulled it back. Scattered around the congregation, other members of the priest class did the same. The man before him had the face of brutal, feral corruption. His black hair was a leonine mane. Ritualistic scars and tattoos ringed his hairline. A lower canine had been fashioned into a fang that protruded over his upper lip. His eyes were a liquid crimson, devoid of pupil. His acolytes were just as debased. Some had faces that lives of violence had turned into masses of scar tissue. Others had been marked in more precise fashion, with sinuous runes running across forehead and eyelids. All bore some kind of injury like a badge of office. Galba saw missing ears, cheeks cut in half, scalps peeled back to the skull. And in every face was a sick, cancerous joy.

With the religious caste unmasked, the appearance of the rest of the people seemed to change. The new context altered Galba’s perception of the other colonists. Their glow of faith now had an ugly hue. Their rough appearance was the product of a cultural choice. They had embraced something dark, and now they waited for a culminating event.

The cultists stared back at Galba with a gloating triumph.

‘My name, legionary, is Tsi Rekh,’ said the priest. ‘I am proud to be a priest of Davin. I am proud that the Gods of Chaos opened the warp to me and my fellow pilgrims, transporting our humble craft to this place made sacred in their honour. I am proud to walk a world shaped by other worshippers, shaped to find its true purpose on this very day. And I am proud to have reached the moment of my destiny.’

Galba’s finger tensed on the trigger, but Tsi Rekh did not attack. The cultists raised their voices again. The song had no words. It was a sustained cry, rising and falling, twisting through overlapping chords. It was moan and sigh, howl and magnificat. Tsi Rekh did not join it. He took the last step to the centre of the lodge.

He stood over the book. The lightweb reacted. Galba’s perception changed again. The light beams did not move, but the presence of the priest completed a portrait painted by jagged slashes in reality. Where there had been a pattern of painful madness that tortured by hinting at meaning, now that meaning was made manifest. Tsi Rekh was standing in the midst of an altar of light, a light made of wounds.

Tsi Rekh raised the knife.

Galba fired.

Reality trembled.

Eighteen

The priest
The offertory
The feast of all souls

The bolter shells struck Tsi Rekh. Some tore right through muscle and flesh and flew on to kill the Davinites in the rows to the rear of the lodge. One struck the dagger, smashing it to iron slivers. The other projectiles punched into the priest’s body and exploded. Fountains of blood burst from the wounds. Flecks that had been bone shot through the air. The wounds were terrible. They were craters. Tsi Rekh’s form was hammered to crimson meat. His silhouette disintegrated.

Yet he stood.

The rest of Galba’s squad fired less than an eye-blink after the sergeant. The Iron Hands raked the ranks of the cultists with shells. They were methodical. Their commanding officer had responded to a manifest threat, and they were acting in kind. There was no doubt that the cultists were the enemy. It did not matter that they carried no weapons. An attack was under way. Galba knew this to be true, even if the nature of the assault was still hidden from him.

The squad turned the lodge into a slaughterhouse. The air became moist with blood. The bass rattle of the guns competed against the wet thchunk-thchunk-thchunk of bodies being rendered by the devastating firepower. The flesh was weak, and it flew into pieces before the unbending warriors. The cultists were decimated, and more died with every fraction of a second.

Yet still they sang.

The choir redoubled its celebration. There was no pause in the hymn. The awful joy rose higher. Blood washed over the floor of the lodge. It covered Kanshell, who lay flat, cowering. The vitae of Tsi Rekh’s congregation mixed at his feet with his own. His life cascaded down his legs, coating the book. He was barely a form anymore.

Yet still he stood. And still he smiled.

Galba stopped firing. Tsi Rekh’s armoured tunic hung in tatters. There were holes in his torso wide enough for Galba to see right through his body. The priest could not be alive. Galba did not know what force was holding him up. He did not question it. He knew only that he must bring the foul thing down. He mag-locked his bolter to his belt and brandished his chainsword. He would cut the remains of Tsi Rekh into pieces if that is what it took, but this thing would no longer mock him.

He stepped forward, revved his blade, and raised it over his head. Around him, the killing was almost done. Most of the Davinites lay dead. A few, among them Ske Vris, had dropped to the ground, sheltering behind ruined corpses. They were no longer singing. That did not matter. The song continued. It was carried by the lodge itself, echoing from timbers drenched in gore, thrumming in vibrations from beams that Galba now realised only appeared to be light.

Tsi Rekh’s nose was gone. Black clots and grey matter oozed from the void in the middle of his face. But his eyes were alive. Their redness burned. They stared at Galba with sickening triumph. As the chainsword paused, roaring, before descending on its killing arc, Tsi Rekh opened his mouth wide. His jaw was half shot away. His teeth were missing or reduced to jagged stumps. His chest was a broken, pulped mess. There was nothing left of his lungs. Yet a coughing hiss emerged from his ruined mouth. Galba heard it over his chainsword, over the guns of his brothers, over the dreadful song. The priest was laughing.

Galba brought the blade down onto Tsi Rekh’s skull. The whirring teeth ground through bone. They turned brain into paste, and then to mist. Galba bisected the priest’s head. His strike was fast, violent. The Davinite’s body offered no resistance to the weapon or to Galba’s strength. The killing blow took no time at all.

But time itself was taken. It was stretched. Galba moved against a thick current, and the single act became a gallery of frozen hololiths. The chainsword took an eternity to come down. Each step of the mutilation became a sculpture in metal and flesh. As the skull parted to each side, the eyes did not die. They blazed with victory. They held Galba’s gaze. The moment stretched on and on and on. It waited for Galba to realise everything.

He saw, then, the full canvas of desolation. He had been lured into the lodge. He and his squad had been manipulated into butchering the cultists. He knew, with an awful certainty, that the blow he was now striking would have consequences as terrible as the lance fire from the Veritas Ferrum.

Blood everywhere. A luxuriousness of blood. A stinking, dripping, celebration of blood. An exaltation in a temple. Before an altar. Drenching an icon created by the first among traitors.

An offering.

In this moment of the death of illusions, Galba also saw the death of the real. The eyes flared, and time resumed its lethal march. The crimson light embraced the death by chainsword. It burst from the eyes. It engulfed the skull, and then, as the corpse laughed one final time, it swallowed the rest of the body. It was an old light, rotten as a dying star, but also burning with stellar force. Galba yanked his blade free and staggered backwards. The light unfurled from within the priest, yet it was not truly light. It was what had been seeping through the pattern of the web. It was energy, and non-matter, and madness. It was the rage of the warp.

The storm burst over the space of the temple. Galba heard the shattering cracks of wood. The lodge was flying apart, but he could not see the destruction. He could see nothing but the insane howl of blood. It was blinding, but his helmet did not recognise the glare as light and did not shield his senses from the rage. The song became even louder, deafening. Galba heard scratching coming over the vox, but could not make out any words. He stumbled, buffeted by the fury of the monstrous event.

He was standing metres away from a tear in the fabric of the universe. The wound in reality opened wider and Galba crouched, refusing to fall, unable to do anything but keep his footing. The tempest buffeted him, clawing at his eyes and ears and mind. The world teetered on the edge of dissolution.

Instead, something else materialised. It grew from within the storm. It stole the stability of the physical plane, twisting the raw stuff of reality to its own purposes. It gathered in the eye of the gale, using the still-standing remnants of Tsi Rekh as a core around and upon which it constructed something huge. Darkness twisted, gathered definition, became a silhouette. The shadow became a form, taking on mass. The shape stopped changing, though the suggestion of writhing remained in the form of vicious coils and curved spines breaking up its outline.

The non-light faded, sucked into the being that had taken the offering and stepped out of nightmare and into the world. Galba could see again. He saw the enemy the Iron Hands had been seeking.

‘Daemon!’ someone was screaming. It was Kanshell. He was curled in a ball, his lasrifle forgotten, his arms hiding his face. ‘Daemon!’

The being cocked its head Kanshell’s way for a moment. It made a sound that Galba knew was laughter, though it filled his head with the shrieks of diseased infants. Then it strode towards him, the last of the warp-light trailing from it like candle flame.

Daemon. Galba could not reject the word. The truths he had known lay in ruins before him. He knew something about the superstitions of the past. He knew about the monsters conjured by the darkness of human ignorance. One of those monsters now stood before him, and the myths were but pale whispers next to the reality of the thing.

It was immense. It towered over Galba. Its head would have broken through the roof of the lodge, had the building still been standing. It was bipedal, a distortion of the human form that stopped just short of being unrecognisable. Its limbs were grotesquely long, but rippled with taut muscle. Its pelvis was skeletal, and just above it nestled the cleft skull of Tsi Rekh. Its chest was a broad carapace covered in slit-pupilled eyes. They looked exactly like those on the armour of the thrice-cursed traitor Horus, but these were alive. They blinked, twitched and stared at Galba.

The daemon’s head was all fanged maw surrounded by a halo of giant, twisted, asymmetrical horns. They pointed forwards and back, sprouting from the forehead and the base of the skull. Two massive ones curled downward like tusks, almost as far as the creature’s chest. Its forked tongue, long as a snake, whipped and coiled as if seeking prey, the movements strangely echoing those of the abomination’s jointed tail. Beneath a heavy brow, the eyes were as blank and featureless as Tsi Rekh’s. They had the glow of a fire-storm. Galba thought they were blind with rage, because the head always turned in the direction the chest-eyes were looking.

In its right hand, the daemon clutched a staff that ended in a vicious collection of blades. It looked like nestled tridents, but there was also something ceremonial about the configuration. There was artistry in the angles of this metal forged in a delusion’s furnace. There was meaning. The daemon held the staff in a way that reminded Galba of how Tsi Rekh carried his. The weapon was a mark of office. The implications of that idea were as horrific as the being’s presence.

It spread its arms, welcoming the world to its toxic embrace. It opened its jaws wide. It sighed, releasing an aaaahhhhhhhh of unspeakable appetites. It tilted its head back, turning the blank eyes to the void above. It was midday, but darkness rose like vapour from the daemon, forming a canopy of empty black that stretched over more and more of the settlement with every passing second. It was like ink spreading through the air, yet it was something more ominous than that. It was an acid that devoured reality, leaving nothing in its place.

The surviving cultists whispered. The daemon cocked its head. Its tongue licked at the sound, and found it good. The monster spoke, and its voice was the one that had been Galba’s torment since the first night on Pythos. The sound was the mockery of every principle and every hope. It was huge and deep and sibilant. It was a slithering of mountains, a thunder of serpents.

‘Speak my name,’ the daemon said, and it laughed its delight in its voice. It laughed, and nightmares echoed.

‘Madail, Madail, Madail,’ the Davinites whispered. The crowd by the gates picked up the chant, and made it vast.

‘Madail,’ the daemon repeated. It savoured the syllables, dragging them out: Madaaaaaaaail. The second half of the name became an ecstatic exhalation. It was the shape of the synaesthetic shadows Galba had tasted. He had been assaulted by premonitory echoes, and now, at last, here was the sound, coming in judgement and night. Madail.

The daemon gazed down upon the Space Marines. ‘I am the shepherd of the flock,’ it announced, turning the words into obscenity. ‘And I am here to bring my charges to new pastures.’ Madail leaned forwards, its eyes rolling in eagerness. ‘Throw wide the gates,’ it commanded.

‘Now!’ Ske Vris yelled.

Explosions erupted at the base of the palisade. The gate disappeared in a pillar of flame. An entire section of the wall, a hundred metres long, collapsed, opening the settlement to the teeth of the predators beyond. The Legion serfs recoiled from the blasts. Some were crushed under burning trunks. But they held their ranks, and they began firing at the cultists. The Davinites, unarmed, did not retaliate.

‘The offertory,’ said Madail.

The Davinites moved as if possessed by a single mind. Those nearest the serfs ran into the streaks of lasfire, laughing as they were cut down. The rest of the crowd rushed through the fallen gate.

Madail sighed again in anticipation. ‘And later,’ it said, ‘the communion.’

The Iron Hands and Salamanders unleashed the full fury of their bolters on Madail. Dark ichor erupted from the impacts. For a moment, the daemon revelled in the sensation of being struck. Then it brought the haft of its weapon down, striking through the bloody floor of the lodge, down to the earth itself. A wave rippled out from the point of the hit, the ground suddenly as volatile as a lake in a storm. It threw the Space Marines into the air. Galba landed heavily but rose to his feet, firing again. Madail gestured, its free hand clawing at the air, gathering reality into a cluster of folds. The shells fell into the folds and vanished.

Galba found it difficult now to look at the daemon. Madail was advancing behind a shield of damaged materium. The daemon appeared as through a crack-riddled mirror. Its image broke into overlapping segments, and the fractured lines brought tears to Galba’s eyes. The tears ran down his face. When he tasted them, he realised they were blood.

‘Brother-captain,’ he voxed. He could see each move of the coming seconds, and what the endgame would be. If he could warn Atticus, perhaps those seconds would not be futile. But there was only static on the vox network. He could barely make out the transmissions of his own squad members.

‘Brother Galba,’ Khi’dem said. ‘Forgive me. I was wrong.’

‘We all were,’ Galba snarled. But if this was his end, he thought, he would meet it as was worthy of the X Legion. He switched to his chainsword and charged the daemon. The blade roared at his side. He prepared a two-handed swing. At the periphery of his tunnel vision, he was aware of his brothers storming forwards with him. He could hear the growls of the manoeuvring Vindicators. From somewhere above came the rage of the Thunderhawks. The Iron Hands were closing on the monster, and the machine would hurl this absurdity from the rational world. This was Galba’s vow.

It was not his hope. He did not hope for anything, not any longer.

The daemon was two steps away. Galba was the point of the attack. The distortion would not stop him. The cracks in the real were too small. He was a juggernaut. He was sheer mass propelled by righteous vengeance. He was not flesh. He was force itself.

Madail struck first. The daemon shot its trident forward, its full, monstrous reach concealed by the collapse of vision. The weapon glowed darkly and plunged through Galba’s armour. It shattered his black carapace and reinforced ribcage. It punctured his hearts. The sudden pain and shock were eclipsed by something worse: a terminal letting go. His body loosened itself from his will. His extremities went numb. His useless fingers dropped his chainsword. Madail laughed and hoisted him into the air. Galba’s helmet readout flashed a cascade of critical red runes, then went dark.

The dark stretched out from the wound, wrapping its fist around his body. It was cold. It was strong. Stronger than he.

He was flesh after all.

Kanshell saw Madail raise the skewered Galba high. He saw the Space Marine’s struggles diminish, then stop. The daemon did not pause. It moved with speed and grace. It was a dancer at last performing its great work upon the stage. Its spear arm took out the sergeant, and its left hand made a sweeping gesture. Its claws opened ragged tears in the fabric of the world. It made a fist, drawing the real into a tight knot. The rest of the Iron Hands squad closed with the daemon, and they seemed to rush faster as Madail drew its fingers together. They rained blows upon it, and the monster staggered. Its arms shook with strain. But its blind head laughed, and its many eyes looked down upon the legionaries with a cold, knowing indifference. The movements of the Iron Hands were odd. They jerked, and rushed, as if moments of time were missing, or they were moving through a compacted, folded universe.

Madail opened its fist, releasing the real.

The materium snapped back. A shock wave of brutalised physics travelled a dozen metres from the epicentre of the daemon. The Space Marines were caught on the folds, and as the world righted, they were suddenly in several places at once. They flew into pieces, severed by impossibility as if by wire. There was a fog of blood. The legionaries fell, sectioned like logs.

Kanshell wanted to close his eyes. He wanted to shut out the sight of the demigods being cut down. The stalker of the Pythos nights had arrived, and its reality was worse than all of its dark promises. Nothing lay ahead but the fulfilment of a terrible dream.

He did not close his eyes. He saw the Space Marines fall, and he knew that if he surrendered, he dishonoured the Legion to which he was devoted. He saw his fellow serfs engage the cultists, and knew what he must do. Though he and every other mortal would be destroyed the instant Madail’s attention fell their way, that did not absolve him of his duty.

And he had his faith. It was with him more than ever. He had before him the proof of divine powers. If the dark ones walked in forms of flesh and bone, then how could he have ever doubted the divinity of the Emperor and His light? Kanshell’s Lectitio Divinitatus was lost. He did not need it. He had sworn his oath. He had a duty twice over. He had been shown an example, and he would follow it.

He would die in a manner worthy of the X Legion, and fighting for the Emperor.

He stood, his feet squelching in blood. His hands were slick, his hair matted, and his eyes gummed half-shut. He found his lasrifle beside the eviscerated body of a cultist. He clutched it, fired off a shot to see that it still worked, and then ran towards the other serfs.

His path took him behind Madail’s back. The daemon was whispering something to the surviving Space Marines as they crawled along the ground. Kanshell did not listen. Even the sound of the creature’s voice ate away at his sanity. He saw the Vindicators rolling forwards. The gunships were overhead, but hidden behind Madail’s shield of darkness. They would have nothing on which to train their weapons. No matter. Engine of Fury and Medusan Strength had clear lines of sight, and only the presence of critically injured but still-living Space Marines delayed their barrage. In another instant, this section of the plateau would be obliterated by high explosives.

The serfs were giving chase to the cultists. There was nothing to be gained by confronting Madail. But the Davinites had a mission, and they were mortal. Kanshell had plenty of evidence of that. A twisted miracle had spared their lives once, but there were no such miracles today. They could and did die. Find Ske Vris, Kanshell thought. The simplicity and need of the mission kept him focused on it, and not on the terrors around him. Find Ske Vris. Stop her.

His duty would be his revenge. For a brief second, he allowed himself to think that he knew something more now of the heart of the X Legion. Then he pushed all thought away and did nothing but run, racing to stay ahead of his terror and catch up with his anger.

He joined the rear ranks of the serfs as they went out beyond the walls, and emerged from the shield of darkness into a feral day. The cultists were racing over the blasted land towards the base. They were still chanting. The song was a riot of victory and abandon. It was also a summons to the predators. The saurians were closing in from both sides. They no longer feared the open ground. Perhaps they knew that the rival predators in ceramite were no longer present. Perhaps their numbers had reached the point that no threat could hold them back. The ground shook as the monsters stampeded towards the promise of easy kills. The horde was immense. But there were thousands of Davinites.

A banquet of plenty.

The serfs paused in their pursuit. Kanshell shared in the mass uncertainty. The cultists were running towards extinction. Any pound of flesh that the serfs exacted would be taken many times over moments later by the saurians. If they went forwards, they would become prey themselves.

But at their back was a worse monstrosity.

Death ahead. Damnation behind. Duty was reduced to a choice of dooms.

Kanshell kept moving forwards on sheer momentum. He advanced to the front ranks. Further ahead, he saw Tanaura hold her rifle above her head. She shouted something. Her words were lost in the chaos of roars and the thunder of the Thunderhawks and Vindicators beginning their barrage. But her defiance and call to purpose were clear. Her eyes blazing with desperate rage, she pointed. Kanshell looked, and saw that the Davinites were not just throwing their lives away. There was an order to their sacrifice. They were forming lines facing the saurians. The people in those barriers linked arms and stood fast, still chanting, bracing themselves for the impact. Between the lines, the rush towards the base continued. The cultists were selling their lives so their fellow worshippers could reach the Iron Hands’ stronghold.

At the centre of the worshippers, Kanshell saw Ske Vris. She had claimed Tsi Rekh’s staff, and was leading the flock forward. Kanshell saw the mirror of Tanaura’s zeal. He vowed to smash the reflection. He ran forwards. Tanaura was right. If the Davinites still had a mission, so did the servants of the Iron Hands. If they could stop the cultists, their own deaths would have meaning.

The saurians arrived as the serfs caught up to the first of the Davinite lines. Kanshell saw a multitude of spines and horns, shapes squat and elongated, bipeds and quadrupeds, necks like massive serpents, forelimbs with claws as long as his arm, and always the jaws: massive, savage, hungry. He was running a gauntlet of muscle and teeth.

The saurians struck. The cultists laughed. They threw themselves into the jaws. The slaughter was enormous. The monsters ripped into the Davinites. They buried muzzles into ribcages and dragged out viscera. They gutted with claws. The largest beast Kanshell had yet seen, a quadruped ten metres high at the withers, lowered a huge boxy head almost the size of a Dreadnought. It bit the head off a cultist. It swallowed the skull whole, then, with a sudden downward lunge, snapped up the torso before the body hit the ground.

There was blood everywhere. It streamed over the ground. It fell in showers from the victims that were hauled, wriggling, into the air. Kanshell had fled the site of a lake of blood only to find an ocean. And still the chanting did not stop. The victims screamed as they were devoured, but the shrieks had the ring of triumph. Kanshell was back in the lodge, witnessing another dark consecration. The saurians were performing the same ritualistic duty as the Iron Hands. The hand that butchered was unimportant. The spilling of blood was what mattered. The ceremony that had begun in the lodge was not complete. It had moved to a larger canvas. Kanshell could feel the weaving of something immense, and knew just how insignificant he and his efforts were, and how futile. Killing cultists would only feed the creation of the coming horror.

But they would die anyway, and honour demanded some form of judgement.

Kanshell focused on the sight of Tanaura running just ahead of him. Her face was taut with unwavering determination. She was firing from the hip. She could not miss, and she was felling cultists, searing them with lasfire. Ske Vris, deep in the centre of the crush, was as yet beyond reach.

Stop her, Kanshell thought. Stop her. Stop it all. Perhaps the last of the priest caste was important. Perhaps that death, that bit of vengeance, might mean something. He chose to follow that flutter of hope. For the first time in his life, he pulled a trigger with the intent to kill. He found that Tanaura had been right. When the time came, it was not difficult. And he did not miss, either.

The serfs burned away the rear ranks of the Davinites. They rushed up the avenue created by the willing sacrifices. But the barrier did not hold long, and the saurians pounced on the new influx of prey. The road to the base turned into a feeding frenzy.

The last communication Darras had received from the settlement was over half an hour old. The sounds of battle were echoing in the distance, now half-obscured by the howling of the saurians. The lines of sight from the top of the wall were good. With the jungle gone, the plateau was just visible through the low-lying smoke and haze. The Iron Hands could see the madness of the running crowd and the feasting of the reptiles.

All this was presented for Darras to witness. It was a tapestry of disaster.

‘Secure the base,’ he ordered. ‘Nothing gets in.’ He eyed the tide of animal rage heading up the slope. There were limits to what the walls could resist. ‘Saurian or colonist, kill anything that leads a charge our way.’

He tried raising Atticus on the vox again, then Crevther in the Unbending. Nothing, but at least he could see that the Thunderhawks were still in the air. He switched channels. Within the base, the vox network functioned, though not well, not since the explosions had begun at the settlement. He could barely make out the reports from the wall on the opposite side of the base. At least he could reach Erephren in the command centre clearly enough. He did so now, and told her what he could see. ‘Have you detected any changes?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’ The word was spoken by a warrior in the midst of heavy combat. ‘The interference has lessened. The enemy is no longer attacking from the warp.’

A billow of fire in the distance. Darras cursed under his breath. ‘The enemy is using more direct means,’ he said.

‘There is more,’ Erephren told him. ‘The anomaly is becoming much more powerful.’

‘Meaning?’

‘I’m not sure, sergeant. A dark energy is flowing into it and being stored.’

‘You have tried reading the anomaly?’

‘I have…’ She trailed off, sounding awed and drained.

‘And?’

She whispered. ‘I had to pull away. I was about to see everything.’

The mistress of the astropathic choir did not stoop to exaggeration. Darras took her at her word. ‘Your evaluation?’

‘I have little to offer, sergeant. But I can think of only one reason to store energy.’

‘To then release it,’ Darras said.

‘I have observed something else,’ Erephren said. ‘The energy level is building very quickly. It has been accelerating over the last few minutes.’ Her delivery was matter of fact, belying exhaustion and battle.

‘I see. Thank you, mistress.’ Darras looked out at the massacre. It was drawing closer. The saurians and colonists would be within bolter range shortly. Darras was reluctant to pour precious rounds into targets that were about to die. There would no longer be any resupply. If he let matters take their course, the mortals would be obliterated within a very short time span. Without prey, the saurians would disperse.

But Erephren’s words made him uneasy. Something was powering up the anomaly.

‘Brother-sergeant,’ Catigernus said, ‘they are singing.’

Darras listened, finding the voices of the colonists between the roars of the saurians. The other legionary was correct. And the cries that grew louder with every moment were celebratory. Darras’s reason rejected a link between the spilling of blood and the anomaly. His instinct said otherwise.

His options vanished. By tooth, by claw or by bolter, the colonists would die, as they intended. No other outcome was possible. He knew again the acidic taste of defeat, grown too familiar. ‘Hold your fire,’ he ordered, fury turning every syllable into a curse. ‘We must conserve our ammunition. There is worse to come.’

So there was. With every beat of his hearts, worse came. The landscape filled with the rampage of death. The saurian numbers climbed beyond all logic. There were more of the monsters now than there were humans, and still they arrived, pounding across the tortured earth. Darras saw the reptiles now as part of some gigantic mechanism, a clockwork that was being wound turn by turn until it was ready, at last, to perform its great work.

He knew that the final turns of the key had arrived.

Kanshell had adopted tunnel vision. It was the only way he could stay sane long enough to do what he must. He was surrounded by howling monsters. The Davinite’s lines had collapsed. Their rush up the promontory had disintegrated into a pell-mell dash. Strategy had vanished. Not a single cultist would make it to the gates of the base, but perhaps, Kanshell thought, that had never been the goal. The wall was only a hundred metres away. The predators were everywhere. The cultists’ mission had been achieved.

Tunnel vision. If he allowed himself to take in the full carnivorous maelstrom, the fear would take him again, and he would do nothing but cower and die. So he followed Tanaura, and he watched Ske Vris. He treated the massive legs that thrashed on all sides like a forest in storm. They were obstacles, and he looked at them only long enough to avoid them. The blood that fell on his face from victims lifted and ripped apart overhead was just rain, warm and salty. If death came for him, he would not know it. Tanaura was faith, Ske Vris was duty, and nothing else was useful to him.

He weaved in and out of crushing masses in pursuit. The afternoon light was dimmed by the press of giant bodies. The feeding frenzy was escalating, the predators turning on each other when they ran out of human meat. The ground was a mire of blood and muck. Kanshell slipped and fell. He slithered as he tried to rise. A three-toed foot, almost as long as he was, came down within centimetres of his face. He rolled away, choking on gore-drenched earth, and then was up and running again. He still held his lasrifle. He could still see Tanaura. And he could still see Ske Vris.

He was catching up.

He pulled the trigger again. His power pack was close to drained, but there were still half a dozen shots remaining.

‘Stop,’ Tanaura shouted, too late.

Kanshell could not aim and run, and his shots went wild. Still, he could not miss, and he struck a beast ahead of him. The wounds were enough to make it stagger. Its defences were down for a moment, and it was set upon by two others. Tails thrashed. One ended in a knob of bone the size of a power fist. It struck Tanaura a glancing blow, and she went down. Kanshell stumbled back, and the tail mace blew by his chest. If it had hit, it would have caved in his ribs. Tanaura, stunned, tried to raise herself. Kanshell paused to help her up.

‘Go,’ Tanaura hissed. Ske Vris was putting more distance between them.

Kanshell ran on through the meat grinder. Ske Vris moved as if engaged in a dance, dodging around the monsters with ritualistic grace. Kanshell gradually caught up, and realised that Ske Vris was dancing. There was a purpose to each movement. She was forming a sentence, one that no tongue could speak, but that every soul would hear.

And then, somehow, there was a clearing, an eye in the reptile storm. Ske Vris stopped. She faced Kanshell. She was covered in the blood of her kin, and her smile shone all the brighter. She extended her left hand to Kanshell.

‘Join in the worship, Jerune,’ she said. ‘You see the only real Truth. Sing the praise of Chaos.’

Kanshell did not answer. He brought the lasrifle up instead. Before he could pull the trigger, Ske Vris lashed out with the staff. A beam shot out from the ornate bladed tip. It was a dark energy, the deep, rotting violet of pain. It knocked the rifle from Kanshell’s hands and threw him onto his back. It spread over his limbs, a crackling slick. For a moment, his arms forgot what they were. They wanted to change, to become strange. Then the energy dissipated. Ske Vris stood over him. Around them, the war of predators spun. Blood fell in sheets.

‘Are you convinced?’ the Davinite asked. ‘Can you see?’

Kanshell tried to rise. His arms and legs were weak. The ground sucked at him. He saw the moment of his death, and the death of all sanity, of all hope, on Pythos. But he saw nothing to worship. He spat bloody phlegm.

Ske Vris shrugged. ‘A shame. No matter. You were adequate to your purpose.’ She raised the staff.

A las-shot sheared through the cultist’s shoulder. It sent her spinning. Ske Vris grunted, stumbling. Fist still closed around the staff, her arm fell to the ground. The stump smoked. Blood trickled down her flank, but she did not fall. She backed away on clumsy legs.

Tanaura entered the clearing. She had been clawed. Three huge diagonal slashes ran from her neck to left hip. She bore the injury with contempt. Her face was set with the righteous fury of the faithful confronting the heretic.

Ske Vris sagged, but still she smiled. ‘Yes,’ she gasped. ‘Yes, you understand. You will appreciate…’

She paused. The world paused. The saurian war stilled on the lip of a great precipice. Ske Vris looked down at her blood striking the ground. ‘Can it be so?’ she whispered, full of wonder. ‘Am I so blessed?’ She dropped to her knees. She turned to Tanaura. ‘Yes,’ she said, beatific. ‘The offertory is complete. The communion begins.’

There was a huge boom, as if the planet were an anvil struck by a hammer. Then more beats, smaller, but ominous because they did not stop, and they were coming closer.

The day fell into darkness.

Nineteen

The shaft
Unbending
Now

The first sounds of battle did not reach Atticus until the Iron Hands arrived at their target. But he saw the handiwork of a foe long before that. As the company spiralled deeper into the earth, he looked at the xenos architecture in a new light. His perspective was due to more than the revelation of a new region of the structure. This creation had destroyed his ship. Galba had been right: it was a machine, and it had attacked.

The shaft was more clearly a weapon than the rest of the ruins had been. He felt as though he were moving down a rifled gun barrel. The ramp was part of the scoring of the weapon, but so were the runes. They were also part of the power source. He accepted the fact as self-evident. He was conscious of their effect. Even when he closed his human eye and looked at the world solely through the filter of bionics, they still squirmed at the periphery of his vision, still whispered subaural obscenities. He could hear them now, hear them as a shifting fog of nightmare images before his mind’s eye.

He knew something now of what Galba had faced. He still rejected the idea that the powers at work could not be fought by the strategic application of physical force. Whatever used weapons could also be destroyed by them. If the runes were a source of energy, then he would scour them from the shaft walls. But he also acknowledged there were other types of force. Rhydia Erephren used one, with perhaps even more aggression than she would admit to herself. Galba was not a psyker, Atticus accepted that, but the sergeant was more attuned to these energies than he was, more open to oblique thinking. That was why he wanted Galba dealing with the colonists and their worship. He could not imagine how they had played a role in the death of the Veritas Ferrum. But they had. Galba had a better chance of piercing that veil.

The thought crossed Atticus’s mind that he could have explained to Galba why he was entrusting the legionary with this aspect of the mission. He processed the consideration, acknowledged its truth, then filed it away.

Halfway down, he asked Camnus, ‘Any thoughts, Techmarine?’

‘Captain?’

‘This must be more than a fixed cannon.’

‘I agree. I cannot guess at its intended function.’ His servo-arm waved at the serpentine runes. ‘The glow troubles me,’ he said.

‘We have seen it before.’

‘The intensity is greater. It is clearly concentrated in the runes.’

‘What do you conclude?’

‘Nothing definite.’

‘Extrapolate, then.’

‘That our ill-fated barrage was not just reflected…’

‘I saw that for myself,’ Atticus snapped.

‘I mean to say that it seems to have been absorbed, too.’

‘Madness,’ Atticus objected. The beam that had downed the ship had been far more concentrated than the lance fire.

‘Agreed,’ said Camnus. ‘Nonetheless, I believe it to be true. We should prepare ourselves for worse.’

Atticus cursed the warp, cursed the race that had found the means of harnessing its powers in the physical realm, cursed this manifestation of architecture and machine.

Down, down, into the twisting of stone. The dirty light of Pythos’s day did not reach far. It was replaced by the slow throbbing light from the runes. What lay at the bottom of the shaft came into view. A rheumy eye opened. Beneath the shaft was a circular shape of the same diameter. It was marked by a single rune, the largest and most complex of the entire system. The beat of the light was the pulse from this sigil. Atticus returned its glare. ‘That,’ he announced to the company, ‘is what we have come to destroy.’

The Raven Guard had plunged on ahead. They waited on what appeared to be the last spur of the ramp. ‘Captain Atticus,’ Ptero voxed, ‘Do you wish us to begin placing charges?’

How very politic, Atticus thought. Still, he accepted the gesture of respect. ‘At once, legionary,’ he said. ‘My thanks.’

Then, bouncing down the shaft came the echoes of weapons fire. Atticus tried to raise Galba. He found nothing but white noise. ‘We complete the mission,’ he told his warriors. ‘Our brothers know what they are about.’ And he led the way down.

The giant sigil did not mark the end of the descent. The shaft opened up in a vast hemispherical cavern, almost completely filled by a rock dome. This construct was what the tunnels led to, its curved surface their dead ends. The spiral ramp divided as it left the shaft. It became a shelf that ran around the entire circumference of the cavern, hugging the concave wall. Steep staircases zigzagged off from it at regular intervals. The stairs stopped every three metres at a landing. A glance told Atticus the nature of the stairs’ function: they were what had permitted the xenos architects to carve the runes into the cavern wall. The dome itself appeared featureless apart from its one great rune at its peak. The rest of it was smooth black stone. It had no seams that Atticus could detect. It was as if an immense bubble of magma had cooled into a formation as black as obsidian and smoother than ice.

‘We were unable to damage the base of this thing,’ Camnus pointed out.

‘Then we will attempt its roof,’ Atticus replied. Everything has a weakness, he thought. I will wager it is your eye.

Legionaries leapt from the ramp, landing with dull thuds on the roof of the dome. They began to place linked charges. The work had barely begun when the sounds of the war from above changed. There was a lull. Then a greater fury, one that grew in waves, echoes building on echoes.

Then light. Coming closer.

Khi’dem’s left arm vanished below the elbow. The shock of elastic reality returning to stable form disrupted every electrical impulse of his armour and every synapse of his nervous system. For several seconds, his lungs forgot how to breathe, and his hearts stilled. His mind stuttered, his very identity ripped from him. Breath, pulse and thought returned together. He blinked, trying to make sense of the runes that blinked crimson before his eyes as his armour restarted the systems that still worked. The Larraman cells of his blood were forming scar tissue over his stump before he had full knowledge of his mutilation.

In these first moments of reality’s return, he knew only one impulse: move. He did. He rolled out of the path of the striding daemon. He tucked his knees under his chest, shoved against the ground with his right arm, and made it to his feet. He was surrounded by the dismembered pieces of legionaries. He saw Apothecary Vektus, reduced to a writhing head and torso, grunting his final curses before his fall into silence. Then Khi’dem heard the coming of a storm beyond the patch of night that floated above Madail. He managed to put some distance between himself and the daemon before the Hellfury missiles struck. The force of the blasts knocked him sideways. He staggered, but kept his feet.

Madail stood in the centre of the explosions, bathed in fire. The eyes of its chest were closed. Its head was facing up, its maw wide open in chilling ecstasy. It jabbed its staff upwards. The fireball reversed, shrank with a thunderclap of displaced air, and was absorbed into the blades of the staff. Then the flame returned in a stream of concentrated energy. It shot through the shield of darkness. Khi’dem heard the shriek of tearing metal, then a new explosion. Unbending fell through the dark. Streaming smoke, one wing gone, its engines aflame, it streaked in like a comet. It passed over Khi’dem. It touched earth once, rose as if denying its fate, and then slammed down, digging a massive furrow, disintegrating yurts, and roaring towards the centre of the plateau.

‘No,’ Khi’dem whispered as he realised what loomed. Behind him, the daemon laughed. The Demolisher cannons of the Vindicators boomed, and the daemon laughed.

Unbending’s nose was crushed by the impact. The gunship’s speed bled away. Its momentum lasted longer, and it began a slow, agonised somersault. The fire embraced the rest of the hull as secondary explosions touched off. It had turned into a towering torch when it toppled into the great shaft.

Fire and metal roared towards the Iron Hands. Atticus looked up from where he was standing overlooking the sigil. He saw the burning gunship, and knew it as the herald of catastrophe. No orders were needed, and he gave none. The Space Marines scrambled for cover. Atticus glared at what hurtled his way, taking a full second to blast the fates with his hate, and then he too moved. He threw himself to the right, pounding along the perimeter shelf behind his troops. The legionaries on the dome were leaping for the lower shelves. The company moved fast.

The blow came faster. Unbending struck the top of the dome with the force of doom. Its frame compacted like a god’s fist. The ship’s propulsion system was breached. The explosion filled the cavern with killing light. Behind the flash came the flames. They washed over the dome. They raced around the cavern. There was no shelter. There was only distance from the immediate blast. There was the fortitude of metal and the strength of armour. And there was luck.

Precious little of it.

The wreckage of the ship crushed legionaries. The anger of the explosion reduced others to cinders. Atticus’s auto-senses shut down, blocking the flash. In the moment of blindness, he stopped running. He crouched, grounding himself on the ledge, leaning against the wall. The flames and the wind slammed into him. His armour’s temperature shot up to critical levels. A giant’s hand sought to pry him from his perch and hurl him to the storm. He held fast, and after the first moment of the assault, he had the firestorm’s measure. He rose in defiance.

‘We will not fall!’ he shouted. He was surrounded by a cyclone of fire. The howl of the winds was such that he could barely hear his voice inside his helmet. The vox was caught in its own storm, and he did not know if any of his brothers received his words. None of this mattered. He stood, and as long as even one of the Iron Hands still lived to fight, the Legion did too.

He turned around, rejecting the heat that reached through to the traces of the human that still remained and reminded him of the reality of pain. He lifted a foot, challenging the wind to do its worst, and took a heavy step forwards, into the gale of fire. The readouts on his lenses were blinking, erratic. He had no sure knowledge that he was not the sole survivor. No matter. Battle was engaged. He was at war, and there would be no further retreats for the X Legion. Not one more step. And so he walked into the fire.

A body stumbled past him, propelled towards the edge of the shelf. Atticus snapped out an arm and caught the legionary by the wrist as he started to plummet. Atticus dropped to a knee and held fast. The other warrior dangled, then managed to grab on to the ledge with his other hand and haul himself up.

‘My thanks, brother-captain,’ he said. He was Achaicus, from the Assault squad commanded by Lacertus.

Atticus heard him clearly over the vox. The storm was abating. ‘Give me your thanks in force of arms, brother,’ Atticus said. Over the company channel, he voxed, ‘Report, Iron Hands, and regroup. Retaliation calls to us.’

The fire burned itself out. Nothing remained of Unbending except smoking, twisted fragments. Looking down from the shelf, Atticus saw them scattered around the base of the dome. They did not resemble the bones of a gunship. They were shrivelled detritus. They were another shame, another humiliation that Atticus would carve from the enemy’s hide.

The company shook off the effects of the blast. The Iron Hands acknowledged Atticus’s orders. There were gaps in the roll. Fourteen more battle-brothers had died in the destruction. Atticus could hear the rumbling beat of combat coming from the surface. Big guns firing. The Vindicators. He cursed his luck. He ran back to the shaft and looked up. The Thunderhawk’s fall had smashed entire sections of the ramp. The Raven Guard and the Iron Hands’ Assault squad could make it back up. Not so the rest of the company. Atticus growled. He looked at the dome. It was untouched. The impact and explosion had not even scratched the sigil. His fists tightened.

He called Lacertus and the Raven Guard to him. They looked up the shaft, and he did not have to explain. ‘Go back to the surface,’ he told them. ‘Provide support.’

‘What about the rest of the company?’ Lacertus asked.

‘We will find a way.’

‘How?’

‘We will punch handholds into the sides of the shaft if we have to. All I ask is that you leave some of the enemy for us to kill.’

Arms crossed and gauntlets slammed against chestplates as the squads made the sign of the aquila. Atticus turned away as they rode the fire of their jump packs back up the shaft.

‘Captain?’ It was Camnus.

‘I order you to give me good news, brother.’

‘I may have found a way forward.’

‘Where are you?’

‘On the floor of the cavern.’

Atticus ordered a rally at Camnus’s position, then made his way down, leaping from landing to landing of the nearest staircase. He reached the base of the dome in less than a minute. A number of his legionaries had arrived first, some clearly thrown down by the explosion. He saw damaged armour. He also saw a few fatalities.

Running from the base of the dome and back towards the main body of the ruins, precisely spaced along the cardinal points of a compass, were rocky tubes about four metres in height. Camnus had taken up a position beside the nearest one. ‘These are the tunnels,’ he said.

Atticus nodded. ‘And?’

‘They are not made of the same rock as the dome.’

He was right, Atticus saw. The tube’s brickwork used the natural rock of the plateau. It was not the deep, glistening black of the hemisphere. ‘You think we can break through,’ he said.

‘Yes. Then make our way back up through the ruins.’

Atticus nodded. ‘Do it.’

‘So ordered.’

Then, as the Techmarine began to direct the placing of charges, the great blow came. It had no source, but the entire chamber rang. Something all-important changed. For a moment he thought the world had shifted under his feet. Then he realised he had felt the beginning of a rip.

And then, the light. Light from the worst of darkness.

Engine of Fury and Medusan Strength fired in unison. The colossal shells landed with lethal precision at Madail’s feet. The ground erupted. Boulders and dust were thrown dozens of metres into the air. They rained back down as the next salvo arrived. For almost a minute, Khi’dem could see nothing of the daemon. He saw only the plateau transformed into a volcano.

Madail reappeared. Chest-eyes still closed, head still tilted back in rapture, the daemon strode out from the geysers of earth. After two steps, it opened its eyes and ran to Khi’dem’s left, heading for Medusan Strength. The Vindicator surged forwards to meet it. The Demolisher cannon roared again. The daemon seemed to wince in anticipation at the moment of the barrel flash. The shell struck the abomination in the chest. Huge as Madail was, no mass even its size could survive such a blow. Any mass that belonged to the materium would have disintegrated.

The daemon laughed. There was the huge flash of the blast. There was the great thunderclap. And there was the laugh. Khi’dem blinked. The explosion was strangely sanitised, as there was no debris. The blow knocked Madail back several paces. The daemon laughed again as it spun once, recapturing its momentum with the grace of a dancer. Its delight in the experience was clear. It charged Medusan Strength again. Behind it, Engine of Fury closed in. It approached in an arc, staying out of the way of the other Vindicator’s fire, and keeping its own cannon silent for fear of striking its brother. Its engine howling, it rushed in to smear the monster over the landscape with its siege shield.

Medusan Strength fired once more. As it did, Madail leapt. The daemon sailed high over the shot and came down on top of the tank. It landed hard enough to drive the Vindicator’s treads into the ground. Medusan Strength reared up like an enraged animal. The legionary riding in the hatch fired upward with his combi-bolter. Madail plunged the tip of its weapon down, spearing the Space Marine. The daemon pushed down harder, and the blades stabbed all the way through the chassis and embedded themselves in the ground. For a surreal moment, Khi’dem saw the tank pinned like an insect to a board.

Madail hissed with pleasured anticipation, and the staff glowed an incandescent red. The heat was savage. Khi’dem saw the armour near the staff turn molten. Ruptured fuel lines and ammunition ignited. The tank shook with a chain reaction of internal explosions. Then it blew apart. Madail exulted in the centre of light and tortured metal.

Above, the darkness was spreading, as if the longer the daemon walked the earth, the further the stain of its existence spread.

Engine of Fury reached Madail. The massive siege shield struck the back of the daemon. Madail did not move. The Vindicator came to a sudden halt. The towering figure vaulted over the tank as the cannon fired. Madail leaned down and stretched out its immense arms. It embraced the rear of the vehicle. It laughed as the treads turned the ground into mud, fighting in vain to break free of its grip.

The daemon waited. Khi’dem heard the snarl of the other Thunderhawk close in. He could not see it through the darkness.

Madail could.

A steady barrage from Hammerblow’s battle cannon chewed up the surface of the plateau, carving deep trenches towards the daemon. As the shots struck it, and Khi’dem stared in horrified wonder, Madail hurled Engine of Fury into the air. The tank flew up like a missile. It passed through the darkness, and Khi’dem heard the sickening, crunching bangs of massive bodies in collision. Hammerblow hurtled into view, locked in a fatal embrace with the Vindicator. The two machines slammed into the ground, shaking the plateau.

There was a moment of relative calm. The sounds of crackling flame and secondary explosions were the echoes of battle, the fading uproar of a war lost. Khi’dem looked around. He was the only legionary standing. But the Thunderhawk and tank had not gone up. Perhaps there were survivors. Khi’dem stumbled towards the wreckage. He was halfway there when the explosions came, knocking him down, robbing him of the last of his brothers.

Madail bestrode the battlefield, basking in the glory of its good works. ‘A fine dance,’ it called out. In its mockery, its voice became musical, but it was the music of ragged dreams, the chords of strangled hope. ‘Is there no one else?’ it asked.

Rising once more, Khi’dem could not imagine that the daemon was speaking to him. He was, in this moment, beneath notice. But he wondered that the daemon spoke in Gothic. There was something directed, personal about the doom that was unfolding, as if these awful moments, this tragedy of the warriors of the Veritas Ferrum, had been waiting since the dawn of the galaxy.

‘Ahhhhh,’ said Madail, slicking the air with hungry delight. ‘Welcome.’

Khi’dem saw jump-packed legionaries rise from the central shaft. They began firing at the daemon. It ignored their shots.

‘Welcome,’ Madail said again. ‘Witnesses. Witnesses to the great communion.’ It advanced to the edge of the shaft. It looked out beyond the plateau. It pointed with its staff. ‘Servants of the toy god,’ it called out, ‘look what you have brought me. Behold what you have wrought.’

Khi’dem looked. The need to face the worst allowed him no other option. He knew that the Iron Hands and Raven Guard were looking too.

To the east, with the immense, rumbling crack of an earthquake, something was rising. It glowed with a malevolent light, the crimson-streaked deep orange of burning blood. Coils of energy, like solar prominences, flared and danced around the object. The impossibility of the vision confused Khi’dem at first. He did not know what he was seeing. Then he realised it was the stone pillar, the anomaly that had been the nexus of all the struggles on Pythos.

The monolith climbed towards the sky, and its true nature was revealed. The pillar was merely the tip of a cyclopean structure that was not a column at all. Other, lower columns now appeared, rising in parallel. Then the bases of the columns, curving inward towards each other, joining together. To his horror, Khi’dem saw a gargantuan replica of Madail’s staff. It was a symbol and a weapon. It was an aeons-old monument that had been created not as a commemoration, but in anticipation of this moment. Apotheosis had arrived. The bladed stone rose now to claw the sky. It climbed and climbed, a hundred metres, two hundred, three hundred, and still more. It was a tower so laden with significance that it threatened to shatter all meaning. It rose until it loomed over the Pythos landscape. No tree or hill for hundreds of kilometres in all directions was its equal.

The multifoliate tower reached higher yet, and now there came a new sound. To the grating of stone was added a great, rhythmic pounding. Behind the glare of the monument’s infernal energy, Khi’dem saw shifting, hulking shadows. Hills, his eyes tried to tell him. Hills that rose and fell to a massive beat.

Waves, his mind realised. Waves a hundred metres high. The ocean had joined in the dark celebration, paying tribute to the terminal event. It heaved itself up again and again, rising and falling to the beat of sanity’s funeral, a massive darkness beneath the grey sky, its surface reflecting the apocalypse fire of the monument. Khi’dem thought he saw things disporting themselves in the waves. Monsters of the deep, forced up by instinct to celebrate as the planet fulfilled its destiny.

The sounds became ever more deafening, a symphony of deep madness, the endless grinding of stone punctuated by the boom, rasp, boom, rasp of the ocean. And underneath, another theme was preparing itself. It was coming closer, beat by beat, moment by moment, doom by doom. When it arrived, it would be the only sound. It would swallow everything. It would crush everything.

It would be everything.

Madail moved to the lip of the shaft. It raised its arms, holding the staff up towards its gargantuan model. The light from the monument was so intense it dimmed the day. It pulsed even brighter as Khi’dem watched. The energy was being fed by something. Strands like ectoplasmic vitae flowed to it through the air, the echoes of distant violence coming to add their deaths to the growing toll.

The moment approached. The tower rose to its full height. The energy reaching the critical point. Madail stood in ecstasy before the sights, a priest with the powers of a god.

‘Now,’ the daemon cried out, in command and prayer.

Now.

Twenty

The end of day
Horn of plenty
Drumbeats

In answer to the daemon, the sound that had been rising beneath the earth and sea arrived. It was a single beat, so profound that it tore reality asunder. The beat came from the monument. The sound was a ripple that raced from that centre to embrace the world. At the same moment, the energy burst free. It took the form of directed, cancerous light. It shot from the points of the black stone blades, the individual beams joining into one that descended into the shaft.

The great beat shook the world so hard that it knocked the Iron Hands and Raven Guard out of the air. They had only just risen from the hole when the beam struck. Ptero hit the ground. He rolled up and was on his feet in an instant. His brother, Judex, and one of the Iron Hands were less fortunate. They were clipped by the beam. That was enough. Where they were touched, their armour and body ceased to exist in the material sense. An explosion of unreal being overtook them. Madness given form ballooned and crawled from their wounds. Eyes and fangs and clawed limbs multiplied. The two legionaries were dead before they landed with sickening wet thuds. Their corpses devoured themselves until they were nothing but a squirming, senseless mass of snapping entrails and moaning, whistling bone fragments.

The energy from the monument poured itself into the shaft, and Ptero felt that awful rip widen. The tear was, he realised, more than a shift in the nature of all things. It had a specific location. There was a plague about to be unleashed, and it had a source, a point in reality that had been so corrupted that it was now going to burst and spew forth abomination.

Already, the disease was propagating. The stain of night that hovered over the daemon now established its dominion. Tendrils that looked like vapour but moved with the slash of lightning rose to the cloud cover. They altered the clouds. The black spread like oil over water. The day of Pythos, never more than a sour insult, died in agony.

Something worse than night stole over the firmament. The black was absolute, and it was deep. It was not a veil that blocked the light, beyond which the galaxy remained sane. It was a theft. The sky was gone. The stars were gone. Over Pythos now was nothing, a void made terrible by the absence of all that should be, and even more terrible by the sense of ghastly possibility, of imminence. Something would fill the void. Something that should not be.

And from the bottom of the shaft came a noise, an uproar, the rising cacophony of a great horror unleashed.

The light struck the sigil of the dome. Standing at the base, Atticus could not see the rune react to the contact, but he could hear the result. He could feel it. He heard a huge door opening, a door that was stone and iron and flesh. He felt the dome fill with the rotten energy. The black stone pulsed with an abyssal light. The tearing continued, and now Atticus knew that this worst thing was occurring inside the dome.

‘Get us into this tunnel,’ he ordered Camnus. ‘Do it now.’

‘We are ready, brother-captain,’ the Techmarine replied.

The company drew back. Camnus set off the charges. The explosion sounded muffled, drowned by the thrumming of the energy beam. But the power of the blast was more than enough. It punched through the wall of the stone tube, creating a breach the width of three legionaries. The Techmarine’s demolition was skilful: the charges were strong enough to pulverise the wall, so there was little debris inside the tunnel, but not so indiscriminate that they weakened the ceiling and brought it down. The way in was clear.

Atticus entered first. His warriors had a clean run open to them back to the surface, where he knew war awaited. But he paused. He was sure that what was happening in the interior of the unbreachable dome was critical. He looked again at the dead end. What, he wondered, was the point of these tunnels if all they did was run into a wall? The xenos creation – whether architecture, mechanism, or both – was perverse, its functions opaque. But he was learning that there was nothing futile about any of its elements. The tunnels had a purpose. If they existed, it was to bring something to the dome, or to release something from it. As the company gathered in the tunnel, Atticus examined the dome wall once more.

‘Something is changing,’ he said. The pulsing was much faster here than over the rest of the hemisphere. It was painful to observe. It was a blackness that strobed, an energy detached from any known configuration of the eletromagnetic spectrum. It was light’s diseased twin. The intensity of the disturbance rose even as Atticus spoke, and as it did, it crossed a threshold.

Atticus blinked. Each of his eyes was receiving radically different data, and the split was disruptive, assaulting his mind with a fusion of migraine and digital feedback. He shut one eye, then the other. The human eye saw the pulse as a perverse impossibility. His bionic one registered something far more profound. It saw a flicker. The wall was phasing in and out of existence at the speed of insect wings. Atticus picked up a piece of rubble and tossed it against the wall. The stone was atomised.

Camnus joined him. ‘That,’ the Techmarine said, ‘is a gate.’

Atticus nodded. ‘And it is opening.’

The pace of the flicker increased. A vibratory thrum filled the tunnel, shaking dust loose from its roof. The black became so intense, it was almost blinding.

‘Iron Hands,’ Atticus called. ‘Weapons ready.’ An eager certainty took hold of him. ‘We are about to find our enemy.’

The thrum built to a piercing whine. The nature of the flicker changed once again. The gate’s moments in the material realm became fewer, then shorter, then irregular. Winning the war were the time fractions when the barrier was only an illusion, a memory of a wall.

The memory faded. With a sharp crack of dissipating energy, the gate vanished. The way into the dome was open.

As was the way out.

Atticus did not wait for the enemy to declare itself. He had been forced into fighting a reactive war ever since the return from the Hamartia raid. No more. He entered the dome with his finger already depressing the trigger of his bolter.

The space was suffused with a dirty glow. It was the diluted form of the ray that had struck the sigil. The floor was level and featureless, except for what looked like a dais, fifty metres in diameter, in the centre. The interior walls were festooned with runes, larger and more complex than the ones on the wall of the outer chamber. They were the source of the light, but they faded as the thing in the centre of the dome manifested itself. It began as a thin line in the air, stretching from the apex of the vault to the dais. The line twitched and jerked like captured lightning. With each movement, it left a copy of itself behind. Within a few seconds, a black, jerking web occupied the central ground. It spread farther, shorter segments multiplying, connecting, the formation becoming more and more jagged.

Atticus scanned quickly, saw that there was no shelter. The Iron Hands’ armour would have to suffice. ‘Form an arc,’ he commanded. ‘Keep the gate at the centre. It is ours. Let nothing pass. Prepare to concentrate fire on what stands before us.’

The pattern froze. When it did, Atticus realised he was not looking at a web, but at a pane of cracked, shattered reality. There was the blast of a horn, long and deep at first, then rising in pitch from mournful horror to shrieking delight. The broken pane fell in pieces, the edged fragments cutting more chunks out of the materium as they dropped. Behind the fragile layer of reality lay the great depths of madness.

And from those depths an army came.

Bellowing, braying, laughing, snarling, singing, cursing, gibbering, the hordes poured into the dome. They were a cascade of monstrosity, a flood of the perverse: flesh, horns, hooves, jaws, claws, wings, tails, pincers. Arms that were blades, blades that had eyes, weapons and armour and life made indistinguishable. Hide the crimson of anger, the pink of hideous infants, the green of disease, the white of corruption. The frothing, squirming swarm of the maggots was as nothing to this onslaught. The maggots had been a mere sketch, the planet rehearsing an idea now terrible in its blossoming.

Atticus had his enemies, and they were daemons. Perhaps, at a level he did not acknowledge as existing, he had always known this would be his fight. Or perhaps he simply rejoiced at having something to kill. He did not know what the truth was, and he did not care. He adjusted to the reality of the impossible without a pause, and that was all that mattered.

‘Kill everything,’ he said. He raised his voice over the howling mob that raced towards the company. He became the machine. ‘Spare no flesh!’ he snarled as the rounds raked into the front lines of the monsters. ‘This is nothing but the endless spew of weakness. We have abandoned the flesh, and will not be dragged down into its swamp. Exterminate it! Scour the planet of inferior life!’

The explosive shells ripped their targets apart. Some of the daemons fell, killed as easily as any other form of sentience. Others absorbed the damage without slowing. Still others underwent a transformation, writhing and screaming, muscles and skin and bone ripping and cracking until there were two monsters where there had been just one. From the smashed hole in the real, the monsters continued to arrive. The abyss of the warp was full of distorted, ravening life, and the numbers were beyond counting.

Legions were descending on the single company.

The leading edge of the daemon plague was almost upon the Iron Hands. Monsters were going down, pulped and torn beyond repair by the lethal hail. When they died, they lost their form, flesh revealing its essential flaw as it dissolved. The floor of the dome was slick with deliquescing bodies. The advance did not slow. At its centre, giving it shape, was an ordered force of blood-red, horned, sinewy beasts armed with blades almost as long as a man. They were surrounded by a plague of monsters like an explosion of foam on the crest of a great wave. There were so many daemons that they were climbing over each other to reach the Space Marines. The shapes were as varied as madness. Some had just enough of the human about them to make the distortion of the form all the more perverse. Others were vaguely canine, but horned, armoured, massive. And still more were of no recognisable derivation at all. They were chaos made flesh, a cancer of grasping jaws and tentacles.

Atticus could see the truth: the army of damnation was infinite.

So much the better.

‘Take them!’ he roared.

So ordered, the Iron Hands did not meet the wave on the defensive. The offence was all they had left, and so they took it. They attacked. A metal battering ram surged forwards to crash into the daemonic multitude. Bolters were mag-locked. The weapons were chainblades, power fists and flame.

Atticus swung his chainaxe into the twisted visages before him. He felt the impact of his blow up the haft of the axe, a satisfying jar to his arms. Perhaps the flesh he destroyed was a lie, but it tore and died as well as any truth. Ichor sprayed over him. A daemon raised its sword over its head, two-handed, and brought it down at Atticus’s face. He grabbed the blade with one gauntleted fist and snapped it in half. With his other hand, he swung the axe in and decapitated the daemon for its effrontery. The head snarled at him as it arced away to be trampled by the melee. The body flailed at Atticus for several more seconds before it collapsed. It was smashed to pulp before it even had a chance to begin dissolving back to the formlessness of the warp.

The Iron Hands were relentless. Atticus was surrounded by a brotherhood of destruction. He and his legionaries were confronted with the naked truth of the flesh. It was a taint upon the galaxy, upon reality itself, and now it was the time for the Iron Hands to smash it, shred it, burn it. Annihilate it.

The flesh grappled with Atticus. A thing reared up over him. It was like a monstrous slug, an excrescence of muscle and teeth. Its skin rippled. Pustules oozed and dripped. It was rot, it was disease, and it would consume him. As it dropped over him, he lifted the axe. It plunged into the centre of the creature’s mass. Rubbery filth parted. Atticus forced the weapon higher, bisecting the daemon. It howled idiot pain. Its blood, if blood this was, gushed forth in a torrent that was thick, viscous, translucent and streaked with green. It was illness in liquid form. Atticus felt it tug at his boots. His armour was slick with the effluence of rendered monsters. It was a badge of honour. He raised his axe all the way. When it pulled free, the daemon stopped screaming and fell away on two sides.

Over its twitching corpse came more horrors, always more, floods upon floods of the enemy. Atticus swung and punched, swung and kicked. He killed and smashed. With every move, with every step, he sent another daemon out of the physical realm. He commanded but a splinter of what had been the X Legion, but even one warrior of the Legiones Astartes could destroy armies. The Iron Hands pushed hard against the wave of daemons. They halted its advance. The enemy would not pass. It would not reach the surface by going through the Space Marines.

It was a meaningless victory. His forces were only blocking one exit. There were three others, and the gates were all open. Through a momentary gap in the wall of monstrosities, Atticus saw the streams of the mob stampeding through the other openings with raging abandon. In the ceiling of the dome, where the sigil had been, was a huge aperture, and the creatures with wings were flapping up through it and to the shaft.

‘Captain,’ Camnus’s voice came over the vox. Atticus was surrounded again by the clawing, slashing horde, and he could not see the Techmarine. He could not see any of his brothers.

‘Yes, brother.’

A grunt of effort on the vox, then a large, wet crack to Atticus’s right. Camnus was nearby, slaying well.

‘What is our goal?’

And there, with the question before him, Atticus had no answer at first. He had been so focused on locating the enemy that he had not thought through the implications now that he had found it. There was no victory to be had here. The company could fight until the inevitable, and that would be nothing more than another kind of futility.

What is our goal?

To stop this warp-fuelled machine. And if that were not possible, to somehow use its power against itself. We read the warp through it before, he thought. It is vulnerable to us. We will find a weakness. And for that, Rhydia Erephren was key.

‘We make for the surface,’ Atticus told the company. He whirled with the axe, slicing through a massive tentacle that had wrapped around him like a python. ‘We make for the base.’

They would not be retreating. And he vowed that he would yet tear a victory from the throat of this monstrous planet.

Doom marched in on a heavy, echoing beat, the shout of volcanoes forced into a regular metre. It was as much a spectacle as dark music. Darras watched the rise of the monument. Even at this distance, it was clearly higher than the promontory, and it changed the shade of the day. That was the first beat. And then the great boom, the greatest beat, as the light struck downwards, and Darras knew that something fatal had been destroyed.

He knew this because he now saw death take the day. The black beyond night, the black of ending, spread out from the direction of the settlement. It swarmed up into the clouds and swallowed them. It rippled outwards, eating the sky and leaving the great and endless nothing behind.

But then, as the black overhead was complete, something appeared in the empty vault. Pure void pulled back to reveal a sun. It sat in the sky directly above the monument. It was in the position that the Pandorax star would have held, had it ever been visible through the cloud cover. There was no doubt that it was a sun.

But it was stone.

Darras felt the foundations of all certainty crumble away beneath him. The celestial body seemed close enough to touch, the details of its rough, cracked surface as clear as if it were a planetoid no more than few hundred kilometres in diameter. Yet it was a star. It filled a third of the sky. It radiated a cold, grey light. It hung over Pythos, a mass heavy with infernal judgement. It was without sense, without logic. It had no meaning, and for that very reason was dreadful in its significance. It was madness given immense, implacable form. It was a stone against which any semblance of reality and sanity would shatter.

Still the beats came. Still the doom, doom, doom march of catastrophe. These newest beats were softer. They were not globe-ringing strikes as the unleashing of the monument’s energy had been. They were less metaphysical. They were concrete, a true sound. Something in the distance was striking the ground again and again with slow, relentless regularity.

Coming closer.

The sounds came from the north and south. Darras knew the promontory was caught in a pincer movement before he saw what approached. Then, bathed in the frozen, corpse-light of the stone sun, the threats appeared over the horizon.

Darras heard the serfs on the wall whimper in terror. He had no patience for their weakness, but he would have been surprised if they responded otherwise. Mortals were weak. They had brittle limits to their courage. What had been summoned broke those limits. The thing in the sky was a terror, but it was also distant. It was not an immediate threat.

The animals that lumbered towards the base were.

Pythos had held back the worst of its horrors until now. Perhaps, Darras thought, these monsters would not appear until there was a sufficient concentration of prey. They would need unimaginable quantities of meat to live. He remembered Ptero’s refusal to accept as natural the carnivorous ecology of the planet.

‘You are vindicated, Raven Guard,’ Darras muttered. There was nothing natural on this planet. The Iron Hands, of all Legions, should have recognised technology when they encountered it. Everything, from vegetation to animal life to monstrous artefacts, had been created for a purpose, and that purpose was at last being fulfilled.

The creatures now approaching were immense. They were the size of Battle Titans. They were at least fifty metres tall, perhaps more. Their heads were long, crocodilian, with forward-pointing tusks at the hinge of the jaws. Conical spikes the height of missiles lined their spines and clustered at the end of their tails, forming flails that would smash a tank flat. They walked on their hind legs, but their forelimbs were huge, reaching down almost to the ground from shoulders as wide as weapons platforms. Now and then, they would lean forwards and use their arms to propel themselves a bit faster through the jungle. Trees splintered and fell before their advance. Then they were crossing the burned land, rumbling over it, as big as hills, terrible as myths.

Catigernus said, ‘They’ll knock the wall down.’

‘They won’t have to,’ Darras told him. ‘They’ll step over it. I doubt they’ll even notice it.’

The great beasts descended on the feast. Their smaller brethren were still devouring the colonists. There were enough mortals left to keep the air filled with shrieks and song. The giants reached down with their colossal claws and scooped up handfuls of struggling prey. Their jaws clamped down on humans and saurians alike. The air filled with the sound of cracking bones. The monsters advanced to a beat of earthquakes. They were only a few strides from the base. They towered into the empty night, the light of stone washing over their scales, transforming them into gargoyles larger than cathedrals. They devoured all life from the land, and soon would turn their hunger on the Legion emplacement.

‘Here is why we conserved our ammunition,’ Darras voxed to the base’s forces. ‘Open fire.’

A storm burst from the walls. It was a hurricane wind of mass-reactive destruction, the lightning of las-fire and the thunder of rocket launches. The storm smashed into the nearest giant. Its flank was lit by flame and tiny geysers of blood. It turned slowly, as if barely aware of the attack, to face the base head-on. It growled in building anger. The night shook with the rumble of its threat.

‘Eyes!’ Darras commanded.

The beast ducked its head forwards, jaw opening to swallow its attackers whole. How very cooperative, Darras thought. His shells found the monster’s left eye. The saurian shrieked as a jellied explosion erupted over its face. The other eye burst a moment later. The monster thrashed, arms sweeping in huge arcs.

‘Throat!’ Darras shouted.

Aiming was difficult. The target was big enough, but the animal was convulsed in pain and rage. Its movements had gone from majestic to frenzied. But a missile struck it in the throat. The blast ripped through the flesh and unleashed a torrent of blood. The howls became raking, choking gurgles. The beast tried to retreat. It turned its back on the wall, but fell to its knees. As it pitched forwards, its tail swept over the parapet. Plasteel crunched and folded and shattered. Serfs were reduced to bloody smears. Three of Darras’s battle-brothers died, their ribcages crushed, hearts punctured, as they were struck by a spiked battering ram the size of a Land Raider. Darras threw himself flat. The flail smashed down on the parapet a few metres from him, punching a huge gap in the wall, then bounced up, flying just over him to come down again an arm’s length further on. Catigernus had to leap to the ground to avoid being pulped. Darras stood again as the beast collapsed. The earth shook with its death.

The others looked at their fallen kin. Two of them began to feast on its body. The others advanced upon the source of the threat.

‘Sergeant Darras,’ Erephren voxed.

‘Is this urgent?’ Darras asked as he started firing again. Perhaps they might bring one more beast down before the rest of them marched over the base. Perhaps.

‘I believe I can use the anomaly,’ Erephren said.

‘Then do so now,’ Darras told her. ‘Our time is brief.’ His sight of the lifeless sun was blotted out by the approaching monsters. The Iron Hands’ fire was unabating, but the targets were on their guard and attacking in unison. He was shooting at a mountain chain.

Arms greater than trees rose and struck at the wall. Jaws gaped like hangar doors. There was nothing weak about this flesh. The mountains slouched forward, and the defences of the base collapsed like eggshells. A leg clipped Darras and sent him flying. He landed a dozen metres from where the wall had been. There was nothing left but ruin and savagery now. Very few of the serfs were still alive, but they fought on, loyalty to duty and Legion winning out over the instinct for futile flight.

The Iron Hands had been scattered by the blows. They fought back, the unalterable discipline of the machine coordinating their fire even now. But the monsters had broken the formation, and it was no longer possible to concentrate all the shots at a single target. A clawed foot came down and crushed the serf barracks. Venerable Atrax poured the full anger of his twin-linked heavy bolters into the monstrous ankle. He blew away bone and muscle, and the saurian fell. The immense frame collapsed across the camp, levelling still more structures. The avalanche narrowly missed the command unit. Atrax had foreseen the trajectory of the fall, and had a clear shot of the skull. Before the animal could lash out, the Dreadnought hammered it with a stream of fist-sized, armour-piercing shells. He smashed the creature’s brain. The body twitched and writhed, spreading more ruin, then stilled.

Two dead. The end delayed by a few more seconds. Perhaps Erephren would have time to do whatever she had in mind.

In between the deafening roars, through the unceasing pounding of bolter fire, Darras realised the astropath was speaking to him. ‘Sergeant,’ she said. ‘I have tried. I cannot act here.’

‘What?’ He changed a clip and resumed shooting with barely a break in rhythm. He kept moving. Claws almost as large as he was raked furrows in the ground where he had been a moment before.

‘The connection must be total.’ There was a calm in her tone that spoke of a terrible decision. Even through the fracas of devastation, her voice was chilling. ‘I must be in physical contact with the source of the anomaly.’

Darras grunted, staggering backwards as a colossus reached for him, his death glaring from its eyes. He blasted a finger off the hand, forcing a moment of recoil. ‘Do you understand our situation? And what the anomaly has become?’ He wondered if her blindness was shielding her from the full scope of their fate.

‘Better even than you, sergeant,’ she answered. There was no hope in her words. Only the determination of war.

‘Then wait for me,’ Darras said. The run was impossible. It was also imperative.

‘I will meet you at the ship,’ she answered.

‘What?’ Disbelieving, but then he saw her. She was already halfway from the command centre to the landing pad. She moved with the same determined assurance as ever, but more quickly than he had ever seen. She held her staff as though she were a banner bearer. Her cane barely touched the ground. She did not run, but she avoided the gigantic, trampling steps of the monsters with ease, changing direction in anticipation of every movement. The Salamanders’ second ship, Cindara, had been crushed, but the Iron Flame was still intact. Erephren was making for it in as direct a line as the dance of destruction would permit.

Darras raced after her. ‘To all within reach,’ he voxed. ‘With me at Iron Flame. Brother Catigernus, we need a pilot.’

‘At your heels, brother-sergeant.’

‘Brother Atrax…’ Darras began.

‘Understood,’ the Dreadnought answered. ‘I will give you the time you need.’

Darras rolled beneath the swing of a tail. It smashed through the wall of the command centre. ‘Thank you, venerable brother. You will be remembered.’

A noise came over the vox, a laugh almost as divorced from the human as Atticus’s. ‘None of us shall be remembered. But swear to punish the enemy.’

‘I swear it.’

Atrax lumbered towards the centre of the base. He fired his bolters in a circular pattern, striking the three saurians in the base, and one still feasting on victims beyond the wall. They turned on the small creature that had the temerity to injure them. The Iron Hands who were too far from Iron Flame converged on Atrax and added to his fire. A dark order coalesced out of the vortex of the base. Legionaries reduced to the size of ants beside the sky-high beasts ceased evasive manoeuvres. The carnivore gods zeroed in on them and ignored the few who boarded the Thunderhawk. The monsters did not look as the engines ignited with a roar.

In the cockpit, Darras stood behind the seated Catigernus and watched the final curtain fall on the base. The saurians pounced. It was obscene that monstrosities so gargantuan could move with such vicious speed, yet they did. The battle was over in seconds, and even that length was a testament to the force of the Iron Hands’ assault. Greater glory yet came when another of the creatures fell. It crashed on top of the armoury, the impact of its tonnes setting off enough ammunition to trigger a chain reaction. The beast’s torso was consumed in a fireball that spread over half the base.

One creature looked up as the flames washed partway up its back. The others paid no attention, consumed with destroying the Iron Hands. They crushed the legionaries beneath their feet, picked them up and tore them in half. As Iron Flame rose from the landing pad, one of the saurians twisted and smashed Atrax with its tail. The blow crushed the Dreadnought. Inside the chassis, the atomantic arc-reactor went critical. Catastrophic failure ensued. For a moment, everything vanished from Darras’s sight in a searing flash. When the light faded, Atrax had disintegrated, and the explosion of the reactor had blown apart the lower half of the saurian. The monster lived a moment more, even as its viscera plunged to the ground. It raged mindlessly, still trying to devour its prey. Then it collapsed.

It was a victory, of a kind. But then the remaining saurian was joined by its brother from beyond the wall, and there were still more on the promontory slope. For the Iron Hands on the base, the stolen seconds ran out. The battle ended. Hope disappeared beneath claws and between teeth.

Catigernus took the gunship up in a steep climb. He pushed the engines hard. He fired all forward-facing weapons at the same time. Twin-linked heavy bolters on the fuselage, lascannons on the wings and the massive dorsal cannon opened up. The monster that rushed at them, eager to embrace the new prey, vanished in a tremendous eruption of fire and blood. Iron Flame rose through the thick cloud of vitae. Then it was clear, rising higher, flying faster.

Not high enough. Not fast enough.

A colossus reached up with both arms and struck home.

Twenty-One

The message
The revel
Juggernaut

When the day fell into a tomb and the stone sun came to drench the land in the chill of dead marble, Kanshell looked to Tanaura. She did not respond, as transfixed as he was. But then the footsteps of the great saurians drew closer, and the island of calm vanished. The frenzy resumed. Tanaura hesitated, looking first towards the wall, then down the slope. Kanshell felt the panic of indecision. There was no clear path, and no clear duty, and in moments they would be trampled or devoured.

The new monsters arrived, creatures so huge that Kanshell felt the touch of the sublime once again, and he wept that it could take on forms so dreadful.

‘Back,’ Tanaura decided, and ran down the slope, making for a brief gap between beasts. Luck, or the lingering aura of the final step of the ritual, was with them. They had not come to any of the reptiles’ notice. The beasts were consumed with savaging each other and the diminishing crowd of voluntary sacrifices.

‘Why?’ Kanshell shouted as he rushed to keep up.

‘The battle here is over. It may not be at the settlement.’

There was no further speech, then. As before, there was the jerking, stop-start-sprint-hide race through legs and past snapping jaws. There was a difference, though. Earlier, anger had coursed through Kanshell’s blood. There had been the need to strike back at Ske Vris. He had had a target upon which to focus and block out the horrors around him. There was no such goal now. There was only horror, and the need to escape its teeth for one more heartbeat. He followed Tanaura, but to sustain him, he had but one thing: his faith in the Emperor.

It was enough.

He did not despair. He knew that every step he took in the service of fighting the unholy foe of the Emperor was an act of righteousness. If he died in the next second, he would die as one of the faithful. Perhaps even as a martyr, though he did not imagine anyone would ever hear of what had transpired on Pythos. Behind them came the sound of destruction and war as the god-beasts attacked the base.

They were well down the slope when they heard the familiar engine howl of a Thunderhawk. Kanshell’s heart soared. The rout was not complete. The company still had the means to strike hard. He heard the full-throated rage of Iron Flame’s guns. He hoped punishment would pound down the length of the hill, putting an end to the terrible life that surrounded him. He would not mind dying in such a conflagration. He hoped for the dignity of death by weapon over the rending by teeth.

There was the sound of a great impact, and the voice of the engines became a stuttering shriek. The guns fell silent. The craft passed overhead. It was streaming fire, dropping lower. Kanshell caught only a glimpse of it as he and Tanaura fled the reptilian murder on all sides. Then, ahead, a boom and a grinding crash. The night was lit by the brighter, warmer glow of another disaster. Tanaura angled her run in that direction. Kanshell did the same. He was no longer following her. They were both racing towards a new goal. The fall of Iron Flame was the site of their battlefield. Duty summoned them.

There was a change in the current of the savagery. Some of the beasts were moving in the same direction. They, too, were being summoned, but by the call of large and helpless prey.

Darras kicked at the buckled door to the troop compartment until it gave way. Beside him, Catigernus was struggling to free himself from the mangled controls. The legionary’s right arm hung uselessly at his side. Iron Flame had hit the ground nose first, hard enough to crumple the forward fuselage, and it had crushed his armour on one side.

Darras paused at the bulkhead. ‘Do you need help, brother?’ he asked.

‘I can manage. See to the others.’

See to the astropath, was what he meant. Their battle-brothers could withstand worse crashes than this. Even with the flight controls reduced to a farce, Catigernus had managed to bring the Thunderhawk in at a relatively shallow angle. The bulk of the ship was still in a single piece.

But Darras smelled smoke.

He entered the troop compartment. The Iron Hands had removed themselves from the grav-harnesses and were taking up positions at the side door. It looked as though it might still open without a struggle. Erephren was seated. She was not moving. Darras went to her, cursing.

She startled him by speaking. ‘I am well, sergeant.’ Her lips barely moved, but her forehead was lined with effort. Darras saw that she was locked in some unseen mental combat. ‘How close are we?’ she asked.

‘Perhaps halfway there. Your connection is stronger?’

She nodded, the gesture slight and tense. But when she spoke, it seemed that the effort to interact with immediate reality helped anchor her. ‘It wants me to become lost in the contemplation of the warp’s vistas. Its pull is strong.’

‘I don’t see how increasing proximity even further will help, then.’

‘I have a strength of my own.’ She was silent for a moment, a swimmer wrestling with a sudden riptide. Then she continued, ‘As astropaths, our training is limited to the permissible uses of our abilities. I believe I can do something more. But I cannot act over a distance. If I can touch the object, I can engage with it on my terms.’

She was speaking of matters that did not sound in keeping with the role of an obedient and sanctioned psyker. Darras found he did not care. The puritanism he had embraced until now, that had driven a wedge between Galba and himself, no longer had a useful part to play in this war. To throw away any possible weapon against the forces that could steal the sky would be to embrace defeat.

Then Catigernus was at his side. The other legionary was moving well and quickly, shrugging off the loss of the use of his arm. ‘Where is this smoke coming from?’ Darras asked him.

‘A number of small fires. We have the ones we can reach under control.’ Catigernus looked up and nodded towards the dark smoke emerging from a vent. ‘A lot of smouldering going on with the internal systems. Nothing we can do about that.’

‘The engines?’

‘Offline, but I don’t think the damage is critical.’

Darras gestured to the flames visible outside the viewing blocks. ‘What am I seeing there?’

‘I jettisoned the missiles and auxiliary fuel tanks before we hit.’

Darras went to the door and opened it. A huge trail of flame, the result of the explosive destruction of ordnance and gunship fuel, led back up the slope. Saurians were loping down the hill, but were being held back by the fire. In the distance, the great monsters were just beginning to focus their attention on the crash site. ‘We don’t have much time,’ he said.

‘Can we proceed on foot?’ Erephren asked.

‘Too far,’ Darras told her. The reptiles would be upon them before they had gone fifty metres. At a squad’s strength, the Iron Hands could hold the beasts at bay for some time, but there were thousands of the saurians abroad. The chance of Erephren being killed by a lucky attack was too great. His mission now was seeing that she survived long enough to complete hers.

‘We cannot stay here,’ she protested.

‘We can hold out longer,’ he said. They would have, he thought, until the god-beasts reached them.

‘And then?’

He turned to her. ‘We need reinforcements if we are to reach the anomaly. We need to contact Captain Atticus. He needs to know what you hope to do. And the vox still can’t break through the interference.’ He paused, letting the implications sink in. Outside, the flames were already beginning to die. The death of the Veritas Ferrum had consumed everything on the ground that could burn. The growls of the saurians were drawing closer. ‘We both know what is causing the interference,’ he said.

‘You think I can break through?’

‘I know you are the only person who has even a chance of doing so. You are an astropath. Sending messages through the warp is your vocation.’

‘The captain has no one with him who could hear me.’

‘Perhaps not. But if the interference is reduced, I can use the vox. I understand that you cannot defeat the anomaly, mistress. But fight it. Fight it just enough.’

She nodded once, and threw herself into the struggle. She grew so still, she did not appear to be breathing. The creases on her forehead deepened. Her skin paled until it was the same pallor as the stone sun. Narrow trails of dark, rich blood trickled again from the corners of her eyes.

Outside, the slow drumbeat of approaching annihilation began once more. It was joined by a new sound, coming from the direction of the settlement. Darras’s eyes widened.

He could hear laughter.

Reaching the surface was like rising up from an ocean. An ocean of blood. An ocean of monstrous flesh and horn. Atticus was no longer even thinking in terms of destinations. Twice now he had fought his way up from the depths. Both times, the foe had come in a swarm, and combat had indeed meant swimming, a grinding exercise of brawn and chainaxe.

There was no room to move. The only way up was through warp-flesh. But the maggots had been mindless. The new foe was sentient, eager, armed. Too eager, too numerous, for the daemons could not unleash their worst either in the frenzied crush. They were too hungry for the blood of the Iron Hands. That was their mistake, and they shed their own instead, pouring their perversion of vitae over the warriors that advanced through them, one step at a time, never retreating, one gutted body after another, always forwards, always upwards.

Always killing.

And then the surface. Atticus allowed himself a single moment of satisfaction at having reached the first goal. He could think ahead again. He took stock of the new battlefield.

He saw the monument, the glowing mockery of reason hundreds of metres high.

He saw the stone presence in the infinite void.

He saw the air filled with flying daemons. Some of them were in combat with Lacertus’s squad and the Raven Guard. The battle had the rhythm of a sea in storm as the warriors on either side rose from the ground, dropped, then rose again. Most of the winged monsters were flying away from the settlement, cavorting and shrieking in glee as they made for some triumph he could not imagine.

He saw the mutilated dead. The Iron Hands had emerged from the chasm that opened at the base of the mound where the primary lodge had stood. The bodies of colonists and Space Marines were everywhere. And there was a special insult. In the centre of what had been the floor of the lodge, metal torn from the wreckage of the Vindicators had been planted. Its configuration imitated that of the tower. A legionary’s body was draped and impaled over the framework, like a torn, bloody scarecrow. It was Galba. Atticus confronted the severed head of his sergeant. He felt anger at the desecration of the warrior’s body. He added the atrocity to the tally of the enemy’s crimes.

In the lower depths of his identity, something stirred. It was something he had starved into atrophy. He had managed to cut most of it away. It was a human response, an impulse born of generosity and empathy. As it fought to spring back to life, its form became more defined. It was guilt. It was regret.

It was unprofitable. It was a luxury impermissible in combat. And it was weak. Atticus snuffed it out.

Then he turned to behold his true enemy, the shadow he had been hunting since Hamartia. He saw it stride across the plateau, through the flames and smoking ruins of yurts and vehicles. He heard its name chanted by a thousand twisted throats.

MADAIL! MADAIL! MADAIL!

Madail held its staff high, laughing with delight as it conducted the infernal symphony. With every sweep of its arms, a huge current of daemons rushed forwards along the arc of the gestures. Madail was leading its ground troops in the same direction as the aerial daemons. It paused, its flock streaming past its legs. It turned. From its position near the gate, the eyes on its chest stared at Atticus. The daemon’s mouth opened wide. It let out a sigh of hideous pleasure. ‘Ahhhhhhhhhhtticus. At last. You are welcome to the revel. Will you join us? The feast will not be complete unless you witness it.’

The daemon gestured with a hand, and scores of its lesser kin broke off from the main flow and launched themselves at the Iron Hands.

‘Fight hard,’ Madail admonished. ‘Fight well. Earn the reward of my art.’ It turned away and resumed the procession from the settlement.

Then it stopped again, cocking its head in puzzlement. The light from the monument flickered, a slight but distinct cut interrupting its radiation of disease. And through that fissure in the chaos came Darras’s voice over the vox. The sergeant’s message was quick, clear and confirmation of Atticus’s earlier determination. Rhydia Erephren was key. She had the key. The conduct of the war became simple. Atticus doubted he heard the voice of hope. He knew that had been silenced long since, and would be heard no more by the 111th Clan-Company. But he had something more tangible: a mission.

‘Forward, legionaries!’ he called. ‘Cut through the foe! The means to punish him is within our grasp, and the grip of the Iron Hands is unbreakable!’

They charged. They had lost many of their number on the long climb to the surface. They were all battered, their armour scored by blade and acid, slicked with filthy gore. There were only a few dozen warriors left of a company that had stood a thousand strong. They bore all these wounds, and yet attacked with a ferocity even greater than they had inside the dome. They were a machine that had been given a precise goal, and that made them a juggernaut.

The daemons that rushed forwards to meet them were serpentine and insectoid, human and bovine. Their bodies were long and slender to the point that they seemed to be nothing but a tail with head, limbs and stinger. Their legs were long, jointed like an insect’s, elegant like a human’s. Their movements had a hideous grace. In the days before madness, when the Iron Hands ventured aboard the vessels of the Emperor’s Children as brothers, Atticus had, out of courtesy, sat through some of the remembrancer performances so beloved of the III Legion. He saw an echo now of those ballets. The daemons danced, and through their very art, they flew over the ground with the speed of rapiers. And they sang to each other, weaving a siren song of melody and dissonance, beauty and corruption. It was a complexity that sliced the real. It summoned the mind to the dance, and distorted the body. Atticus felt the song try to reach into his form. It wanted his bones to be water. It wanted his flesh to be glass.

His flesh.

That was the daemons’ mistake. They were singing for beings much closer to the human than the weapons that charged towards them. Atticus had never known the sublime in art, and as he had travelled further and further down the machinic path, his perception of music had become the cold eye of an anatomist. He rejected the song and all its works. His body gave it no purchase.

He slammed into the daemons, swinging his chainaxe in a wide, horizontal arc. In a single gesture, he severed four limbs, to either side and before him. He ruined the dance. He killed the song with the outraged shrieks of his targets. The rest of the company followed on, an engine of annihilation that savaged the daemons. None of Atticus’s battle-brothers were as transformed as he was, but if they had been injured by the song, they showed no sign. The advance did not slow. They cut the monsters down, trampling the obscenities under their boots. Atticus heard the howling of the daemons cease. It gave way to the crunching of bone.

Do you see? he wanted to shout at Madail. Do you see what happens? This is the fate that awaits your kind. If not on this planet, on some other, at the hands of our brothers. You will not win.

As he fought, he saw shapes drop on torn wings. Lacertus, Ptero and the other assault legionaries were carrying the day against the flying daemons. Other shapes flew away to rejoin the main swarm.

The Iron Hands stormed to the edge of the plateau. Madail sent no other contingents against them. The daemons continued to pour in an unending flow from the chasms before the ruins of the lodges. The streams skirted the Iron Hands, rushing to the promise being enacted on the Pythos landscape. For the moment, the daemons had lost interest in the legionaries.

Atticus paused. Spread out before him was a vista of mad carnival and absurd warfare. The daemons and the saurians met. They were two waves of monstrosity, colliding in a storm of perfect destruction. The reptiles roared their challenge to the new enemy. Their jaws parted in anticipation of new, unlimited prey. The daemons laughed. They fought the saurians, and they danced with them. Atticus saw the clash of monstrous flesh, of reptile and warp-born, of savage instinct and perverse refinement. The land itself was almost invisible. A new forest had appeared to cover it. It was a writhing forest, the slashing, bleeding, eviscerating forest of monsters vying for supremacy.

More saurians were arriving from all sides of the plateau. More daemons raced from the depths to meet them. And in the distance, from the direction of the base, Atticus saw the giants come. The flying daemons were already swooping around the colossi. The monsters swatted at them as if they were insects. Other, larger, more hulking daemons were moving up to grapple with the giants. They were still smaller, but there were many of them.

‘And these are our works,’ said a voice beside Atticus.

The captain turned, and found Khi’dem standing beside him. The son of Vulkan had lost an arm, but seemed no less steady, no less derived of the bedrock itself, than Atticus had ever seen him. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

Khi’dem nodded at the spectacle. ‘We have been manipulated every step of the way, Captain Atticus. All of us. But we all acted in accordance with our beliefs. I don’t know if we could have done anything differently. This result was inevitable, given who we are. And though we were tricked, we have done this. We opened the way.’

‘Then we must atone,’ Atticus told him.

Khi’dem nodded again.

Atticus pointed to the guttering trail of fire about a kilometre distant. ‘We are awaited there,’ he told the company. He looked at Khi’dem. He no longer felt any animosity toward the Salamander, though he felt no kinship, either. There was nothing left in his world except the battle ahead, and the hatred for everything he would kill. He asked, ‘You will fight beside us?’

‘Until the end.’

‘I don’t think you will need to wait long,’ Atticus told him.

The Iron Hands descended the slope of the plateau, picking up speed as they plunged into the rampaging hell.

When Kanshell saw that the Thunderhawk was still largely intact, he was surprised. He was also surprised that he and Tanaura had survived their journey this far. His surprise gave way to a sick awe when he saw why the saurians had ignored the insects running at their feet.

A tide of daemons was heading their way. Leaping, striding, hopping, flying, the abominations came on with a chorus of murderous joy. The stone sun looked down upon the army of its children, and the light was the blessing of death. Every fragment of hell that had haunted Kanshell during the nights of torment had become a full, monstrous manifestation. The screaming end to hope and life was here. All that the divine reality of the Emperor stood against had been unleashed. He quailed, and clutched the thread of his faith with all his strength. His instinct was to close his eyes and wait in terrified prayer for his doom. But Tanaura was still on the move, running to the side door of the gunship. He joined her. They reached up and pounded against it.

Darras threw the door back. He looked down at them for a moment, and then, to Kanshell’s shock, he laughed. ‘If you two are the answer to my call,’ the sergeant said, ‘then the Iron Hands have come to a sorry end, indeed.’ He turned sombre. ‘Get in,’ he said, as saurian and daemon came together.

Kanshell and Tanaura scrambled aboard. Darras slammed the door closed. Tanaura turned to the viewing port and looked out at the war of madness. The earth was shaking with the blows of monsters, and there was still the deeper, slower booms of the approaching giants. ‘Do we fight?’ she asked. She sounded eager. Her wounds were bleeding freely, but her eyes shone with the mission of her faith. Inaction was heresy.

‘We will,’ Darras told her, ‘if we must. And we will strike when we have a purpose. Until then, I will willingly let our enemies fight each other. I have no respect for suicide disguised as bravery.’

Tanaura looked at him, her face flushed with indignation, but she had the sense to bite down on her retort. Kanshell felt a rush of sympathetic anger. Darras did not understand the nature of faith. The struggle they were engaged in went far beyond the material world. Kanshell did not want to die, but if the right thing to do was charge back out and claw at the monsters with his bare hands, then he vowed that he would do just that. To die with the praise of the Emperor on his lips was not suicide. It was martyrdom.

Darras moved to Erephren. The astropath looked ghastly. Blood flowed in a constant stream from the empty-looking orbits of her eyes. Her skin had thinned and tightened over her skull. Her breath rattled like stones. She was a funerary sculpture that had been given a dry, whispering life. But the will that animated the frame was so fierce, it burned. Kanshell kept thinking he saw an aura in his peripheral vision, a spiky black crown of crackling determination.

‘Any chance of clearing the way again?’ Darras asked.

A tiny, sharp shake of the head. ‘I have the strength for one last battle with the anomaly, sergeant,’ Erephren said. ‘I cannot squander it.’

‘So be it.’

Kanshell cleared his throat. When Darras’s helmet turned his way, he dared to ask, ‘You have spoken with Captain Atticus?’

‘I have. He brings the rest of our forces. And then,’ he nodded at Tanaura, ‘you will be part of a great charge.’ He paused. The compartment filled with the sounds of the revel. He spoke again, and he was addressing his fellow legionaries. ‘This action will be worthy of song, though those songs shall never be written. But brothers, we will know the full measure of our worth. And could we ask for a better reward in our final moments? I think not.’

In unison, the other Iron Hands clapped arms to breastplates, an accord in action that was more eloquent than any oath.

And in the next instant, the ship was rocked by a gigantic blow. It knocked Kanshell off his feet. The blow came again. Something huge was slamming against the gunship. Darras checked out the viewing port. The amourglass had been knocked out of the frame, and the foetid air of Pythos was coming in, filling the compartment with the stench of too much life.

‘Brace!’ Darras yelled, and the ship heaved again. A horn almost as tall as Kanshell punched through the fuselage. It withdrew, then hit again, tearing the side of the gunship open. One more hit, and there was a hole large enough for the monster to stick its head inside the compartment.

The thing looked like a saurian, but it was covered in crimson metal plates. Kanshell could not tell if it wore armour, or if the metal was the daemon’s hide. Its hinged jaw opened wide and from it issued a roar like the grinding of immense gears. It shook its head back and forth, widening the hole still further, the thick shielding of Iron Flame giving way before the daemon’s eagerness to reach its victims. On its back rode one of the horned, sword-wielding horrors. The smaller daemon laughed and urged its mount on to greater violence.

Darras and the other Iron Hands retaliated, but the daemon shrugged off their rounds. Kanshell backed away as far as he could from the daemon. He fired his lasrifle, knowing the act was futile, grasping for a shred of meaning in the fact of the gesture alone. He tried to hit the juggernaut’s eye. It was not a small target, but he was too unskilled, and the daemon’s movements were too violent. It shoved its head further. It was trying to force its bulk into the ship. Its jaws snapped in Erephren’s direction. The monster had come to neutralise a threat.

Catigernus lunged forwards, a krak grenade in hand. When the daemon’s jaws opened, he threw the grenade down the monster’s throat. Instead of recoiling, it snapped at him, and severed his arm at the elbow. As he fell, the grenade went off inside the daemon. There was a muffled detonation, and the daemon’s throat blew out. Somehow the daemon still had a voice, and its shriek went so high, it climbed beyond hearing. Then it cut off as noxious ichor, a stew of blood and oil and venom, poured to the deck.

The daemon convulsed so violently that its rider fell off. When it rose, trying to squeeze into the hole past its agonised mount, Darras blew its head apart with bolter shells. The juggernaut refused to die. Its pain and its fury were silent, but the violence of its actions was eloquent. It shook its head back and forth, horn tearing the ship asunder. Its jaw swung like a broken flap and one of its eyes had burst outward, but it had been slowed only for a moment, and shouldered its way in, ignoring the weapons fire. Its remaining eye fixed on the astropathic wraith. She returned its stare with a blind gaze that was almost as inhuman.

A krak missile streaked past Iron Flame and slammed into the side of the daemon. Its rear legs buckled, and it slid from the Thunderhawk. It turned to face its new attackers. It was struck by a second rocket that reduced the armoured flesh on its right shoulder to slag. The murderous stream from an assault cannon hit its chest and head. For a moment, the daemon leaned into the salvo. Then its form disintegrated into jagged wet shrapnel.

Kanshell blinked at the gap where the daemon had been. Some distance from the gunship, the warp spawn and the saurians struggled. But nothing else was attacking the ship in this moment. Then massive silhouettes appeared. They were the Imperium’s way of war given form. Atticus had arrived.

The captain stepped up into the ship. He clasped forearms with Darras in greeting. Atticus was even more fearsome than when Kanshell had seen him last. He was drenched in ichor. His armour was scarred and gouged. Kanshell could hear its servo-motors whirring at a louder volume than was healthy, and now and then there was a stuttering grind. The damage was not slowing Atticus, but it stripped away still more of his vestigial humanity. He was an autonomous weapon, pausing from killing only to find a new target.

He stood before Erephren. The being of metal and the being of vision. Neither of them had any use for the sad limitations of the flesh. Kanshell shivered, feeling his puny condition reduced to pathetic insignificance in a universe where only the likes of Atticus and Erephren mattered. He clung to the Emperor’s divinity. That was a truth beyond any other, and it mattered even more than the majestic and terrifying inhumanity before him.

The Space Marine spoke to the astropath. ‘We have a great work ahead of us.’

‘Then we must begin,’ Erephren replied.

Outside, the sound of frenzied battle and massive footsteps drew closer. The time of last things had come.

Twenty-Two

Resurrection
To the tower
Witness

Atticus was surprised to see any of the Legion’s serfs still alive. He would not have thought any mortal could survive more than a few seconds of the new face of Pythos. He nodded at Tanaura as the forward elements of the company formed up with Erephren at their centre. ‘You have done well,’ he told his serf.

‘The Emperor protects,’ she answered.

Atticus said nothing. Her blatant flouting of the Imperial Truth did not so much anger as disappoint him. He looked at Kanshell and saw the fervour in his eyes. Superstition was giving both of them the strength to fight on. He turned away, disgusted by their weakness, and disgusted that their crutch was serving them well.

Atticus took the head of the formation. The wreckage of Iron Flame was still surrounded by a diminishing oasis of calm. The daemons and the saurians had not finished their dance, though the respite was almost over. The giants were a handful of strides away, slowed by their conflicts with the largest daemons. Atticus’s impressions of those warp monsters were fragmentary. They had emerged from the shaft while the Iron Hands were still fighting their way through the ruins, and they had remained huge shadows in the distance. There was something different about this variant of monstrosity, something more than their great size. Their movements suggested the mechanical along with the perversity of warp unlife. Atticus felt the hint of a kinship that he rejected even as he recognised it.

He chose not to look more closely at those shapes. There was no useful knowledge that awaited him there. All that mattered was the destruction of anything that stood in the path of this final advance.

‘We march!’ he shouted.

The Iron Hands moved forwards. They left Iron Flame behind. They headed back in the direction of the plateau, in a straight line towards a tangle of warring monsters. Though the pace was slower than the bloody rush to the gunship, Erephren was finding the strength in some hidden reserve to walk. She strode like the whisper of death over the blasted earth, her steps precise. Blind, she was unmoved by the phantasmagoria on all sides. Sighted in a more awful sense, her face was set against visions Atticus could not imagine.

The two serfs ran parallel to the formation. They had no protection from the warriors of their Legion, nor did they expect it. But Khi’dem walked with them, the last of the Salamanders 139th Company staying true to his Legion’s misguided concern for preserving that which was not strong enough to preserve itself.

As they crossed the last dozen metres of open ground, a light to the north caught Atticus’s eye. It was a bruised glow, deep shades of violet and blue and red mixing and staining. It was the light of putrefaction. It was growing brighter. Where it shone, the daemons had ended their celebratory war with the saurians. They were building something. It was huge. It was being constructed of countless fragments.

No, Atticus realised, it was not being constructed. It was being summoned into existence by the combined powers of thousands of fiends. He saw jagged chunks of metal flying into place, pieces of a gargantuan puzzle. They were rising from the ground for kilometres in every direction. The fragments were just one of the elements of the assemblage. There were also the bones and ragged flesh of saurian and human. And the daemons themselves. They threw themselves into the creation, becoming a hideous, squirming mortar that cemented the fragments, made them a whole, and gave the form definition.

The form was the greatest horror. Atticus’s vision swam with a rage that threatened to devour his reason, leaving nothing behind but a howling engine of destruction. He knew this shape. He was witnessing a resurrection. The Veritas Ferrum was coming into being once more. But the proud, soaring lines of the strike cruiser were now distorted, bubbling, carrion things. Forming over its prow was a figurehead hundreds of metres long. It was a thing of horns and a gaping maw filled with needle teeth, and it moved. It lived. It had eyes that shone the white of lunacy, and it laughed. The ship was corpse, and it was scavenger, as ready to feast on itself as on any uncorrupted thing that crossed its path.

It would have a path, Atticus knew. The ship would traverse the void once more. It was the means by which the daemonic legions would leave Pythos and spread their curse through the galaxy. Sickened, he saw how utterly the Iron Hands had danced to Madail’s tune. Their every act since arriving in the Pandorax System had been in the service of this moment. Even their coming had been no bit of happenstance. They had been lured, and then they had been made to cavort for the amusement of the daemonic puppet-master.

As if in answer to his despairing fury, the monster arrived. Madail travelled on a high mound of bones that moved over the landscape like a wave. The remains were bleached clean of all flesh, but shone with traces of blood and the clear slick of agony. The daemon’s course stopped a dozen metres from the Iron Hands. Madail made an expansive gesture towards the reforming ship. ‘Behold the art,’ the monster said.

From behind the company came the boom of the giant saurians taking another stride closer. Atticus kept moving. The Iron Hands did not pause. Madail’s hill of bodies moved in parallel with them.

Madail’s chest-eyes were wide with eager hunger. ‘The machine and the spirit,’ it said. ‘That is your goal, though I think you would turn from the words. Yes, yes, I think you would.’ The tongue whipped its length through the air, tasting the daemon’s own speech. ‘Come, then. Rejoin your ship. Be the full expression of your being. Become the undivided vessels of Chaos.’

‘No,’ Atticus said. He spoke quietly, to himself more than to Madail. He was done with the dance. His reason cut through the fog of rage, and he saw the doom the daemon was tempting him to embrace. The seduction of Madail’s words was a lie. The fiend did not believe the Iron Hands could be corrupted so quickly. It did not expect their surrender. It expected their fury. It expected their futile attack. If the company charged, it would face not just the might of Madail, but that of a thousands-strong daemon army and the already sentient obscenity of the Veritas Ferrum. Annihilation would be certain.

No, then. No.

And if Madail desired that attack so much, perhaps it feared the alternative to the same degree.

‘Confound the enemy!’ Atticus shouted. ‘Onward to our victory!’ He tasted his own eagerness to exploit the daemon’s mistake as he increased the speed of the march. He glanced back, saw that Erephren was keeping up. She was striding as if possessed by the energy of death itself. She had an appointment with her fate, and it was not in this place.

Atticus led the way forwards, on the original course, making for the plateau and, beyond it, for the tower whose power would be wrested from his foe.

‘You will stop,’ Madail announced.

Atticus ignored him. A wall of daemons waited just ahead, but it was a thinner wall. So many of the abominations were still fighting the saurians or being consumed by the resurrection of the Veritas.

The wall was too thin. The Iron Hands struck, sending bolter fire on ahead of their advance, then smashing into the enemy. They were a battering ram, unstoppable, and this was their true identity. This was what they were, not the submission of the purity of the machine to the corruption of the warp. With chainblade and fist, they smashed the daemons down. Even the serfs fought without fear. Their weapons were weak, but the accumulation of blows took its toll, and they moved with surprising agility, desperation keeping them out of the grasp of claws, and off the point of blades.

‘Stop!’ Madail shouted, and for the first time, Atticus heard something like tension in the daemon’s voice.

The legionaries punched through the line and marched faster. The route ahead was clear.

‘Stop them!’ Madail roared. Waves of daemons broke off from the summoning of the ship. The counter-attack raced forwards on the winds of madness.

‘Brothers,’ Khi’dem said, ‘You sacrificed much for the remnants of my Legion. You have my thanks.’ He left his position from the side of the serfs and ran back down the length of the column.

‘What are you doing?’ Atticus demanded.

‘Finding time.’ Khi’dem stopped beside Ecdurus and took the legionary’s rocket launcher. He angled away from the company, heading straight for Madail, whose raised staff was shining with a building, trembling glow.

Madness, Atticus thought, but the leading daemons were upon them. The crimson, blade-wielding horrors fought to the front of the line against graceful grotesqueries that married the illusion of human femininity with savage claws and talons.

‘Into the fires of battle,’ Khi’dem intoned as he reached the base of the moving hill. He wrestled the rocket launcher onto his shoulder with one hand. He fired. The missile streaked past the daemon. Madail laughed, ignoring the single Space Marine, unleashing the built-up energy of its staff. As the rear of the Iron Hands’ column was consumed by a violet fire that melted the warriors to slag, the rocket exploded against its target.

Khi’dem had not missed. He had struck a colossus in the corner of the eye. ‘Unto the anvil of war,’ he whispered over the vox.

The saurian snarled, and it turned to find its attacker. In its line of sight was the giant daemon. With a heave, the reptile hurled its opponents aside and brought its immense anger down upon Madail. A foot larger than a tank smashed the hill to shards. It obliterated Khi’dem, and drove Madail down under hundreds of tonnes of mass.

The daemons howled, hurling themselves at the monster that had committed sacrilege. A tide of obscene shapes swarmed up the legs of the saurian. Its brothers came roaring to its aid. The assault on the Iron Hands faltered.

Atticus had his time. He used it. The march ate up more ground. The Iron Hands reached the plateau before more waves of daemons caught up. The company repulsed them. The daemons attacked again and again, their forces beyond counting. Their leader had not returned, was perhaps destroyed, and the daemons’ tactics fell victim to their own chaos. Their anger made them reckless. They fought each other for supremacy. And they failed to stop the advance.

But their numbers made the result inevitable. They eroded the formation. Discipline preserved the Iron Hands’ cohesion, but the unit became smaller with every metre of ground. Then the winged daemons arrived. Ptero and Lacertus’s squads had hurt them, but they, too, had infinite forces to spare. They swooped down on the company with screams so piercing, Atticus saw wounds open on the faces of the serfs. The daemons flew as swimming through the air, and indeed they resembled creatures of the sea. One executed an elegant dive and decapitated Tanaura. Her body ran on for a few steps as though supported by a faith that persisted beyond death. It collapsed in front of Kanshell.

‘The Emperor…’ Kanshell gasped. ‘The Emperor protects.’ He fired upwards, scorching the belly of the demon with las-fire. It squealed and flew to the side, into a stream of bolter shells from Darras. Then it fell to the ground, twitching.

‘The Emperor…’ Kanshell kept repeating. His eyes were wide, unblinking. ‘The Emperor… The Emperor…’

Atticus realised he was hearing a prayer, the only one Kanshell had either the breath or the mental capacity left to utter. The little man’s religion was what kept him in the fight. The reason disgusted Atticus. Was this the shape of mortal fidelity to the Emperor? A superstitious worship that made a mockery of the truth for which the Emperor and the Legiones Astartes had sacrificed so much? If so, what point did anything have?

There was duty. There was war. There was the fact of being true to what it meant to be a legionary of the Iron Hands. If there was nothing else, that was still enough.

Over the plateau, past the shaft, through the ruins of the settlement, the advance continued. Then the company was moving down the final slope. The monument waited for Atticus. It was serene, towering so high that it was above any petty concern on the ground. It did not care. It pulsed with the glow of Chaos’s great revel.

Another light, a huge flash from behind, as if a true sunrise had come to Pythos for the first time in its history, a sunrise that contained no life, but only the promise of crematoria. Atticus looked back. The light came from one of the giant saurians. It bisected the monster, then blew it apart. Streaking from the centre of the blast, riding a dark comet, came Madail.

The remnants of the Assault squads and the Raven Guard rose to meet the daemon. Madail struck with indifferent impatience. A beam from the staff caught Lacertus. His ashes drifted to the ground while the daemon picked off the rest of his command.

Ptero alone reached the prophet of the warp. He landed on Madail’s neck and drove his lightning claws into the creature’s right eye, but the chest-eyes never lost their focus on the targets on the ground. The daemon’s only reaction was to reach up with its right hand. It mimicked Ptero’s attack and drove its huge claws through his chestplate. The Raven Guard shuddered, but stabbed again at the punctured orb. Madail’s hand tightened into a fist. It yanked the Space Marine’s hearts free and squeezed them to pulp. Ptero fell. A split second after his body hit the ground, Madail landed, crushing and burning all within a five metre radius. Camnus existed as a mechanical silhouette for a moment, and then he, too, was gone.

The daemon spread death, but missed its target. Erephren ran, sprinted, in the last moment before the impact. She can see you coming, Atticus thought. You cannot surprise her.

And now the final reckoning. They had reached the monument. Erephren ran past Atticus. ‘Time,’ she murmured. Her movements were strange, savage jerks, and Atticus thought again of puppetry. Erephren’s body, he saw, had become the puppet of her will.

The daemons fell upon the last fragments of the 111th Clan-Company.

Erephren touched the tower.

The force swallowed her with a hunger that said got you. Erephren let it. She fell into the infinite depths. The vistas of absolute insanity surrounded her. But she was not a mere bit of psychic flotsam to be absorbed. Her physicality, however small, was as real as the tower’s. She used her materiality as an anchor. She shaped her identity into an adamantium kernel. She weathered the attacks. From the consuming deluge of revelation, she seized on a fragment of knowledge: the hulks of dead ships around the Mandeville point of Hamartia. The mines had done good work. She made a weapon of that small triumph. She used it to forge her war song.

We have hurt you. We will hurt you. I will hurt you. She became a single purpose.

She became a voice. She was a message. She was a cry of warning.

The warp was infinity. It was also zero. There was no space between Pythos and Terra.

She gathered her will, drawing on the final sparks of her life. She used the perfect, mad clarity of the anomaly. She prepared to send her shout across the zero.

The pulse of the cyclopean structure stuttered. Madail howled curses whose shape snapped the bones of the air. It lunged for Erephren. Atticus launched himself upwards from daemon to daemon. He was climbing an avalanche of warp-flesh. Darras was with him, and they both rose before the great daemon. Darras swung his blade at Madail’s chest. The eyes blinked shut. The blade shattered. Madail snarled and impaled Darras with the staff. The weapon went all the way through the body of the Space Marine and struck the writhing daemons below. Madail struggled to pull it free. Atticus made a final leap, hurling himself, chainaxe raised, at the monstrous head.

The head snapped forwards and sideways. The jaws caught Atticus around the torso. They squeezed, crushing. The damage alarms flashed before his vision. He ignored them. He felt no pain.

He had so little flesh remaining.

And he had seen the daemon’s defensive reflexes. What it protected was what he must strike.

He made as if to swing the axe one last time at the daemon’s blank left eye. The chest-eyes looked up at him in amusement. Atticus seized his moment. He reversed the chainaxe and brought it down with terrible speed at the daemon’s true vision. His surprise was total. The axe ground deeply into the eyes. Acidic jelly poured down Madail’s torso.

The daemon screamed, releasing Atticus. He fell on a carpet of struggling abominations. He tried to rise. His armour did not respond. It was a coffin enclosing the inert metal of his body. Deep inside his shell, there was an awful, swimming movement where none should be.

But Madail was staggering too, for a few more precious seconds. And then the glow stopped its flicker. It became a single, steady, magnificent beam that shot up and, for a moment, pierced through the nothing, opening a window to the stars.

Only for a moment. Then the light resumed its malignant pulse, and the absence consolidated its grip around the planet. Atticus managed to turn his head. He saw Erephren release the tower and collapse. She lay on her side, her face towards his. Her eyes were the terrible, clear absence they had always been, but he felt her true gaze on him. She nodded once, and then was still.

Atticus looked back at Madail. The daemon had mastered itself. Its uninjured eyes regarded him with a perfect rage. ‘You have not won,’ Atticus ground out.

Madail advanced.

Feeling all that was left of him puncture and bleed out, Atticus uprooted the last of his humanity from his awareness. The machine rose to his feet for one last time. He closed with the daemon. ‘The flesh is weak!’ he roared, and met the darkness.

Kanshell saw it all. He saw his nightmare injured. He saw the light from the tower. And he saw the nightmare kill his captain.

The daemons ignored him. They let him live. They flowed around him, an ocean of madness, as they feasted on the bodies of the Iron Hands.

They let him see. They let him see that the stone sun did not set. They let him see the slow rise of the reborn, daemoniacal Veritas Ferrum. They let him see the moment of the next dark exodus approach.

He clutched the single moment of hope to his heart. The warning was sent, he thought. The Emperor will know. The Emperor protects. The Emperor protects.

His refrain faltered only when Madail loomed over him and a vile, pustule-ridden hulk with a horn where its eyes should be seized his arm.

‘Little creature of faith,’ Madail said, ‘will you show the strength of your belief? Will you bear witness?’

Kanshell’s long screams began as he was carried towards the unholy ship.

Epilogue

Astropath Emil Jeddah stiffened in shock. His mouth gaped wide, his face contorted. Mehya Vogt, his scribe, saw that look countless times every day, and she always winced in sympathetic pain. How could she not, when she knew the damage he was suffering with every message he received? This one, it seemed, had pierced his cortex like a stiletto of ice. It spread through his nervous system, hijacking his entire being for the length of its reception. His blind eyes rolled back in his head. His jaw worked, and he began to sing. Vogt grabbed her stylus and tried to start the transcription. The sound coming from Jeddah’s throat was plaintive, urgent, agonised, an atonal chant filled with the smoke of distant war.

It was also largely unintelligible.

The song ended. Vogt looked down at what she had written on her tablet.

Jeddah used a cloth to wipe away the blood from his nose. ‘What…’ he began, then stopped. He rubbed at his temple. He tried again. ‘What is the message?’

Vogt hesitated. ‘It is priority extremis,’ she said.

‘I’m aware of its urgency.’ He ran a hand over his scalp, wiping away the sweat of pain. ‘I felt it.’ What he meant, Vogt knew, was that he had suffered it. He measured urgency by the severity of the psychic wound the message caused. ‘But what is the content?’ When Vogt did not answer right away, Jeddah continued, ‘I couldn’t tell for myself. There was too much distortion.’

‘I… I find the message disturbing,’ Vogt said at last. ‘There was only one word I could pick out, but it makes no sense, and…’

‘Read it to me.’

She did. The word was wrong. It had no place in the Imperium. When she shaped them, the syllables were not just foreign in her mouth. They felt unclean.

Jeddah sat very still. His skin, white as marble, took on a grey tinge. When he stood, he did so gingerly, as if reality had turned to thin ice. ‘Take me to Master Galeen,’ he said. ‘Bring the transcription.’

Vogt took Jeddah’s arm and led him from his cell. They walked the hallways whose dim lighting was barely strong enough to illuminate the way for the scribes. Mosaics covered the walls on either side, but their designs were lost in the gloom. Though she had the use of her eyes, Vogt felt that she, not Jeddah, was the one who was blind in this twilight world. She transcribed messages that she struggled to understand, and moved through endless shadow on missions whose import she was never told. She did not understand the nature of this one, either.

But she sensed Jeddah’s worry.

They reached the processing chamber, deep within the City of Sight. It was a vast space, better lit, but the glow-globes were so high above in the domed ceiling that their rays felt weak and thin by the time they reached the ground. Dominating the centre of the chamber was the message repository. Tens of thousands of missives were amassed here in hundreds of stacks five and ten and twenty metres tall. Balconied galleries circled the hall, and from each extended multiple retractable platforms. Scribes, administrators and servitors used them to have access to the repository. Sometimes, a message was removed from the stacks, but at any given moment, dozens more were added. Sheets of vellum dropped from the upper levels of the chamber, falling like snowflakes.

Straight ahead, at the base of the repository, Helmar Galeen, hunchbacked, face pinched narrow with permanent disapproval, sat at his massive desk, examining one message after another, passing some to servitors to add to the stacks, tossing others down a chute that led to an incinerator.

‘What is it, Jeddah?’ he asked without looking up.

‘A message from the Pandorax System. I thought you should see it.’

Galeen sighed, put down his stylus, and held out a hand. Vogt gave him the transcription. The administrator read it, then turned his cold gaze first on Vogt, then on Jeddah. ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’ he asked.

‘I thought–’ Jeddah began.

‘To annoy me with an archaic word?’ Galeen interrupted.

‘It might be more… relevant than that.’

‘So I should announce the collapse of the rational tenets of the Imperial Truth because of this single message?’

Vogt was about to retort, but Jeddah must have felt the tension through her arm – he placed a warning hand upon her shoulder. Galeen did not tolerate scribes who did not cower before him. ‘That transmission is priority extremis,’ Jeddah said, his voice calm.

Galeen gave a short bark of laughter. ‘Of course it is. We are at war. Every message is priority extremis.’ He waved a weary hand at the stacks before him. ‘Most of these contain actual communications, or at least complete imagery. Not one talks about myths.’

A servitor approached, and Galeen handed it the message. ‘Take this to the stacks,’ he said.

He turned back to Jeddah. ‘The priority rating is the only reason I’m not dropping that nonsense into the flames. Now return to your duties.’

Jeddah bowed. They withdrew.

Vogt paused and looked back as they reached the exit from the chamber. She wondered why she cared, why her heart had constricted in her chest as if she had lost something or someone vital. The message was only a single word. What difference could it make?

‘Can you still see it?’ Jeddah whispered.

‘No.’

But before they walked on, she looked back one more time. She tried to spot the servitor. She tried to follow the message as it fell into the stacks. She failed. It was just another snowflake, another snowflake falling, fallen, buried. It had come out of the night, and now was returned there, smothered in the continuous shhh-shhh-shhh of messages covering each other in the oblivion of white noise.

The Author Of Vulkan Lives

Nick Kyme is the author of the Tome of Fire trilogy featuring the Salamanders. He has also written for the Space Marine Battles and Time of Legends series with the novels The Fall of Damnos and The Great Betrayal. In addition, he has penned a host of short stories and several novellas, including ‘Feat of Iron’ which was a New York Times bestseller in the Horus Heresy collection The Primarchs. He lives and works in Nottingham.

Acknowledgements

A few thanks need sharing around to some dedicated and very special folks without whom this novel would not have been possible, my editors Christian Dunn, Lindsey Priestley, Laurie Goulding and Graeme Lyon. Also, the legendary Neil Roberts for the fantastic cover. To Dan Abnett, whose advice and support has been utterly invaluable. Last, but not least, my wonderful other half, Stef, whose patience, understanding and encouragement got me through the tough times.

Afterword

I’ve had this story in my head for a long time. A very long time. Ever since I started researching the Salamanders and their tragic past, there has been this desire to fill in that most glaring of gaps in the Horus Heresy timeline: what was the fate of Vulkan?

Opinions at the time varied widely on the subject from stating out and out that he was dead, killed in a blast of nucleonic fire never to be seen again, to that he had somehow miraculously survived and was present at the breaking of the Legions.

It was a mystery, in many ways the mystery. It’s the one piece of Heresy lore, other than the identity and fate of the lost Legions (and don’t hold your breath on that one, folks – no, really, you’ll only asphyxiate yourselves…) that has never truly been answered.

I thought it never could, or never would.

Turns out I was wrong about that.

Years ago when the sum total that we, the readers, knew about the Horus Heresy was the contents of the collectible card game (later transferred and translated into the various Horus Heresy ‘Visions of…’ art books), Vulkan’s storyline ended at Isstvan V, the primarch engulfed in a massive explosion. Believe it or not, there was more to that story. It just never got told. That’s not to say that it existed; it didn’t, but it was always meant to. But, the CCG ended prematurely, and so many tales that were begun never got the ending they deserved.

Vulkan was one of them. A big one.

Fast forward several years and here I am writing the afterword to part one of the answer to that mystery. I say ‘part one’ because I see Vulkan’s journey as a saga that won’t truly meet its resolution, and therefore have closure or an answer, until we’re standing at the Gates of Terra in defiance of tyranny and Chaos.

There will be more. You must have figured that out on account of the open-ended finale. In the manner of a relay race, I have merely held the baton for my lap and now pass it on to the next runner. Fully recovered from my heroics on this novel, I’m hoping I’ll get it back for the last leg.

So then, this novel provides an answer to one of the greatest mysteries of the Horus Heresy – what happened to Vulkan on Isstvan V? Does he live, did he die? What did he have to go through? If you’ve skipped to the end and are reading this before the novel, you might think there’s a pretty big clue in the title. Well, you’d be wrong about that. And if you’ve read the novel and think you know the answer then I challenge you to read on beyond my own first, modest volume in this saga of sagas and see where it takes the Lord of Drakes.

Nick Kyme,
Nottingham,
April 2013

The Author Of The Unremembered Empire

Dan Abnett is a multiple New York Times bestselling author and an award-winning comic book writer. He has written almost fifty novels, including the acclaimed Gaunt’s Ghosts series, and the Eisenhorn and Ravenor trilogies. His Horus Heresy novel Prospero Burns topped the SF charts in the UK and the US. In addition to writing for Black Library, Dan scripts audio dramas, movies, games, comics and bestselling novels for major publishers in Britain and America. He lives and works in Maidstone, Kent

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the following, variously, for ground work laid down in other novels and stories, for plot threads, for brainstorming, for questions answered… and in many cases all of the above – Graham McNeill, Gav Thorpe, Jim Swallow, Aaron Dembski-Bowden, John French, Rob Sanders, Graeme Lyon, Alan Merrett, Nick Kyme, Neil Roberts, Alan Bligh and Laurie Goulding.

Thanks, love and appreciation to Nik for her supportive work editing copy, delivering feedback, and generally putting up with me and the whole process.

Afterword

‘I have come to the conclusion that the making of laws
is like the making of sausages – the less you know about
the process, the more you respect the result.’

…as Bismarck apparently never said. I find myself adding to that proverbial list The Unremembered Empire. Indeed there are quite a few things whose manufacture I think we’re all better off not witnessing. One would be ‘cheese smoke’, as Guy Haley will readily agree.

My point, and I can confirm that I do have one, is that during the much-longer-than-I-expected period of time that it took to write The Unremembered Empire, I said far too many times to far too many people, ‘It’s the hardest writing job I’ve ever done.’

No one wants to know that. Not really. For one thing, it sounds like a boast, for another it sets up unnecessary expectations (‘Oh, Dan’s written forty kazonkajillion novels, and if he says this has been the hardest, then it must be the best!’). What I should have done is remained tight-lipped on the subject, and allowed the book to speak for itself. Indeed, whatever its comparative difficulties, if I’ve done my job properly, it should read as a fluid whole, with the reader utterly oblivious to all the backstage heavy-lifting, grunt-work and duck-paddling that went on. I hope so. It’s not supposed to be a hard thing to read.

But I did mention it, severally, so I might as well expand on that theme now that the cat’s out of the bag. Just this once.

The trick to any series is total immersion in the story’s continuity. Not just to know the background, so as to sustain a credible world or universe, but to reference and interlock ideas, characters and themes in interesting and revealing ways. An example of the former might be knowing that Guilliman goes on to write the Codex Astartes, and using that knowledge to characterise him as a man of theory and structure, possessed of an ordered, martial mind. An example of the latter might be remembering that Guilliman goes on to write the Codex Astartes, and thus sow the seeds of the need of that codification here, as he struggles to bind the disparate elements of the Shattered Legions into a cohesive whole.

Series of books always bring with them the burden of exponential continuity mass. I know this full well: the Gaunt’s Ghosts series is fourteen books long, and I need pie charts and spread sheets to keep track of all the character details (my first job when starting a new Gaunt book is to update my character file to include characters killed or injured in the previous volume – and there’s always at least one that comes as a surprise to me). Similar problems arise with the Inquisitor series of Eisenhorn/Ravenor/Bequin (currently only seven books long). At least they’re my series. I’m the only one writing them, and I’m the only one responsible for weaving the continuity, so if I blunder, it’s all me.

The Horus Heresy series is a collective effort. The overall story already exists and is known to the readership, and we’re reconstructing it as a team in the form of a relay, adding details. Now, we have lots of meetings, and we read each other’s stuff, but oh my god, it’s so easy to forget who said what specifically about whom and where they said it to be easily able to check it and maintain consistency.

Knowing that, it was perhaps foolhardy of me to choose to write a novel that is not only the direct sequel to my last Horus Heresy novel, Know No Fear, but which also picks up direct or indirect storylines from getting on for ten other novels and short stories. One of the main strands of The Unremembered Empire comes from James Swallow’s Blood Angels work, thus making The Unremembered Empire a direct sequel to Fear To Tread. It’s also a sequel to Aaron Dembski-Bowden’s Betrayer. It’s also also a direct sequel to Nick Kyme’s Vulkan Lives. It also follows directly the stories ‘The Lion’ by Gav Thorpe, ‘Rules of Engagement’ by Graham McNeill, ‘Savage Weapons’ and ‘Prince of Crows’ by Aaron, ‘The Iron Within’ by Rob Sanders and ‘The Crimson Fist’ by John French, not to mention pretty much all of the Mark of Calth anthology. And those are just the major reference points.

The Unremembered Empire, for no better reasons than where it falls in the story and what it portrays, is a kind of nexus novel, drawing together many different strands and characters, repositioning them, realigning them and setting them on new and divergent paths.

And, man oh man, are they some difficult sausages to make!

A book usually develops a flow so that, in any given session, I can get lost in the pattern after a few hundred words or so, and a two or three thousand word chunk just flies by. With this one, it felt as if I were stopping every sentence or two because I had to check or recheck another fact. Which hand did Alexis Polux lose again? The Dark Angels… Still in black at this point, not yet in green? How many moons does Macragge have, Graham? Gav, exactly how does the xenos tech on the Invincible Reason work? Wait, wait, Sevatar is still a captive of the Dark Angels at this time? For really reals?

And so on. That’s why this book was the hardest yet, because I had to stop so often and check so much. I have tested the patience of my fellow authors and the editorial team, especially continuity guru Laurie Goulding, past the point of destruction. Their responses have never been less than generous.

But really, I don’t want you knowing that, gentle reader. I’d prefer it if you didn’t know it at all. If I’ve done my job right, there should be zero sense that this book was arduous and demanding to compose. You shouldn’t be aware of the individual bricks, just the handsome aspect of the building as a whole. And if there are occasional moments when you stop, smile and think, ‘Wow! That was a really smart cross-reference to that other thing!’ or ‘Crikey! I didn’t expect him to turn up, but it makes great sense!’ then those, my friend, are what DVD people call Easter Eggs.

So I hope this afterword hasn’t in any way spoiled your enjoyment of The Unremembered Empire. And I’m definitely not going to mention how many different directions the story strands of this book will now take us in, and how much industrial grade, but mercifully secret, sausage-making that’s going to require…

Dan Abnett
Maidstone, June 2013

The Author Of Scars

Chris Wraight is the author of the Horus Heresy novella Brotherhood of the Storm and the Space Wolf novel Blood of Asaheim. He has also written the Space Marine Battles novels Wrath of Iron and Battle of the Fang, along with Schwarzhelm & Helborg: Swords of the Emperor and Luthor Huss in the Warhammer universe. He’s based in a leafy bit of south-west England, and when not struggling to meet deadlines enjoys running through scenic parts of it.

Acknowledgements

The greatest share of thanks goes to Laurie Goulding, both for the brainstorming we did together on the development of the White Scars, as well as the detailed editorial work he did on the manuscript throughout. His lore-stuffed brain prevented a host of continuity errors creeping in, as well as improving the story itself no end.

Thanks are also due to the whole editorial team at Black Library who worked extremely hard to get the eBook episodes out. I’m also hugely grateful to Ead Brown, who read the early drafts of the first half; Graham McNeill, who provided invaluable comments on the synopsis; and Dan Abnett, who came up with the cunning plan for getting a White Scars Horus Heresy novel onto the schedule in the first place.

Afterword

I loved writing the White Scars. I was particularly lucky to end up working on them as, almost alone among the various factions present in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, they’d had virtually no attention during the Horus Heresy series thus far. They were a blank slate, an unknown quantity. Even on the M41 side of things they were still relatively unknown, so starting work on a White Scars story felt like breaking new ground – a rare privilege in a series that’s now twenty-eight books in.

Working up the Legion in conceptual form was great fun. Even before the limited edition novella Brotherhood of the Storm was written, some key ideas had been laid down. The first of these was symmetry between the obscurity of the V Legion in the real world and in the fictional universe. It couldn’t be an accident that hardly anyone referenced the Khan in the Heresy – it had to be a feature of his style of war. This fit nicely, it seemed to me, with the plains-nomad imagery that’s always been the hallmark of the White Scars. So the Khan became an outsider, an ‘other’, someone about whom even the Emperor knew little and whose actions became uniquely hard to predict. To the extent that every primarch has a ‘feature’, that’s his.

This thought led to the next important aspect of the Legion – their ambiguity. The Horus Heresy has seen a number of stories about Traitor Legions vacillating over their choices before finally taking the plunge. We’ve had slightly less about the moral dilemmas of Loyalist Legions, with the Dark Angels being the major exception. I decided fairly early on that the major theme of the novel would be the tortuous route the Legion took to loyalty, together with much uncertainty and confusion about what was really happening around them. The fog of war makes everything hard to perceive with clarity, all the more so in a galaxy where the only means of long-range communication is through psychic visions and where the laws of physics are regularly trumped by blood-sacrifices and ritual daggers.

The third consideration I had in mind was the small body of lore we did have about what the White Scars did in the Heresy. The Chondax encounter with the Alpha Legion is the most prominent, and takes up the first half of the book. As the engagement is written up in Collected Visions, it’s quite unclear what’s going on in this episode, and I’ve tried to retain a sense of that mystery. The Alpha Legion have no point-of-view, and there’s room for debate about what they were really up to (I’m sure the full story will come out at some point, mind).

When Alan Merrett’s text in Collected Visions was originally penned, the Horus Heresy storyline was in its infancy and there was less of a focus on the seven years long Age of Darkness. That opened up scope for the Legion doing more than just refusing to engage Alpharius and haring back to Terra. In keeping with the themes of unpredictability and ambiguity, I wanted them to investigate for themselves the truth of what they were being told, which led to the final element of the novel – the Librarius. Graham McNeill mentioned the three architects of the Librarius in A Thousand Sons, and I was fascinated that the Khan was one of them. I’ve always found the Nikaea episode one of the most interesting bits of Warhammer 40,000 lore, and so Yesugei’s backstory, as a means of flushing out exactly what the politics of the edict were, began to take shape.

The result is Scars. Writing the book took longer than I’d hoped (as ever), but as well as being hard work it was particularly rewarding. The original serialised format posed its own challenges as well – publishing the individual eBook episodes was something of a new venture for Black Library, and certainly a new prospect for me. Knowing from the outset that the story would also be released as a novel made it difficult, because I wanted to retain all the various story-strands I had in mind, but didn’t want to completely alienate readers who’d opted to follow it on a weekly basis. Each instalment was designed to leave on a cliffhanger, or at least a revelation about the Legion that would make the reader want to find out what happened next. I think this ended up as a good discipline for writing books in general, since it forced me to consider how the plot was unfolding at very regular intervals.

By now, the Horus Heresy series has become so massive and so involved that it’s quite daunting adding anything new to the unfolding mythos, and the risk of breaking something that readers care about certainly weighed heavily on this author’s mind. However, at least the Khan and the V Legion have their entry into the story now. They’re no longer skulking around at the narrative edges, but are lined up to take their place at the very heart of the action, just where they ought to be.

We know, of course, where that will take them. But, as Michael Ende says, that is another story and shall be told another time.

The Author Of Vengeful Spirit

Graham McNeill has written a host of novels for Black Library, including the ever popular Ultramarines and Iron Warriors series. His Horus Heresy novel, A Thousand Sons, was a New York Times bestseller and his Time of Legends novel, Empire, won the 2010 David Gemmell Legend Award. Originally hailing from Scotland, Graham now lives and works in Nottingham.

Afterword

The Horus Heresy. There’s a clue in the name of this series as to who the main man in this story ought to be, whose name will be above the door when all the dust settles. For a while we’d all been guilty of sidelining the Warmaster. The man whose name is on every single book of this series hadn’t done much since the opening trilogy. Sure, he’d made great appearances in plenty of the stories (cutting Erebus’s face off, anyone?) but in most of them he’d been confined to the strategium or Lupercal’s Court aboard the Vengeful Spirit. He was an observer in his own story.

And that was just wrong.

Part of that comes from the fact that there’s not much written about what Horus actually does during the Heresy – he orchestrates things, he sends people to carry out his orders, he devises grand plans. And as much as he is so very good at that, it’s also not at the heart of who he is. Horus says as much during the fighting on Murder: ‘That is how I was made. If I had suspected, back at Ullanor, that the rank of Warmaster would require me to relinquish the glories of the field forever, I would not have accepted it. Someone else could have taken the honour.’

So that’s what I decided to do, to take the Warmaster away from the bridge of the Vengeful Spirit and get him back in the field. I wanted to remind everyone that Horus was the War-master, with the supreme mind of a tactician, but the skill of a killer warrior too. To see Horus make war is to bear witness to a god of battle walking the earth, an avatar of slaughter with no equal. Now, I just needed a war for him to fight, a campaign that would tempt him to meet the foe, eye-to-eye and blade-to-blade.

It had to be something personal, and in my search for a big war to involve the Sons of Horus, I came upon an old article Gav Thorpe had written in White Dwarf.

The article was about using Daemon Knights in games of Epic, and the backdrop for their introduction to the game was the war on Molech, a conflict that embodied the Heresy in microcosm: ferocious combat, hideous betrayal, the insidious touch of Chaos and slaughter on an unimaginable scale. With the setting in place, I wanted something more, something that made this particular conflict personal to Horus. That immediately suggested that it had to involve the Emperor. Not in person (steady on, we’re not there yet!) but something to do with the power at the heart of the Master of Mankind. That gave Molech extra significance, and got straight to the heart of the Warmaster too, a reason for him to risk his own life in the field.

As well as the Warmaster, Vengeful Spirit was a chance to get another favourite character back in the pages of a Horus Heresy novel. Garviel Loken had been a fan favourite since he first appeared in the pages of Horus Rising. His story was apparently concluded with the ending of Galaxy in Flames, as having a basilica collapse on your head seems pretty final. But you can’t keep a good hero down, and when he returned in Jim’s excellent audio drama Garro: Legion of One, it was as a shadow of his former self. Loken was back, but was he the same man left buried in the ruins of Isstvan III? Can any man suffer the things that he suffered and still retain any shred of his sanity?

The idea of putting Loken and Horus back in the same room came early in one of our regular meetings, and was borne out of an intense morning’s deliberations concerning the VI Legion and their role when it came to Horus...

Thus the stories of Loken and Horus were always on a collision course, with Molech and its loathsome rulers as the backdrop. I’d written a couple of short stories as preludes to this tale – ‘The Devine Adoratrice’ from The Imperial Truth, and ‘Luna Mendax’, which appeared in The Black Library Anthology 2013/14. One prepared the ground for the Battle of Molech, sowing the seeds for Raeven Devine’s slide into corruption. The other reminded us that Loken may be back, but that his fractured mind hasn’t yet fully recovered from his time as Cerberus. Both stories hopefully whetted your appetite for the book you’ve just read. And if you’ve not had the chance to read them yet, I’d suggest hunting them down.

You may have wondered why, in a book about the Warmaster and the Sons of Horus (both ex- and current) I didn’t go into the head of the Warmaster as much as I did, say, with Perturabo in Angel Exterminatus. The answer is because I wanted Horus’s actions to show what he was thinking. Rather than have him tell the reader what he wanted to do, I figured it was better to actually have him do something that revealed his motivations. In other words, I wanted to make you guys sing for your supper, to read what was happening and fill in the blanks. After all, interacting with a book is a two-way street – you take what I write and you make it your own.

By now you’ll have realised that there’s more to the title of this book than simply the name of the Warmaster’s flagship. Yes, it’s that, as a good portion of the action takes place aboard the Vengeful Spirit, but it could also a reference a number of the characters. It could be Loken, back from the dead and hungry to expunge the stain to his Legion’s honour. It could also be Tormaggedon, a vengeful spirit if ever there was one. Or might it refer to the sad fate of Iacton Qruze?

There’s a lot going on in this book, with plenty of new characters I’d love to come back to. I want to see where Alivia Sureka goes and if things are indeed okay. I want to see the depths of madness into which Albard Devine plummets. What’s going to happen to the Mournival now that it has Tormaggedon as one of its members? Just what did the Warmaster see on the other side of that barrier and what power has he now returned with? Is he now the equal of the Emperor?

Only time will tell. And while I bet you think you know the answers, we’ve still got some killer surprises in store for you.

Graham McNeill
October 2013

The Author Of The Damnation of Pythos

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.

Acknowledgements

If the act of writing is a solitary one, the result is nonetheless a collaboration, and I owe a great deal of thanks to my editors at Black Library: Christian Dunn, Laurie Goulding, Nick Kyme, Graeme Lyon and Lindsey Priestley. This book also owes a great debt to Fulgrim, so thank you to Graham McNeill for having written that marvellous tome. And for Margaux, for her love, belief and support, I have more thanks than the words to express them.

Afterword

Monsters. I have always loved them. It is, for me, no small part of the joy of writing Warhammer 40,000 and Horus Heresy stories that this fictional universe is rife with monsters, human and inhuman. So when I found out from Nick Kyme and Laurie Goulding that I would have the opportunity to tell the story of Pythos, it would be a gross understatement to say I was excited. Here were all the monsters my heart could desire, and a stage upon which to have them clash in all their variety.

So what kinds of monsters are there here? Obviously, there are the flora and fauna of Pythos itself, and the daemons of the Damnation Cache. But the Iron Hands are monsters in their way, wilfully so, and I wanted to explore this idea, particularly in the character of Captain Durun Atticus.

Unlike my beloved Black Dragons, the Iron Hands are not monsters of the flesh. Quite the reverse, in fact: their rejection of the flesh and its perceived weakness is pushing them further and further away from their remaining humanity, to their cost. One of the (many) aspects that I love about Graham McNeill’s Fulgrim is the implication that Ferrus Manus had grave doubts about the path his Legion was heading, but met his fate on Isstvan V before he could do anything to reverse that course. The tragedy of what happens to the Iron Hands at the Dropsite Massacre is a compounded one. Not only is the X Legion shattered, but the very beliefs its surviving fragments cling to are contrary to what their primarch would have wished.

In Atticus, I pictured a warrior who has travelled a long way down that road. His rejection of the flesh is almost total, and so the very thing that makes him an extreme embodiment of the ethos of his Legion also makes him a symbol of their tragedy. That personal tragedy of his, incidentally, was something I touched on in the short audio drama Veritas Ferrum too, which sprang out of the writing of this novel, as I worked out how these surviving Iron Hands travelled from Isstvan V to the Pandorax System.

Another of the wonderful things about the universe of the Horus Heresy is that the oppositions are complex ones. If the Iron Hands have chosen a form of inhumanity, so have the Emperor’s Children, only they have embraced the excess of the flesh. Is it any wonder, then, that Atticus would feel even more justified in his beliefs? The monstrous acts of the Emperor’s Children are clearly wrong, but does that mean what Atticus chooses to do is correct?

My hope was to have some of this complexity of opposition extend to the situation on Pythos. Atticus is at one extreme, his disgust with the flesh diminishing his capacity for mercy and other fundamental human characteristics. Galba, nowhere near as transformed, is much more humane, and the Salamanders are even more so, of course. The question I wanted to ask, though, was, ‘Who is right? Or is anyone?’ The mercy that the Iron Hands do extend has catastrophic consequences. But is the alternative Atticus represents better? Must he become a monster of iron and cold calculation, a thing barely recognisable (if at all) as human in order to be able to do battle with other monsters? If so, what then?

I think this is one of the big questions that the Horus Heresy asks: given the stakes, given the terrible nature of the threat represented by Chaos, what extremes are justified in response? I don’t think there is an easy answer here. I do think the hard questions themselves are as interesting as they are important. At least, that was what I hoped to suggest in these pages.

This doesn’t mean the characters don’t seek answers themselves, and those answers are often in the form of a faith of one kind or another, whether the characters acknowledge this or not. And so this was something else I wanted to explore in the book. The Horus Heresy is such an inviting playground in this regard, because we are witness simultaneously to a mythological clash of titans, echoing everything from the War in Heaven to Ragnarok, as well as to the birth of a very specific faith: what will become the Imperial Creed.

Atticus has faith of a kind, though it certainly isn’t a religious one. Madail has a faith too, based on the ultimate triumph of the Ruinous Powers. But then there are the unfortunate mortals swept up in the wars of gods. The serfs aboard the Veritas Ferrum don’t have any choice about their flesh. They are what they are. So where can they turn for strength when faced not only with a demoralising military catastrophe and a world that wants to eat them, but also attacks from forces beyond their comprehension, if not to the belief that promises salvation from those forces?

And mention of those forces brings me to the Damnation Cache itself, and what a privilege it was to pry it open. The scale of the daemonic force unleashed, and what the end result of that unleashing would be, were an invitation and a challenge to be worthy of that dark host. I felt that once the daemons started strutting their stuff, if I wanted to do them justice, I had to write a book that was as much about fear as it was war. If, after reading this book, you’re tempted, even a little, to keep the lights on a tiny bit longer, than I will be a happy writer indeed.

Though, if truth be told, I am already a happy writer for having had the chance to play in this world of monsters.

David Annandale,

February 2014

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2013 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Neil Roberts

Internal illustrations by Karl Richardson

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