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The Lightning Hall – Graham McNeill

About the Author

An Extract from ‘The Solar War’

A Black Library Publication

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THE LIGHTNING HALL

Graham McNeill

‘Our brothers’ bones were naught but dust,
Their swords of steel all gone to rust.
Typhon’s Causeway sealed their fate,
A house brought low by traitors’ hate.’

– Taranis Invictus, Verse XCIV

It never rained on Mars.

Lord Commander Verticorda only ever told the tale of his meeting with the Emperor when he had supped too much at the most auspicious feast days of House Taranis. Always the provocateur, Caturix would coax him to tell it, the younger lord commander the volatile firebrand to Verticorda’s steady hearthfire. Wine flowed, the consorts would cheer, and the young scions would begin hammering their fists upon the tables until the venerable warrior inevitably relented and rose from his onyx throne with one arm raised.

He would stand at the end of the Lightning Hall, its colossal vaulted expanse hung with wheel-patterned banners amid columns carved from basalt lifted from the dead volcanic depths of the Arsia Mons chapter house.

And so he would tell of that day – the golden city-ship descending from Terra, the sublime being within, and the baptismal rain that fell upon the slopes of Olympus Mons. A rain that nourished the red soil like never before, bringing new purpose to the legions of toiling adepts and thralls.

Platters of roasted meat and ewers of strong wine were consumed at such feasts, and the entirety of Verticorda’s mien would transform as he turned to Ares Lictor, the Paladin-class Knight behind him, its ivory-edged plates resplendent in a deep, midnight blue. He would climb to its once wounded knee and lay his palm upon it as the Emperor had done, and he would weep tears of joyous remembrance as the house scions shook the walls with their valorous cries.

Days of glory. A time of heroes.

But those days were gone. No longer did the Lightning Hall echo to shouted oaths and sworn bonds of honour. No longer did its scions raise their fists to the sky in proud boasts.

House Taranis was dead.

Nothing could survive long in the ash wastes of the Pallidus.

The bone-white desert stretched as far as the eye could see, a desolate expanse that no sane adept would ever seek to traverse or colonise. Lunatic dust devils carved its caustic landscape into wondrous spirals, and the air flickered with spontaneous coronal discharges that had given rise to legends of electrostatic gods battling in the deep dust. Storms of such fury they could topple the mightiest of the god-machines were birthed deep in its hinterlands, freighted with heavy metals swept up from the toxic regolith.

One such supercell, in truth the merging of a dozen such storms, surged north in the direction of Arsia Mons. The shield volcano’s fiery heart had cooled in ages past, but the geomancers of Koriel Zeth, Mistress of the Magma City, had reignited it after excavating its hardened interior and filling it with a labyrinth of titanic arming halls and engine forges.

The towering storm front of flaked iron and dust stretched for over sixteen thousand kilometres, and forks of lightning danced before its anvil head, which seethed nearly nine thousand metres above the ashen ground. This particular storm was vast, but not even half the height of the volcano, and it had roared to life in the atomic wastelands surrounding the ruptured Memnonia Deep Core mining fields. A furious exchange of atomics early in the Martian schism had destroyed the controlling infrastructure, setting off a cascade of detonations that turned the region into a nightmarish hellscape which vomited up storm after storm.

Two loping forms raced ahead of the advancing storm into the endless battlefield of Daedala Planum, bent low in the shrieking winds of the supercell’s forward shelf cloud. Hurricane-force winds chased them, scouring their armour with micro-fragments of metal, but they marched on undaunted. Only the scattered wreckage of war engines and the machine parts of once living combatants gave the forms scale: ten-metre-high bipedal walkers. Their outlines were humanoid, but with pneuma-piston-driven legs, heads like skulls of silver steel and arms hung with powerful weapons.

Knights, but with no heraldry to mark them, no banners to identify them.

The carapace plates of their armour had once been a rich, midnight blue, but after the years they’d spent in the Martian dead zones without access to refitting or repair, only patches of stubborn colour remained on plates mostly scoured back to bare metal.

The two Knights had followed the storm from the rumpled skirts of Medusa Fossae, using the cover of its auspex-fouling e-mag squalls to conceal their presence. Mars was enemy territory now, especially the Tharsis quadrangle, where the fire that consumed Mars had begun. This landscape had once been theirs to roam with impunity, but now was entirely hostile.

Snatched blurts of ancient binharic crackled on the manifold, crackling whispers borne on the storm winds that repeated random numbers and letters over and over again. Such phenomena were not uncommon on Mars, but they could make nothing of the numeric patterns, and whatever truth they might possess was encrypted by means now forgotten.

Some said they were simply vox echoes from the past, bouncing from the roof of the world and endlessly circling the planet in search of meaning. Others claimed they were ghost code from the earliest sentient machines who lay buried in forgotten tombs deep in the heart of the Pallidus, hoping to one day be resurrected.

Perhaps all of these explanations were true, perhaps none.

To Raf Maven they were the voices of the dead.

They plagued Maven every night. He heard them all whenever he closed his eyes, whenever he let himself think of the life he had once known. Sometimes he thought he saw them too, manifold ghosts lurking at the edges of his vision: fellow scions of Taranis, the lord commanders, the sacristans and the consorts. Their voices mingled in a forlorn lament, his dead family condemning him with an endless litany of accusation.

Where were you?

We needed you!

You should have died with us!

Maven heard their echo in the whispered voices carried on the storm wind, scratching at the vox like a distress call just beyond reach. He tried to keep the voices out, but no matter how far he dampened Equitos Bellum’s manifold, he couldn’t entirely silence them. He felt their presence everywhere within his Knight. Their silent stares were an ever-increasing weight upon his shoulders.

Equitos Bellum had ever been a fractious mount, its machine-spirit as wilful as its pilot, and before Mars had fallen to madness, their temperaments had suited one another well. But the years spent hiding and raiding isolated supply hubs for ammunition, food and water had worn at his mortal spirit with gnawing guilt and a creeping sense of hopelessness.

After he and his Taranis brother Leopold Cronus had escorted the companions of the golden-eyed girl to the automated research facility deep in the Medusa Fossae, Maven had wanted to ride straight back out and fight, to strike back against the traitors who had brought shame to the red planet. Only the calm, sage counsel of Cronus had convinced him of that plan’s suicidal folly.

And so they had hunkered down to wait out the storm.

But the storm had not abated, had not been a sudden squall whose very ferocity burns it out all the faster. This storm had endured, and now all of Mars was engulfed.

The treachery within the priesthood of Mars had run deeper than any of them could have suspected, with one forgemaster after another declaring fealty to Kelbor-Hal and the Warmaster. In the years since, Maven and Cronus had come to know their companions in exile: Caxton Torgau and Zouche Chahaya. Both were faithful servants of the Omnissiah and fiercely loyal to the Throneworld. Together they had endured, hidden deep in an isolated scrap of desert, and waited.

And waited…

Caxton had once been a lowly component assembler in the Magma City, while Zouche had served as a machinist in its deep fabricatus halls, but they had risen to the challenge of keeping Equitos Bellum and Pax Mortis functional after each sortie. Like Maven and Cronus, they were horrified by what had happened to Mars, but each overcame their grief in their own way – Caxton by obsessively scraping the noospheric networks for word of a golden-eyed girl named Dalia Cythera, and Zouche by burying himself in an obscure tome he had borne from the Noctis Labyrinthus.

As the years wore on with only scraps of hard data filtering through the insane babble polluting the noosphere, it had become harder and harder to sort meaning from the chaos.

Until four days ago.

A brief signal of perfect clarity, a rallying call prefixed by command codes authenticated by both Equitos Bellum and Pax Mortis.

Coming from the depths of Arsia Chasmata. The chapter house of Taranis.

Maven tried to keep his focus on the striding form of Pax Mortis through the dust and smoke as they circled the southern flank of Arsia Mons. Amber clouds seethed above the towering mountain, and the tar-black smoke of the Magma City’s destruction still gathered in its deep caldera.

Though many years had passed since its sinking, the bones of the city’s corpse were evident in the stubs of support columns and leaning adamantium towers jutting from the cooled magma lagoon in which it had once stood. The cantilevered remains of Typhon’s Causeway jutted out into the lake like an unfinished transitway, still strewn with battlefield debris. Maven looked up and saw the gaping void in the mountain’s flank where Aetna’s Dam had once concentrated the reactivated heart of the volcano. The arched loops of magma ducts that once flowed with the golden light of molten rock lay in ruins, partially buried in hardened flows of lava.

‘Hard to believe it’s gone,’ said Cronus, leading them through the shattered remains of the dead city’s outworks and gutted infrastructure. His friend’s voice came over a short-range, line-of-sight vox to avoid being triangulated by enemy surveyor sweeps, which made it so faint and rich with static that Maven had a hard time separating it from the whispers of the dead.

He didn’t respond, his mouth dry and tasting of tin. His neck and shoulders ached with low-grade infection where the neural connectors of the Throne Mechanicum plugged into his cranial sockets. The counterseptics had run out over a year ago, and the flesh around his ports was swollen and necrotic, wet with leaking blood and cloudy spinal fluid. His Knight’s enormous limbs were twitchy and hesitant, the past overlaying the present in stuttering auspex echoes.

‘Maven?’ said Cronus. ‘Are you with me?’

Sweat beaded Maven’s skin like a layer of frost. He nodded, and the Knight mirrored the gesture. He swallowed and blinked shadow-rimmed eyes, the pupils dilated and whites bloodshot from lack of sleep and overuse of stimms.

‘I’m with you,’ he said, his lips dry and his voice cracked.

‘You’re moving erratically,’ said Cronus, sounding like they were out on a training mission, rather than deep in enemy-held territory in barely functional machines.

‘Residual pain memory,’ said Maven. ‘All the damage Equitos Bellum has taken in these years still lingers in the manifold and we don’t have the equipment to properly purge it.’

‘Caxton and Zouche are doing their best, but they’re no sacristans,’ agreed Cronus. ‘Do what you can, and try to keep Equitos Bellum’s spirit in check.’

‘Easier said than done,’ snapped Maven. ‘She’s chafing on my mind, restless and bellicose. She’s twitching at every phantom image on the auspex.’

As if to prove his point, the surveyor panel flickered with life, and a blurred image swam into being, tall and wide-shouldered, hunched over and warlike.

Engine sign. A big one too. A Reaver at least. Maybe even a Warlord…

Without any input from Maven, Equitos Bellum switched to a war footing, its weapon generators firing from idle to active, and the high-energy cells that drove the war machine switching to battle mode.

‘Maven!’ cried Cronus. ‘What is it?’

Maven cut the vox-link to Pax Mortis, and fought against the Knight’s urge to evade the engine-sign of a god-machine. His eyes darted from the panel to the cracked armaglass of the canopy and the storm-wracked wasteland beyond.

Nothing, just the ruin of everything we once held dear.

‘It’s not real,’ he told the Knight. ‘You’re just picking up a data echo looping in the noosphere. Maybe there was a Warlord here, but it’s long gone now.’

As well as speaking aloud, he pushed that thought through the neural cables into the manifold, soothing the Knight’s restless spirit. It resisted him at first, still believing he was walking them towards an enemy Titan.

‘There’s no Warlord,’ he insisted. ‘If there was, it would have already killed us.’

The Knight eased up under him, finally accepting it wasn’t in immediate danger, and Maven pulled it back into position on the starboard rear quarter of Pax Mortis. He bridged the vox back to Pax Mortis to hear Cronus yelling.

‘…aven! Where’s the threat? Maven!’

‘No threat,’ said Maven. ‘Just a sensor ghost. An echo. Equitos Bellum is skittish today. Being here… where our brothers all died… it’s hard. For both of us.’

He heard Cronus sigh over the vox, taking time to cool his ire.

‘I understand, brother,’ said Cronus at last. ‘That we weren’t there with them that day haunts me every waking moment.’

The informational death of Koriel Zeth’s forge sinking beneath the magma lagoon had rocked Mars to its core. That a forge so representative of the dream of Mars could be lost so swiftly and thoroughly sent shockwaves all around the red planet.

Encoded within its doomed scream had been the determination of Zeth’s intentionality, a last act of defiance to deny Kelbor-Hal so much as a single bolt or byte from her foundries. From that and the initially comprehensible chatter over the global networks, they had pieced together the details of the last ride of Taranis, and each death they confirmed only twisted the twin knives of grief and guilt deeper.

Name after name of men and machines lost…

But for Cronus and Maven, Taranis was a dead house.

‘This signal? Do you really think it’s possible any of our brothers survived?’ he said.

Cronus hesitated before answering, leaving only the crackle of static and the hum of overtaxed machinery to fill the stale, heavy air of Maven’s cockpit.

‘I don’t know,’ he said at last, and even over the vox, Maven could hear the disguised hope in his brother’s voice. ‘The last days of the Magma City were confusing and chaotic. Nothing Caxton’s been able to glean from the noosphere is certain, so… it’s possible.’

‘But not likely?’

‘No, it is not likely,’ agreed Cronus. ‘But we have to be sure.’

‘The signal could be a trap,’ said Maven. ‘A means to draw out warriors loyal to Mars who may have survived.’

‘That seems the most plausible explanation,’ answered Cronus. ‘But Equitos Bellum and Pax Mortis believed it to be true, and I have to trust to their wisdom.’

‘Maybe they just want it to be true?’ said Maven, feeling a tremor run through the metal body of his Knight. ‘Maybe we all do.’

‘That is also a possibility.’

‘So is this a fool’s errand?’ asked Maven, struggling to temper his hope.

‘If it is, then we are all fools together,’ said Cronus.

The main entrance to the Taranis chapter house was via the Chasmata, a series of steep-sided canyons on the north-eastern flank of Arsia Mons that plunged deep into the bedrock of the volcano. Red cliffs rose starkly to either side as the two Knights moved cautiously into the shadowed darkness. A chill ran the length of Maven’s spine as he recalled stepping down into the cold, shadowed grabens of the Noctis Labyrinthus. The canyons of Arsia Mons were shallower than that valley of night, its rocky floor nowhere near as deep, and the glaring russet of the sky was clearly visible.

Almost immediately they saw signs of war. Forward gun batteries set high on the canyon sides hung from their mounts on swaying cables, the turrets buckled and torn. Laser scars, carbon scoring and vitrified patches marred the canyon sides, indicative of a fierce battle. Without Knights, the house protectors and wardens would have fought alone to keep the enemy at bay, but with all the might of Mars turned against them, it would have been a battle that could have only one outcome.

Deeper in, at convergences of canyons, bastion forts blocked the way down, but their armoured gateways hung open or lay shattered across their thresholds. Portions of plated stonework sagged like melted wax, and every flanking tower lay smashed to rubble.

‘What did this?’ said Maven.

Cronus had no answer, and the ruins and dust offered no clues as to who had attacked the chapter house. They saw no bodies or debris of battle engines. Whoever had done this had left nothing in their wake, gathering up the flesh and machinery of those they had murdered in their treachery.

Deeper still, they found yet more evidence of the ferocious fighting: entire portions of the Chasmata collapsed in blocking manoeuvres, revetted trenches and hastily poured herringbone barriers to slow the attackers. None of it had worked, and with every step downwards, Maven felt his anguish replaced by fury. His rage passed into Equitos Bellum, his emotions galvanising the Knight. Its pace increased with every fresh atrocity visited upon House Taranis.

‘Ease back,’ said Cronus. ‘If this is a trap, then we only aid our enemies by blindly walking into it.’

‘It wasn’t enough for them to kill our brothers,’ growled Maven. ‘They had to desecrate our home as well?’

‘You have seen what Kelbor-Hal has done to Mars,’ said Cronus. ‘This perfidy should not surprise you.’

‘It doesn’t, but… I don’t know, I just hoped that with our house destroyed, they would have no need to further wound us.’

‘Kelbor-Hal is nothing if not thorough,’ said Cronus. ‘He seeks to remake the history of Mars, and to do that he must ensure no trace of any who defy him is left behind.’

‘We are left behind.’

‘And we will make him rue the day he left two of Taranis alive.’

Eventually, Maven and Cronus reached the base of the Chasmata, where a wide semi-circular door had once been set deep in the strata of the mountain. Unlike the great gates of the Legio fortresses of Pavonis Mons or Ascaeus Mons, these were not titanic marvels of engineering designed to remind those approaching them of their insignificance. These had been a testament to history.

Tall enough for Knights to march beneath, but no taller.

Wide enough for two Knights to march abreast of one another, but no wider.

The gate to the chapter house had been torn from the mountain, the metal bent and buckled by the enormous power that wrenched it from its frame. Its burned and cratered surfaces were carved with symbols of loyalty and devotion that went back to the ancient founding of the First House in a time before the union of Terra and Mars. The left side was carved with the wheel and lightning bolt of Taranis, while the right bore the sigil of the Questor Mechanicum and the double-headed eagle of the Emperor. A vertical locking bar in the shape of an upraised sword had once sat at the centre of the mighty door, held in place by a pair of eagles at top and bottom. Intended to symbolise the unity of two empires, while still recognising their sacred independence, the enormous sword lay on the ground, partially buried by the door.

Beyond the gate, a dark tunnel, sparsely illuminated by flickering lumens and glowing power cables. A sickly-sweet smell of rank corruption filled Maven’s senses. A tang of burnt iron and rusted metal soaked in blood.

His mouth tasted of ashes, and he wanted to spit and rinse it out with water. He felt his stomach knot, hearing a similar reaction over the vox from Pax Mortis.

‘You feel it too?’ said Maven.

‘What is it?’ said Cronus between dry heaves.

At first, Maven wasn’t sure, but the longer the sensation lingered in his mind, the more he knew exactly what was happening.

‘Our Knights,’ he said. ‘Their auspexes are rendering the data into a sensory experience within our minds. They want us to feel what they feel.’

‘And what is that?’

‘It’s evil,’ he said. ‘Evil lies within. And it’s waiting for us.’

They entered the mountain, stepping cautiously through the flickering darkness of the approach tunnels, navigating inner defences that had been demolished as thoroughly as those without. With every step, they saw yet more evidence of fierce fighting, smashed barricades and walls burned back to the reinforcement bars. Pride and grief warred in Maven’s heart as he witnessed how hard the men and women of Taranis had fought to defend their home.

Past the inner defensive structures, the mountain opened up into a series of wide, arched chambers. Now the architecture transformed, changing from the martial designs of the outer fortifications to something altogether more grandiose. This level contained the receiving halls, where petitioners seeking the aid of the house’s Knights would present their case to the lord commanders, guest chambers for visiting lords and adepts, and the grand reliquaries of Taranis.

The antechamber beyond the defences was a vast, circular space domed in gold, and its coffered walls were a mosaic of great moments in the history of Taranis. Heat had fused them into bright swirls that cast the glittering beams of the Knights’ stablights around them in a kaleidoscope of colours.

A flicker of light bloomed on Maven’s auspex. He turned his Knight, the stablights piercing the inky blackness.

‘You have something?’ asked Cronus.

‘I don’t know,’ said Maven. ‘Maybe another sensor echo.’

The light vanished from the auspex, but Maven kept his gaze upon it a moment longer. Something in the speed and solidity of the return made him uneasy.

‘A traitor Knight perhaps,’ suggested Cronus, walking his Knight in a slow circle.

‘No. Too small for an engine.’

‘Infantry? Robots?’

‘Perhaps, but there would need to be a lot of them.’

‘Not beyond the realms of possibility,’ said Cronus. ‘A salvager guild or scavver-clan could have taken over the place.’

‘The auspex isn’t registering any significant bio-sign. Nothing human or bio-chimeric.’

‘Sounds like another ghost echo,’ said Cronus, his relief evident. ‘Have Caxton clean out the data-receptors when we get back.’

Maven nodded. The return he was getting felt off, and though Cronus was likely correct about it being another ghost echo, he kept an eye on the bio-auspex to be sure. Many a battlefield was littered with the remains of those who erred on the wrong side of caution.

‘So, which way do you think?’ said Cronus.

Maven chewed his blistered lip. He had no answer for Cronus. Four archways led deeper into the mountain, though only two were viable, the others having collapsed under the weight of fire or deliberate destruction. The brief signal had come from the Taranis chapter house, but had ceased transmitting many days ago and could have come from anywhere within. The chambers of the lord commanders seemed like the obvious choice, but a number of locations were equally likely.

Maven felt an insistent tug at his senses, an urge to haul on the controls, a feeling that his mount was trying to tell him something if only he had the wit to understand it. The itching, unhealed sores in his spine tingled with heat.

‘I feel you,’ he said, speaking directly to Equitos Bellum.

‘What’s that?’ said Cronus.

He had felt this sensation once before.

‘Equitos Bellum is trying to guide me,’ he said. ‘Just like it did when it brought us to the golden-eyed girl in the Noctis Labyrinthus.’

‘Where is it leading you?’

‘I can’t tell, not exactly,’ said Maven.

Before, the pull on his senses had been unambiguous, too insistent to ignore, and unmistakable in the direction it wanted him to go. But now it was a pervasive sensation of restive impatience.

Tell me where you need to go… please!

Maven’s mind filled with the image of a great hall, hung with wheel-embossed banners and filled with the roars of a thousand throats. The sensation was so strong, he felt as though he stood within that vaulted space, his throat raw from cheering, his fist raised to a sky of black thunderheads that rippled with blue light.

He knew that place. He had stood within it countless times: in celebration, in mourning, in fealty.

Maven’s lips moved, but no sounds emerged, only a hot breath of grating machine-speech. He tried again, and this time the words were those of mortals.

‘The Lightning Hall,’ he gasped. ‘We need to go to the Lightning Hall.’

Into the volcanic heart of Arsia Mons.

Deeper through passages choked with rubble.

Down curving transitways that circled the volatile geothermal heart of the volcano.

Through arming chambers where wounded Knights were repaired, ringed by gantries and hung with chained hooks. Heavy, hazard-striped ark-cranes groaned in the darkness, and the air stank of grease and oil. No Knights remained here, not so much as a single chassis of a Knight too badly damaged to march. Had the enemy stolen them all or had someone within Taranis managed to salvage enough parts to craft a viable fighting machine?

They passed reliquaries and temples to the Omnissiah, every one desecrated with contaminated oil and filled with smashed masonry piled like burial cairns or primitive idols. Collapsed pillars, tens of metres thick, lay fallen like uprooted saplings at the entrances to caverns that would never again be opened, as if the mountain sought to undo what the industry of mortals once wrought within it.

Chambers choked with rubble and leaking streams of dust that drifted in red veils. They tracked back through forge-halls that once rang to the sound of hammering metal, the hum of plasmic energies and the proud boasts of scions. But the sacristans were gone now, their energies stilled, and the scions lay dead on Typhon’s Causeway. The senselessness of it all clung to Maven like a second skin.

More signs of battle: scorched walls, smashed machinery and furniture hastily stacked to provide protection from attack. None of it had worked. At every junction where a defence had been mounted, it had been smashed aside like matchwood.

‘This has the look of something… unnatural,’ said Cronus.

‘You saw the thing we fought in the Noctis Labyrinthus,’ said Maven. ‘That was something unnatural. It wasn’t built for the hands of a warrior or directed by a mortal mind, it was a machine given its own violent life. Who knows what other monsters Kelbor-Hal has loosed on Mars? Woe-machines, uncaged ur-engines from the Dark Age of Technology, or worse…’

Maven’s words trailed off as they entered the shadowed chamber of the Preceptorium, the vault at the heart of the mountain, where Knights of the house would assemble before marching out. Sputtering electro-braziers hung from towering columns that ran the full kilometre length of the marble-floored chamber.

Maven had stood here more times than he could remember, pride swelling in his breast as Verticorda and Caturix inspected their mounted Knights, ensuring none would bring dishonour to House Taranis. But whoever had taken the chapter house had defiled it. They had turned it from a place of honour to a place of horror.

The rusted carcasses of hundreds of sacristan repair-walkers were strewn around the chamber, stripped back to their metal bones and pulled apart, limb from limb. What little remained of their superstructures was set in geometric patterns around the chamber like angular sigils in a host of blasphemous rituals. Dried oil and blood stained every surface, and the remains of thousands of extinguished candles lay in ragged stars of melted wax. At the centre of each ritual arrangement of iron was a looming totem of cannibalised machine parts, grotesque, horned idols in the shape of multi-armed beings with slender limbs formed of sinewed cables and bladed shears. Heaped at the base of each totem were piles of scrap metal, severed machine-limbs and the discarded remains of servitors.

Maven felt Equitos Bellum’s hate for what had been done here on a primal level, a heat in his hands that urged him to strike out and destroy every one of these desecrations. Tears pricked at the corners of his eyes, and he felt the steel and fire of Equitos Bellum pull harder around him, his fury passing into its superstructure.

‘The Lightning Hall…’ said Cronus.

Maven nodded and pushed his Knight onwards, fragments of circuitry and snapped metal crunching under his splay-clawed feet as he stepped deeper into the chamber. Yet more heaped piles of scrapped metal were strewn across the floor, and Maven crushed them beneath his Knight’s tread as he advanced.

The auspex flickered in his wake, tiny signals, barely worthy of his notice.

Equitos Bellum tugged at his senses, its urgency plain, but Maven was too intent on reaching the far end of the chamber to notice.

And there, beneath a gilded dome of gold at the terminus of the Preceptorium, stood an imposing door of pristine onyx. Hewn from the rock of Terra, its surface was veined with threads of gold and silver, like forking streaks of divine thunderbolts.

Beyond, was the heart of the chapter house.

The Lightning Hall.

‘It’s still sealed,’ said Cronus, his relief plain. ‘Whoever did this… they didn’t get in…’

‘The signal? So it could be real…?’

The auspex flickered again, and this time Maven registered what Equitos Bellum was telling him. He turned his Knight and saw the gloom of the chamber shift.

The darkness rippled with motion, a swirling undulant mass of chimeric bodies emerging from the piles of metal scattered across the chamber floor and heaped around the hideous idols.

What Maven had thought were piles of discarded metal cast aside as junk were splitting apart, interwoven limbs twitching and jerking with malfunctioning spasms as they rose from the ground. Denuded of most of their flesh, their half-skeletal forms were missing limbs or portions of their skulls. Those without legs crawled towards the Knights, hauling themselves forward on buckled stumps of arms. Others limped with a shambling, unbalanced gait, while yet more bore things that were little more than snapping, metallic jaws or clawing arms. Sinews of amber fire slithered across their forms, animating twisted bodies and connecting limbs that could not otherwise have remained active.

Maven’s stablights swept across the horde of shattered iron bodies, and his lip curled in a sneer as he understood what these degenerate things were.

‘Enemy sighted,’ he said, bringing up Equitos Bellum’s weapon arms.

‘Nature and number?’ demanded Cronus, turning Pax Mortis and reverting to standard engagement protocols.

‘Feral servitors,’ he said. ‘Thousands of them…’

Part human, part mechanical; wretched men and women whose minds had rejected the brutal implementation of servitor-grade cybernetics or whose wetware had degraded with corruption.

Corruption…

Most such aberrations were destroyed, their bodies cremated and their implants recycled, but some less fastidious adepts simply dumped their broken bodies in the Pallidus, leaving them to wander the wasteland in voracious packs in search of energy to feast on.

Corruption…

The word lodged in Maven’s mind, more apposite than he could have imagined.

In the years since the great betrayal, Maven and Cronus had seen sights that would haunt them forever – deranged machine intelligences, nightmarish hybrids of forbidden technologies and weapon systems banned since the earliest days of Martian experimentation – but the sight of these crippled monsters making their lair in the seat of their chapter house cut to the very heart of them.

‘Kill them all,’ ordered Cronus.

Equitos Bellum and Pax Mortis opened fire simultaneously, the roar of their rapid-firing battle cannons echoing like the thunder of their house’s namesake. Explosions ripped up the flagstones of their ancestral home in fountains of marble and basalt, steel and fire.

Servitor bodies tumbled through the air, rent asunder by the furious blasts.

Maven walked his Knight into the servitors, its mighty form towering above the lowly constructs. Heavy-stubber fire flensed them, blizzards of heavy-calibre shells fragmenting their bodies and completing their destruction. He lifted his leg and stomped down, crushing them beneath his clawed feet, turning and sweeping his vast chainsword arm through dozens with every swing.

Reserve power level warnings flashed in his eyes. Ammo counters pinged with quarter-load notifications. Maven eased up his rate of fire, turning on his heel and letting the vast blade cleave the feral servitors’ bodies to shards. His stamping feet threw sparks and amber fire upward.

Impossible to know how many he had killed.

They kept coming on in waves, mindless things driven only by their insensate hunger.

All the fury and grief he carried in his heart came out in every killing blow, every carefully aimed shot, and every crashing footfall that obliterated the feral servitors by the score. He and Cronus stomped and raged through the Preceptorium in a killing fury. Maven let the wild colt that was the soul of Equitos Bellum rage, the awesome power of its vengeance flowing through him with every passing second.

He knew that was dangerous; the Knight had already tasted the freedom of his flesh once before, but his own towering anger was barrier enough to keep their spirits separate, yet united in their hatred of the foe.

Maven began reciting a litany of his fallen brothers, letting the years of frustration and sorrow bleed out of him with every name.

‘Raf!’

Something in the tone of his friend’s voice penetrated the red mist of Maven’s fury.

A warning? Fear?

Maven stepped Equitos Bellum back from the slaughter, the Knight knee-deep in feral corpses, its once silver plates stained red with the blood of the beasts that had despoiled his chapter house.

He swung the Knight’s head to the side. The floor of the Preceptorium was all but obscured by the carnage they had wrought. Servitors were unworthy of a Knight’s skill at arms, but as Maven looked to where Pax Mortis was facing, he saw the truth of what the Preceptorium had become.

These abominations hadn’t made it their lair, they’d made it their temple.

The totemistic idols were unfolding, infused with the same amber fire that had animated the servitors, turning things that were once broken and misshapen into things both sinuous and the equal of a Knight in stature: terrible woe-machines given life by a force neither Maven nor Cronus could hope to comprehend.

Six hideous, mantis-like monsters, sway-backed and multi-legged, with reverse-jointed limbs like vast scythe blades at their shoulders. Their forms seethed with change – heads formed of swirling congeries of bulbous augmetic eyes, slashed mouths filled with grinding chisel-teeth, and their spines alive with whipping, claw-tipped cables.

‘Throne preserve us!’ said Cronus. ‘What are they?’

Maven didn’t waste breath on a reply and took a quarter-step back, turning and lowering his left shoulder as his ion shield ignited. The slaughter of the feral servitors had been cathartic, but it was merely a prelude to this coming fight.

The woe-machines came on in a clattering rush of shrieking, tearing metal. Their screams blared in Maven’s ears, piercing cries of maddening pain. Equitos Bellum shut out the wail as Maven charged to meet them, using the Knight’s superior mass to bulldoze the first pair of machines from his path. He grunted in pain as he felt scything claws slash across the legs of his Knight. Streams of lubricant and blessed oils flowed down his shin armour.

He hammered the blade of his Reaper chainsword through the chest of a toppled woe-machine. It screamed with a sound all too organic and too fleshy to be entirely mechanical. Maven twisted the blade free and crushed its head with a stamping foot.

A burst of liquid fire streamed over his battle cannon, and he bit back a scream as sympathetic pain stabbed into his arm of flesh and blood. He stepped back in time to avoid a slashing blow to his midriff, wrenching Equitos Bellum’s body around to take the next strike on his shield. The strength behind it was ferocious, his shield failing in an agonising burst of electrostatic discharge.

Another blow staggered him, this one from behind.

He retreated a step, sweeping his sword arm up. The revving teeth tore through the flank of the woe-machine, ripping out glutinous chunks of chimeric flesh and metal, as though puncturing some loathsome reservoir of devoured meat and blood within its armoured shell.

Something struck him, low on the left hip. Pain flared and he staggered.

A woe-machine pounced – a feat surely impossible for a thing so heavy. Maven roared and brought his battle cannon to bear, and fired as the thing of blades and teeth and claws filled his visor. Percussive blasts rocked him back and the cockpit bloated with searing heat and light. Ammo warnings blared as autoloaders sought more shells and came up dry.

The woe-machine slammed into Equitos Bellum, driving him back against one of the towering columns. He saw the thing’s molten face inches from his cracked canopy, jaws spread wide with swirling metal teeth, grasping feeder cables and a hellish, volcanic gullet already melting the armaglass.

His battle cannon was still wedged in its guts. Only the shells left in the breech remained.

‘Get the hell off me!’ Maven yelled, and loosed his last shots.

The woe-machine flew backwards, its spine splintered and its body coming apart in a thunder of spinning fragments. The shockwave of the point-blank detonations was like a gut-punch to Equitos Bellum, and the Knight sank to one knee. Blinding white light filled Maven’s senses, and he fought to right himself, pushing back and up. Bolts of fiery pain clamped down on his legs, the Knight’s agony now his.

Another blow struck his shoulder carapace, a piercing downward strike that plunged through the armour and wedged in the complex mesh of gears and joints in his battle cannon arm. Maven spat a mouthful of blood, convulsing in the Throne Mechanicum as his shoulder twisted savagely in his harness. Pain misted his vision, but he had skill and instinct enough to bring up his Reaper to protect his head as the second blow came in. Repercussive microfractures spread up the bones of his arm as the woe-machine’s strike slid clear, and finally he had enough breathing room to gain a moment’s clarity.

He limped backwards, facing off against two machines that wept bloody oil and whose bodies of metal were in constant motion, remoulding arms into piston-driven blades and mouths into lashing whips, growing eyes upon eyes. Equitos Bellum sagged against one of the columns, barely able to hold itself upright.

Maven coughed another mouthful of blood, no longer sure if this was his pain or the Knight’s. Did it even matter any more?

He saw Cronus, Pax Mortis down on one knee and bleeding floods of oil and sparks. Its battle cannon was buckled, and to fire it now would destroy both the arm and the Knight.

‘Cronus!’ shouted Maven, the effort sending a surge of pain through his chest. Only waves of static answered him.

Is this it…? Is this the end?

Why did we endure the years in the wilderness just to die here?

Part of him felt it only right and proper that this would be where he died. Hubris had taken him from the house when they needed him most. His brothers had died without him. A debt of death was owed to Taranis, and where better for it to come due than in the heart of the chapter house?

Anger filled Maven at this craven self-pity. He pictured Verticorda, the old warrior shaking his head solemnly in disappointment.

The woe-machines bellowed at him, a sound like thunder.

A gathering storm…

‘You are not the thunder,’ spat Maven in a voice that wasn’t his. ‘Taranis is the thunder!’

He couldn’t win this fight. But Equitos Bellum…?

Maven sank back into the Throne Mechanicum and said, ‘Take them.’

His words were all the invitation his Knight needed. The rage simmering in the manifold surged as it had upon his destruction of the traitorous war machine threatening the golden-eyed girl. It erupted like the reborn fire of Arsia Mons, and Maven’s back arched as the stabbing pain of psychostigmatic wounds flared all across his body. He felt Equitos Bellum’s power move within his flesh, his limbs convulsing as he surrendered his will.

The Knight’s essence was a summer lightning storm, the seething nuclear heart of a newborn star at the moment of conception, and only reluctantly had it consented to having its insubstantial nature confined to machine form so many centuries before. Maven’s body spasmed with neural overload, fingers beating out a binaric tattoo on the arms of the Throne Mechanicum. His spine arched in a flexing bow, and he screamed as he felt the vertebrae grind together and tear at his infected connection sockets.

Equitos Bellum was a wild, untrammelled spirit, born in a distant age when lost technologies finally understood the truth of what lay at the heart of every machine. It had ever chafed at its form of iron and plasteel, tolerating its mortal pilot for the glorious wars he helped it fight. Maven felt the machine-spirit’s mind fill his mind with crackling energies, firing off impulses at random. Circuit-etched patterns burned into the blue of his eyes as hyper-dense schematics filled him with knowledge of machine hearts only the greatest archmagi were wise enough to know.

A sea of information, unnumbered lives of machines and lost secrets filled him.

Visions of ages past, where machines were but tools, and ages where the line between man and machine was meaningless. And beyond even those techno-literate times were centuries where machines and men made war, a time of breaking and unknowing that had almost been ended before this latest schism had quashed that hope.

All of this was overlaid with memories – if such impressions could be called memories – of moving through microscopic pathways of gold and silver, blessed conduits of flowing circuitry. Dreams bathed in rivers of lightning, of motion and force, of electromagnetic connections made, and of divine life imparted to the inanimate.

Intoxicating and immortal, this was a power that had always existed in the world, fierce and elemental, a power humanity had only yoked in the last blink of existence. It wasn’t meant for him, and he fought to hang on to all that made him Raf Maven.

Equitos Bellum pushed off the column, the primal power of its machine-spirit filling its veins and limbs with fire. Maven saw only dimly what it saw, a world limned in light and sound, of edged metal and atomic structures.

The Knight was too fast for his mortal senses to comprehend, the woe-machines ponderous geoformers to its viper-like speed. Equitos Bellum swung its sword in a butcher’s blow, cleaving the first woe-machine from shoulder to pelvis. Stinking fluids gushed from the catastrophic wound, and its body fell apart in a rain of dismantled metal. Equitos Bellum was already on the move, using its battle cannon as a bludgeon to smash the second woe-machine from its feet. It crashed onto its back, squirming as its composite body rearranged its physique.

Maven felt the thrill of triumph as Equitos Bellum stamped down on its back. The woe-machine bellowed in fury, but Maven’s Knight was without mercy. It pressed its clawed foot harder into the woe-machine’s spine.

Maven ground his teeth, tasting blood and cracked enamel as he heard the sound of splitting metal. His Knight leaned back before whipping forward again to drive the Reaper chainblade straight down into the woe-machine’s back. His shoulder burned with pain as Equitos Bellum worked the blade like a lever, grinding the inner workings of the woe-machine to shards. It howled as it died, smoking orange fire spilling from its many mouths and the apocalyptic wound in its back.

The power holding it together fled the woe-machine’s destruction, and it too came apart in a clanking tide of disparate metal parts.

And with its death, the surging force of Equitos Bellum’s machine-spirit ebbed.

Man and machine were never meant to share the same flesh with such intimacy, and now the potent technologies of the manifold were restoring the barriers between them.

‘No…’ said Maven, looking over to where Pax Mortis struggled in the death grip of the last woe-machine. For all his grievous hurts, Cronus had destroyed two of his foes, but the third was too much.

Maven pushed away from the dead woe-machine at his feet, but without the machine-sprit’s power, his injured leg locked in place. Wounded joints, bled dry of lubricant and taxed beyond measure, seized fast, jammed and smoking as Maven dragged his Knight forward.

His body burned all over. Psychostigmatic pains and repercussive injuries cracked his bones and leeched his flesh of vitality. His breath came in short, hiking gasps.

Equitos Bellum took a halting, half-step forward, its left leg a dead weight. Maven had to reach Cronus.

But he wouldn’t.

The woe-machine had its bladed tail locked around Pax Mortis’ leg, one scything claw buried in its midriff, as though trying to saw it in two. Only Cronus’ fragment-jammed chainblade kept the other from spearing into his pilot’s canopy.

Maven’s eyes burned with smoke and hot tears, his throat locked open in a silent scream as the woe-machine’s blade slowly gouged its way into his brother’s Knight.

Another step, his leg still locked.

Another, his clawed foot gouging the marble floor.

And then light exploded around the woe-machine, a storm of fire. Las-impacts and a hail of solid slugs spanking from its segmented hull. It rocked back, twisting its attention away from Cronus.

Maven couldn’t understand what was happening as yet more explosions scoured the woe-machine’s steel flesh. Through a filmy haze, he saw the onyx doors to the Lightning Hall were no longer closed.

They were flung wide, and through them came the last of his house.

Men-at-arms in threadbare surcoats of ivory-trimmed blue, hung with silver epaulettes and the lightning wheel of Taranis; iron-masked protectors with force-staves, and…

Could it be…?

A Knight…

No, not a Knight, but so very nearly. Smaller than Equitos Bellum by several metres, it marched with a limping, lopsided gait, a machine wrought in the image of a Knight from the few spare parts, broken chassis and scrap metal left in the wake of a devastating attack.

The demi-Knight’s inner workings were visible, the few plates of armour it possessed not the traditional blue of the house, but the vivid red of Mars. Its ion shield still bore the wheel of Taranis, but now sported a black sword overlaying the demi-skull at its heart, with lightning bolts wreathing its cog-toothed circumference. Through the open steel lattice of its cockpit, Maven saw the robed, gold-masked form of a sacristan.

His shock at seeing one of the Cult Mechanicum’s artificers in the seat of a Knight was swiftly replaced with grim satisfaction as he saw the weapon mounted atop its carapace. Its design was unfamiliar to Maven, but the coruscating energies building around its dish-like muzzle were triggering Equitos Bellum’s defensive protocols.

‘Stand down,’ gasped Maven. ‘It’s one of ours!’

The demi-Knight’s weapon fired and a spear of eye-watering crimson light punched through the woe-machine’s armour. The beam pierced its heart and spread all across its hide in a web of crackling light, disintegrating everything it touched with an ear-splitting shriek.

Maven roared to see it destroyed, and threw his fist in the air, the Reaper blade mimicking his movement. He took another faltering step towards Pax Mortis, his brother’s Knight locked in place and leaking smoke from its many hurts.

‘Cronus? Are you in there?’ called Maven. ‘Are you there, brother?’

‘I’m here, brother,’ replied Cronus. ‘Just…’

Maven turned as the demi-Knight that had killed the woe-machine approached.

Its workings were crude by circumstance, brilliant by necessity, and typical of the ingenuity of the sacristans. Its gold-masked pilot bowed from the seat of his Throne Mechanicum, and said, ‘Honour thy forge.’

Maven nodded and said, ‘Honour the Primus Ordinus.’

The Lightning Hall had been transformed.

No longer a feast hall, but a habitat – home to the surviving men and women of House Taranis. Maven and Cronus, now dismounted and with the help of a pair of Mechanicum protectors, shuffled through the gathered survivors with expressions of awe and gratitude. Men, women and children smiled at them, welcoming them with tears of joy.

Do they think us liberators?

Maven held tight to his brother’s hand, his knuckles white from holding on so hard.

The sacristan led them through the hall, between a gathering crowd of a hundred or more people: the civilians of House Taranis. Once wounded men who could not have marched to Typhon’s Causeway, widowed consorts still in black, and their children. Technomats, servitors and support staff tended to machines that had allowed them to exist this long in hiding, atmospheric processors, fluid recyclers and curated hydroponics bays.

The sacristan led them to a secluded portion of the hall, hung with banners taken from the walls. The crowd held back in deference to something or someone Maven couldn’t see. Their gold-masked guide bowed, spoke softly, then turned to Maven and Cronus. He beckoned them in, and the two Knights ducked as they entered the makeshift pavilion.

A lone figure reclined on a rumpled heap of blankets, a man old before his time.

A man Maven had numbered among the dead.

‘Raf Maven and Leopold Cronus,’ said Lord Commander Caturix, his voice rasping and wet. ‘I always believed you two would find a way to survive.’

Maven stood frozen in astonishment. Cronus knelt in deference to their commander, speechless in the face of his survival.

‘My lord… We thought you dead on Typhon’s Causeway,’ said Maven, his head bowed.

Lord Commander Caturix, once the young firebrand of the house, was now bent and made ancient by wounds that would have slain a lesser man thrice over. The entirety of his visible flesh was ridged with burn scars, and one eye wept milky tears from its puckered ruin. His sword arm was missing and both of his legs had been amputated at mid-thigh.

‘Melagator’s traitors tried their best,’ said Caturix. ‘They killed Gladius Fulmen, but they couldn’t get me. Not all of me at least…’ Caturix gestured to the gold-masked sacristan and said, ‘Kol-Sarabyn here found me in the wreckage, fought off the carrion-rabble scouring the ruins in the wake of Adept Zeth’s sacrifice. Brought me back here just before the woe-machines attacked the chapter house.’

‘We thought we were the only ones left,’ wept Cronus.

‘It’s my fault,’ blurted Maven. ‘I kept us from the last ride of our Taranis brothers. We should have been there at your side, blade to blade with the foe.’

Caturix shook his head.

‘No,’ said the lord commander, and his voice grew in power as he spoke. ‘Your presence would have affected the battle’s outcome not at all. You would have died with the others, and Taranis would truly be extinct.’

With his one remaining arm, Caturix reached out and took Maven’s wrist in a powerful grip. The wounded lord’s good eye burned into him and Cronus.

‘I believe it was the will of the Omnissiah that you were not there,’ said Caturix. ‘And so long as your Knights bear the Sword of Taranis, you serve the house. You serve Mars and you serve the Omnissiah. You must be the spark that lights the fires of resistance.’

‘Resistance?’ said Maven. ‘We are but two broken Knights and a ragged household.’

The strength of Caturix’s grip grew stronger.

‘So long as a single Knight lives, Taranis lives,’ said Caturix. ‘And what still draws breath can rise once more. There will be others, lone warriors and hidden clans. Forges yet loyal to the Emperor, machine-clades. All across Mars, there will be pockets of resistance against the Warmaster and Kelbor-Hal. Find them. Bring them under your banner. Unite them all and give them hope!’

Hope… the word made a familiar, bilious misery rise in Maven’s throat, but the power of Caturix’s words were a jolt of igniter to his soul and lit a golden flame in his heart.

‘I understand,’ said Maven, stealing a glance at Cronus.

‘My last breath approaches,’ said Caturix. ‘It is why I risked sending the signal out into the world, hoping you and Cronus were still out there and still fighting. When I am dead, you must lead Taranis. I will have your oaths on this.’

Maven glanced over his shoulder at the assembled host of Taranis. He saw embers of hope in every face. A burden of responsibility he had neither sought nor expected settled upon him as the truth of Caturix’s words steeled his spine like nothing else could.

‘You have my oath,’ said Maven.

Cronus nodded. ‘And mine also.’

‘Then Taranis lives,’ said Caturix with a satisfied nod.

Maven saw it wasn’t forgiveness the lord commander offered. Nor was it absolution and neither was it redemption. He had given them something far greater.

Caturix had given them purpose.

In return, Maven bound himself to a singular promise.

‘Mars will rise.’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Graham McNeill has written many Horus Heresy novels, including The Crimson King, Vengeful Spirit and his New York Times bestsellers A Thousand Sons and the novella The Reflection Crack’d, which featured in The Primarchs anthology. Graham’s Ultramarines series, featuring Captain Uriel Ventris, is now six novels long, and has close links to his Iron Warriors stories, the novel Storm of Iron being a perennial favourite with Black Library fans. He has also written the Forges of Mars trilogy, featuring the Adeptus Mechanicus. For Warhammer, he has written the Warhammer Chronicles trilogy The Legend of Sigmar, the second volume of which won the 2010 David Gemmell Legend Award.

An extract from The Solar War.

Terra

On the first of Primus the sirens rang across Terra.

On the myriad worlds conquered and ruled by the Imperium of Man, they talked of year divisions, of time sliced into a thousand equal slivers. First division, second division, third, and so on, without variation or character, until the weight of counting reached a thousand, and one year tipped over into the next. On worlds of endless night or blinding days, a year was the same. In an empire spanning a galaxy, anything else would have been meaningless.

0000014.M31 was how surviving records would mark the first moment of that day, stamped and corrected for temporal accuracy, standardised and stripped of any meaning. But, here, on the world whose night and day and seasons had given mankind its concept of time, the old counting still meant something and so did the moment that one year died and another was born: the Feast of Two Faces, the Day of New Light, the Renewal – on and on went its names. But for longer than memory it had been the first of Primus, firstborn of the three hundred and sixty-five days that would follow, a day of hope and new beginnings.

The turning of that year began with snow on the northern battlements of the Imperial Palace, where three brother demigods watched the night skies above. It began with the dawn light and icy chill reaching into a tower-top chamber and stirring the painted cards dealt by a man who was older than any knew. It began with the sirens calling out, one at first, high on the Palace spires, before the cry was picked up by others, on and on across the turning globe. The sound echoed through the mountain-sized space ports and rasped from vox-horns in the deep strata of the Atlantean Hives.

On and on it went, stilling the hands of people as they ate and worked. They looked up. In caves beneath the earth, and hive vaults, and under the smog drifts, they looked up. Of those that could see the sky, a few thought they could make out new stars amongst the firmament and froze at the promise of each pinprick of light: a promise of fire and ash and an age of loss. And with the sound of sirens, fear spread, unnamed but still spoken.

‘He is here,’ they said.

Prison ship Aeacus, Uranus high orbit

‘I understand you have a story…’ she said. The wolf stood before her, the fur of its back silver beneath the moonlight. ‘A particularly entertaining one. I’d like to remember it, for posterity.’

The wolf turned, its teeth a smile of sorrow.

‘Which story?’

‘Horus killing the Emperor.’

Mersadie Oliton woke from the memory-dream with sweat on her face. She breathed, and pulled the blanket over her from where it had slipped onto the floor. The air was cool and dank in the cell, scented with the tang of air that had been exhaled too much. She blinked for a second. Something was different. She reached out a hand and touched the metal wall. Moisture clung to the rivets and rust scabs. The thrum of the ship’s engines had gone. Wherever they were, they were stationary in the void.

She let her hand drop and let out a breath. The tatters of the memory-dream still clung to her eyelids. She focused, trying to pull back the threads of the dream even as they slid into darkness.

‘I must remember…’ she said to herself.

‘The prisoner will stand and face the wall.’ The voice boomed out of the speaker set above the cell door.

She stood instinctively. She wore a grey jumpsuit, worn and faded. She put her hands on the wall, fingers splayed. The door unlocked with a clang, and footsteps sounded on the grated floor. The guard would be one just like the rest: crimson-clad and silver-masked, the humanity in its voice concealed by vox distortion. All the gaolers were the same, as constant as the ticking of a clock that never struck the hour.

Small spaces, locked doors, questions and suspicions – such had been her world for the seven years since she had come back to the Solar System. That was the price for what she had seen, for what she remembered. She had been a remembrancer, one of the thousands of artists, writers and scholars sent out to witness the Great Crusade as it brought the light of reason to a reunited humanity. That had been her purpose: to see, to remember. Like many clear purposes and shining futures, it had not worked out that way.

She heard the footsteps stop behind her, and knew the guard would be placing a bowl of water and a fresh jumpsuit on the floor.

‘Where are we?’ she asked, hearing the question come from her mouth before she could stop it.

Silence.

She waited. There would not be a punishment for her asking, no beatings, no withdrawal of food or humiliation – that was not how this imprisonment worked. The punishment was silence. She had no doubt that other, more visceral methods were used on other prisoners – she had heard the screams. But for her there had only been silence. Seven years of silence. They did not need to ask her questions, after all. They had taken the memory spools out of her skull, and those recordings would have told them everything they wanted and more.

‘We are still in the void, aren’t we,’ she said, still facing the wall. ‘The engine vibrations have stopped, you see. No way of missing it if you have spent any time on ships… I spent time on a warship once. You never lose the sense of it.’ She paused, waiting for a response, even if it was just the sound of retreating footsteps and the door shutting.

Silence again.

That was strange. She had tried talking to guards in the early years, and their response had been to leave her without reply. After a while, that had felt worse than if they had struck a whip across her back. They had never beaten her, though, or even touched her. Even when they opened her skull to remove the memory spools, they had sedated her, as though that made the violation that followed more acceptable.

She supposed that such small mercies had to do with Qruze or Loken. The former Luna Wolves had watched over her as much as they could. But that had still left her a prisoner of the greatest and darkest prison in the Imperium. Loken had said that he would free her, but she had refused. Even while it pained her, she understood why she had to remain locked up. How could she not? After all, had she not seen the true face of the enemy? Four years of life on the Vengeful Spirit amongst the Sons of Horus, in the shadow of their father, who now had set the galaxy alight with civil war. What other reward could there be for remembering those days? A galaxy shrunk to silence and plasteel walls, with only dreams and memories to speak to her.

She had begun to dream memories after a few months, dreams of her home on Terra, of the sunlight shattering across the edge of the Arcus orbital plate, her mother laughing and calling after her as she ran through the hydro-gardens. And she had dreamed of her time amongst the Luna Wolves, and the Sons of Horus, of people now long dead. She had asked for parchment and pen, but none had been given to her. She had gone back to the old games her mind-nurse had taught her, ways of tucking memories away when she woke from sleep, ways of remembering the past even as it fled into the distance. In the silence, she had found that memories and dreams were all she had, all she was.

‘Are we still somewhere in the Solar System?’ she asked, and twitched her neck to look behind her. Why was she still talking? But then why had the guard not left? ‘The ship doesn’t feel like it’s preparing for translation. Where are we?’

They had come for her in her cell on the Nameless Fortress three nights ago. They had loaded her into a box barely big enough to stand upright in. She had felt the box judder and sway as machines had lifted it and her. They had let her out into this cell, and she had recognised the vibration of a void-ship under power. It had been comforting at first, but her dreams had not been, and now the silence of this moment was feeling stranger with each elongating second.

‘Why was I taken away from the fortress?’ she asked. ‘Where am I going?’

‘Where we all wish we could go, Mistress Oliton,’ said Garviel Loken. She whirled, and the end of her cell was gone and a wolf was rising from a pool of dark water beneath the moon. Its eyes were black spheres, and its bared-teeth grin was wide as it spoke. ‘You are going home.’

In the dark of her cell, Mersadie Oliton woke to silence and lay still, waiting for the dream to fade or for herself to wake again.

Strike Frigate Lachrymae, Trans-Plutonian Gulf

The first ship of the onslaught died as it breached the veil of reality. Streams of plasma reached out from gun platforms. White fire smashed into the ship’s prow. Lightning and glowing ectoplasm streamed behind its hull. Macro shells detonated amongst the molten wounds already cut into its skin. Turrets and spires sheared from its bulk. Towers broke from its spine. It kept coming even as its bows were torn apart. The burning wreck struck the first of the mines scattered across the dark. Explosions burst around it. The front portion of the ship sheared from the back. Prow and gun decks hinged down. Atmosphere vented from the exposed interior. Debris scattered, burning for an eye-blink before the flames ate the air trapped in the wreckage.

‘Ship kill,’ called a sensor adept from across the bridge of the Lachrymae.

Sigismund watched the intruder’s death as it spread across the pict screens above the command dais. He was armoured, his sword chained to his wrist and resting point down on the deck at his feet. He did not blink or move as the dying ship tumbled across his sight. In the still depths of his mind he heard the words that had brought him to this place and time.

‘You must choose where to stand. By the words of your duty, or by your father’s side at the end.’

Around him the command crew was silent. Eyes fixed on instruments and screens. This was the beginning of the moment they had all known would end the years of waiting. Some, perhaps, had thought or hoped that it would never come. But here it was, marked with fire.

I chose, Keeler, he thought, and in his mind, he heard again the words that Dorn had spoken in judgement of that choice.

‘You will continue in rank and position as you have, and you will never speak to any other of this. The Legion and the Imperium will not know of my judgement. Your duty will be to never let your weakness taint those who have more strength and honour than you.’

‘As you will, father.’

‘I am not your father!’ roared Dorn, his anger suddenly filling the air, his face swallowed by dusk shadows. ‘You are not my son,’ he said quietly. ‘And no matter what your future holds, you never will be.’

‘I chose,’ he whispered to himself, ‘and here I stand at the end.’

The fire from the dead warship spread across the displays.

‘If they come at us like this, the slaughter will barely be worth the sweat,’ growled Fafnir Rann.

‘They will not give us that luxury,’ replied Boreas from further back on the platform. Sigismund did not look around at where the holo-projections of the Assault captain or his lieutenant hovered at his shoulders. Each of them stood on the command deck of one of the Lachrymae’s sister ships.

Rann wore void-hardened Mark III armour, with reinforcing studs bonded to his shins and left shoulder. The scars of battles fought here, at the edge of the system, ran beneath the fresh yellow lacquer. His tall boarding shield hung in his right hand, the twin axes mag-locked to its back echoed in the heraldry painted on the shield’s face. Sigismund imagined he could see the warped smile on Rann’s face as he turned to Boreas and shrugged.

The holo-image of the First Lieutenant of the Templars did not move. Unhelmed, his face was a single twisted scar, and if there was any emotion beyond cold fury behind his eyes, Sigismund could not see it. Boreas’ sword of office stood almost as tall as he did, its guard the cross of the Templars, its blade etched with the names of the dead.

‘All ships, stand by,’ said Sigismund softly, and heard the orders ripple out.

The vibration in the deck rose in pitch. The dull ache that had been building in his skull for the last hours was sharpening. He noticed one of the human deck crew shiver and wipe a hand across a bead of blood forming in her nose.

‘Hold to our oaths and the strength of our purpose,’ he called.

Whispers buzzed at the edge of his thoughts, razor tips scratching over metal. They had needed to sedate every astropath in the fleet two hours before, as a wave of psychic pressure had sent them babbling and screaming. It had become more intense with every passing moment, and it presaged one thing: it was the bow wave of a truly vast armada coming through the warp, bearing down on the Solar System like a storm front. Horus and the traitors were coming.

‘Etheric surge detected!’ shouted a sensor officer.

‘Here it comes,’ said Rann, and brought his fist to his chest. ‘Honour and death.’

‘For the primarch and Terra,’ said Boreas.

‘For our oaths,’ said Sigismund. The images of his two brothers blinked out.

He reached down and pulled his own helm from his belt and locked it in place over his head. ‘May my strength be equal to this moment,’ he said to himself as the helm display lit in his eyes. The data of the battle sphere overlaid his sight.

The Plutonian Gulf glittered with weapon platforms, torpedo shoals and mine drifts. Together they formed a great web, tens of thousands of kilometres deep, stretching from the very edge of night to the orbits of Pluto itself. Ships glinted amongst the defences: fast gun-sloops and monitor ships that were little more than engines and weaponry. They had been built in the orbital forges of Luna, Jupiter and Uranus and dragged to the edge of the sun’s light. Alongside them lay the fleet of the First Sphere: hundreds of warships, all in motion. And beyond the warships, the moons of Pluto waited. Studded with weapons and hollow with tunnels, each was a fortress that could have stood against a fleet.

The sheet of stars erupted with lightning. Rents opened in the vacuum. Nauseating colours and dazzling light poured out as ship after ship surged from nothing into being. Tens, and then hundreds. The sensor servitors in the Lachrymae twitched and gabbled as targets multiplied faster than they could vocalise updates.

Mines detonated, explosions leaping from one to another in chains that stretched across the dark. Gun platforms opened up. Macro shells, rockets and plasma struck metal and stone, bored in and exploded. Ships died even as they tasted reality, armour stripped by fire, guts spilled into the dark. In the first ten seconds, over a hundred vessels burned to wreckage. Most had been former warships of the Imperial Army, crewed by humans who had given their oath to Horus and been rewarded with the honour of being the first to draw their blades in this battle. They died for that honour, burning too in the ruin of their ships, hulls shredded around them.

But they kept coming.

Ship after ship, tearing reality like flags waving in front of a gun-line. The first Legiones Astartes warship surfaced from the warp. It was named the Erinyes, and it was a bombardment galleon of the IV Legion: a five-kilometre-long hull wrapped around a trio of nova cannon barrels. She loosed all three shots as the void kissed her skin. Each nova cannon shell was the size of a Battle Titan, its core filled with unstable plasma. They had no target, but they needed none. They ran straight into the heart of the defences and exploded with the force and light of a star’s birth. Gun platforms vanished. Mines lit off in spheres of red flame. Fire poured from the defences as more ships rammed past the debris of their dead kin.

The light of the blaze flooded through the Lachrymae’s screens and viewports. Sigismund’s helm display dimmed.

‘Engage,’ he said, and the Lachrymae leapt forwards. Twenty strike cruisers and fast destroyers followed in tight formation. Lance fire speared out from them, slicing into ships as they cut across the front of the enemy fleet. Plumes of ghost-light and ectoplasm stretched like arms through the dark as more ships punched through from the warp.

A backwash of etheric lightning struck the Imperial Fists cruiser Solar Son. It spun, its hull cracking and crumpling as the laws of reality went into flux. The Lachrymae and its sisters did not pause but plunged on. They had one purpose in this moment: to kill as many of the enemy as possible while they clawed from the warp onto the shore of reality. For the moment, the Imperial Fists’ prey was vulnerable, and the First Sphere fleet were predators.

The Lachrymae’s guns found the skin of the gun-barge Fire Oath before it could light its void shields. Macro shells punched through gun decks and exploded. Munitions cooked off in loading hoists. The Fire Oath’s hull bulged, then burst. Building-sized pieces of hull scythed out, caught the flank of a battle cruiser as it emerged from the warp and tore its command castle from its back. The warp breach it had emerged from pulsed and swallowed the wreckage.

‘Hold,’ called Sigismund, his voice passing through the ships of his command via crackling vox-link. ‘For our oaths, we hold true.’

The Lachrymae sliced on while its mortal crew screamed as ghosts and nightmares flooded their sight. Reality in the battle sphere was now little more than tattered scraps blowing in the night. The Lachrymae rolled, her guns finding enemy after enemy. But for each one that died, another three came from the warp.

Deadfall torpedoes set in the void triggered and speared forwards. Carcasses of ships split and burned. Pluto’s fortress-moons found their range to the first of the invaders and spoke. Newly lit void shields flashed as they collapsed. Volleys answered. The reserve fleets holding close to the moons powered forwards and began to kill and die. The light of battle swelled, blurring with the glow of thousands of warp transitions, until which side was firing and which was burning was lost in a rippling blaze tens of thousands of kilometres across. Hours later, the light of that fire would glimmer in the night above the battlements of the Imperial Palace as the sirens called and alarums rang to tell that Horus had, at last, brought his war to the birth system of humanity.

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2020.
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