Further reading from The Horus Heresy

Book 1 – HORUS RISING

Dan Abnett

Book 2 – FALSE GODS

Graham McNeill

Book 3 – GALAXY IN FLAMES

Ben Counter

Book 4 – THE FLIGHT OF THE EISENSTEIN

James Swallow

Book 1 – THE SOLAR WAR

John French

Book 2 - THE LOST AND THE DAMNED

Guy Haley

Book 3 - THE FIRST WALL

Gav Thorpe

Book 4 - SATURNINE

Dan Abnett

Book 5 - MORTIS

John French

Book 6 - WARHAWK

Chris Wraight

ANGRON: SLAVE OF NUCERIA

Ian St. Martin

KONRAD CURZE: THE NIGHT HAUNTER

Guy Haley

LION EL’JONSON: LORD OF THE FIRST

David Guymer

ALPHARIUS: HEAD OF THE HYDRA

Mike Brooks

The Horus Heresy Character Series

VALDOR: BIRTH OF THE IMPERIUM

Chris Wraight

LUTHER: FIRST OF THE FALLEN

Gav Thorpe

SIGISMUND: THE ETERNAL CRUSADER

John French

Order the full range of Horus Heresy novels, audio dramas
and audiobooks from blacklibrary.com

Contents

Cover

Backlist

The Horus Heresy

Lupercal’s War

Introduction

THE EMPEROR

The Last Church

DARK ANGELS

Savage Weapons

THE EMPEROR’S CHILDREN

Imperfect

IRON WARRIORS

The Iron Within

Black Oculus

WHITE SCARS

Brotherhood of the Moon

SPACE WOLVES

Bjorn: Lone Wolf

Bloodhowl

IMPERIAL FISTS

Champion of Oaths

NIGHT LORDS

Child of Night

BLOOD ANGELS

Lost Sons

IRON HANDS

Immortal Duty

WORLD EATERS

After Desh’ea

ULTRAMARINES

The Laurel of Defiance

DEATH GUARD

Daemonology

THOUSAND SONS

Rebirth

SONS OF HORUS

Little Horus

WORD BEARERS

Child of Chaos

SALAMANDERS

Artefacts

RAVEN GUARD

The Grey Raven

ALPHA LEGION

Liar’s Due

About the Authors

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

THE HORUS HERESY

It is a time of legend.

Mighty heroes battle for the right to rule the galaxy.

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

The dawn of a new age of supremacy for humanity beckons. Gleaming citadels of marble and gold celebrate the many victories of the Emperor. Triumphs are raised on a million worlds to record the epic deeds of his most powerful and deadly warriors.

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

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

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

Horus is a star ascendant, but how much further can a star rise before it falls?

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to Lupercal’s War, a tome of fantastic Horus Heresy short stories, handpicked to take you through the epic 54-book series. Each Space Marine Legion is represented within the anthology, showcasing some of their major themes and battles, in tales penned by some of the most talented Black Library authors. In addition, after each Legion’s stories is a small section outlining their Journey through the Heresy. This quick and easy guide offers an alternative way to read through the Horus Heresy series. It is intended for those who wish to follow their favourite Legion’s narrative, from their most deceitful of betrayals to their most glorious of victories, rather than tackle the series as a whole. Though starting at book 1 remains an excellent way to experience the Heresy, for those wanting a different approach, simply follow the chronological reading order here and enjoy!

THE EMPEROR

THE LAST CHURCH

Graham McNeill

Midnight services had once been crowded at the Church of the Lightning Stone. Fear of the darkness had drawn people in search of sanctuary in a way the daylight could not. For as long as anyone could remember, the dark had been a time of blood, a time when raiders attacked, monstrous engines descended on wings of fire and the violence of the warlike thunder giants was fiercest.

Uriah Olathaire remembered seeing an army of those giants as it marched to battle, when he had been little more than a child. Though seven decades had passed since then, Uriah could picture them as though it were yesterday: towering brutes who carried swords of caged lightning and were clad in plumed helmets and burnished plate the colour of a winter sunset.

But most of all, he remembered the terrible magnificence of their awesome, unstoppable power.

Nations and rulers had been swept away in the dreadful wars these giants made, entire armies drowned in blood as they clashed in battles the likes of which had not been seen since the earliest ages of the world.

Now the fighting was over, the grand architect of this last world war emerging from the host of toppled despots, ethnarchs and tyrants to stand triumphant on a world made barren by conflict.

An end to war should have been a wondrous thing, but the thought gave Uriah no comfort as he shuffled along the nave of his empty church. He carried a flickering taper, the small flame wavering in the cold wind sighing through the cracks in the stonework and the ancient timbers of the great doors to the narthex.

Yes, the midnight service had once been popular, but few now dared come to his church, such was the ridicule and scorn heaped upon them. Changed days from the beginning of the war, when fearful people had sought comfort in his promises of a benign divinity watching over them.

He held his gnarled claw of a hand around the fragile flame as he made his way towards the altar, fearful that this last illumination would be snuffed out if his concentration slipped even a little bit. Lightning flashed outside, imparting a momentary electric glow to the stained-glass windows of the church. Uriah wondered if any of his last remaining parishioners would brave the storm to pray and sing with him.

The cold slipped invisibly into his bones like an unwelcome guest and he felt something singular about this night, as though something of great import were happening, but he couldn’t grasp it. He shook off the sensation as he reached the altar and ascended the five steps.

At the centre of the altar sat a broken timepiece of tarnished bronze with a cracked glass face, and a thick, leather-bound book surrounded by six unlit candles. Uriah carefully applied the taper to each candle, gradually bringing forth a welcome light to the church.

Aside from the magnificence of the ceiling, the interior of his church was relatively plain and in no way exceptional: a long nave flanked by simple timber pews and which was crossed by a transept that led to a curtained-off chancel. Upper cloisters could be reached via stairs in the north and south transepts, and a wide narthex provided a gallery prior to a visitor entering the church itself.

As the light grew, Uriah smiled with grim humour as the light shone upon the ebony face of the bronze timepiece. Though the glass face was cracked, the delicate hands were unscathed, fashioned from gold with inlaid mother-of-pearl. The clock’s internal mechanisms were visible through a glass window near its base, toothed cogs that never turned and copper pendulums that never swung.

Uriah had travelled the globe extensively as a feckless youth, and had stolen the clock from an eccentric craftsman who lived in a silver palace in the mountains of Europa. The palace had been filled with thousands of bizarre timepieces, but it was gone now, destroyed in one of the many battles that swept across the continent as grand armies fought without care for the wondrous things lost in their violent spasms of war.

Uriah suspected the clock was perhaps the last of its kind, much like his church.

As he had fled the palace of time, the craftsman had cursed Uriah from a high window, screaming that the clock was counting down to doomsday and would chime when the last days of mankind’s existence were at hand. Uriah had laughed off the man’s ravings and presented the clock to his bemused father as a gift. But after the blood and fire of Gaduaré, Uriah had retrieved the clock from the ruins of his family home and brought it to the church.

The clock had made no sound since that day, yet Uriah still dreaded hearing its chimes.

He blew out the taper and placed it in a shallow bowl at the front of the altar and sighed, resting his hand on the soft leather of the book’s cover. As always, the presence of the book was a comfort, and Uriah wondered what was keeping the few faithful that remained in the town below from his doors this night. True, his church stood at the summit of a high, flat-topped mountain that was difficult to climb, but that never usually stopped his dwindling congregation from coming.

In ages past, the mountain had been the tallest peak upon a storm-lashed island shrouded in mists and linked to the mainland by a sleek bridge of silver, but ancient, apocalyptic wars had boiled away many of the oceans, and the island was now simply a rocky promontory jutting from a land that was said to have once ruled the world.

In truth, the church’s very isolation was likely all that had allowed it to weather the storm of so-called reason sweeping the globe at the behest of its new master.

Uriah ran a hand over his hairless scalp, feeling the dry, mottled texture of his skin and the long scar that ran from behind his ear to the nape of his neck. He turned towards the doors of his church as he heard noises from outside: the tramp of feet and the sound of voices.

‘About time,’ he said, looking back at the clock and its immobile hands.

It was two minutes to midnight.

The grand doors of the narthex opened wide and a cold wind eagerly slipped inside, whipping over the neat rows of pews and disturbing the dusty silk and velvet banners that hung from the upper cloisters. The ever-present rain fell in soaking sheets beyond the doors and a crack of lightning blistered the night sky alongside a peal of thunder.

Uriah squinted and pulled his silk chasuble around him to keep the cold from his arthritic bones. A hooded figure was silhouetted in the doorway to the narthex, tall and swathed in a long cloak of scarlet. Uriah could see the orange glow of burning brands carried by a host of shadowy figures who stood behind him in the rain. He squinted at these figures, but his aged eyes could make out no detail beyond firelight glittering on metal.

Displaced mercenaries looking for plunder?

Or something else entirely…

The hooded figure stepped into the church and turned to shut the doors behind him. His movements were unhurried and respectful, the doors closed softly and with care.

‘Welcome to the Church of the Lightning Stone,’ said Uriah, as the stranger turned towards him. ‘I was about to begin the midnight service. Would you and your friends wish to join me?’

‘No,’ said the man, pulling back his hood to reveal a stern, but not unkind face – a remarkably unremarkable face that seemed at odds with his martial bearing. ‘They would not.’

The man’s skin was leathery and tanned from a life spent outdoors, his hair dark and pulled back into a short scalp-lock.

‘That is a shame,’ said Uriah. ‘My midnight service is considered quite popular in these parts. Are you sure they won’t come in?’

‘I’m sure,’ repeated the man. ‘They are quite content without.’

‘Without what?’ quipped Uriah, and the man smiled.

‘It is rare to find a man like you with a sense of humour. I have found that most of your kind are dour and leaden-hearted men.’

‘My kind?’

‘Priests,’ said the man, almost spitting the word as though its very syllables were a poison to him.

‘Then I fear you have met only the wrong kind,’ said Uriah.

‘Is there a right kind?’

‘Of course,’ said Uriah. ‘Though given the times we live in, it would be hard for any servant of the divine to be of good cheer.’

‘Very true,’ said the man as he moved slowly down the aisle, running his hands over the timber of each pew as he passed. Uriah walked stiffly from the altar to approach the man, feeling his pulse quicken as he sensed a tangible threat lurking just beneath the newcomer’s placid exterior, like a rabid dog on a slowly fraying rope.

This was a man of violence, and though Uriah felt no threat from him, he knew there was something dangerous about him. Uriah fixed a smile and extended his hand, saying, ‘I am Uriah Olathaire, last priest of the Church of the Lightning Stone. Might I have your name?’

The man smiled and shook his hand. A moment of sublime recognition threatened to surface within Uriah’s mind, but it was gone before he could grasp it.

‘My name is not important,’ said the man. ‘But if you wish to call me something, you may call me Revelation.’

‘An unusual name for one who professes a dislike of priests.’

‘Perhaps, but one that suits my purposes for the time being.’

‘And what purpose might that be?’ asked Uriah.

‘I wish to talk to you,’ said Revelation. ‘I wish to learn what keeps you here when the world is abandoning beliefs in gods and divinity in the face of the advances of science and reason.’

The man looked up, past the banners to the incredible ceiling of the church, and Uriah felt the unease that crawled over his flesh recede as the man’s features softened at the sight of the images painted there.

‘The great fresco of Isandula.’ said Uriah. ‘A divine work, wouldn’t you agree?’

‘It is quite magnificent,’ agreed the man, ‘but divine? I don’t think so.’

‘Then you have not looked closely enough,’ answered Uriah, looking up and feeling his heartbeat quicken as it always did when he saw the wondrous fresco completed over a thousand years ago, by the legendary Isandula Verona. ‘Open your heart to its beauty and you will feel the spirit of god move within you.’

The ceiling was entirely covered in a series of wide panels, each one depicting a different scene: nude figures disporting in a magical garden; an explosion of stars; a battle between a golden knight and a silver dragon; and myriad other scenes of a similarly fantastical nature.

Despite the passage of centuries and the fitful lighting, the vibrancy of hues, the fictive architecture, the muscular anatomy of the figures, the dynamic motion, the luminous colouration and the haunting expressions of the subjects were as awe-inspiring as they had been on the day Isandula had set down her brush and allowed herself to die.

‘And the whole world came running when the fresco was revealed,’ quoted Revelation, his gaze lingering on the panel depicting the knight and the dragon. ‘And the sight of it was enough to reduce all who saw it to stunned silence.’

‘You have read your Vastari,’ said Uriah.

‘I have,’ agreed Revelation, only reluctantly tearing his gaze from the ceiling. ‘His works are often given to hyperbole, but in this case he was, if anything, understating the impact.’

‘You are a student of art?’ asked Uriah.

‘I have studied a great many things in my life,’ said Revelation. ‘Art is but one of them.’

Uriah pointed to the central image of the fresco, that of a wondrous being of light surrounded by a halo of golden machinery.

‘Then you cannot argue that this is not a work truly inspired by a higher power.’

‘Of course I can,’ said Revelation. ‘This is a sublime work whether any higher power exists or not. It does not prove the existence of anything. No gods ever created art.’

‘In an earlier age, some might have considered such a sentiment blasphemy.’

‘Blasphemy,’ said Revelation with a wry smile, ‘is a victimless crime.’

Despite himself, Uriah laughed. ‘Touché, but surely only an artist moved by the divine could create such beauty?’

‘I disagree,’ said Revelation. ‘Tell me, Uriah, have you seen the great cliff sculptures of the Mariana Canyon?’

‘No,’ said Uriah, ‘though I have heard they are incredibly beautiful.’

‘They are indeed. Thousand-metre-high representations of their kings, carved in stone that no weapon can mark or drill can cut. They are at least as incredible as this fresco, somehow worked into a cliff that had not seen sunlight in ten thousand years, yet a godless people carved them in a forgotten age. True art needs no divine explanation, it is just art.’

‘You have your opinion,’ said Uriah politely. ‘I have mine.’

‘Isandula was a genius and a magnificent artist, that much is beyond question,’ continued Revelation, ‘but she also had to make a living, and even magnificent artists must take commissions where they are to be found. I have no doubt this undertaking paid very well, for the churches of her time were obscenely wealthy organisations, but had she been asked to paint a ceiling for a palace of secular governance, might she not have painted something just as wondrous?’

‘It’s possible, but we shall never know.’

‘No, we won’t,’ agreed Revelation, moving past Uriah towards the altar. ‘And I am tempted to believe there is an element of jealousy whenever people invoke the divine to explain away such wonderful creations.’

‘Jealousy?’

‘Absolutely,’ said Revelation. ‘They cannot believe another human being can produce such sublime works of art when they cannot. Therefore some deity reached into the artist’s brain and inspired it.’

‘That is a very cynical view of humanity,’ said Uriah.

‘Elements of it, yes,’ said Revelation.

Uriah shrugged and said, ‘This has been an interesting discussion, but you must excuse me, friend Revelation. I have to prepare for my congregation.’

‘No one is coming,’ said Revelation. ‘It is just you and I.’

Uriah sighed. ‘Why are you really here?’

‘This is the last church on Terra,’ said Revelation. ‘History will soon be done with places like this and I want a memory of it before it’s gone.’

‘I knew this was going to be an unusual evening,’ said Uriah.

Uriah and Revelation repaired to the vestry and sat opposite one another at a grand mahogany desk carved with intertwining serpents. The chair creaked under the weight of his guest as Uriah reached into the desk and removed a tall bottle of dusty blue glass and a pair of pewter tumblers.

He poured dark red wine for the pair of them and sat back in his chair.

‘Your good health,’ said Uriah, raising his tumbler.

‘And yours,’ replied Revelation.

Uriah’s guest took a sip of the wine and nodded his head appreciatively.

‘This is very good wine. It’s old.’

‘You have a fine appreciation of wine, Revelation,’ said Uriah. ‘My father gave it to me on my fifteenth birthday and said I should drink it on my wedding night.’

‘And you never married?’

‘Never found anyone willing to put up with me. I was a devilish rogue back then.’

‘A devilish rogue who became a priest,’ said Revelation. ‘That sounds like a tale.’

‘It is,’ said Uriah. ‘But some wounds run deep and it does no good to reopen them.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Revelation, taking another drink of wine.

Uriah regarded his visitor over the top of his tumbler. Now that Revelation had sat down, he had removed his scarlet cloak and draped it over the back of his chair. His guest wore utilitarian clothes, identical to those worn by virtually every inhabitant of Terra, save that his were immaculately clean. He wore a silver ring on his right index finger, which bore a seal of some kind, but Uriah couldn’t make out what device was worked upon it.

‘Tell me, Revelation, what did you mean when you said this place would soon be gone?’

‘Exactly what I said,’ replied Revelation. ‘Even perched all the way up here, you must surely have heard of the Emperor and His crusade to stamp out all forms of religion and belief in the supernatural. Soon His forces will come here and tear this place down.’

‘I know,’ said Uriah sadly. ‘But it makes no difference to me. I believe what I believe and no amount of hectoring from some warmongering despot will alter my beliefs.’

‘That is an obstinate point of view,’ said Revelation.

‘It is faith,’ pointed out Uriah.

‘Faith,’ snorted Revelation. ‘A willing belief in the unbelievable without proof…’

‘What makes faith so powerful is that it requires no proof. Belief is enough.’

Revelation laughed. ‘That is why the Emperor wants rid of it, then. You call faith powerful, I call it dangerous. Think of what people in the grip of faith have done in the past, all the atrocities committed down the centuries by people of faith. Politics has slain its thousands, yes, but religion has slain its millions.’

Uriah finished his wine and said, ‘Have you come here just to provoke me? I am no longer a violent man, but I don’t take kindly to being insulted in my own home. If this is all you are here for, then I wish you to go now.’

Revelation placed his tumbler back down on the desk and held up his hands.

‘You are right, of course,’ he said. ‘I am being discourteous, and I apologise. I came here to learn of this place, not to antagonise its guardian.’

Uriah nodded graciously. ‘I accept your apology, Revelation. You wish to see the church?’

‘I do.’

‘Then come with me,’ said Uriah, rising painfully from behind his desk, ‘and I will show you the Lightning Stone.’

Uriah led Revelation from the vestry back into the nave of the church, once again looking up at the beautiful fresco on the ceiling. Shards of firelight danced beyond the stained glass of the windows, and Uriah knew that a sizeable group of men waited beyond the walls of his church.

Who was this Revelation and why was he so interested in his church?

Was he one of the Emperor’s warlords, here to earn his master’s favour by demolishing the last church on Terra? Perhaps he was a mercenary chief who sought to earn the new master of Terra’s gratitude by destroying icons of a faith that had endured since the earliest days of mankind’s struggle towards civilisation?

Either way, Uriah needed to know more of this Revelation, to keep him talking and learn what he could of his motives.

‘This way,’ said Uriah, shuffling towards the chancel, an area behind the altar that was curtained off from the rest of the church by a rich emerald drape the size of a theatre curtain. He pulled a silken cord and the drape slid aside to reveal a high, vaulted chamber of pale stone in which stood a tall megalith that rose from the centre of a circular pit in the ground.

The stone was napped like flint and had a distinct, glassy and metallic texture to its surface. The mighty stone was around six metres tall and tapered towards the top, such that it resembled an enormous spear-tip. The stone reared up from the ground, the tiled floor of the pit laid around it. Patches of wiry, rust-coloured bracken clustered at its base.

‘The Lightning Stone,’ said Uriah proudly, descending a set of stairs built into the ceramic-tiled walls of the pit to place a hand on the stone. He smiled, feeling the moist warmth of it.

Revelation followed Uriah into the pit, his gaze travelling the length of the stone as he circled it appreciatively. He too reached out to touch it and said, ‘So this is a holy stone?’

‘It is, yes,’ said Uriah.

‘Why?’

‘What do you mean? Why what?’

‘I mean why is it holy? Was it deposited on the ground by your god? Was a holy man martyred here, or did a young girl receive some revelation while praying at its base?’

‘Nothing like that,’ said Uriah, trying to keep the irritation from his voice. ‘Thousands of years ago, a local holy man who was deaf and blind was walking in the hills hereabouts when a sudden storm came in over the western ocean. He hurried back down to the village below, but it was a long way and the storm broke before he could reach safety. The holy man took shelter from the storm in the lee of the stone, and at the height of the storm it was struck by a bolt of lightning from the heavens. He was lifted up and saw the stone wreathed in a blue fire in which he saw the face of the Creator and heard His voice.’

‘Didn’t you say this holy man was deaf and blind?’ said Revelation.

‘He was, but the power of god cured him of his afflictions,’ said Uriah. ‘He immediately ran back to the village and told the people there of the miracle.’

‘And then what happened?’

‘The holy man returned to the Lightning Stone and instructed the townspeople to build a church around it. The story of his healing soon spread and within a few years, thousands were crossing the silver bridge to visit the shrine, for a spring had begun to flow from the base of the stone and its waters were said to be imbued with healing properties.’

‘Healing properties?’ asked Revelation. ‘It could cure diseases? Mend broken limbs?’

‘So the church records say,’ said Uriah. ‘This bathing chamber was built around the stone and people came from across the lands to bathe in the sacred waters while they still flowed.’

‘I knew of a similar place far to the east of this land,’ said Revelation. ‘A young girl claimed to have seen a holy vision of a woman, a holy woman that bore a conspicuous similarity to a religious order of which her aunt was a member. Bathing houses were set up there too, but the men that ran the site were afraid the output of their holy spring would be insufficient, so they only changed the water in the pools twice a day. Hundreds of dying and diseased pilgrims passed through the same water every day, so you can imagine what a horrible slop it was at the end – threads of blood, sloughed-off skin, scabs, bits of cloth and bandage, an abominable soup of ills. The miracle was that anyone emerged alive from this human slime at all, let alone was cured of anything.’

Revelation reached out to touch the stone once more, and Uriah saw him close his eyes as he laid his palm flat on its glistening surface.

‘Haematite from a banded ironstone formation,’ said Revelation. ‘Exposed by a landslip most likely. That would explain the lightning strike. And I have heard of lightning curing people of blindness and deafness, but mostly in those whose suffering was a result of hysterical complaints brought on by earlier traumas rather than any physiological effect.’

‘Are you trying to debunk the miracle this church was founded upon?’ snapped Uriah. ‘There is a malicious streak to you, if you would seek to destroy another’s faith.’

Revelation came around the Lightning Stone and shook his head. ‘I am not being malicious, I am explaining to you how such a thing could have happened without the intervention of any godly power.’ He tapped a finger to the side of his head and said, ‘You think that the way you perceive the world is the way it actually is, but you cannot perceive the external world directly, none of us can. Instead, we know only our ideas or interpretations of objects in the world. The human brain is a marvellously evolved organ, my friend, and it is especially good at constructing images of faces and voices from limited information.’

‘What has that to do with anything?’ asked Uriah.

‘Imagine your holy man sheltering from the storm in the cover of this great stone when the lightning bolt hit, the fire and the noise, the pounding surge of elemental energy pouring through him. Isn’t it possible that an already-religious man might, in such desperate circumstances, perceive sights and sounds of a divine nature? After all, humans do it all the time. When you wake with dread in the dead of night, is that darkness in the corner not an intruder instead of just a simple shadow, the creak of a floorboard the tread of a murderer instead of the house settling in the cold night?’

‘So you’re saying that he imagined it all?’

‘Something like that,’ agreed Revelation. ‘I don’t mean to suggest he did so consciously or deliberately, but given the origins and evolution of religions in the human species, it seems a far more likely and convincing explanation. Don’t you agree?’

‘No,’ said Uriah. ‘I don’t.’

‘You don’t?’ said Revelation. ‘You strike me as a not unintelligent man, Uriah Olathaire. Why can you not concede at least the possibility of such an explanation?’

‘Because I too have seen a vision of my god and heard His voice. Nothing can compare with knowing personally and completely that the divine exists.’

‘Ah, personal experience,’ said Revelation. ‘An experience utterly convincing to you and which cannot be proved or disproved. Tell me, where did you receive this vision?’

‘On a battlefield in the lands of the Franc,’ said Uriah. ‘Many years ago.’

‘The Franc were long ago brought to Unity,’ said Revelation. The last battle was fought nearly half a century ago. You must have been a young man back then.’

‘I was,’ agreed Uriah. ‘Young and foolish.’

‘Hardly a prime candidate for divine attention,’ said Revelation. ‘But then, I’ve found that many of the men who appear in the pages of your holy books are far from ideal role models, so perhaps it’s not surprising at all.’

Uriah fought down his anger at Revelation’s mocking tone, turning away from the Lightning Stone and climbing from the pit. He made his way back towards the candlelit altar, taking a few seconds to calm his breathing and slow his racing heartbeat. He lifted the leather-bound book from beside the candle and took a seat on one of the pews facing the altar.

He heard Revelation’s footsteps and said, ‘You come in an adversarial mood, Revelation. You say you wish to learn of me and this church? Well come, let us joust with words, thrust and parry one another’s certainties with argument and counter-argument. Say what you will and we will spar all night if you desire. But come sunrise, you will leave and never return.’

Revelation descended the steps of the altar, pausing to admire the doomsday clock. He saw the book in Uriah’s hands and folded his arms.

‘That is my intention. I have other matters to attend to, but I have this night to talk with you,’ said Revelation, pointing to the book Uriah clutched to his thin chest. ‘And if I am adversarial, it is because it infuriates me to see the blinkered wilfulness of those who live their lives enslaved to such fantastical notions as are contained in that book and others like it – that damnable piece of thunder in your hands.’

‘So now you mock my holy book too?’

‘Why not?’ said Revelation. ‘That book is nine centuries worth of agglomerated texts assembled, rewritten, translated and twisted to fit the needs of hundreds of mostly anonymous and unknown authors. What basis is that to take guidance for your life?’

‘It is the holy word of my god,’ said Uriah. ‘It speaks to everyone who reads it.’

Revelation laughed and tapped his forehead. ‘If a man claimed his dead grandfather was speaking to him he’d be locked up in an asylum, but if he were to claim the voice of god was speaking to him, his fellow clerics might well make him into a saint. Clearly there is safety in numbers when it comes to hearing voices, eh?’

‘This is my faith you are talking about,’ said Uriah. ‘Show some damned respect!’

‘Why should I?’ said Revelation. ‘Why does your faith require special treatment? Is it not robust enough to stand some questioning? No one else on this world enjoys such protection from scrutiny, so why should you and your faith be singled out for special treatment?’

‘I have seen god,’ hissed Uriah. ‘I saw His face and heard His words in my soul…’

‘If you have had such an experience, you may believe it was real, but do not expect me or anyone else to give it credence, Uriah,’ said Revelation. ‘Just because you believe a thing to be true does not make it so.’

‘I saw what I saw and I heard what I heard that day,’ said Uriah, his fingers clenching tightly on the book as long-buried memories swam to the surface. ‘I know it was real.’

‘And where in Franc did this miraculous vision take place?’

Uriah hesitated, reluctant to give voice to the name that would unlock the box in which he had shut the memories of his past life. He took a breath. ‘On the killing field of Gaduaré.’

‘You were at Gaduaré,’ said Revelation, and Uriah couldn’t tell if Revelation’s words were a question or simply an acknowledgement. For the briefest second, it sounded as though Revelation already knew.

‘Aye,’ said Uriah. ‘I was.’

‘Will you tell me what happened?’

‘I’ll tell you of it,’ whispered Uriah. ‘But first I’ll need another drink.’

Once again, Uriah and Revelation returned to the vestry. Uriah reached into a different drawer and removed a bottle, identical to the first, except that this bottle was half-empty. Revelation sat, and Uriah noticed the chair protested once more at his weight, though the man was not especially bulky.

Uriah shook his head as Revelation held out the pewter tumbler and said, ‘No, this is the good stuff. You don’t drink it from a tumbler, you drink it from a glass.’

He opened a walnut cabinet behind his desk and lifted out two cut crystal copitas and deposited them on the desktop amid the clutter of papers and scrolls. He uncorked the bottle and a wonderful peaty aroma filled the room, redolent with the memories of high pastures, fresh, tumbling brooks and dark, shadow-filled woods.

‘The water of life,’ said Uriah, pouring two generous measures and sitting opposite Revelation. The liquid was heavy and amber, the crystal of the glass refracting slivers of gold and yellow through it.

‘Finally,’ said Revelation, lifting his glass to take a drink. ‘A spirit I can believe in.’

Uriah said, ‘No, not yet, let the vapours build. It intensifies the flavour. Swirl it a little. See the little slicks on the side of the glass? They’re called tears, and since they’re long and descending slowly we know the drink is strong and full-bodied.’

‘Can I drink it now?’

‘Patience,’ said Uriah. ‘Carefully nose the drink, yes? Feel how the aromas leap out at you and stimulate your senses. Allow yourself to react to the moment, let the scents awaken the memories of their origin.’

Uriah closed his eyes as he swirled the golden liquid around the glass below his nose, letting the fragrances of a lost time wash over him. He could smell the mellow richness of the alcohol, his memory alight with sensations he had never experienced: running through a wild wood of thorns and heather at sunset, the smoke from a fire in a wooden hall with a woven roof of reeds and which was hung with shields. And above all, he sensed a legacy of pride and tradition encapsulated in each element of the drink.

He smiled as he was taken back to his youth. ‘Now drink,’ he said. ‘A generous sip. Swirl the drink over your tongue, cheeks and palate for a few seconds before you let it slide down as you swallow.’

Uriah sipped his drink and revelled in the silky smoothness of its warmth. The drink was powerful and tasted of toasted oak and sweet honey.

‘Ah, that’s a flavour I’ve not had in a long time,’ said Revelation, and Uriah opened his eyes to see a contented smile on his visitor’s face. ‘I didn’t think any remained.’

Revelation’s features had relaxed and Uriah saw his cheeks glow with a rosy health. For no reason he could identify, Uriah felt less hostile to Revelation now, as if they had shared a moment of sensation that only two connoisseurs could appreciate.

‘It’s an old bottle,’ explained Uriah. ‘One I was able to rescue from the ruin of my parents’ home.’

‘You make a habit of keeping old alcohol around,’ said Revelation.

‘A throwback to my wild youth,’ said Uriah. ‘I was fond of drink a little too much, if you take my meaning.’

‘I do. I have seen many great individuals brought low by such an addiction.’

Uriah took another sip, a smaller one this time, and savoured the heady flavours before continuing. ‘You said you wanted to know of Gaduaré?’

‘If you are ready and willing to tell me of it, yes.’

Uriah sighed. ‘Willing, yes. Ready… Well, I suppose we will find out, eh?’

‘Gaduaré was a bloody day,’ said Revelation. ‘It was hard on all who were there.’

Uriah shook his head. ‘My eyes are not what they once were, but I can still tell that you are too young to know of Gaduaré. You would not even have been born when that battle was fought.’

‘Trust me,’ said Revelation. ‘I know of Gaduaré.’

The tone of Revelation’s words sent a shiver down Uriah’s spine and, as their eyes met, he saw such a weight of knowledge and history that he felt suddenly humbled and ashamed for arguing with Revelation.

The man put down his glass and the moment passed.

‘I should tell you a little of myself first,’ said Uriah. ‘Who I was back then and how I came to find god on the battlefield of Gaduaré. If you’ve a mind to hear it, that is…’

‘Of course. Tell what you feel you need to tell.’

Uriah sipped his drink and said, ‘I was born in the town below this church, nearly eighty years ago, the youngest son of the local lord. My clan had come through the final years of Old Night with much of their wealth intact and they owned all the land around these parts, from this mountain down to the mainland bridge. I wish I could say I was treated badly as a child, you know, to give some reason for why I turned out the way I did, but I can’t. I was indulged, and became something of a spoiled brat, given to drinking, carousing and bouts of petulance.’

Uriah sighed. ‘Looking back, I realise what a shit I was, but of course it’s the lot of old men to look at themselves as youngsters and realise too late all the mistakes they made and regrets they carry. Anyway, I decided in my adolescent fires of rebellion that I was going to travel the world and see whatever free corners of it remained in the wake of the Emperor’s conquests. So much of the world had been brought under His sway, but I was determined to find one last patch of land that wasn’t yet under the heel of His thunderbolt-and-lightning armies.’

‘You make it sound like the Emperor was a tyrant,’ said Revelation. ‘He ended the wars that were destroying the planet and defeated dozens of tyrants and despots. Without His armies, mankind would have descended into anarchy and destroyed itself within a generation.’

‘Aye, and maybe we’d have been better off that way,’ said Uriah, taking another sip of his drink. ‘Maybe the universe decided we’d had our chance and our time was up.’

‘Nonsense. The universe cares not a whit for our actions or us. Our fate is wrought by our own hands.’

‘A philosophical point we’ll no doubt return to, but I was telling you of my youth…’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Revelation. ‘Continue.’

‘Thank you. Well, after I announced my intention to travel the world, my father was good enough to grant me a generous stipend and a retinue of soldiers to protect me on my journeys. I left that very day and crossed the silver bridge four days later, travelling across a land recovering from war and which was growing fat on labours decreed by the Emperor. Hammers beat out plates of armour, blackened factories churned out weapons, and entire towns of seamstresses created new uniforms for His armies.

‘I crossed to Europa and caroused my way across the continent, seeing the eagle-stamped banner everywhere I went. In every town and city, I saw people giving thanks to the Emperor and His mighty thunder giants, though it all seemed hollow, like they were going through the motions because they were too afraid not to. I’d seen an army of the Emperor’s giants once when I was a child, but this was the first time I had seen them in the wake of conquest.’

Uriah’s breath caught in his throat as he remembered the warrior’s face, leaning down to regard him as though he had been less than an insect.

‘I was drunk and whoring my way down the Tali Peninsula when I came upon a garrison of the Emperor’s super-soldiers at a ruined clifftop fortress and my romantic, rebellious soul couldn’t help but try and bait them. Having seen them in battle, I shudder now to think of the hideous danger I was in. I shouted at them, calling them freaks and servants of a bloodthirsty, tyrannical monster whose only thought was the enslavement of mankind to His own towering ego. I paraphrased the works of Seytwn and Galliemus, though how I remembered the old masters when I was so drunk, I’ll never know. I thought I was being so clever, and then one of the giants broke ranks and approached me. Like I said, I was monumentally drunk and filled with that sense of invincibility that only drunks and fools know. The warrior was a hulking figure, more massive than any human being should ever be. His brutish frame was encased in heavy, powered armour that enclosed his chest and arms, and which I thought was ridiculously exaggerated.’

‘In previous wars, most warriors preferred to grapple with one another in close combat rather than use long-range weapons,’ said Revelation. ‘The power of a warrior’s chest and arms were of paramount importance in such feats of arms.’

‘Ah, I see,’ said Uriah. ‘Well, anyway, he came over and lifted me out of my chair, spilling my drink and upsetting me greatly. I kicked at his armour and beat my fists bloody against his chest, but he just laughed at me. I screamed at him to let me go and he did just that, telling me to shut my mouth before tossing me off the cliff and into the sea. By the time I’d climbed back to the village, they were gone and I was left with a hatred as strong as any I’d known. Stupid really, I was asking for it and it was only a matter of time until someone put me in my place.’

‘So where did you go after Tali?’ asked Revelation.

‘Here and there,’ said Uriah. ‘I’ve forgotten a lot of those years, I was drunk a lot of the time. I know I took a sand-skimmer across the Mediterranean dust bowl and traversed the wastelands of the Nordafrik Conclaves that Shang Khal reduced to ashen desert. All I found were settlements that paid homage to the Emperor, so I carried onwards far into the east to see the ruins of Ursh and the fallen bastions of Narthan Dume. But even there, in places so far away as to be the most desolate and remote corners of the world, I still found those who gave thanks to the Emperor and His gene-engineered warriors. I couldn’t understand it. Didn’t these people see that they’d just exchanged one tyrant for another?’

‘Humanity was heading for species doom,’ said Revelation, sitting forwards in his chair. ‘I keep telling you that without Unity and the Emperor, there would be no human race. I can’t believe you don’t see that.’

‘Oh, I see it all right, but back then I was young and full of the fires of youth that see any form of control as oppression. Though they don’t appreciate it, it’s the function of youth to push at the boundaries of the previous generation, to poke and prod and establish their own rules. I was no different from any other youth. Well, perhaps a little.’

‘So you’d travelled the world and hadn’t found any corner of it that hadn’t sworn allegiance to the Emperor… Where did you go next?’

Uriah refilled their glasses before continuing. ‘I returned home for a spell, bearing gifts I’d mostly stolen along the way, then set off again, but this time I went as a soldier of fortune instead of a tourist. I’d heard there were rumours of unrest in the land of the Franc, and fancied I could earn myself renown. The Franc were a fractious people before Unity and did not take kindly to invaders, even ones posing as benign. When I reached the continent, I heard of Havuleq D’agross and the Battle of Avelroi and rode straight for the town.’

‘Avelroi,’ said Revelation, shaking his head. ‘A town poisoned by the bitterness of a madman whose meagre talents fell far short of his ambition.’

‘I know that now, but the way I heard it at the time, Havuleq found himself wrongly accused of the brutal murder of the woman the Emperor had appointed as his governor. He was set to be shot by a firing squad when his brothers and friends attacked the Army units tasked with his execution. The soldiers were torn to pieces, but some of the townsfolk got themselves killed in the fighting, including the local arbiter’s son, and the mood of the people turned ugly. For all his other faults, and there were many, Havuleq was a speaker of rare skill and he fanned the flames of the townsfolk’s ire at the Emperor’s rule. Within the hour, a hastily formed militia had stormed the Army barracks and slain all the soldiers within.’

‘You know, of course, that Havuleq did assault and murder that woman?’

Uriah nodded sadly. ‘I learned that later, yes, when it was too late to do anything about it.’

‘And then what happened?’

‘By the time I reached Avelroi, full of piss and vinegar for the coming fight, Havuleq had rallied a number of the local townships to his cause and had amassed quite an army.’

Uriah smiled as the details of his early time in Avelroi returned, clearer than they had been for decades. ‘It was a magnificent sight, Revelation, the icons of the Emperor had been torn down and the city was like something from a dream. Colourful bunting hung from every window and marching bands played in the streets every day as Havuleq marched his soldiers up and down. Of course, we should have been training, but we were buoyed up with courage and our own sense of righteous purpose. More and more of the surrounding towns were rising up against their Army garrisons, and within the space of a few months around forty thousand men were ready to fight.

‘It was everything I’d dreamed of,’ said Uriah. ‘It was a glorious rebellion, courageous and heroic in the grand tradition of the freedom fighters of old. We were to be the spark that would light the fuse of history that would see this planetary autocrat tumbled from his self-appointed rulership of the world. Then we heard that the thunderbolt-and-lightning army was marching from the east and we set off in grand procession to meet it in battle. It was a joyous day as Havuleq led us from Avelroi, I’ll never forget it: the laughter, the kisses from the girls and the spirit of shared brotherhood that filled us as we marched out to battle.

‘It took us a week to reach Gaduaré, a line of high hills directly in the path of our enemies. I had read my share of the ancient stories of battle and knew this was a good place to make our stand. We occupied the high ground and both our flanks were anchored on strong positions. On the left were the ruins of the Gaduaré Bastion, on the right a desolate marsh through which nothing could pass.’

‘It was madness to oppose the Emperor’s armies,’ said Revelation. ‘You must have known you could not defeat them. These were warriors bred for battle, whose every waking moment was spent in combat training.’

Uriah nodded. ‘I think we knew that as soon as our enemy came into sight,’ he said, his features darkening at the memory, ‘but we were so caught up in the mood of optimism. By now our army was fifty thousand strong, and we faced less than a tenth of that number. It was hard not to feel like we could win the day, especially with Havuleq riding up and down and firing our blood. His brother tried to calm him, but it was already too late and we charged from the hillside like mad, glorious fools, screaming war cries and waving swords, pistols and rifles above our heads. I was in the sixth rank and we’d covered nearly a kilometre by the time we got anywhere near the ranks of the giants. They hadn’t moved since we’d set off, but as we got close, they shouldered their guns and opened fire.’

Uriah paused and took a long gulp of his drink. His hand was shaking and he carefully and deliberately set his glass down on the desk as he continued.

‘I’ll never forget the noise,’ he said. ‘It was like a thunderstorm had suddenly sprung into existence, and our first five ranks were completely cut down, dead to a man without even the time to scream. The enemy’s bolts tore limbs from bodies or simply burst men apart like wet sacks. I turned to shout something, I forget what exactly, when I felt a searing pain in the back of my head and I fell over the remains of a man who’d had his entire left side blown off. It looked like he’d exploded from the inside out.

‘I rolled onto my knees and felt the back of my head. It was sticky and matted with blood and I realised I’d been hit. A ricochet or a fragment. Anything larger and I’d have lost my head. I could feel the blood running from me and looked up in time to see our enemies fire again. That’s when I started to hear screams. Our charge had ground to a halt, men and women milling around in confusion and fear as they suddenly understood the reality of what Havuleq had begun.

‘The Thunder Warriors put up their guns and marched towards us, unsheathing swords with serrated edges and motorised blades. The noise, oh god, I’ll never forget the noise they made. A roar like something out of a nightmare. We were already beaten, their first volley had broken us, and I saw Havuleq lying dead in the middle of the field. The lower half of his body had been blown clean off and I saw the same terror I was feeling on every face around me. People were begging for mercy, throwing down their weapons and trying to surrender, but the armoured warriors didn’t stop. They marched right up to us and hacked into us without mercy. We were cut apart and brutalised with such economy of force that I couldn’t believe so many people could die in so short a time. This wasn’t war, at least not as I’d read about it, where men of honour fought in glorious duels – this was mechanised butchery.

‘I’m not ashamed to say I ran. I ran, soiled and bleeding, for safety. I ran like all the daemons of legend were after me, and all the time I was hearing the awful sound of people dying, the wet sound of flesh splitting open and the stench of voided bowels and opened bellies. I can’t remember anything much of my flight, just random flashes of dead bodies and screams of pain. I ran until I couldn’t run any more, and then I crawled through the mud until I lost consciousness. When I woke, which I was surprised I did at all, I saw it was dark. Pyres had been lit and the victory chants of the Thunder Warriors drifted over the killing field.

‘Havuleq’s army had been destroyed. Not routed or put to flight. Destroyed. In less than an hour, fifty thousand men and women had been killed. I think I knew even then that I was the only survivor. I wept beneath the moonlight and as I lay there bleeding to death in agony, I thought of how pointless my life had been. The heartbreak and ruin I’d visited upon others in my reckless pursuit of hedonism and self-interest. I wept for my family and myself, and that was when I realised I wasn’t alone.’

‘Who was with you?’ asked Revelation.

‘The power of the divine,’ said Uriah. ‘I looked up and saw a golden face above me, a face of such radiance and perfection that my tears were no longer shed for pain, but for beauty. Light surrounded this figure and I averted my eyes for fear I’d be blinded. I’d been in pain, but now that pain was gone and I knew I was seeing the face of the divine. I couldn’t describe that face to you, not with all the poetic images in the world at my disposal, but it was the most exquisite thing I had ever seen.

‘I felt myself lifted up and I thought that this was the end for me. And then the face spoke to me, and I knew I was destined to live.’

‘What did this face say to you?’ asked Revelation.

Uriah smiled. ‘He said, “Why do you deny me? Accept me and you will know that I am the only truth and the only way.”’

‘Did you reply?’

‘I couldn’t,’ said Uriah. ‘To utter any words would have been base. In any case, my tongue was quite stilled by the awesome vision of god.’

‘What made you think it was god? Did you not hear what I said earlier about the brain’s ability to perceive what it wants to? You were a dying man on a battlefield, surrounded by your dead comrades and you were having an epiphany of the futility of the life you had led. Surely you can think of another explanation for this vision, Uriah, a more likely explanation that does not require the supernatural?’

‘I need no other explanation,’ said Uriah, firmly. ‘You may be wise in many things, Revelation, but you cannot know what goes on in my own mind. I heard the voice of god and saw His face. He bore me up and set me into a deep slumber, and when I awoke, my wounds were healed.’

Uriah turned his head so that Revelation could see the long scar on the back of his neck. ‘A piece of bone shrapnel had been embedded in my skull, barely a centimetre from severing my spinal cord. I was alone on the battlefield and I decided to return to the land of my birth, but when I returned I found my family home in ruins. The townsfolk told me that Scandian raiders from the north had heard of my family’s wealth and come south in search of plunder. They killed my brother then violated my mother and sister in front of my father to force him to tell them where he hid his treasures. They couldn’t know my father had a weak heart and he died before they could learn his secrets. I found my home in ruins and my family little more than bleached cadavers.’

‘I am sorry to hear of your loss,’ said Revelation. ‘If it is any consolation, the Scandians would not accept Unity and were wiped out three decades ago.’

‘I know, but I do not revel in death any more,’ said Uriah. ‘The men who killed my family will have been judged by god, and that is justice enough for me.’

‘That is noble of you,’ said Revelation, real admiration in his voice.

‘I took a few keepsakes from the ruins and made my way to the nearest settlement, thinking I’d get blind drunk and then try to figure out what to do with my life. I was halfway there when I saw the Church of the Lightning Stone and knew I had found my purpose in life. I had spent my life until that point living only for myself, but when I saw the spire of the church I knew that god had a purpose for me. I should have died at Gaduaré, but I was saved for a reason.’

‘And what reason was that?’

‘To serve god,’ said Uriah. ‘To bring His word to the people.’

‘And that’s what you’ve been doing here?’

Uriah nodded. ‘It’s what I’ve been trying to do, but the Emperor’s promulgators traverse the globe with His message of reason and the refutation of gods and the supernatural. I assume that is why you are here and why none of my congregation has come to the church tonight.’

‘You are correct,’ said Revelation. ‘In a manner of speaking. I have come to try and convince you of the error of your ways, to learn of you and to show you that there is no need for any divine powers to guide humanity. This is the last church on Terra and it falls to me to offer you this chance to embrace the new way willingly.’

‘Or?’

Revelation shook his head. ‘There is no “or”, Uriah. Come, let us go back out into the church as we talk, I want to instruct you of all that belief in gods has done for humanity down the ages, the bloodshed, the horror and the persecution. I will tell you of this and you will see how damaging such belief is.’

‘And then what? You’ll be on your way?’

‘We both know that’s not what’s going to happen, don’t we?’

‘Yes,’ said Uriah, draining the last of his drink. ‘We do.’

‘Let me tell you a story that happened many thousands of years ago,’ said Revelation.

They walked along the north transept of the church, coming to a set of spiral stairs that led to the upper cloisters. Revelation followed after Uriah, talking as he climbed. ‘It is a story of how a herd of gene-bred livestock caused the death of over nine hundred people.’

‘Did they stampede?’ asked Uriah.

‘No, it was a handful of half-starved creatures that escaped from their paddocks outside Xozer, a once-great city of the Nordafrik Conclaves.’

They reached the top of the stairs and began walking along the cloister, its confined walls dark and cold. Dust lay thick on the stone-flagged floor and a handful of thick candles that Uriah could not remember lighting guttered in iron sconces.

‘Xozer? I’ve been there,’ said Uriah. ‘At least I saw what my guide told me were its ruins.’

‘Quite possibly. Anyway, these hungry animals walked through a building holy to one of the many cults that called Xozer home. This cult, which was known as the Xozerites, believed that gene-bred meat was an affront to their god and they blamed a rival sect known as the Upashtar for the defilement. The Xozerites went on a rampage, stabbing and clubbing any Upashtar they could find. Of course, the Upashtar retaliated and rioting spread throughout the city and left close to a thousand people dead.’

‘Is there a point to that story?’ said Uriah, when Revelation did not continue.

‘Absolutely, it tells a universal tale and typifies religious behaviour that has been recurring since the beginning of human history.’

‘A slightly far-fetched example, Revelation. One freakish story cannot serve as a proof that belief in the divine is a bad thing. Such belief is the bedrock of moral order. It gives people the character they need to get through life. Without guidance from above, the world would descend into anarchy.’

‘Sadly, millions once held that view, Uriah, but that old truism just isn’t true. The record of human experience shows that where religion is strong, it causes cruelty. Intense beliefs produce intense hostility. Only when faith loses its force can a society hope to become humane.’

‘I don’t believe that,’ said Uriah, stopping by one of the arches in the cloister and looking down onto the nave. Dust swirled across the floor, blown by the storm winds chasing around the lonely church. ‘My holy book gives instruction on how to live a good life. It has lessons humanity needs.’

‘Are you sure?’ asked Revelation. ‘I have read your holy book and much of it is bloody and vengeful. Would you live your life literally by its commandments, or do you view the people who populate its pages as exemplars of proper behaviour? Either way, I suspect the morals espoused would be horrifying to most people.’

Uriah shook his head. ‘You’re missing the point, Revelation. Much of the text is not meant to be taken literally – it is symbolic or allegorical.’

Revelation snapped his fingers. ‘That’s exactly my point. You pick and choose which bits of your book to take literally and which to read as symbolic, and that choosing is a matter of personal decision, not divinity. Trust me, in ages past, a frightening number of people took their holy books absolutely literally, causing untold misery and death because they truly believed the words they read. The history of religion is a horror story, Uriah, and if you doubt it, just look at what humanity has done in the name of their gods over the millennia.

‘Thousands of years ago, a bloody theocracy that venerated a feathered-serpent god rose in the Mayan jungles. To appease this vile god, its priests drowned maidens in sacred wells and cut out the hearts of children. They believed this serpent god had an earthly counterpart and the temple builders drove the first pile through a maiden’s body to pacify this non-existent creature.’

Uriah turned to Revelation in horror and said, ‘You can’t seriously compare my religion to such heathen barbarism?’

‘Can’t I?’ countered Revelation. ‘In the name of your religion, a holy man launched a war with the battle cry of “Deus Vult”, which means “God wills it” in one of the ancient tongues of Old Earth. His warriors were charged with destroying enemies in a far-off kingdom, but first they fell upon those in their own lands who opposed the war. Thousands were dragged from their homes and hacked to death or burned alive. Then, satisfied their homeland was secure, the zealous legions plundered their way thousands of kilometres to the holy city they were to liberate. Upon reaching it, they killed every inhabitant to “purify” the symbolic city of taint. I remember one of their leaders saying that he rode in blood up to the knees and even to his horse’s bridle, by the just and marvellous judgement of god.’

‘That is ancient history,’ said Uriah. ‘You cannot vouchsafe the truth of events so lost in the mists of time.’

‘If it were one event, I might agree with you,’ replied Revelation, ‘but just a hundred or so years later, another holy man declared war on a sect of his own church. His warriors laid siege to the sect’s stronghold in ancient Franc, and when the city fell his generals asked their leader how they might tell the faithful from the traitor among the captives. This man, who followed your god, ordered the warriors to “Kill them all. God will know His own.” Nearly twenty thousand men, women and children were slaughtered.

‘Worst of all, the hunt for any that had escaped the siege led to the establishment of an organisation known as the Inquisition, a dreadful, monstrous plague of hysteria that gave its agents free rein to stretch, burn, pierce and break their victims on fiendish pain machines to force them to confess to disbelief and identify fellow transgressors. Later, with most of their enemies hunted down and killed, the Inquisition shifted its focus to wychcraft, and priests tortured untold thousands of women into confessing that they engaged in unnatural acts with daemons. They were then burned or hanged for their confessions, and this hysteria raged for three centuries in a dozen nations, a madness that saw whole towns exterminated and over a hundred thousand dead.’

‘You pick the most extreme examples from the past, Revelation,’ said Uriah, struggling to maintain his composure in the face of such tales of murder and bloodshed. ‘Times have moved on and humanity no longer behaves in such ways to one another.’

‘If you believe that then you have been shut away in this draughty church for far too long, Uriah,’ said Revelation. ‘You must have heard of Cardinal Tang, a mass-murdering ethnarch who practised a crude form of eugenics. His bloody pogroms and death camps saw millions dead in the Yndonesic Bloc. He died less than thirty years ago after seeking to return the world to a pre-technological age, emulating the Inquisition’s burning of scientists, mathematicians and philosophers who contradicted the church’s view on cosmology.’

Uriah could stand no more and walked towards the stairs at the far end of the cloister that led down into the narthex. ‘You fixate on the blood and death, Revelation. You forget all the good that can be achieved through faith.’

‘If you think religion is a force for good, Uriah, then you’re not seeing the superstitious savagery that pervades the history of our world,’ said Revelation. ‘It’s true that just before the descent of Old Night, religion gradually lost its power over life, but like the worst kind of poison, it lingered and fostered division amongst the people of the world that endured. Without belief in gods, divisions blur with passing ages – new generations adapt to new times, mingle, intermarry and forget ancient wounds. It is only belief in gods and divine entities that keep them alien to one another, and anything that divides people breeds inhumanity. Religion is the canker in mankind’s heart that serves such an ugly purpose.’

‘Enough!’ snapped Uriah. ‘I have heard enough. Yes, people have done terrible things to one another in the name of their gods, but they have done terrible things to one another without the recourse to their beliefs. An acceptance of gods and an afterlife is a vital part of what makes us who we are. If you take that away from humanity, what do you suggest takes its place? In my many years as a priest I have ministered to many dying people, and the emotional benefits of religion’s power to console them and those left behind cannot be underestimated.’

‘There is a flaw in your logic, Uriah,’ said Revelation. ‘Religion’s power to console gives it absolutely no more credence or validity. It might very well be a comfort to a dying man to believe that he will go to some bountiful paradise of endless joy, but even if he dies with a wonderful smile on his face, it means nothing in the grand scheme of things as far as the truth of the matter is concerned.’

‘Maybe not, but when my time comes, I will die with my god’s name on my lips.’

‘Are you afraid to die, Uriah?’ asked Revelation.

‘No.’

‘Truly?’

‘Truly,’ said Uriah. ‘I have my share of sins, but I have spent my life in the service of my god and I believe that I have served Him faithfully and well.’

‘So why is it then, when you go to these people who are dying and clinging to their beliefs, that they don’t welcome the end of their life? Surely the gathered family and friends should be of good cheer and should celebrate their relative’s passing? After all, if eternal paradise awaits on the other side, why are they not filled with gleeful anticipation? Could it be that, in their heart of hearts, they don’t really believe it?’

Uriah turned away and made his way down the narthex stairs, his anger and frustration giving him force of pace that quite outweighed the stiffness in his limbs. A cold wind blew in from the outer doors and he could hear the mutter of voices and the scrape of metal on metal from outside. The narthex of the Church of the Lightning Stone was an austere place, its stone walls lined with niches in which sat statues of various saints that had passed this way in the thousands of years the church had stood. A swaying candelabra, empty of candles, hung from the roof, but it had been many years since Uriah had been able to climb the stepladder in the store room to replace them.

He pushed open the door to the church and walked stiffly down the nave towards the altar. Four of the six candles he had lit there had gone out and the fifth guttered and died in the wind that entered with him.

The lone candle burned beside the clock, and Uriah made his way towards it as he heard Revelation enter the church behind him. Uriah reached the altar and lowered himself to a kneeling position with some difficulty.

He bowed his head before the altar and clasped his hands together.

‘The Lord of Mankind is the Light and the Way, and all His actions are for the benefit of mankind, which is His people. So it is taught in the holy words of our order, and above all things, god will protect…’

‘There’s no one there to hear you,’ said Revelation from behind him.

‘I don’t care what you say any more. You have come here to do what you feel you need to do, and I’ll not buttress your ego and self-righteousness by playing along any longer. So just end this charade.’

‘As you wish,’ said Revelation. ‘No more games.’

A golden light built behind Uriah and he saw his shadow thrown out onto the graven surface of the altar. The pearlescent hands of the clock shimmered in the reflected light and the ebony face gleamed. Where once the church had been gloomy and filled with shadows, it was now a place of light.

Uriah pulled himself to his feet and turned to see a wondrous figure standing before him, towering and magnificent, clad in golden armour fashioned with love and the greatest skill, every plate embossed with thunderbolts and eagles.

Gone was Revelation, and in his place was a towering warrior of exquisite splendour, an exemplar of all that was regal and inspirational in humanity. The armour bulked his form out beyond measure and Uriah felt tears spilling from his eyes as he realised he had seen this breathtakingly, achingly perfect face once before.

On the killing fields of Gaduaré.

‘You…’ breathed Uriah, stumbling back and collapsing onto his haunches. Pain shot through his hip and pelvis, but he barely felt it.

‘Now do you understand the futility of what you do here?’ said the golden giant.

Long dark hair spilled around the warrior’s face, a face that Uriah could only see through the hazy lens of memory. He could see the unremarkable features of Revelation subsumed into the warrior’s countenance, itself so worthy of devotion that it took all Uriah’s self-control not to drop to his knees and offer what remained of his life to its glorification.

‘You…’ repeated Uriah, the pain in his bones no match for the pain in his heart. ‘You are the… the… Emperor…’

‘I am, and it is time to go, Uriah,’ said the Emperor.

Uriah looked around at his now gleaming and brightly lit church. ‘Go? Go where? There is nowhere else for me in this godless world of yours.’

‘Of course there is,’ replied the Emperor. ‘Embrace the new way and be part of something incredible. A world and a time where we stand on the brink of achieving everything we ever dreamed.’

Uriah nodded dumbly and felt a firm hand gently take his arm and lift him to his feet once more. Strength flowed from the Emperor’s grip and Uriah felt the aches and ailments that had plagued him for decades fade until they were little more than evil memories.

He looked up at Isandula Verona’s magnificent fresco, and the breath caught in his throat. Colours once dulled by the darkness now blazed with life and the ceiling seemed to burst with vitality as the Emperor’s light gave it fresh animation and vibrancy. The skin of the painted figures shone as though it were gold, and the livid blues and lusty reds radiated potency.

‘Verona’s work was never meant for darkness,’ said the Emperor. ‘Only in the light can it achieve its full potential. Humanity is the same, and only when the suffocating shadows of a religion that teaches us not to question are gone from this world will we see its true brilliance.’

Uriah only reluctantly tore his eyes from the impossibly beautiful fresco and cast his gaze around his church. The stained-glass windows shone with new life and the intricate, subtle architecture of the interior gleamed with the skill of its builders.

‘I will miss this place,’ said Uriah.

‘In time I will build an Imperium of such grandeur and magnificence that this will seem like a pauper’s hovel,’ said the Emperor. ‘Now, let us be on our way.’

Uriah allowed himself to be guided down the nave, his heart heavy with the knowledge that the course of his life had been altered by, at best, a misunderstanding, and at worst, a lie. As he followed the Emperor towards the narthex doors, he looked up at the ceiling once more, recalling the sermons he had delivered here, the people who had hung on his every word and the good that had flowed from this place and into the world.

He smiled suddenly as he realised that it didn’t matter whether his life and faith had been based on a falsehood. He had believed what he had seen and he had come to this place with a heart open and emptied by grief. That openness had allowed the spirit of his god to enter his soul and filled the emptiness within him with love.

What makes faith so powerful is that it requires no proof. Belief is enough.

He had devoted his life to his god, and even with the understanding of how his fate had been manipulated by random chance, he found no resentment in his heart. He had spread a doctrine of love and forgiveness from his pulpit and no amount of clever words would make him regret that.

The door to the narthex was still open and, as they passed through its cold embrace, the Emperor pushed open the main doors of the church. Howling wind and sheets of rain blew inwards and Uriah clasped his robes tightly to him, feeling the night’s cold stab into his body like a thousand shards of ice.

He looked over his shoulder towards the altar of his church, seeing the lone candle beside the doomsday clock snuffed out by the gale. Once again, his church was swathed in darkness and he sighed to see this last illumination extinguished. The wind blew the internal doors shut and Uriah followed the Emperor out into the darkness.

Rain soaked him instantly and a crash of lightning lit the heavens with an actinic blue glow. Hundreds of warriors stood in ordered ranks before the church, brutal giants in pugnacious armour he had last seen on the battlefield of Gaduaré.

They stood immobile beneath the downpour, the rain beating against the burnished plates of bronze in an unrelenting tattoo and causing their scarlet helmet plumes to hang limply at their shoulders. There had been some refinements, saw Uriah, the armour now all-enclosing and each warrior sealed from the elements by an interlocking series of artfully designed plates.

Huge backpacks vented excess heat in steaming plumes like breath, and each of the warriors carried a burning torch that hissed and fizzed in the downpour. Guns were slung over their shoulders and Uriah shivered as he remembered the murderous volley, like the thunder at the end of the world, that had felled so many of his comrades.

The Emperor put a long cloak about Uriah’s shoulders as a group of armoured warriors stepped towards the church with flame lances raised. Uriah wanted to protest, to speak out against what they were about to do, but the words died in his throat as he realised they would have no effect.

Tears streamed down his face along with the rain as torrents of flame erupted from the warriors’ weapons and licked over the roof and walls of the church. Other warriors fired grenades that smashed through the stained-glass windows and percussive booms thudded from inside as the hungry flames took hold of the roof.

Thick smoke billowed from the windows, the rain doing nothing to dampen the destructive ambition of the flames, and Uriah wept to think of the wondrous fresco and the thousands of years of history that was being destroyed.

He turned to look up at the Emperor, the warrior’s face lit by the fires of destruction.

‘How can you do this?’ demanded Uriah. ‘You say you stand for reason and the advancement of understanding, but here you are destroying a repository of knowledge!’

The Emperor looked down at him and said, ‘Some things are best forgotten.’

‘Then I hope you have foreseen the consequences of a world bereft of religion.’

‘I have,’ replied the Emperor. ‘It is my dream. An Imperium of Man that exists without recourse to gods and the supernatural. A united galaxy with Terra at its heart.’

‘A united galaxy?’ said Uriah, averting his gaze from his blazing church as he finally grasped the scale of the Emperor’s ambition.

‘Indeed. Soon enough, Unity will be achieved on Terra. It is time to reclaim humanity’s lost empire among the stars.’

‘With you at its head, I presume?’ said Uriah.

‘Of course. Nothing of such grand scale can be achieved without a singular vision at its heart, least of all the reconquest of the galaxy.’

‘You are a madman,’ said Uriah. ‘And you are arrogant if you believe you can subjugate the stars with warriors such as these. They are powerful to be sure, but even they are not capable of such a thing.’

‘You are right,’ agreed the Emperor. ‘I will not conquer the galaxy with these men, for they are but men. These are the precursors to the warriors I am forging in my gene-labs, warriors with the strength and power and vision to bestride the battlefields of the stars and bring them to compliance. These warriors shall be my generals and they will lead my Great Crusade to the furthest corners of the galaxy.’

‘Didn’t you just tell me of the bloody slaughters perpetrated by crusaders?’ said Uriah. ‘Doesn’t that make you no better than the holy men you were telling me about?’

‘The difference is I know I am right,’ said the Emperor.

‘Spoken like a true autocrat.’

The Emperor shook His head. ‘You misunderstand, Uriah. I have seen the narrow survival path that is all that stands between humanity and extinction, and this is the way it must begin.’

Uriah looked back at the church, the gleeful flames reaching high into the darkness.

‘It is a dangerous road you travel,’ said Uriah. ‘To deny humanity a thing will only make them crave it all the more. And if you succeed in this grand vision of yours? What then? Beware that your subjects do not begin to see you as a god.’

Uriah looked into the Emperor’s face as he spoke, now seeing past the glamours and the magnificence to the heart of an individual who had lived a thousand lives and walked the Earth for longer than could be imagined. He saw the ruthless ambition and the molten core of violence at the Emperor’s heart. In that instant, Uriah knew he wanted nothing to do with anything this man had to offer, no matter how noble or lofty His ambitions might be.

‘I hope in the name of all that is holy you are right,’ said Uriah, ‘but I dread the future you are forging for humanity.’

‘I wish only the best for my people,’ promised the Emperor.

‘I think you do, but I will not be a part of it,’ said Uriah, casting off the Emperor’s cloak and walking back towards his church with his head held high. The rain beat down on him, but he welcomed it as a baptismal.

He heard footsteps approaching him, but he heard the Emperor say, ‘No. Leave him.’

The outer doors of the church stood open and Uriah walked into the narthex, feeling the heat of the flames as they billowed around him. The statues were on fire and the doors to the nave were gone, blown off their hinges by the blasts of grenades.

Uriah marched into the blazing heat of the church, seeing a wall of flame devouring the pews and silken hangings with insatiable hunger. Smoke filled the air and the fresco above him was almost obscured by the roiling blackness.

He looked at the clock face on the altar and smiled as the flames closed in around him.

The warriors remained outside the church until it collapsed, the roof timbers crashing down into the building in a tremendous flurry of flying sparks and wreckage. They stayed until the first rays of sunlight crested the mountains and the rain finally extinguished the last of the flames.

The ruins of the last church on Terra smouldered in the chill morning air as the Emperor turned away and said, ‘Come, we have a galaxy to conquer.’

As the Emperor and His warriors marched down the hillside, the only sound to be heard was the soft chiming of an old and broken clock.

HORUS RISING

After thousands of years of expansion and conquest, the human Imperium is at its height. His dream for humanity accomplished, the Emperor hands over the reins of power to his Warmaster, Horus, and heads back to Terra.

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FALSE GODS

The Great Crusade that has taken humanity into the stars continues. The Emperor of Mankind has handed the reins of command to his favoured son, the Warmaster Horus. Yet all is not well in the armies of the Imperium...

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GALAXY IN FLAMES

Having recovered from his grievous injuries, Warmaster Horus leads the triumphant Imperial forces against the rebel world of Isstvan III, where Horus’s treachery is finally revealed...

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THE MASTER OF MANKIND

As war splits the galaxy, the Emperor toils in the vaults beneath his Palace. But his great work is in peril, with the forces of Chaos closing in…

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DARK ANGELS

I LEGION

SAVAGE WEAPONS

Aaron Dembski-Bowden

‘In raising these men to watch over mankind, we have bred a legion of inhumans whose sole purpose is to defend that which they no longer understand. Their duty, borne with pride; their curse, carried with grace – but let it never be forgotten what we have done to Caliban’s finest sons. Unending Imperial ambition has not bred warriors with the warm hearts of men, but angels with the cold hearts of weapons.

No soul so changed will recover what was lost. No weapon so savage can be wielded without cost.’

– The Verbatim, Lutherian Amendments,
Chapter I: These Savage Weapons

I

The beast never dies in his dreams.

He watches it slink through the trees, keeping its sinuous body low to the ground, its movements fluid enough to be sickening and boneless. Its ears rake back flat against its head, while its clawed paws are silent on the deep snow. The creature hunts, eager but passionless, its dead cat’s eyes glinting with emotionless hunger.

The boy takes the shot, and the shell goes wide.

With the cold air split by the crack of gunfire, the beast twists in the snow, ghost-light on the ground as it snarls at its attacker. Quivering black spines rise from the denser white fur at its back and neck, an instinctive defensive response. A tail lashes behind the beast in threatening rhythm, coiling and thrashing in time with the boy’s own heartbeat.

For a moment he sees what the elder knights all claimed to see – a sight he’d always believed to be the lies of ageing warriors girding their fading legends with false poetry.

Yet there it is in the beast’s black eyes, something beneath the raw desire to survive. Recognition stares back at him: a crude intelligence, malicious despite its feral simplicity. The moment shatters as the creature vents its anger. Something between a lion’s burbling snarl and a bear’s hoarse roar rings out in the cold air between them.

The boy fires again. Three more shots echo through the forest, disturbing the snow bundled on branches above. Shivering fingers seek to reload the primitive pistol, but the beast’s sinewy weight pounds into his chest, hurling him away, throwing him down onto the frost. In the same moment the boy hits the ground, he feels the chunky shells scatter from his grip, spilling out onto the snow. The beast’s bulk on his back saps his strength as well as his breath. What little air he drags into his abused lungs reeks of the creature’s foetid exhalation, and a hot, wet mist of stinking tumour-breath washes over the back of his head. Whatever the beast is, it’s rotting from within. Saliva runs in a slick string from the beast’s jaws, spattering onto his bare neck.

Corswain swings over his shoulder, hammering the body of his pistol against the beast’s skull. Bone gives with a muffled crack, eliciting a whine that’s almost feline. As the creature rears in response, the boy scrabbles across the snow, regaining his feet in a staggering run. Steel whispers as it slides from his sheath, a sword almost as long as the boy is tall, clutched in two shivering hands. As the beast stalks closer, he sees the malign hunger in its eyes cool to a feral wariness. It’s afraid now, or at least cautious. Flakes of snow drift onto the blade, freezing into diamonds wedded to the steel.

‘Come on,’ the boy breathes the whispered words. ‘Come on...’

The beast leaps, striking his chest with the force of a stallion’s kick, and he’s down again. This time his sword spins from his grip, stabbing into the snow like a grave marker. The ache in his chest is a dull, creaking crackle, as if his lungs are filled with dry leaves. He knows his ribs are shattered, but there’s almost no pain at all.

The boy strains under the creature’s weight, his young muscles bunched taut as he struggles to strangle through the thick fur. The spined quills pierce his fingers and the backs of his hands, each one tipped by beads of clear, stinging venom. His hands tremble as the toxins attack his blood.

When he coughs, steaming bile gurgles from his mouth in a bitter rush. The puke hisses onto the snow, eating holes in the frost with acidic eagerness. The boy barely notices his useless hands falling away from the beast’s neck, nor how they curl into arthritic claws.

Convulsions wrack his whole body no more than three heartbeats later. The venom has him now. A scream leaves his lips as nothing more than a silent mime.

Slowly, everything starts to whiten, to fade away. He feels himself dragged, body scraping over the snow, but other, truer sounds begin infiltrating his thoughts: the sound of a ticking fan blade in a labouring air filtrator; boot-steps on the deck above; the omnipresent rumble of live engines.

At last, he opens his eyes.

It plays out like this each time he sleeps. The beast never dies in his dreams.

II

His mind wandered during the morning vigil. As Corswain knelt with his brothers, his head bowed against the hilt of his sword, he gave all the appearance of another knight in dutiful reflection of the coming crusade. In truth, he dwelled in memories. His thoughts flew home to a world that hated him.

Caliban.

The name brought a smile to his lips, hidden by the hood that cast his features into shadow. Caliban, that lethal haven of burning summers and vicious winters; where the unending forests permitted no sunlight to fall beneath their boughs, and every ancient tree defended itself with poisonous sap for blood; where every beast hunted with killing talons, mythic agility, or acidic venom. Biting insects spread plagues that left entire settlements silent and lifeless within days. Chittering clouds of locusts descended over the land year after year, annihilating villages and towns in their wake.

Orders of knights shared the grim duty of burning devastated settlements with each yearly cycle around the sun. On Caliban, the number of names inscribed upon the rolls of the dead matched the lists of the newborn. Imperial ledgers coded the world In Articulo Mortis, ‘at the moment of demise’, with the slang tag of ‘death world’. Corswain had laughed when he first saw those words written in an archive.

The scribes’ notations damned the world as a worthless globe deserving no further colonisation. It was rendered exempt from paying certain Imperial tithes, even when other worlds began to suffer such demands from the fledgling usurers of Terra, and pledged itself only to sell its sons into willing slavery in the Emperor’s First Legion.

On and on the negative declarations went, citing brutal weather conditions that would affect sensitive orbital communication satellites; continental forests useless for lumber because of the unsafe biochemistry in the world’s flora; and screeds of lore decreeing Caliban’s fauna among the most predatory yet found on any colonised world – from the lowliest vermin that showed no fear of humankind to the great beasts that had apparently been hunted into extinction.

Corswain knew it was all of that and worse. But it was also home, a home he’d not seen in long decades. A home he no longer believed he would ever see again. His smile in the morning vigil was both secret and bittersweet.

Alajos called to him once the reverence ended. The other knights filed from the chamber of reflection, their white surplice robes not enough to cover the battle scarring that ravaged every suit of black armour.

We have been fighting this war for two years, and I recall each day, each night, every order to draw steel and every shell fired in anger.

Two years. Two years since Horus committed his first act of insanity. Two years since the VIII and I Legions both found themselves ordered into the void, feuding over possession of an entire subsector. Neither side gave ground without taking it back elsewhere. Neither side charged without leaving a vulnerable flank open to assault. Neither Legion lost a battle when their progenitors led them to war.

Two years of civil war. World against world, fleet against fleet, brother against brother.

‘Hail,’ Alajos greeted him.

Corswain nodded in reply. ‘Is something amiss?’

Alajos, like his brothers, wore his full armour beneath a clean surplice. The hood was up, leaving his features in shadow.

‘The Lion summons us,’ he said.

Corswain checked his weapons. ‘Very well.’

III

The lord of the First Legion sat as he so often sat these nights, leaning back in an ornate throne of ivory and obsidian. His elbows rested upon the throne’s sculpted arms, while his fingers were steepled before his face, just barely touching his lips. Unblinking eyes, the brutal green of Caliban’s forests, stared dead ahead, watching the winking dance of distant stars. Every so often there’d be the slightest betrayal of movement: the rise and fall of his armoured shoulders, or a moment taken to blink and shake his crowned head in silent dismissal.

The warlord’s armour was the same rich, unspoiled black as the void into which he stared. Sculpted across his breastplate and greaves, rearing lions formed from red gold – that rarest of metals dredged from the dusty crust of Mars – bared their teeth at a diligent and devoted bridge crew. He wore no helm while he sat in repose, yet the mane of ashen blond locks was bound back in a tight horsetail to keep his face free of distraction, and a simple silver circlet adorned his tanned brow. This last trinket sported no ostentation, being nothing more than an echo of tradition from the disbanded knightly orders of the Lion’s adopted home world. By such simple crowns were the knight-lords of Caliban once known.

Alajos and Corswain approached the throne as one. In perfect unity, they drew their blades and kneeled before their liege. The Lion watched their obeisance with impassive eyes. When he spoke, his voice was the grind of thunder at the horizon – it could never be mistaken for human.

‘Rise.’

They rose as commanded, sheathing their swords in twinned movements. Alajos remained hooded, ignoring the bustle of the command deck around them, his hidden eyes focused only on the enthroned warlord. Corswain stood more at ease, arms crossed over his breastplate, his armour enlivened by the thick, white fur pelt draping down his back. The skinned beast’s fanged head draped over his shoulder guard, forming the cloak’s binding.

‘You summoned us, my liege?’

‘I did.’ The Lion remained seated with his fingers steepled before his lips. ‘Two years, little brothers. Two years. I can scarce give it countenance.’

Corswain allowed himself a smile. ‘I was thinking the very same thing no more than half an hour ago, my liege. But what causes you to dwell upon it?’

Now the Lion rose, leaving his long blade and helm resting on the throne’s arched sides. ‘It is not because I share your impatient nature, Cor. I assure you of that.’

Alajos snorted. Corswain grinned.

‘Come with me,’ the Lion said, his tone neither kind nor cold, and the three warriors moved to the hololithic table at the heart of the command chamber. At the Lion’s order, a robed servitor triggered the projectors into life, bathing them all in the ethereal green half-light of flickering holo-images. The patchwork display hovering in the air before them showed the suns of the Aegis Subsector, each with their child worlds. Heroldar and Thramas flashed brighter than any other, both marked by a messy display of Mechanicum symboliser runes.

Corswain saw nothing new. A long crescent of pulsing red worlds marked the spread of systems locked in open rebellion; these were the worlds existing in defiance of the Imperium, flying the banners of Horus Lupercal and the Mechanicum of Old Mars. Entire systems in breach of the Emperor’s will, opposing just as many systems crying for Imperial aid and Terran reinforcement.

‘Parthac fell earlier this evening.’ The Lion gestured to one of the systems ringed by Martian glyphs. ‘The Fabricator-Governor of Gulgorahd reported his victory four hours ago.’ The primarch’s subtle mirth would be invisible to all but his closest kin. ‘He was less elated when I informed him that his push to take Parthac left Yaelis open to attack. The rebels took Yaelis less than an hour ago.’

‘He overcommitted.’ Corswain watched the flashing glyphs before looking to his liege lord. ‘Again.’

Alajos spoke before the Lion could reply. ‘Did he tender an apology for failing to heed your words when you promised this is exactly what would happen?’

‘Of course not.’ The Lion leaned on the table, his fists on the smooth surface. ‘And that is not why you are here, so spare me the righteous indignation, even if it is fairly placed.’

‘Contact with the Imperium?’ Alajos let hope filter into his voice.

‘No.’ The Lion brushed his gauntleted hand through the flickering hololithic image, seeming to drift deeper into his own thoughts. ‘No, our astropaths are still rendered mute by the warp’s turbulence. I believe the last recorded contact is currently listed as four months and sixteen days ago.’ The warlord’s cold green eyes never wavered from the holo-image. ‘Two years of void skirmishes, two years of planetary sieges, two years of global invasions and worldwide retreats, orbital assault and shipboard evacuation... and we have a chance to end it at last.’

Corswain narrowed his eyes. He’d never heard the Lion speak in possibilities before. Always, the primarch spoke with a pragmatist’s tongue guided by an analytical mind, his every wartime utterance drenched in logic, with all sides considered before any remark left his lips.

‘Curze,’ Corswain ventured. ‘Have we located Curze, my liege?’

The Lion shook his head. ‘My venomous brother’ – he gestured to the hololith again – ‘has located us.’

The hololith wavered, crackling audibly as it retuned to present another image. ‘One of our outrider vessels, the Seraphic Vigil, received this message from a deep-void beacon left in its patrol path.’

Corswain read the distorted words, silently mouthing them as he did so. They made his skin crawl. ‘I don’t understand,’ he confessed. ‘One of the Lutherian Amendments to the Verbatim. And an unpopular one, at that. Why leave this for us to find?’

The Lion’s murmur of agreement sounded closer to a feral growl. ‘To bait us with mockery, using words Curze likely believes are apt. The beacon was set to transmit coordinates in addition to this message. It appears my beloved brother wishes to meet at last.’

‘This can only be a trap,’ said Alajos.

‘Of course,’ the Lion agreed easily. ‘And yet we will sail into the beast’s jaws this once. We cannot spend eternity butchering one another’s warriors the way we have these last years. If this crusade is ever to end, my brother and I must face one another.’

‘Then continue the hunt,’ Alajos insisted. ‘We catch their fleets–’

‘As often as they catch ours.’ The Lion spoke through closed teeth, his armoured shoulders rising and falling with his heavy breath. ‘For twenty-six months I have chased him. For twenty-six months, he has fled from me, burning worlds before we arrive, crippling supply routes, annihilating Mechanicum outposts. Every ambush we plan, he slips from our fingers, wriggling away unseen. For every victory we claim, Curze gifts us with a loss in return. It is not a hunt, Alajos. If a primarch does not fall, this will be war without end. And neither he nor I will fall without death bestowed by a brother’s hand.’

‘But, my liege–’

‘Be silent, captain.’ The Lion’s voice remained measured and low, but cold passion, almost feverish in its intensity, burned in his eyes. ‘We are one of the last loyal Legions left at full strength in the Imperium, and we are alone in the void, seeking to hold the entire kingdom together while all other eyes turn to Terra. Do you think I have no desire to stand with Dorn on the battlements of my father’s palace? Do you believe I wish to linger here in the silence of space, piecing together the shards of this shattered empire? We cannot reach Terra. We tried. We failed. That war is denied to us by the warp’s treacherous tides. But the rest of the galaxy is falling dark, and we may be the only living Legion that bears the Emperor’s light out here among the stars.’

The Lion straightened again, his eyes still fierce with suppressed emotion. ‘That is our duty, Alajos of the Ninth Order. And our Legion has always done its duty. We must win this war. An entire subsector with its forge worlds bleeding their genius and materiel into surviving, rather than supplying other Imperial forces. The Knight worlds do the same, as do the harvest worlds, the host worlds, the ore worlds. The sooner we complete this crusade, the sooner every Imperial sector is bolstered by its efforts, and the sooner we sail to join forces with my loyal brothers.’ He sighed at this last declaration. ‘Wherever they may be.’

Corswain remained silent throughout all of this. When the Lion’s last words trailed off, leaving the promise hanging in the air, the knight cleared his throat to speak.

‘I understand why you will rise to Primarch Curze’s bait, my liege. But why did you summon us?’

The Lion exhaled slowly, indicating a world on the hololith at the edge of the sector. ‘The coordinates mark this system. I cannot risk the entire Legion fleet abstaining from the crusade on a fraternal whim.’ Here, he grinned – a smile nothing like his subtle, sincere smirk. This was a tiger baring its fangs. ‘I will take a single company and a handful of warships, with a small support fleet. Enough to repel and evade treachery if it strikes, but not enough to risk losing any ground in this pitiful, eternal deadlock if it is all nothing more than a false trail.’

Alajos saluted immediately. ‘The Ninth Order will be honoured to serve as your personal guard, my liege.’

‘And I am honoured to be served by them.’ The Lion nodded in acknowledgement. ‘Cor. You seem thoughtful, little brother.’

‘What is this world’s name?’ Corswain asked.

The Lion consulted the data-screen mounted on his side of the table. ‘Tsagualsa. Listed as barren and unsuitable for colonisation, with no evidence of settlement during Old Night.’

‘So we are summoned by a blood enemy to a dead rock at the galaxy’s edge.’ Corswain glanced at Alajos. ‘If the entire Night Lords fleet is there, you may cross blades with Sevatar a second time.’

The captain lowered his hood, revealing his devastated face. Most of his ruined visage was marred by lumpen scar tissue and discoloured synthetic flesh that hadn’t healed cleanly at the seams. His teeth were blunt steel pegs affixed into reconstructed gums.

‘Good.’ Alajos narrowed his eyes – practically the only unflawed feature on his face. ‘I owe him for this.’

IV

The strike cruiser Vehemence translated in-system alone. It burst into the silence of realspace on grinding, protesting engines, braking as it slowed from the warp rupture in its wake. Momentum desistors fired along the ship’s prow and central spine, lesser brake-engines howling to slow the warship’s forward flight.

In space, it came to a slow crawl in noiseless elegance. On board, the shaking hull coupled with the screaming engines made for a scene altogether less graceful. Hundreds of sweating crew members in the enginarium chambers worked to maintain the immense plasma furnaces, while uniformed officers on the command deck called and demanded status reports from every section of the ship. The Lion’s throne on board the Invincible Reason was a grander affair than anything on the bridge of the Vehemence, and rather than take the captain’s position, the Lion allowed Captain Kellendra Vray to ostensibly remain in command of her vessel. While she sat in her smaller throne, her greying hair bound in a severe ponytail, the Lion stood to the side with his arms crossed over his breastplate as he stared at the oculus screen.

Tsagualsa turned in the void before them: grey, bare, granted only the thinnest cloud cover over its visible hemisphere.

Corswain and Alajos stood away from their lord, watching the world themselves. ‘Permission to speak freely, my liege.’

The Lion nodded, not taking his eyes from the oculus. ‘Granted, Cor.’

‘The enemy has summoned us to a purgatorial shithole.’

The Lion’s lips curled. To the humans nearby, it was a cold sneer. To his warriors, it was the ghost of amusement. ‘I will be sure to include that in the rolls of honour for this campaign. Auspex?’

An officer by the auspex station conferred with the three robed servitors hardwired to the console. He called over to the Lion a moment later. ‘The planet reads as lifeless, my lord – a thin atmosphere, tolerable but devoid of any mass life trace. The soil appears to be faintly irradiated, a natural phenomenon. A fleet with Legiones Astartes code returns is stationed in high geocentric orbit on the planet’s sunless side.’

‘Such literal creatures,’ the Lion growled. ‘Fleet size? Disposition?’

‘Counting for long-range auspex unreliability and warp echoes, it looks like seven vessels. One cruiser and six support ships, all in abeyance of standard formation protocols.’

The Lion rested his hand on the pommel of his sheathed blade. ‘When our support translates in-system, hold a loose formation on approach. Master of vox-officers, when we are in range, hail the enemy cruiser.’

The Dark Angels fleet, modest as it was, arrived piecemeal over the course of the next three hours. When the final destroyer, Seventh Son, drifted into formation with the gathered ships, the Vehemence powered up its engines and guided the flotilla closer to the dead world.

‘We’re already being hailed,’ the master of vox-officers called out. ‘Audio only.’

The Lion inclined his head at the man. A moment later, a soft voice breathed over the bridge speakers, flawed by vox-crackle.

‘Well, well, well. Look what stumbled into our system.’

‘I know that voice.’ The Lion’s tone was ice itself. ‘Cease your barking, dog, and tell me where I will find the master that holds your leash.’

‘Is that any way to greet a beloved nephew?’ The soft voice broke away into a short chuckle. ‘My master makes ready to walk the surface of the world below, for he expects you to meet with him. To prove our good intentions, our fleet will move out of orbit, beyond the range necessary to fire on the surface. Meanwhile, scan the world yourself. In the northern reaches of the largest western continental plate, you will find the foundations of a fortress. My primarch will meet you there.’

‘This still reeks of an ambush,’ Alajos warned.

The Lion didn’t reply. Instead, he answered the vox-voice. ‘What is to stop me firing on those coordinates from orbit?’

‘By all means, do just that. Commit to whatever course of action it takes to ease your suspicions. When you have ceased panicking and firing into the shadows, please inform me. I will ask my lord to wait until then.’

‘Sevatar.’ Corswain had never heard the Lion pour so much threat into a single name.

‘Yes, uncle?’ the soft voice chuckled again.

‘Tell your master that I will meet him where he wishes. Inform him to limit his honour guard to two warriors, for I will be doing the same.’

The Lion drew a thumb across his throat, signalling the vox-channel’s termination. Those cold eyes turned upon his closest two sons, and he reached for his helm. ‘Alajos. Corswain. Come with me.’

V

He hated doing this.

‘Permission to speak freely, my liege.’

The Lion stood in full armour now, his features masked by the snarling helm with its angular crest of splayed angel wings. The helm’s slanted red eyes emanated disapproval even before the Lion’s rumbling baritone left the speaker-grille.

‘Not this time, Cor. Focus yourself.’ The sword at the Lion’s hip was as tall as a Legiones Astartes warrior in full war plate. The primarch’s left hand rested on its hilt, his posture somewhere between the piratical grace of a gunslinger and the cautious reverence of a knight preparing to pull steel.

Corswain kept his silence, bolter loosely clutched in his hands. The chamber around them was almost devoid of gothic ornamentation, its ceiling and walls instead given over to the cabled, thudding engineering of Mechanicum teleportation generators. Several of the rattling engine pods vented near-continuous gushes of steam for no reason Corswain could comprehend.

‘Begin,’ the Lion ordered. At the chamber’s edges, cowled tech-menials cranked levers and manned great bronze wheels, turning them on squealing mechanisms. As they worked, each one chanted a different numerical line of a binary cant, like some bizarre mathematical sea shanty.

The engines started to judder, whining as they cycled up to engage. On a raised platform above the flat chamber deck, a choir of nine robed astropaths sang with closed eyes. Their droning chants were at eerie odds with the blurted coding issued forth from the menials.

Corswain truly loathed travelling like this. Seat him down in the deployment bay of a Stormbird gunship screaming through low atmosphere and into the face of enemy fire rising up from the ground, and he wouldn’t think twice. Buckle him into a drop pod and spit him from the bowels of an orbiting ship to plough into the soil several kilometres below, and he’d do his duty without a whisper of complaint.

But telepor–

VI

–tation was something else.

Even before the flash of white-gold faded, he felt the world’s wind pushing against his armour with weak breaths, strong enough to do no more than tear at his surplice and the oath scroll bound to his shoulder guard. His bolter was up and ready in the seconds it took for his vision to clear of the chemical-scented mist from their teleportation. Artificial thunder from displaced air echoed in his ears, filtered to tolerable levels by his helm’s auto-senses.

The aura of coiling mist would’ve lingered longer but for the breeze. Corswain took a moment to feel the hard earth beneath his boots, to assure himself that he was whole and complete. With teeth gritted and skin crawling, he panned his bolter across the vista before him.

Dusty wind gritted against his visor as his gunsight followed the horizon. They’d materialised in the heart of a crater, spanning at least a kilometre across in all directions. Black stone foundations jutted from the ground – too new to be ruins, they were low walls and pillars that would form the basis of a huge building above. The Night Lords were building something here. A fortress... but the work crews had evidently been withdrawn to make way for this meeting.

Nothing moved. Nothing breathed.

‘Clear,’ he called, in the same moment Alajos called the same.

The Lion moved to one of the black rock pillars, stroking a gauntleted hand down its sculpted side. Corswain doubted it escaped the primarch’s notice that the stone was clearly quarried off-world and brought here for use.

‘Do you hear something?’ he asked.

Alajos turned to the primarch. ‘The wind, my liege.’

Corswain didn’t answer at first. Could he hear something beneath the wind clawing at his helm’s receptors? Something beyond his own slow breathing and the machine-beat of his pulse tracker at the left edge of his retinal display? With a blink-click, he disabled his active retinal screen.

The world’s breath howled on.

‘Just the wind, sire.’

‘Very well,’ the Lion replied. ‘Now we wait.’

VII

On the strike of the third minute, a second sonic boom of displaced air heralded the enemy’s arrival. Corswain looked into the nexus of spreading mist as the ship’s atmosphere teleported down with the enemy dissipated into the wind. His lenses didn’t filter out the light fast enough, and in the wake of the transition flare, Corswain had to blink to clear his aching eyes. Tears came unbidden, not from pain or torment, but as the biological response to soothe the irritation.

The Lion anticipated his movements, for he said, ‘Weapons down, little brothers,’ as soon as the knight felt his muscles bunch.

‘Yes, my liege,’ Alajos murmured, displeasure raw in his tone.

Corswain swallowed his awe at what stood before him. A cadaverous god, in midnight clad, each armoured finger ending in a charged blade the length of a scythe. Black hair at the mercy of the world’s winds streamed back from a corpse’s face. Chained skulls rattled against war plate etched with runic writing rejoicing in past massacres and celebrating atrocity against the empire of humanity. This husk of nobility, this emaciated wraith now no more than the shadow of a prince, bared teeth filed to fangs as he opened his arms to the Lion, offering a welcoming embrace.

‘My brother,’ hissed Konrad Curze, Lord of the VIII Legion. His was a viper’s smile, just as predatory, just as brazen in its hunger. ‘I have missed you.’

The Lion hesitated. He raised his hands to his collar, unlocking the helm’s seals hidden there, and pulled the helmet free. An expression of naked surprise marked his features, yet his face was still an angel’s countenance – not the beatific, handsome lies of ancient religious myth, but rather the truth of Terran artistry: a face that could’ve been shaped from tanned marble, emerald eyes with soulful depths, contrasted by a mouth that would forever struggle to show emotion.

To Corswain’s eyes, Curze was pathetic, ghoulish, in comparison. A wretched husk facing a knight-lord, claws against a prince’s sword.

‘Curze?’ the Lion asked, his resonant voice softened by disbelief. ‘What has happened to you?’

The Night Lord ignored the question, speaking with insincerity rich enough to make Corswain’s teeth ache. ‘Thank you for coming. How it warms my heart to see you.’

The Lion drew his blade in a slow, clean movement. He neither brought it en garde, nor threatened the other primarch. Instead, he clutched it in both black gauntlets, the crosspiece hilt before his face as he stared at Curze above the quillions.

‘I will ask you this once and once only – why did you betray our father?’

‘I would ask you something in return, brother,’ Curze answered with a grin, his filed teeth on display. The clawed primarch’s eyes were unhealthily bright, rich with a secret sickness. ‘Why did you not?’

The Lion lowered his blade to end the salute, knightly respects now paid. ‘Our father has charged me to take your head back to Terra.’

‘Our father said nothing, for He hides within His dungeons, collecting the secrets of the universe and sharing them with no one. Lorgar and Magnus have seen everything our father sought to hide, so do not carry a precious little lie as your shield, Lion. You are Dorn’s hound, running here to the Eastern Fringe because he ordered you.’ Curze licked his filed teeth. ‘Come, brother. Let us at least do one another the service of being honest. I know Dorn.’ Here, the Night Lord gave his cadaverous smile again. ‘He sent you to do that which he feared to try himself.’

‘I did not come to duel with words, Konrad. I came to end this crusade.’

The Night Lord shook his head, his pallid face grey in the weak moonlight. His lips were the only colour on his visage, and even they were a bloodless blue. ‘Speak with me, brother. Listen, reply in kind, and then decide if we must continue this war.’

‘You will not sway me with your traitor’s tongue.’

Curze nodded, utterly unsurprised. His vile facade cracked for a moment, revealing the warrior he’d once been – perhaps never pure, never free of torment, but capable of emotion beyond this condescending bitterness. The strain lines of pain faded from his brow, and the serpent’s sneer left his lips. His voice was still raw, still ruined, but now carried an edge of sorrow. ‘I know. So what harm is there in speaking together, this one last time?’

The Lion nodded. ‘Wait here,’ he ordered his sons. ‘I will return soon.’

VIII

The two Night Lords had no need to introduce themselves, for their identities were known throughout the million-strong ranks of the Legiones Astartes. Both wore helms with painted-skull faceplates; both bore armour trophies of oversized skulls and Dark Angel helms hanging from their war plate on bronze chains; and both stood at ease, watching the warriors from the First Legion through red eye-lenses. One of them leaned on the haft of a long halberd, a weapon he was renowned for. The other held a bolter at rest, a cloak of black weave draped over one shoulder and down his back.

‘You look familiar,’ the first warrior said. He nodded his head towards Alajos. ‘We met at Kruun, did we not?’

Alajos’ voice barely rose above a growl. ‘Aye. We did.’

‘Yes, I recall the moment now.’ The Night Lord chuckled whisper-soft, and mimed a two-handed chop with his halberd. The deactivated chainblade atop the spear’s haft was over a metre long, grinning with its stilled teeth. ‘I’m surprised you survived, Angel. It was careless of me to allow that. How is the face?’

Corswain moved to rest his hand on his brother’s bolter. He spoke over their helm-vox, so the Night Lords wouldn’t hear. ‘Be calm, captain. Don’t let him wound you with childish words.’

Alajos nodded. He spoke as Corswain moved away. ‘It has healed well. Your flawed carving did sting for several minutes afterwards, though.’

‘That’s good news. It is wise of you to wear the helm this time, cousin. The last time I saw your face, most of it was a wet ribbon of flayed flesh stuck to the ground by my feet. My brothers in the First Company enjoy the tale, for it was the first time I’ve ever started to skin an Angel while he was still alive.’

Alajos grunted in reply, his hands fairly twitching with the need to raise his bolter and open fire. ‘I will kill you, Sevatar. On my life, I swear it.’

‘Cousin, cousin, cousin... I outrank you, do I not? That’s First Captain Sevatar to you, little Angel.’

‘Peace,’ Corswain voxed. ‘Peace, brother. Vengeance will come, and be all the sweeter for this moment.’

This time, the cloaked warrior spoke. ‘You. Angel in the fur. Do you know me?’

Corswain turned to them both. He felt the wind pick up, ruffling the white fur cloak around his shoulders. ‘Yes, Shang. I know you.’

‘The skinned animal you wear as a trophy. I’ve never seen such a thing. What manner of creature is that?’

Corswain grinned. ‘It’s the beast that never dies in my dreams.’

‘Is that some crude Calibanite poetry? We had few poets on our home world, but their works would have made you weep. Our tongue lends itself to melodic prose very gracefully.’

‘Nath sihll shah, vor’vorran kalshiel,’ Corswain said, in fluent Nostraman. Shang and Sevatar shared another laugh.

‘Your accent is brutal,’ Sevatar admitted, ‘but that was nicely done. It will be a shame to kill you both when the time comes. You have my oath here, on Eighth Legion soil, that we will make trophies from your helms. You deserve nothing less.’

‘How comforting,’ Corswain chuckled with them. ‘I have a question of my own.’

Sevatar performed a mocking little bow. ‘We are at your service, cousins.’

‘Your gauntlets,’ Corswain said, and left it at that.

Sevatar held up his free hand, as he continued to lean on the halberd with the other. The gauntlet was at odds with his midnight armour – where the war plate was deep, dark blue and marked by streaks of lightning, his gauntlets were painted arterial red.

‘A mark of shame in our Legion,’ the Night Lord’s voice still betrayed more amusement than regret. ‘A warrior’s gauntlets are marked this way when he has failed the primarch gravely enough to warrant death. He will wear the stain of failure on his hands until his execution, at the hour of the primarch’s choosing.’

Corswain watched the enemy captain through the filter of retinal target locks. ‘A curious custom.’

‘Perhaps. But so is hiding your armour beneath cloth robes.’

Corswain felt himself grinning again. ‘A knightly tradition from our home world.’

Sevatar nodded. ‘This is a gang tradition from ours. The hands of traitors and fools were tattooed red by their families to show them as deathmarked. A sign that no gang or family would tolerate grave failure, but that the condemned still had labours to perform before they were allowed to die.’

‘So which are you, a traitor or a fool?’

The Night Lord’s voice revealed his own smile, even if his soulless helm did not. ‘Both.’

Alajos was losing his patience. ‘Why do you revel with these wretches, brother? And what did you say in their snake-tongue?’

‘I told them that I knew they mated with pigs.’

‘Madness. Do they have no honour? Why would they laugh at such an insult?’

‘Because they are not knights. They possess honour of a kind, it is simply different to ours.’

‘Perhaps you should spend less time in the archives learning the tongues and traditions of murderers.’ Alajos’ tone carried more than a hint of reprimand. It was almost an accusation.

‘And what of “knowing one’s enemy”? Balance your humours, I am on your side, remember.’ Corswain turned to the west as the primarchs stalked back, moving slowly, still speaking in low voices. ‘The Lion returns. Be ready.’

Alajos grunted again, his mood too sour to bother with words.

IX

The warriors fell silent as their lords returned – still distant, but close enough to be heard. The Lion acknowledged his warriors with a curt nod. They responded with salutes, forming the sign of the aquila over their tabards. Curze ignored his sons, still addressing his brother.

‘Horus himself charged me to speak those words to you,’ he said. If the Night Lord had seemed cadaverous before, now he was practically exhumed. The primarch’s eyes, with what little white actually showed around the black pupils, were inhumanly bloodshot. His gaunt features were dusted with a faint sheen of cold sweat, and a trickle of dark blood ran from his nose. He wiped it away on the back of his gauntlet. ‘Savage weapons, one and all, too dangerous to be wielded without cost. That is all history will see of us. Even you, Lion. Even you.’

The Lion shook his crowned head. ‘You underestimate our father’s empire.’

‘And you overestimate humanity. Look at us. See how we’ve duelled for the last two years out here in the void. A crusade between two Legions and countless worlds that is still only just beginning. You have chased me for two years, across a hundred battlefields, and why do we meet now? Because I allow it.’

The Lion conceded to that with a slight nod. ‘You hide, like vermin fleeing the coming of dawn.’

Curze shrugged, the barest rise of one shoulder guard. ‘You will never reach Terra in time to defend it, brother. The warp will not let you. This crusade will not let you. I will not let you. Do you think the archives of future generations will look upon you kindly for your absence?’

Curze paused in his diatribe, wiping away a fresh trickle of blood.

‘Or will the human descendants of this Imperium look to your legend and whisper of doubt? Will they ask why you were not present to defend the Throneworld, and speak likely lies that perhaps the Lion was not as loyal and true as the mighty, perfect Rogal Dorn? Perhaps the Lion and his Dark Angels waited in the deepest reaches of space, watching, listening, and deciding to join the fight only when an obvious victor emerged.’ The Night Lord’s eyes glinted again, with both amusement and sorrow. ‘That is your fate, Lion. That is your future.’

‘Forgive me, brother.’

Curze tilted his head. ‘For what?’

Corswain was watching both primarchs yet still never saw what happened, such was the speed of the Lion’s movements. One moment the two brothers were speaking – the Lion’s features cast down in contemplation, Curze’s eyes fever-bright as he promised an ignoble fate. The next, Curze’s features twisted into a taut rictus of pain, blood running between his clenched teeth. The Lion held tight to the grip of his blade, buried to the hilt in his brother’s stomach. More than a metre of shining, bloodstained steel thrust from the back of Curze’s armour.

‘For such a dishonourable blow,’ the Lion whispered into Curze’s pale, bleeding face. ‘I do not care who knows the truth now, tomorrow, or in ten thousand years. Loyalty is its own reward.’

The Lion pulled his sword free. The Night Lord fell back.

At the same moment, the chainblade atop Sevatar’s halberd snarled to life.

X

Corswain vaulted a low wall and crouched behind it, taking aim over the top. His visor display realigned, targeting reticule skipping left and right, locking onto nothing. Sevatar and Shang had vanished as soon as the first blow fell. Alajos and Corswain had raised their weapons, issuing a challenge to empty air. The Lion was already following the retreating, limping Curze, leaving his two warriors behind.

Alajos pinned himself to a pillar now, his breathing coming over the vox. ‘I didn’t see where they went.’

‘Nor I,’ Corswain confessed. ‘This is Corswain of the Ninth, to the Vehemence. Respond, Vehemence.’

‘Vray of the Vehemence.’ How calm she sounded. Corswain almost laughed.

‘Ware treachery in the heavens,’ he said. ‘We’ve engaged the enemy.’ Corswain caught sight of the Lion through a small forest of pillars, advancing on the retreating Curze, their weapons crashing together several times a second.

‘Do you require a teleportation recall?’ the mortal captain’s reply came back.

Corswain risked another glance over the wall, but saw no sign of Sevatar or Shang. They’d gone to ground in the foundations of the fortress, out of sight but not out of mind.

‘No. We need to move. You won’t be able to maintain a recall lock.’

Alajos stared around the stone column. ‘Let’s go.’

Corswain followed, keeping low, trusting the wind’s roar to mask the sounds of his boots on the ground.

XI

The primarchs duelled, heedless of their sons’ hunt. The Lion’s blade wove an exquisite dance, while pain acted as Curze’s catalyst. The Night Lord ignored the bloody wound in his belly, letting his arcane genetics quickly seal the injury shut. He fought as he always fought – like a killer backed into a corner. Brutal scythes slashed from their housings on the back of the primarch’s oversized gauntlets, and the air rang with the clash of metal against metal, with the fizzing crack of opposing power fields.

The Lion wrenched his blade back, the silver steel breaking through the air in lashing chops, blurring into a crescent that reflected the moons above. Each carving strike crashed against Curze’s blocking claws. Both warriors moved beyond mortal capability, with speed that defied sight. Yet one was a knight, the other merely a murderer. Curze’s grin was a brittle facade at the best of times. Now it turned to glass.

‘We never sparred, did we?’ the Lion sounded almost bored, his words still carrying over the vox. Every few seconds would see a new cut ripped open in Curze’s armour or slashed across his face. He was fast enough to avoid death at the Lion’s hands, but not skilful enough to flawlessly defend against every attack.

‘I never cared for swords.’ Curze weaved under the carving blade, thrusting out with both claws. The Lion tilted back, his balance executed to preternatural perfection. Curze’s claws shredded the ivory tabard, barely scratching the layered ceramite beneath.

‘There exists nothing of elegance inside you.’ The Lion turned the blade in his hands, parrying another dual-claw strike with his single blade. ‘And nothing of loyalty. For a time, I considered you my truest brother. No others grew untouched by civilisation, only you and I.’

Curze licked his sharpened teeth, eyes narrowed with effort. ‘You should be with us, brother. Even your own Legion senses it. The First Legion’s strife is not unknown to the Warmaster.’

‘There is no strife.’

Their blades locked in that moment, Curze catching the Lion’s sword in the net of his linked claws.

‘No?’ The Night Lord spat the word as a curse. ‘No risk of the fair Angels falling? When did you last walk upon the soil of Caliban, oh proud one?’

The Lion smiled – the first time Curze had ever seen it – but the movement of his brother’s lips still did nothing to warm his statuesque visage. Stone gave off more warmth than that smirk. He gave no answer beyond the smile.

Curze returned it, just as insincere, just as lifeless. In that moment, he stopped fighting, ceased his measured duelling, and leapt at his brother with a howl. Where the warring primarchs had represented the pinnacle of human possibility in warfare, now the Lion’s poise, skill and grace counted for nothing. They brawled as brothers, rolling across the ground, hands at each other’s throats.

When the tumbling ended, Curze knelt atop the Lion. Pinkish saliva sprayed from his pale lips as he bore down on his brother, claws clasped to strangle, to inflict that most slow and intimate of murders, when slayer and slain stare into each other’s eyes.

‘Die,’ Curze breathed. Desperation ruined his voice, rasping it from bleeding lips. ‘You should never have survived that tainted world you call home.’

The Lion’s armoured hands grasped his brother’s throat in mirror response, but the Night Lord’s advantage was crystal clear. Curze shook the Lion’s neck in his fists, cracking his brother’s head against the rocky ground again and again and again.

‘Die now, brother. History will be kinder to you this way.’

XII

He was getting farther ahead, weaving through a forest of stone columns and rockcrete walls, far enough for Alajos to warn him, ‘Caution, brother. We’re being hunted.’

‘Why haven’t you summoned the Ninth Order?’

Alajos grunted in response. ‘I already have. A drop pod assault will still take seven minutes to reach us.’

Corswain moved to another pillar, his eyes gleaming red and his tabard turned cream in the gloom. ‘I’m going to help the Lion.’

‘Corswain...’ Alajos warned again. ‘He needs none of our help to slay that ghoul.’

‘I saw him go down into the dust.’ Corswain risked another glance. The fortress’ foundations were a forest of stone columns and walls, and the wind whipping through the crater stole any hope of hearing the Night Lords’ armour thrumming.

‘What did you see?’ Alajos’ voice came more hesitantly now, ripe with doubt.

‘The revenant leapt at the Lion. They went down into the dust.’ Corswain listened to the wind clawing at his helm, muffled to dull buffeting. ‘I think I see them. Cover me.’

‘Wait!’

He didn’t wait. He sprinted through the construction site, falling under fire almost immediately. Shang. It had to be. Corswain weaved through fire from his left, ignoring Alajos’ warning cries. Several shells struck home, ripping chunks from his war plate and sending black armour shards cracking against the stone walls. Each detonating shell kicked like a warhorse, knocking him off balance, but he could focus on nothing but the Lion lying in the dirt, his slack neck in a heretic’s grip.

The enemy fire ceased. Alajos was breathless over the vox, ‘I’ll... kill Shang.’ The audible clashing of blades served as percussion to the words. The captain already battled the Night Lord. ‘Behind you!’ he threw another warning over the vox.

As Corswain tore closer to the prone figure of his liege lord, the snarl of a chainblade throttling up came from behind. He didn’t turn as Sevatar finally made himself known, never breaking the headlong sprint.

‘I can outrun him,’ he whispered into the vox. The chainspear’s growl was already fading. His hearts thudded as hard as hooves on the snowy ground. Around pillars, over low walls, he sprinted and weaved, doing all he could in case Sevatar opened fire.

Behind him, only silence. Over the vox, the crash of blade on blade.

‘Brother,’ Alajos voxed, ‘keep running.’ The tone of his voice was enough to make Corswain turn, though he didn’t slow down. After vaulting another wall, he looked over his cloaked shoulder just in time to see his captain die.

XIII

Alajos was many things beside his rank of Ninth Captain: a loyal son; a dutiful knight; a gifted tactician; and a warrior with a head for the detailed logistics of planning and organising a crusade force. He was also one of the finest swordsmen in the First Legion, and had once lasted almost a full minute in a spar with his primarch.

He suspected the number of warriors capable of besting him numbered fewer than twenty across all the Legions. Ezekyle Abaddon of the traitorous Sons was one; Jubal Khan of the Scars another; and the Templar Sigismund of the Fists definitely another.

As was Sevatar. His name joined the others, coursing through both sides of the Imperial civil war, cheered by some, cursed by others.

Shang was Nostraman gutter trash – he offered almost no threat at all despite being his primarch’s huscarl. When Alajos assured Corswain he would kill the Night Lord, it hadn’t been false bravado. He could, and would, do just that. The first clashes of blade on blade told Alajos all he needed to know about the other warrior’s form: Shang was an aggressive killer, seeking to stab rather than chop, dodging rather than blocking. But the tells betrayed him, as they always did to those who knew what to seek. Shang was slower than Alajos. Weaker. Less experienced. He overbalanced when he dodged. He missed the perfect angle of his blade each time he parried.

Appallingly inelegant swordwork. He’d be dead in minutes. Alajos engaged him and held nothing back, utterly convinced of victory.

When Sevatar finally broke cover behind Corswain, Alajos had whispered his warning. Corswain chose to run on. Sevatar, curse his eyes, chose not to pursue. Alajos had watched Corswain’s pounding boots breed more distance between them, while Sevatar stalked back to aid his foul brother, Shang.

Alajos backed away from them both now, his blade up to guard against Shang’s stabbing sword and Sevatar’s grinding halberd. The Night Lords stalked closer, stolen skulls and Dark Angels helms clacking against their ceramite war plate as they dangled on chains.

On a whim, Alajos tore the helm from his head. If this was the end, then by the Emperor’s blood, it would be done properly. He raised his blade in salute to them both, ceremonially kissing the hilt as he watched them come closer.

The blade lowered, at the ready.

‘I am Alajos,’ he told them. ‘Captain of the Ninth Order of the First Legion. Brother to all knights, son to one world, sworn to one lord.’

Sevatar lowered his halberd with a lance’s intent. The whirring teeth chewed air with a petulant whine. ‘I am Sevatar the Condemned,’ he growled, ‘and I will wear your skin as a cloak before dawn ruins the sky.’

‘Come then,’ Alajos chuckled, though never in his life had he felt less like laughing. They charged as one, a short blade and cutting spear descending in the same moment. The Angel parried, barely, his long sword catching both strikes with awkward grace. All the while he surrendered ground, backing away, drawing the Night Lords with him.

In his own Legion, only two knights had managed to beat him in the sparring circles. One was Astelan, absent these past years from the Great Crusade. The other was Corswain, Paladin of the Ninth Order, bearer of the Mantle of the Champion.

With Alajos’ death, he would buy his brother’s life.

‘Brother,’ he voxed, ‘keep running.’

XIV

Corswain’s retinal display blurred as it refocused. The auto-senses obeyed his impulse, tracking the distant movement and zooming to capture Alajos backing away from his attackers. It ended with humiliating speed, despite the captain parrying several strikes in a matter of heartbeats. Even at this distance, Sevatar was a blur of movement in grainy night vision, his long halberd cutting and chopping, coming closer to digging into the Angel’s armour with each strike.

The end came when Shang’s blade plunged into Alajos’ thigh, driving the knight down to one knee. The Angel’s return cut cleaved through the Night Lord’s forearm, chopping the hand – and the sword it held – free. Even as Shang was staggering back, Sevatar let his blade fall.

Corswain saw his brother’s head roll clear of the armoured shoulders, the murder that failed all those months ago finally finished.

He turned and ran again, rounding the final pillar. Alajos’ sacrifice bought him precious seconds. He used them to hurl himself onto the primarch’s back, driving his sword through the spine of one of the Emperor’s sons.

XV

Curze screamed, his ghastly face raised to the sky. More blood drizzled from his pale lips as the insane pressure in his back and chest increased, until his breastplate gave way with a brittle crack that split the night. The wounded demigod clutched at the sword tip poking from below his collarbone, screaming like a man doused in chemical fire. More than a shriek of pain, it was an aural assault in itself, sending Corswain staggering back. The knight’s grip slipped from his blade – in desperation he clutched at whatever he could reach. One hand fisted in the primarch’s lank black hair, the other snagged a thick chain hanging from Curze’s pauldron.

The Night Lord primarch staggered to his feet, hauling the struggling warrior up with him. Corswain yanked the primarch’s head back, pulling out a fistful of tangled hair, while ripping the bronze chain from the shoulder guard gave him a weapon. Instead of lashing it against the primarch’s skull as a whip, he slapped it around Curze’s throat, holding tight to both ends. The cold metal garrotte tightened as the Night Lord stumbled and thrashed. Corswain tugged harder, hearing the soft, wet clicks of vertebrae giving way beneath Curze’s ragged gasps.

Corswain had broken horses as part of his squire training back on Caliban. Instinct made him tense the first time a horse bucked beneath him, and his rigid muscles had seen him easily thrown from the beast’s back. To break a horse, especially the proud and muscled chargers so prized by the home world’s knights, required as much grace and care as it did raw strength. The key was to move with the horse, to stay balanced, for the rider to keep his muscles loose and flexible in order to adapt to whatever tricks the creature might try. Corswain hadn’t thought of those days in a long time, but the bucking, thrashing ride he endured now brought it all rushing back. He knew he couldn’t have been on the primarch’s back for more than a handful of seconds, but it already felt like an age.

Curze twisted again, with enough force this time that the Angel lost his grip on the heavy chain. Corswain ended his tumbling fall by crashing against a stone pillar, the impact of his armour plating taking a huge chunk from the dense stone. He’d been shrugged off like a bothersome insect. Even strangled, beaten, bleeding, cut and stabbed, Curze had hurled him aside with almost no effort at all.

He hurt. Blood of the Emperor, he hurt. But he scrambled back to his feet, reaching for his sword in the dirt. If he could–

The shadow fell over him. Something hit – a mountain avalanche against his left side – throwing him back into the air. The ground spun, became the heavens, became both earth and sky at once. Corswain felt himself thudding along the rocky earth until he crashed to a rest against a stone wall.

For a moment, all he could taste and see was dust and blood, blessedly knocked insensitive to the protests of his tormented body.

The dull-witted invulnerability passed all too quickly, leaving him at the mercy of his injuries. His head was a swollen globe of blunt pain, contained by the helm that prevented his skull from coming to pieces. Agony replaced strength in his body; his entire left side felt shattered, literally broken into fragments. When he rose, it was with a scream of spasming effort. Only one leg and one arm obeyed his needs. One shattered eye-lens showed a flawed, lagging view of the foundation site. The other showed nothing at all. He was blind in that eye, feeling something hot, wet and useless now occupying the broken socket. Three teeth fell from his lips as he voiced a second scream. They rattled at the base of his helmet.

Through what remained of his vision, he saw his liege lord standing once more. The Lion, a bleeding statue, advanced on Curze with sword in hand. In turn, Curze readied his claws. Several of the talon-blades were broken, scattered over the ground. They came together yet again, weapons sparking and flaring.

Corswain’s muscles ached with the sudden influx of chemical stimulants as his armour’s internal systems sought to keep him alive. He doubted it would work for long. Something dense and heavy hung in his chest, turning each breath into breathing fire. Something had burst within him, he was certain of it. Acidic spittle ran from his lips, pooling at his sealed collar. He’d drown in his own blood and spit if he didn’t get his helm off soon, or at least unseal the mouth-grille.

A figure obstructed his view of the primarchs. A figure with a spear in its hands.

‘Not much left of you, is there?’ Sevatar chuckled in a low, crackling vox-voice.

‘The moons are crying,’ Corswain breathed, and crashed down to his knees. His fading eye stared skywards, watching as the moons wept fire.

XVI

The first drop pod hammered home into a gravel slope, sending ashy stones spraying out in a burst of debris. Heat-shielding on its black hull glowed from the atmospheric descent, while the whining turbines hissed with vented steam. Sealant bolts popped with gunshot cracks, and the pod’s sides opened with all the crude grace of a mechanical flower. The Dark Angels emerged with their bolters up and firing.

The second landed cleaner, followed by the third and fourth. All three struck home across the crater, spilling their knights onto the construction site.

‘How quickly the tide turns.’ Corswain was grinning bloodily behind his helm now. The shadows vanished. Sevatar and Shang fled as abruptly as they’d descended.

Rattling like hailstones, more drop pods fell from above. Some were blackened by allegiance, others by the atmospheric fire. Both fleets in orbit disgorged warriors onto the surface, even as they were surely battling in the void. Here on the ground, Corswain could barely see anything at all. He heard the Legions meeting in the skidding clashes of chainblades on ceramite, and the insistent crash of bolters, but saw precious little. With the hand that still obeyed him, he dragged his helmet off, wincing as the cold night air hit his savaged face.

The Lion was in similar ruin, surrounded by his black-clad warriors. Blood sheeted down the back of his head, a liquid cloak down his shoulders. Corswain had no idea how he still lived with so little of his skull intact.

Curze laughed – at least, he began to – before his own warriors began to drag him back just as the Angels dragged the Lion. The two primarchs staggered away from one another, cursing each other above their sons’ heads, both hindered by weakened limbs and grievous wounds that made the air stink with their genetically divine blood.

The great sword impaled the ground as it fell from the Angel Lord’s grip, while Curze could no longer lift his claws.

Corswain felt himself sliding back down to the ground despite his attempt at moving to the primarch’s side. Strong hands pulled at him, hauling him up, forcing him to do what his muscles wouldn’t allow. He turned his head, seeing with his good eye.

‘Alajos,’ he said.

‘The captain is dead, your grace. It is I, Sergeant Tragan.’

‘Sevatar is here. Watch for him. He is here, I swear it. He killed Alajos. I saw it happen.’

‘Yes, your grace. Come... this way. Thunderhawks are inbound.’ Across the vox, he yelled to every surviving soul, ‘First Legion, fall back!’

Corswain limped in his brother’s arms, vaguely wondering if he was dying. It felt like it, though never having died before, it was a guess.

‘You’re not dying, your grace,’ Sergeant Tragan laughed now. Corswain hadn’t realised he was murmuring out loud.

His last vision was of the primarchs, both near driven to their knees, surrounded by growing phalanxes of their armoured sons. Curze reached his claws for the Lion, snarling and cursing, too weak to resist his Legion dragging him from the field. The Lion’s reaction was a foul mirror, made all the more hideous because of the warlord’s majesty. He screamed oaths from his bleeding, angelic face, pulled back from the battle by his own sons.

Above the battle, he heard Sevatar’s cry. ‘Death to the False Emperor! Death to his Angels in Black!’ His skin crawled in the wake of those words. Such conviction. Such hate.

‘The Thramas Crusade,’ Corswain sighed. ‘They are right, all of them. This war is just beginning.’

‘Your grace?’

‘My sword,’ Corswain reached a hand out, as if he could touch the opposing groups of warriors.

‘Where is it, your grace?’

‘Gone,’ Corswain closed his remaining eye. ‘I left it in a primarch’s spine.’

XVII

The beast never dies in his dreams.

He watches it slink through the trees, keeping its sinuous body low to the ground, its movements fluid enough to be sickening and boneless. Its ears rake back flat against its head, while its clawed paws are silent on the deep snow. The creature hunts, eager but passionless, its dead cat’s eyes glinting with emotionless hunger.

The boy takes the shot, and the shell goes wide.

With the cold air split by the crack of gunfire, the beast twists in the snow, ghost-light on the ground as it snarls at its attacker. Quivering black spines rise from the denser white fur at its back and neck, an instinctive defensive response. A tail lashes behind the beast in threatening rhythm, coiling and thrashing in time with the boy’s own heartbeat.

For a moment he sees what the elder knights all claimed to see – a sight he’d always believed to be the lies of ageing warriors girding their fading legends with false poetry.

Yet there it is in the beast’s black eyes, something beneath the raw desire to survive. Recognition stares back at him: a crude intelligence, malicious despite its feral simplicity. The moment shatters as the creature vents its anger. Something between a lion’s burbling snarl and a bear’s hoarse roar rings out in the cold air between them.

The boy fires again. Three more shots echo through the forest, disturbing the snow bundled on branches above. Shivering fingers seek to reload the primitive pistol, but his aim was true and his father’s pistol sang its killing song. The beast limps now, dragging itself closer in a grotesque, mangled run.

He feels the chunky shells scatter from his grip, spilling out onto the snow. It’s too cold to reload with his fingers numbed to raw senselessness. He drops the pistol, too. Not from fear or pain, but because he needs two hands for what will come next.

Steel whispers as it slides from his sheath, a sword almost as long as the boy is tall, clutched in two shivering hands. As the beast stalks closer, he sees the malign hunger in its eyes cool to a feral wariness. It’s dying, but that only makes it bolder. Its foul sentience knows it no longer has anything to lose. It hunts now out of malice alone.

Flakes of snow drift onto the blade, freezing into diamonds wedded to the steel.

‘Come on,’ the boy breathes the whispered words. ‘Come on...’

The beast leaps, striking his chest with the force of a stallion’s kick, and he’s down on his back. The beast weighs as much as a warhorse, its twitching bulk pressing down on the boy’s slender body. The ache in his chest is a dull, creaking crackle, as if his lungs are filled with dry leaves. He knows his ribs are shattered, but there’s almost no pain at all. Steaming blood courses down the blade and onto his hands.

Finally, the beast ceases its shaking. The boy gathers his strength and counts to three, rolling the stinking creature onto its side. The spines still quiver and leak clear fluid. He’s careful not to touch those.

The sword in his hands is bonded to his fingers by a coating of the beast’s cooling blood. He lets the blade fall into the snow, and draws the serrated skinning knife from his boot. Birds sing in the branches above, though birdsong on Caliban is never beautiful. Raptors cry challenges at one another, while carrion birds caw for corpse-meat.

Slowly, everything starts to whiten, to fade away as other, truer sounds begin infiltrating his thoughts: the sound of a ticking fan blade in a labouring air filtrator; boot-steps on the deck above; the omnipresent rumble of live engines.

At last, he opens his eyes.

Both of them. Both work. He looks at the harsh illumination globes above, smelling the sharp disinfectant smell of the medicae chambers.

With a pained grunt, Corswain rises and says, ‘Water.’

XVIII

His mind wandered during the morning vigil. As Corswain knelt with his brothers, his muscles still stiff with aches and his skin discoloured by bruises, he found the serenity of purposes ever more difficult to attain. His head remained bowed against the hilt of his sword, and he gave all the appearance of another knight in dutiful reflection of the coming crusade. In truth, he dwelled in memories. His thoughts flew back to a world that hated him.

Tsagualsa.

The name brought a sneer to his lips, hidden by the hood that cast his features into shadow. Tsagualsa, a dead world the Night Lords claimed as their own; a world where primarchs had been reduced to screaming brothers, and the foundations of a fortress would one day rise to become an enemy stronghold.

Tragan called to him once the reverence ended. The other knights filed from the chamber of reflection, their white surplice robes not enough to cover the battle scarring that ravaged every suit of black armour.

‘Your grace,’ Tragan greeted him as he limped closer.

Corswain smiled in reply. ‘You do not need to call me that any more, captain. Is something amiss?’

Tragan, like his brothers, wore his full armour beneath a clean surplice. The hood was down, revealing his strong, aquiline features for all to see.

‘The Lion summons us,’ he said.

Corswain would‘ve checked his weapons, had they still been at his side. Instead, he nodded. ‘Very well.’

XIX

The lord of the First Legion sat as he so often sat these nights, leaning back in his ornate throne of ivory and obsidian. His elbows rested upon the throne’s sculpted arms, while his fingers were steepled before his face, just barely touching his lips. Unblinking eyes, the brutal green of Caliban’s forests, stared dead ahead, watching the flickering hololith of embattled stars.

Tragan and Corswain approached the throne as one. In a display far from perfect unity, the captain drew his blade and knelt before his liege, while Corswain went down slower – his body still sore, muscles still at odds with his desires. The Lion watched their obeisance with impassive eyes. When he spoke, his voice was the grind of thunder at the horizon – it could never be mistaken for human, and the pale scar across his tanned throat didn’t help humanise his tone.

‘Rise.’

They rose as commanded. Corswain stood with muscles taut, arms crossed over his breastplate, his armour enlivened by the thick, white fur pelt that hung down his back. The skinned beast’s fanged head draped over his shoulder guard, forming the cloak’s binding.

‘You summoned us, my liege?’

‘I did.’ The Lion remained seated with his fingers steepled before his lips. ‘We have made contact with Imperial forces.’

‘Orders?’ Corswain asked, feeling his heart beat faster. ‘A summons?’

‘Neither. We will not abandon the Thramas Crusade until these systems are ours. The Imperium lives and dies by what we do here in the deepest reaches. Defending Terra means nothing if the rest of the empire is ash.’

‘I do not understand, sire. What force has made contact with us?’

The Lion shook his crowned head again, watching the hololith. His eyes reflected bright clusters of stars and worlds, while his voice was uncharacteristically soft.

‘We have made contact with several of my brothers and their Legions,’ he said, ‘for the first time since we parted company with the Wolves.’

‘Is it the Wolf King, sire?’ Corswain made no effort to disguise his reluctance. The Angels and the Wolves had hardly parted on brotherly terms.

‘No, Cor. The hail comes from Guilliman and our cousins within the Thirteenth Legion. Knowing we have been unable to reach Terra, it seems the Lord of Ultramar wishes us at his side instead.’

Before the warriors could reply, the Lion narrowed his Calibanite eyes. ‘Unending Imperial ambition has not bred warriors with the warm hearts of men, but angels with the cold hearts of weapons.’ He rose from his throne, circling the hololithic table, watching the worlds turn about their suns.

‘My sons,’ he smiled, though it was utterly without warmth. ‘It seems Horus is not the only soul to believe he is heir to the empire.’

DESCENT OF ANGELS

As the mighty Lion El’Jonson strives to unify his feudal home world of Caliban, the coming of the Imperium brings a new destiny – and new division – for his knightly followers.

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FALLEN ANGELS

With news of Horus’s treachery spreading across the galaxy, the Great Crusade grinds to a halt as the primarchs and their Legions decide where their loyalty lies – with the Emperor, or with the rebel Warmaster.

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THE PRIMARCHS

Four tales of the primarchs, the Emperor’s own sons and liege-lords of the Space Marines. From the Great Crusade to the end of the Heresy itself, what roles have they yet to play?

In this volume, read the story ‘The Lion’.

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ANGELS OF CALIBAN

The First Legion go to war, and their primarch’s brutal actions threaten to tear apart the fragile alliance of Imperium Secundus.

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RUINSTORM

With Imperium Secundus a failed dream, the primarchs of the Triumvirate swear to reach Terra and defend the Imperium’s heart. But danger awaits them, and their destinies are in their hands…

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THE EMPEROR’S CHILDREN

III LEGION

IMPERFECT

Nick Kyme

Two embattled armies, their forces scattered, glared unblinking at one another across a white and ebon field. They had begun arrayed in perfect formation, their ranks orderly, their pennants standing stiff against a shallow breeze and the faces of their front-rank fighters as hard as rock. Raised up on their circular plinths, their lords and spiritual leaders had looked on imperiously – Emperor and Empress standing side by side, displaying to all the strength of their rule and commitment to victory.

But as was so often the case in war, even with the loftiest of strategic minds, order broke down and chaos took the reins. For if one thing was certain about conflict, it was that it always ended in the reign of chaos.

War now blighted this hard, unyielding plain. It could only end in defeat for one side or the other. With the clarions of battle not yet faded on the air, much blood was spilled before one of their generals spoke.

‘Do you imagine yourself as the Emperor or the Tetrarch, brother?’ asked Fulgrim.

The Phoenician was leaning back and staring at Ferrus across the finely carved game pieces. He narrowed his keen eyes, easing himself forward so that he was level with his brother, who had sunk down amongst the pieces to contemplate his next move.

Unlike his more serious sibling, Fulgrim wore loose-fitting robes of pearlescent violet and his silver hair hung loose about his neck and shoulders. An ivory goblet inscribed with curious sigils sat near the tapered fingers of his right hand, adjacent to the gaming table. Fulgrim took a sip of the draught within – it seemed to invigorate him – before saying, ‘I think you see yourself as the Tetrarch. Am I right?’

He toyed with the piece that represented the Divinitarch. She was a robed and blind seer clutching her staff of office, an iconic depiction of an iris within the letter ‘I’. Or, in ancient Grekan, the iota.

Intent on his playing pieces, Ferrus did not look up. ‘Are you trying to distract me, brother?’ he asked, good-naturedly.

His tone didn’t match his appearance. Ferrus was clad in his Medusan war plate. Black as a funerary shroud, it looked thick and unyielding. His hair was shorn close to the scalp and his face might as well have been hewn from stone for all the emotion it betrayed.

Fulgrim leaned back, the light from the single phosphor globe above catching the porcelain cast to the skin of his face and neck. His long, lustrous hair flashed brightly in the lambent glow.

Beyond the light, there was only darkness. It made discerning the exact size of the chamber that they were playing in difficult. A low hiss did resonate on the cool air, though, suggesting at least a sizeable hall or gallery.

‘Not at all,’ he said, the slightest curl of his lip betraying both a nascent smile and the lie in his words. ‘I merely pose the question – Emperor or Tetrarch?’

‘Why not Primarch?’ Ferrus answered, looking up from his deliberations at last to fix Fulgrim with hard eyes reminiscent of knapped flint or obsidian fire-ice. ‘For that is what we are, is it not?’

Ferrus made his move, a cunning outflank with his last remaining Ecclesiarch. He sat back, arms folded, looking pleased with himself.

Fulgrim laughed, a genuine expression of warm bonhomie that he seldom felt except for when he was with his brother.

‘You should really mask your intentions better, Ferrus.’

‘Should I?’ The flicker of a smile manifested but was buried quickly under the crags of Ferrus’ stern features. ‘Who has a better mask than the Gorgon, brother?’ he asked. ‘Tell me that.’

‘Now who’s using distraction?’

Ferrus didn’t answer, but merely gestured to the board with a gauntleted hand.

Fulgrim’s face darkened a little as he noticed the armoured glove, but he recovered quickly. Who wears armour to a gentle game of strategy, he thought, though the shadows around them seemed to shift uncomfortably at the ire implicit in Fulgrim’s unspoken tone. And the gauntlets? Amateurish.

‘Does it bother you,’ he said aloud, addressing Ferrus, ‘being called that? Gorgon. An ugly creature, a monster of Grekan myth, so loathsome it could petrify a man by merely looking at him.’

Ferrus gave a short laugh.

‘I see it as a compliment. Besides, I am ugly.’

They laughed together at Ferrus’ mild self-deprecation. He only did it in Fulgrim’s presence, the closeness of their fraternal bond evident in his apparent ease.

Even so, Ferrus still had to rationalise the comment. It was his nature.

‘My enemies held rigid with fear just at the sight of my stern countenance,’ he said, sighing. ‘Would that all battles were fought and won so easily.’

‘Yes...’ Fulgrim replied wistfully, his attention only half upon the board. ‘Would that they were.’

He leaned forwards again, going to take a sip from his goblet but finding to his dissatisfaction that he had already drained it.

‘We are friends, you and I?’ he asked.

Ferrus frowned, slightly incredulous at Fulgrim’s remark. ‘Did I not forge your sword for you, brother?’

‘Is that what friendship is, the forging of swords?’

‘I can think of no more tangible a bond of trust than that,’ Ferrus answered, his raw honesty difficult for Fulgrim to see. ‘As warriors, we need to be sure of our weapons in battle. I would not let just anyone forge something I rely upon so keenly.’

‘And so does that mean you trusted me then?’

Ferrus’ brow furrowed in confusion. ‘Trusted?’

‘Trust. That you trust me.’

‘You are my brother, Fulgrim. Of course I trust you.’

‘And do you trust all of your brothers?’

Now the Gorgon showed his true face, a stern slab of rock that seemed to darken the light with the sudden severity of its expression. ‘You know I don’t.’

Fulgrim recalled the names. Curze, Magnus, Jaghatai...

‘Then ours is a deeper bond,’ he said, relaxing.

‘Rare as the ore of Medusa.’

Fulgrim smiled warmly, forgetting for a moment where he was.

‘How do you think two men like us became such firm friends when our humours are so very different?’

‘We are far from mortal men, Fulgrim.’

Ferrus had always revelled in that. The idea that he was greater, more than just ordinary. Perhaps my own demeanour is not so different?

‘Well, you know what I mean.’

Ferrus bowed his head apologetically. ‘Are our humours so dissimilar?’

You’re right, they’re not. I am the master of mine and you... well...

‘And does similarity really promote such a strong bond? Both Vulkan and I are blacksmiths of one creed or another. I respect his craft, but I do not wish he was sitting here in your place.’

Fulgrim leaned back again, seemingly satisfied. ‘You are noble, Ferrus. I want you to know that.’

Ferrus smiled, his dark mood lifting.

‘And you are still procrastinating, brother.’

‘Just playing up to your pride.’

Fulgrim made his next move, opting to place one of his Citizens in a vulnerable position. It was an obvious strategy, and one Ferrus should see coming. But it veiled a second threat, concealed by the hooded board.

Their battlefield was circular – not an uncommon configuration – and divided into segments, each of which were made up of nexuses conjoined by the curved lines that gave the board its shape. Six spokes jutted from the main nexus, the core. Both primarchs’ pieces were currently arrayed around it, though not all were visible. The ‘hooded’ board meant that several of their pieces, predetermined before the commencement of the game, were held in reserve. When deployed, such pieces would remain hidden, represented as lowly Citizens, until such time as they turned or killed another piece.

The only other way to reveal the identity of hooded pieces was to use a Divinitarch. Ferrus had sacrificed his early on, deeming it tactically more valuable to manoeuvre his Tetrarch into a favourable position.

The armoured warrior piece, its sword held up in salute against its visored faceplate, had much in kind with its wielder’s demeanour.

As Fulgrim released the Citizen, Ferrus gave a snort of admonition.

‘I won’t be goaded so easily.’

His thin, serpentine lips pursed. Fulgrim considered his brother’s words but left the obvious rejoinder unspoken. Instead, he returned to the question. ‘You still haven’t answered. Emperor or Tetrarch?’

Ferrus smiled, engrossed in the board and the game.

It is good to see him at such ease.

Fulgrim studied him.

The angular cheekbones. The sweep of his heavy brow, each line above it like a fissure in the sharp crags of his face. The muscular jawline, peppered with dark stubble. The trunk-like neck. A pugilist’s ears – ugly, small and misshapen. The mild discolouration of his skin from hours spent toiling in the forge. His piercing eyes, ever judging. Every hair, every stalwart tooth, every crease and scar...

‘Blind Man’s Fate is a strategy to use against novices, brother,’ said Ferrus in his familiar rumbling baritone. Again, he moved his Tetrarch.

‘Novices, or the arrogant pedagogue...’ Fulgrim murmured.

‘And which am I?’

Both. Neither.

‘Let us see, shall we?’

Fulgrim brought his Divinitarch into contact with a hooded Citizen, and Ferrus was forced to reveal its true identity.

‘A Fortress, brother? How intriguing.’

‘Is it?’

‘Only that, whenever we play this game, you always favour an attacking strategy.’

Paying no heed and absorbed in the game, Ferrus took his Fortress down the board towards the core nexus.

‘Aggressive...’ Fulgrim nodded approvingly, then made his own move.

Taking less and less time to deliberate each move, Ferrus swept aside the Ecclesiarch that Fulgrim had just offered him in a killing move that sent a flash of anticipatory triumph across the Gorgon’s face.

Fulgrim tapped the edge of the table with his thin, sinuous fingers. His fallen Ecclesiarch had apparently dented his preferred strategy. The seconds lapsed, and he did nothing.

‘Do you know why they call this game “Regicide”?’ he asked, caressing the ivory stem of his white Empress, she with all the potency but none of the actual power.

‘I care not,’ snapped Ferrus. ‘Cease this pathetic stalling and make your move.’

‘Patience, brother,’ Fulgrim chided him. ‘Was Narodnya really so long ago that you’ve forgotten how to be patient?’

Ferrus looked about to snap again when he relaxed, plaintively holding up both gauntleted hands. Again, Fulgrim noticed them and had to stifle a tremor of rage beneath his right eye. A sibilant undertone cut the frigid air.

‘What was that?’ Ferrus asked, reacting to the sound.

‘Nothing. Just atmospheric recirculation protocols.’

For the first time since the game began, Fulgrim looked up from the table and into the darkness beyond. He preferred it this way, especially when playing, as it tended to focus the mind. A hazy spotlight flushed the table and its players in sickly yellow. Just beyond this faint corona of illumination, penumbral figures could be seen in silhouette watching the contest unfold. They were still, rapt with attention as the test reached its most crucial phase.

‘Death of a monarch,’ answered Ferrus, his voice drawing Fulgrim’s attention back to him. ‘That’s what it means.’

‘It also refers to the death of an emperor,’ the Phoenician countered, finding his confidence again as he marshalled his Empress into position. ‘Not only that, brother, but the just and lawful execution of said monarch or emperor, following trial.’ He licked his lips and the susurration from the atmospheric recirculation briefly intensified. ‘I find it an intriguing notion.’

‘Indeed,’ said Ferrus, his attention back again on the board.

A trap was forming, his awareness of it evident in his tense facial expression. It also revealed that he could not discern the nature of the trap – only that one existed.

Still so blind...

By moving his Empress, Fulgrim had left his Emperor open to attack.

‘Yes,’ he continued. ‘Intriguing that an emperor can be considered subject to the same laws and strictures that bind ordinary men. That any act of harm put to such a being can be considered lawful and just.’

‘You believe it should not be so?’

‘I believe it suggests that a leader, or even a father, can be flawed.’

‘All men have flaws, it’s what makes them men. The ability to see and mitigate one’s own flaws is a measure of a man’s greatness. Only good leaders possess such self-awareness.’

How ironic, Fulgrim wanted to say, but instead he said, ‘Now who’s stalling, brother?’ deliberately turning Ferrus’ earlier words against him in the hope of gaining a psychological advantage.

‘I am not stalling.’ Some of the anger returned, visible in the Gorgon’s clenching and unclenching of his fists.

‘Then act.’

‘You are trying to hurry me into a mistake.’

No goading is required, dear brother.

Ferrus’ gauntleted hand poised over the Tetrarch. One angular move, and he could kill the identical piece in Fulgrim’s army. It was a move called ‘the Swordbreaker’, and in this version of Regicide it would turn Ferrus’ conquering Tetrarch into a Primarch, a piece of much greater manoeuvrability and, therefore, power.

‘You’re hiding something,’ he said, still wavering.

‘And you’re behaving distinctly out of character, brother.’ Fulgrim snarled, baring his teeth.

Ferrus seemed not to notice. Instead, he stared at the board, wracked by indecision.

‘Do I kill him?’

How many times did I ask myself that very question?

After making his move, Ferrus would have to withstand whatever attack Fulgrim crafted next, but with another Primarch at his side. He scrutinised the board, but saw no potential danger.

‘You have nothing...’ he muttered, smiling. ‘As ever, you opt for obfuscation instead of a solid strategy.’

‘Then show me yours,’ invited Fulgrim. ‘But before you do, answer my question. Are you the Tetrarch or the Emperor?’

Ferrus looked up, his face a mask of defiant belligerence.

‘No one can be Emperor, save the Emperor Himself,’ he declared and thrust his Tetrarch forwards, killing the opposing piece and substituting the former for his new Primarch. ‘As I play, I imagine myself as the Tetrarch.’

And there’s the brother I know.

‘Without pretension to rule, only to serve,’ said Fulgrim.

‘Just so.’

‘And now Primarch.’

‘Again, yes. It’s your move, brother.’

‘Becoming what you appear to be.’

‘Is there not honour in that?’ asked Ferrus, but his pride bled through in the words.

‘Much. Dissembling is for less obvious minds than yours, dear brother.’

That was a mistake. Fulgrim hadn’t meant to say that out loud. Perhaps he was not as in control of the situation – and himself – as he thought?

Ferrus scowled, annoyed. ‘What is that supposed to mean?’

Words could not be unsaid, so Fulgrim went with them. With an open hand, he gestured to the board and the game in progress. There was a faint undercurrent of sadness to the Phoenician’s tone as he made his final move.

‘That you fail to see what is in front of you.’

The Citizen he had positioned earlier came adjacent to Ferrus’ new Primarch and revealed itself to be an Ecclesiarch. Both of Fulgrim’s Divinitarchs and his second Ecclesiarch were also adjacent. None could take the Primarch, for their specific permitted moves across the board combined with their relative positions did not afford this opportunity. They did, however, allow for something else.

Ferrus’ eyes widened as he finally saw the trap. ‘Too late,’ he murmured, ‘too late...’

You were, both of you. And too weak...

Fulgrim started for a moment, unsure as to where the thought had come from, but quickly recovered.

‘This,’ he said, tapping the place over his chest beneath which his heart was beating fast, ‘was your downfall. Too rash, too eager. Undone by your anger, your arrogance. Are you so impatient, Ferrus? You speak of flaws, of the traits of great men. Are we not great men? So then, are we so aware of our own inherent flaws? Are you?’

Ferrus had no answer. He could only stare mutely, grasping for comprehension.

That was the second fault.

Fulgrim simmered with displeasure, but had to play this out.

‘Why did you not heed me, brother?’ he asked. ‘We were bonded you and I, beneath the slopes of Mount Narodnya. You with Fireblade and I with Forgebreaker. Now, what has become of those noble weapons and the ideals we craved as we forged them?’

Ferrus looked up from the table, a frozen fist around his heart.

‘The Traitor’s Gambit?’ he asked, not because he didn’t recognise the strategy but more out of disbelief that Fulgrim had used it against him.

Anger. This was something that the Ferrus before Fulgrim could understand.

‘You sound annoyed, brother,’ the Phoenician hissed.

‘Because you try to turn me!’

‘I have turned you, Ferrus. You have fought and bled, wrought a piece with significant power for your efforts, and now I have taken it for my own.’

Ferrus shoved the table back so it jabbed Fulgrim in the stomach, and rose to his feet.

‘Brother!’ Fulgrim shifted backwards himself and tried to look shocked.

He is unravelling again, just like before.

‘You dare...’ accused Ferrus. He slammed his fist down on the board, scattering the pieces.

‘I dare what? We are merely playing a friendly game.’

‘You dare this?’ Ferrus clenched his jaw. Fulgrim could hear his brother’s teeth grinding hatefully, but he stayed where he was for now.

‘How have I insulted you? Please sit down.’ He gestured to Ferrus’ stool, but it was upended and rolling away from the board now. ‘Return to the game.’

‘Your game,’ Ferrus snarled. ‘One in which you try to turn my hand. I am a loyal son of the Emperor. As were you.’

He reached for a weapon, but there was no scabbard at his hip and no hammer at his back.

‘Perturabo has Forgebreaker now,’ Fulgrim said with resignation. ‘His anger towards me eclipses your own, brother, as hard as I’m sure that is for you to believe.’

Seismic cracks appeared in the Gorgon’s stolid countenance as he struggled to comprehend everything that Fulgrim was saying.

‘Where is Perturabo?’ Ferrus demanded. ‘Where is my hammer? Tell me!’

The ruse is over, said the voice in Fulgrim’s head that had hijacked his most recent thoughts. ‘I agree...’ Fulgrim muttered sadly.

‘With what?’ snapped Ferrus.

‘That this is done.’ Fulgrim glanced to the shadows and the silhouette standing there. ‘I am very disappointed in you,’ he murmured, then turned his ophidian gaze back to Ferrus, ‘And as for you...’

Ferrus seemed not to understand. ‘Explain yourself.’

Fulgrim did as Ferrus requested, five words that drained away the Gorgon’s wrath and left him stunned.

‘You are not my brother.’

Savagely, Fulgrim gripped the Regicide table in both hands and threw it aside. The pieces clattered noisily to the floor, Emperors and Citizens alike toppled and slain in seconds. The game was over, and Fulgrim was revealed in all of his infernal beauty.

Ferrus backed away as the other primarch rose to his full height, dwarfing him.

He gasped, ‘Monster...’

Fulgrim’s reply was sibilant and insidious. ‘I prefer exalted.’

Where Ferrus had known him as a being of immortal perfection, a handsome warrior-king of Chemos, the creature that Fulgrim had become scarcely echoed that former ideal.

A purplish hue affected the pallor of his skin now, and there were ridges of scale in kind with Fulgrim’s serpentine body. His upper torso and face still remained much as it once had been, though the eyes looked distinctly reptilian and sharp, needle-like fangs filled a mouth that seemed, at times, oddly distended. His legs were no more, his dancing swordman’s gait surrendered in preference to the coiled agility of a viper’s tail, the two limbs conjoined by some terrible alchemy.

Fulgrim knew his appearance well. He had often studied it narcissistically in one of his many mirrors. He had beheld it in the shimmering blood of his enemies. Seen it reflected in the eyes of those he was about to kill.

It was murderous. It was beautiful.

It was perfection.

Unlike this wretched specimen.

Ferrus was overcoming his revulsion, and bunched his fists.

‘That won’t be necessary...’ uttered Fulgrim flatly, and sprang at him.

Ferrus roared as Fulgrim clamped his maw around the Gorgon’s neck and bit deep. In a panic, those strong, gauntleted hands wrapped around his upper and lower jaws and tried to pull them open.

Fulgrim was spitting blood as Ferrus’ carotid artery gushed even more vigorously. The Gorgon’s grip was firm, his face a mask of pained hatred. Fulgrim raked him with his talons, tearing deep rents in his armour, but Ferrus clung on desperately.

Like a beast tamer wrestling his charge, Ferrus used the power in his hips to fling Fulgrim onto his back, where the monster writhed and hissed.

‘I remember now...’ he snarled, blazing Medusan anger to meet his cold, iron hatred. ‘Your betrayal.’

He slowly prised open Fulgrim’s jaws like they were a vice.

‘You coward!’

Fulgrim thrashed, unable to speak, seized by the very real possibility that significant harm might yet come to him. He twisted, trying to free himself, but Ferrus would not let him go.

‘I should have killed you at Isstvan,’ Ferrus said, ‘I should have–’

He does remember. Everything, just as Fabius had promised he would.

‘I...’ Ferrus stumbled, losing his grip as he stared down dumbly at the thing that his brother had willingly become.

He remembered too much.

‘You tried,’ said Fulgrim, grief-stricken and slurring the words.

With a ferocious twist of his serpentine body, Fulgrim threw Ferrus off. He staggered, going down on one knee, but didn’t move far. His trailing hand, supporting his body, scraped against an armoured boot. In confusion, Ferrus looked down behind him into the shadows.

He saw a figure there. Recognising its physiognomy, he looked back to his brother.

‘What is this?’ he asked, struggling with his ambivalent emotions.

Fulgrim righted himself and stabbed his dumbstruck brother through the heart with his barbed tail, piercing the weak spot he had raked earlier with his talons.

‘I think it’s closure,’ Fulgrim answered with quiet resignation. ‘Or sometimes torture.’

And so Ferrus Manus, the Gorgon and Primarch of the Iron Hands, died.

Again.

Fulgrim glared at the corpse, unable to hide his disgust.

‘He was imperfect. How many times now is it that you have failed me, Fabius?’

The silhouette watching from the shadows shifted uncomfortably.

‘My lord,’ began a rasping, obsequious voice.

‘Don’t answer, I can see for myself.’

Lumen globes fixed in alcoves and the domed ceiling above flared into life in perfect unison. Revealed starkly in their glow were bodies. Huge, armoured, primarch bodies. Corpses. The coppery stench of their spilled and cooling blood was almost overwhelming. Fulgrim had ordered nullifying agents pumped into the chamber to mask the smell, but seeing it seemed to bring it back.

Ferrus Manus lay dead. His imperfect clones littered the chamber floor in their dozens, a silent and broken audience. Fulgrim regarded them disappointedly.

Apothecary Fabius’ hololithic image flickered nearby, but cast no light that he might observe without disturbing his primarch. Even with practised indifference disguising much of the emotion of his wizened face, Fabius looked relieved that he was not actually in Fulgrim’s presence.

The flesh-maker was in his usual garb. A shawl of rough, leathern skin draped purple-and-gold armour and a necrotic-looking armature sprouted from his back. The chirurgeon’s limbs were folded, though the many surgical instruments, diffusers and injection-philtres were still visible.

‘It is not easy, my lord,’ he tried again, peering through tangles of dirty white hair, taking advantage of the primarch’s distraction. ‘And corrupt samples yield imperfect results.’ He paused to lick those dry, cadaverous lips. ‘As you can see, cloning a being like a primarch – well, it is a process that borders on requiring the Emperor’s own scientific genius to perfect.’

A marble table, with a Regicide board carefully arranged upon it, stood alone and unmolested some metres away. The last one. Fulgrim eased his immense serpent body down next to it, taking his position as he had many times before.

Repetition was important, Fabius had informed him. It was the only way to control the many variables. Subtle changes would garner more conclusive results.

‘I can hear your pride from several systems away, Fabius.’

Fabius bowed. ‘It is complex, but not impossible.’

‘Then what about his hands?’ Fulgrim snapped. ‘They were like flowing mercury, not gauntleted. He must be perfect! I need this, Fabius. I need it. When Ferrus died I was a prisoner in my own flesh. I have to speak to him. I have to tell him...’ He trailed off.

‘Replication is not easy,’ said the Apothecary, filling the brief silence with his squirming excuses. ‘As I said, a corrupt sample–’

‘The blood from my blade shall have to suffice!’

‘Yes, my lord, but the problem I am trying to–’

‘Shut up. I’m bored.’ Fulgrim sneered at the hololith. ‘You are an unpleasant creature, Fabius. So full of bile.’

‘As you wish, my lord. Are you ready to try again?’

Fulgrim nodded curtly and the lights dimmed once more, a single globe staying lit over the Regicide table as the rest of the chamber was drowned in darkness. From below there came the sound of gears and servos, a great mechanism at work. A hatch slid open, large enough to admit a hulking figure in black war plate sitting upon a simple stool.

As the clone reached the chamber, the platform filled the hatchway and Ferrus opened his eyes.

‘Brother,’ it said warmly, awareness lighting up its face. ‘Are you ready to play?’

I am ready... hissed the voice in Fulgrim’s head.

Have I not silenced you?

You can no more silence me than you can silence yourself, dear host.

You are subservient to me.

For now...

Fulgrim clenched a fist, but the daemon would have to wait. He wasn’t surprised that it had resurfaced. This had as much to do with it as it did Fulgrim and his brother.

Ferrus seemed not to notice the delay, his awareness held in mental stasis until Fulgrim gestured to the board. The Phoenician smiled as Ferrus looked down to consider his move.

‘Do you consider yourself the Tetrarch or the Emperor?’ asked Fulgrim, and the game began.

Again.

Unlike most of his brethren, Fabius preferred isolation to the company of others. He had always regarded his pathology as unique amongst the Emperor’s Children – whenever he flayed a subject or pinned back its flesh to reveal the complex anatomy of its internal organs, there was an end in mind. Knowledge, reason. It separated him from his more... self-indulgent siblings.

Fabius desired sensation. He wanted to experience all of it, but he wanted to do that forever. He also knew that his great work would take time. Millennia, perhaps, despite the fact he had already made significant progress.

By returning to the Pride of the Emperor, he had to sacrifice certain ‘freedoms’ to experiment, proscriptions he had not been bound by on the Andronius, but it was a large ship and Fulgrim had much to occupy him already. If this latest fascination with the Gorgon was anything to gauge by, Fabius could operate more or less with impunity.

If he was careful.

In the antechamber where he currently toiled, secrecy was of prime importance. A gene-coded key was required to access it, something Fabius altered every few cycles. It was also hidden deep in the bowels of the ship and would not appear on any schematics or auspex scans. It was, for all intents and purposes, a dead zone.

The irony of that particular nomenclature amused the Apothecary. He smiled, seeing himself reflected grimly in the outer glass on the caskets he had under observation.

In one, a mutated freak with tiny winged appendages of gristle and wasted flesh. It mewled in the briny solution of the casket, blind and forever drowning. Another bore its organs on the outside, a ruddy scum collecting at the bottom of its casket as it raged impotently with its shrivelled fists against the glass. The samples numbered in the dozens, each in varying stages of evolution and genetic success.

Ferrus had not been the first, though he was advanced. Nor would he be the last.

Strolling the length of the laboratorium, the caskets reminded Fabius of some insidious processional. He paused at the last in the line.

Within was an infant child, curled up, sleeping warm and safe within its amniotic stew. A Cthonian birthmark was visible on the small of the child’s tiny back.

‘Sleep,’ hissed Fabius, a grim nursemaid to the slumbering infant, ‘for when you wake, the galaxy shall be a very different place.’

GALAXY IN FLAMES

Having recovered from his grievous injuries, Warmaster Horus leads the triumphant Imperial forces against the rebel world of Isstvan III, where Horus’s treachery is finally revealed...

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THE FLIGHT OF THE EISENSTEIN

Having witnessed the terrible massacre on Isstvan III, Death Guard Captain Garro seizes a ship and sets a course for Terra to warn the Emperor of Horus’s treachery.

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FULGRIM

As the Great Crusade draws to a close, primarch Fulgrim and the Emperor’s Children continue their pursuit of perfection. But pride comes before a fall, and this most proud of Legions is about to fall a very, very long way...

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THE PRIMARCHS

Four tales of the primarchs, the Emperor’s own sons and liege-lords of the Space Marines. From the Great Crusade to the end of the Heresy itself, what roles have they yet to play?

In this volume, read the story ‘The Reflection Crack’d’.

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ANGEL EXTERMINATUS

Primarch Fulgrim of the Emperor’s Children leads his brother Perturabo and the Iron Warriors in an attack upon a mysterious eldar world, in search of ancient xenos weaponry.

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SLAVES TO DARKNESS

As the traitor fleet closes on Terra, turmoil grips its heart. Horus lies wounded, and as the greatest battle of all time looms, it falls to Maloghurst the Twisted to hold the force together and save the Warmaster.

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IRON WARRIORS

IV LEGION

THE IRON WITHIN

Rob Sanders

The iron within. The iron without. Iron everywhere. The galaxy laced with its cold promise. Did you know that Holy Terra is mostly iron? Our Olympian home world, also. Most habitable planets and moons are. The truth is we are an Imperium of iron. Dying stars burn hearts of iron, while the heavy metal cores of burgeoning worlds generate fields that shelter life – sometimes human life – from the razing glare of such stellar ancients.

Empires are measured in more than just conquered dirt. Every Iron Warrior knows this. They’re measured in hearts that beat in common purpose, thundering in unison across the void; measured in the blood that spills from our Legiones Astartes bodies, red with iron and defiance. This is the iron within and we can taste its metallic tang when an enemy blade or bullet finds us wanting. Then the iron within becomes the iron without, as it did on what we only now understand to be the first day of the Great Siege of Lesser Damantyne…

The Warsmith stepped out onto the observation platform, each of his power-armoured footfalls an assault on the heavy grille. The Iron Warrior’s ceramite shoulders were hunched with responsibility, as though the Space Marine carried much more than the dead weight of his Mark III plate. He crossed the platform with the determination of a demigod, but the fashion in which his studded gauntlets seized the exterior rail betrayed a belief that he might not make the expanse at all. The juggernaut ground to an irresistible halt.

A rasping cough wracked the depths of his armoured chest, his form rising and falling with the exertion of each tortured, uncertain breath. Imperial Army sentries from the Ninth-Ward Angeloi Adamantiphracts watched the Warsmith suffer, uncertain how to act. One even broke ranks and approached, the flared muzzle of his heavy carbine lowered and scalemail glove outstretched.

‘My lord,’ the masked soldier began, ‘can I send for your Apothecary or perhaps the Iron Palatine…’

Lord Barabas Dantioch stopped the Adamantiphract with an outstretched gauntlet of his own. As the Warsmith fought the coughing fit and his convulsions, the armoured palm became a single finger.

Then, without even looking at the soldier, the huge legionary managed: ‘As you were, wardsman.’

The soldier retreated and a light breeze rippled through the Iron Warrior’s tattered cloak, the material a shredded mosaic of black and yellow chevrons. It whipped about the statuesque magnificence of his power armour, the dull lustre of his Legion’s plate pitted with rust and premature age, lending the suit a sepia sheen. He wore no helmet. Face and skull were enclosed in an iron mask, crafted by the Warsmith himself. The faceplate was a work of brutal beauty, an interpretation of the Legion’s mark, the iron mask symbol that adorned his shoulder. Lord Dantioch’s mask was a hangdog leer of leaden fortitude with a cage for a mouth and eyes of grim darkness. It was whispered in the arcades and on the battlements that the Warsmith was wearing the mask – pulled glowing from the forge – as he hammered it to shape around his shaven skull. He then plunged head and iron into ice water, fixing the beaten metal in place forever around his equally grim features.

Gripping the platform rail, Dantioch drew his eye-slits skywards between his hunched, massive shoulders and drank in the insane genius of his creation. The Schadenhold: an impregnable fortress of unique and deadly design, named in honour of the misery that Dantioch and his Iron Warriors might observe if ever an enemy force was foolish enough to assault the stronghold. During the process of Compliance, as part of the Emperor’s strategy and holy decree, thousands of bastions and citadels had been built on thousands of worlds, so that the architects of the Great Crusade might watch over their conquered domain and the new subjects of an ever-expanding Imperium. Many of these galactic redoubts, castles and forts had been designed and built by Dantioch’s Iron Warrior brothers: the IV Legion was peerless in the art of siege warfare, both as besiegers and the besieged. The galaxy had seen nothing like the Schadenhold, however – of that Dantioch was sure.

Under his mask, the Iron Warriors commander’s pale lips mumbled the Unbreakable Litany. ‘Lord Emperor, make me an instrument of your adamance. Where darkness is legion, bless our walls with cold disdain. Where foolish foes are frail, have our ranks advance. Where there is mortal doubt, let resolution reign…’

The Warsmith had blessed the Schadenhold with every modern structural fortification: concentric hornworks; bunkers; murder zones; drum keeps; artillery emplacements and kill-towers. The fortress was a monstrous study in 30th millennium siegecraft. For Dantioch, however, location was everything. Without the natural advantages of material, elevation and environment, all other architectural concerns were mere flourish. A stronghold built in a strategically weak location was certain to fall, as many of Dantioch’s kindred in the other Legions had discovered during the early trials of compliance. Even the Imperial Fists had had their failures.

Dantioch had hated Lesser Damantyne from the moment he had set foot on the dread rock and had felt instantly that the planet hated him also. It was as though the world did not want him there, and that appealed to the Warsmith’s tactical sensibilities: he could use Damantyne’s environmental hostilities to his advantage. The small planetoid was situated in a crowded debris field of spinning rock, metal and ice that made it seem unfinished and hazardous from the start. The cruisers of the 51st Expedition that had brought the Warsmith and his Iron Warriors there had negotiated the field with difficulty. Although the planet had tolerable gravity and low-lying oxygen that made an outpost possible, the world was a swirling hellstorm of hurricane winds, lashing lightning and highly corrosive, acid cloud cover. Nothing lived there: nothing could live on the surface. The acidic atmosphere ate armour and ordnance like a hungry beast, rapidly stripping it away layer by layer in an effort to dissolve the flesh and soft tissue of the Legiones Astartes beneath. Even the most heavily armoured could only expect to survive mere minutes planetside.

This made vertical, high-speed insertions by Stormbird the sole way down, and that was only if the pilot was skilful enough to punch through the blinding cloud cover and down into one of the narrow, bottomless sinkholes that punctuated the rocky surface. Through some natural perversity of Damantyne’s early evolution, the planetary crust was riddled with air pockets, cavities and vast open spaces: a cavern system of staggering proportion and labyrinthine madness. Dantioch chose the very heart of this madness as the perfect location for his fortress, in a vaulted subterranean space so colossal it had its own primitive weather system.

‘From iron cometh strength. From strength cometh will. From will cometh faith. From faith cometh honour. From honour cometh iron. This is the Unbreakable Litany. May it forever be so. Dominum imperator ac ferrum aeturnum.’

The Iron Warriors were not the first to have made Lesser Damantyne their home. Below the surface, the lithic world was rich with life which had evolved in the deep and the dark. The only real threat to the Emperor’s chosen were the megacephalopods: monsters that stalked the caverns with their sinuous tentacles and could collapse their rubbery bulk through the most torturous of cave tunnels, creating new entrances with their titanium beaks. The Legiones Astartes’ first few years on Lesser Damantyne comprised a war of extermination on the xenos brutes, who seemed intent on tearing down any structures the IV Legion attempted to erect.

With the alien threat hunted to extinction, Dantioch began construction on his greatest work: the Schadenhold. While Iron Warriors had been battling chthonic monstrosities for planetary supremacy, Dantioch had had his Apothecaries and Mechanicum advisors hard at work creating the muscle that would build his mega-fortress. Iron Warriors laboratories perfected genestock slave soldiers, colloquially known as the Sons of Dantioch. Although the Warsmith’s face had been hidden for many years behind the iron of his impassive mask, it was plain to see on the gruesome hulks that had built the Schadenhold.

Taller and broader than a Space Marine, the genebreeds used the raw power of their monstrous bulk to mine, move and carve the stone from which the fortress was crafted. As well as physical prowess the slave soldiers had also inherited some of their gene-father’s cold, technical skill and the Schadenhold was more than a hastily constructed rock edifice: it was an enormous example of strategic art and siegecraft. With the fortress complete, the Sons of Dantioch found new roles in the maintenance and basic operation of the citadel and as close-quarters shock troops for the concentric kill-zones that layered the stronghold. It pleased the ailing Warsmith to be surrounded by brute examples of his own diminished youth and physical supremacy and, in turn, the slave soldiers honoured their gene-father with a simple, unshakable faith and loyalty: a fealty to the Emperor as father of the primarch and the primarch as father of their own.

‘I never tire of looking at it,’ a voice cut through the darkness behind. It was Zygmund Tarrasch, the Schadenhold’s Iron Palatine. Dantioch grunted, bringing an end to his mumbled devotions. Perhaps the Adamantiphract had sent for him, or perhaps the Iron Palatine had news.

The Space Marine joined his Warsmith at the rail and peered up at the magnificence of the fortress above. Although Dantioch was Warsmith and ranking officer among the thirty-strong Iron Warriors garrison left behind by the 51st Expeditionary Fleet, his condition had forced him to devolve responsibility for the fortress and its day-to-day defence to another. He’d chosen Tarrasch as Iron Palatine because he was a Space Marine of character and imagination. The cold logic of the IV Legion had served the Iron Warriors well, but even among their number, there were those whose contribution to compliance was more than just a conqueror’s thirst – those who appreciated the beauty of human endeavour and achievement, not just the tactical satisfaction of victory and the hot delight of battle.

‘Reminds me of the night sky,’ Tarrasch told his Warsmith. The Iron Palatine nodded to himself. ‘I miss the sky.’

Dantioch had never really thought of the Schadenhold in that way before. It was certainly a spectacle to behold and the final facet in the Warsmith’s ingenious design, for the two Iron Warriors were standing on a circular observation platform, situated around the steeple-point of the tallest of the fortress’ citadel towers. Only, the tower did not point towards the sky or even at the cavern ceiling: it pointed down at the cavern floor.

The Schadenhold had been hewn out of a gigantic, conical rock formation protruding from the roof of the cave. Dantioch had immediately appreciated the rock feature’s potential and committed his troops to the difficult and perilous task of carving out an inverse citadel. This hung upside down, but all chambers, stairwells and interior architecture were oriented skywards. The communications spires and steeple-scanners at the very bottom of the fortress were hanging several thousand metres above a vast naturally occurring lake of crude promethium, which bubbled up from the planet depths. At the very top of the stronghold were the dungeons and oubliettes, situated high in the cavern roof.

As Dantioch cast his weary eyes up the architecture, he came to appreciate the comparison the Iron Palatine was making. In the bleak darkness of the gargantuan cavern, the bright glare of the fortress searchlamps and soft pinpricks of illumination escaping the embrasure murder holes appeared like a constellation in a deep night sky. This was accentuated further by the phosphorescent patches of bacteria that feasted on the feldspar in the cavern roof and the dull glints reflecting off the shiny, pitch surface of oozing promethium below: each giving the appearance of ever more distant stars and galaxies.

‘You have news?’ Dantioch put to Tarrasch.

‘Yes, Warsmith,’ the Iron Palatine reported. The Space Marine was also in full armour and Legion colours, bar gauntlets and helmet, which he clutched in one arm. The vigilance – or paranoia, as some of the other Legions believed – of the Iron Warriors was well known and the Schadenhold and its garrison maintained a constant state of battle readiness. Tarrasch ran a hand across the top of his bald head. His dark eyes and flesh were the primarch’s own, a blessing to his sons. As the Warsmith turned and the light of the observation platform penetrated the slits of his iron mask, Tarrasch caught a glimpse of sallow, bloodshot eyes and wrinkled skin, discoloured with age.

‘And?’

‘The flagship Benthos hails us, my lord.’

‘So, the Fifty-First Expedition returns,’ Dantioch rasped. ‘We’ve had them on our relay scopes for days. Why the slow approach? Why no contact?’

‘They inform us that they’ve had difficulty traversing the debris field,’ the Iron Palatine reported.

‘And they hail us only now?’ Dantioch returned crabbily.

‘The Benthos accidentally struck one of our orbital mines,’ Tarrasch informed his master. Dantioch felt something like a smile curl behind the caged mouth of his faceplate.

‘An ominous beginning to their visit,’ the Warsmith said.

‘They’re holding station while they make repairs,’ the Iron Palatine added. ‘And they’re requesting coordinates for a high-speed insertion.’

‘Who requests them?’

‘Warsmith Krendl, my lord.’

‘Warsmith Krendl?’

Tarrasch nodded. ‘So it would appear.’

‘So Idriss Krendl now commands the Fourteenth Grand Company.’

‘Even under your command,’ Tarrasch said, ‘he was little more than raw ambition in polished ceramite.’

‘You might just get your night sky, my Iron Palatine.’

‘You think we might be rejoining the Legion, sir?’

For the longest time, Dantioch did not speak – the Warsmith lost in memory and musing. ‘I sincerely hope not,’ the Warsmith replied.

The answer seemed to vex the Iron Palatine. Dantioch laid a gauntleted hand on Tarrasch’s shoulder. ‘Send the Benthos coordinates for the Orphic Gate and have two of our Stormbirds waiting near the surface to escort our guests in.’

‘The Orphic Gate, sir? Surely the–’

‘Let’s treat the new Warsmith to some of the more dramatic depths and cave systems,’ Dantioch said. ‘A scenic route, if you will.’

‘As you wish, my lord.’

‘In the meantime, have Chaplain Zhnev, Colonel Kruishank, Venerable Vastopol and the cleric visiting from Greater Damantyne meet us in the Grand Reclusiam – we shall receive our guests there and hear from Olympian lips what our brothers have been doing in our absence…’

The Grand Reclusiam rang with both the wretched coughing of the Warsmith and the hammer strokes of his Chaplain. The chamber could easily accommodate the thirty-Iron Warrior garrison of the Schadenhold and their cult ceremonies and rituals. In reality – with the fortress in a state of constant high alert – there were ordinarily never more than ten legionaries in attendance during any one watch.

Dantioch and his Chaplain had not allowed such a restriction to affect the design and impact of the chamber. The Iron Warriors on Lesser Damantyne were few in number but great of heart, and they filled their chests with a soaring faith and loyalty to their Emperor. To this end the Grand Reclusiam was the largest chamber in the fortress, able in fact to serve the spiritual needs of ten times their number. From the vaulted stone ceiling hung a black forest of iron rods that dangled in the air above the centrum altar approach. These magnified the cult devotions, rogational and choral chanting of the small garrison to a booming majesty – all supported by the roar of the ceremonial forge at the elevated head of the chamber and the rhythmic strikes of hammer on iron against the anvil-altar.

The aisles on either side of the centrum consisted of a sculpted scene that ran the length of the Grand Reclusiam, rising with the flight of altar steps and terminating at the far wall. Towering above the chamber congregation, it depicted a crowded, uphill battle scene crafted from purest ferrum, with Iron Warriors heroes storming a barbaric enemy force that was holding the higher ground. The primitive giants were the titans and personifications of old: the bastions of myth and superstition, smashed upon the armour and IV Legion virtues of technology and reason. As well as serving as an inspiring diorama, the sculpture created the illusion that the congregation was at the heart of the battle – and there was nowhere else Dantioch’s men would rather be.

Beyond the sculpture on either side, the rocky walls of the chamber had been lined with polished iron sheeting, upon which engraved schematics and structural designs overlapped to create a fresco of the Emperor looking on proudly from the west and the primarch Perturabo from the east.

‘My lord, they approach,’ Tarrasch announced, and with difficulty the Warsmith came up off one devout knee.

Shadows and the sound of self-important steps filled the Reclusiam’s grand arch entrance. The Iron Palatine turned and stood by his Warsmith’s side, while Colonel Kruishank of the Ninth-Ward Angeloi Adamantiphracts hovered nearby in full dress uniform. His reverential beatings complete, Chaplain Zhnev uncoupled the relic-hammer from a slender, bionic replacement for his right arm and shoulder. He handed the crozius arcanum attachment to a hulking genestock slave whose responsibility it was to keep the ceremonial forge roaring. Zhnev made his solemn way down the steps, nodding to the only member of the congregation who was not part of the Schadenhold garrison: a cleric dressed in outlandish hooded robes of sapphire and gold.

‘They come,’ Zhnev murmured as the delegation marched into his Reclusiam and up the long approach to the altar steps.

Out front strode Idriss Krendl, the new Warsmith of the 14th Grand Company. The intensity of his Olympian glower was shattered by the scarring that cut up his face. Following, clad in the crimson robes of the Mechanicum, was an adept, whose own face was lost to the darkness of his hood. A sickly yellow light emanated from three bionic oculars that rotated like the objective lenses of a microscope. Beside him was a Son of Horus. The eyes on his shoulderplate and chest were unmistakable and his fine armour was of the palest green, framed in a midnight trim. His unsmiling face was swarthy and heavy of brow, as though in constant deliberation. Flanking them, and marching in time, were Krendl’s honour guard: a four-point escort of Legiones Astartes veterans in gleaming, grey Mark IV Maximus suits lined in gold and gaudiness.

‘Warsmith,’ Krendl greeted his former master coolly, at the foot of the altar steps.

A moment passed under the engraved eyes of the Emperor.

‘Krendl,’ Dantioch replied.

The Iron Warrior pursed his mangled lips but let the failure to acknowledge his new rank pass. ‘Greetings from the Fifty-First Expedition. May I introduce Adept Grachuss and Captain Hasdrubal Serapis of the Sons of Horus.’

Dantioch failed to acknowledge them also. The Warsmith gave a short cough and waved a gauntlet nonchalantly behind him.

‘You know my people,’ Dantioch said. Then added, ‘and yours.’

‘Indeed,’ Krendl said, raising a ragged eyebrow. ‘We bring you new orders from your primarch and your Warmaster.’

‘And what of the Emperor’s orders? You bring nothing across the stars from Him?’ Dantioch asked.

Krendl stiffened, then seemed to relax. He gave Serapis a glance over his armoured shoulder, but the captain’s expression didn’t change.

‘It has long been the Emperor’s wish that His favoured sons – under the supreme leadership of His most favoured, Horus Lupercal – guide the Great Crusade to its inevitable conclusion. Out here, amongst a cosmos conquered, the Warmaster’s word is law. Dantioch, you know this.’

‘Out here, in the darkness of the east, we hear disturbing rumours of this cosmos conquered and the dangers of the direction it is taking,’ Dantioch hissed. ‘Rector, come forth. You may speak.’

The cleric in sapphire and gold stepped forwards with apologetic hesitation. ‘This man,’ Dantioch explained, ‘has come to us from Greater Damantyne with grave news.’

The priest, at once scrutinised by the supermen, retreated into the depths of his hood. He fumbled his first words, before gaining his confidence.

‘My lords, I am your humble servant,’ the rector began. ‘This system is the terminus of a little-known trade route. Merchants and pirates, both alien and human, run wares between our hinterspace and the galactic core. In the last few months they have brought terrible news of consequence to the Emperor’s Angels here on Lesser Damantyne. A civil war that burns across the Imperium, the loss of entire Legions of Space Marines and the unthinkable – a son of the Emperor slain! This tragic intelligence alone would have been enough to bring me here: the Space Marines of this rock have long been our friends and allies in the battle with the green invader. Then, a dread piece of cognisance came to my ears and made them bleed for my Iron Warriors overlords. Olympia – their home world – the victim of rebellion and retribution. A planet razed to its rocky foundations, mountains aflame and a people enthralled. Olympia, I am heartbroken to report, is now no more than an underworld of chain and darkness, buried in rotten bodies and shame.’

‘I have heard enough of this,’ Serapis warned.

Krendl turned on the Warsmith. ‘Your primarch–’

Dantioch cut him off. ‘My primarch – I suspect – had a hand in these reported tragedies.’

‘You waste our time, Dantioch,’ Krendl said, his torn lips snarling around the hard consonants of the Warsmith’s name. ‘You and your men have been reassigned. Your custodianship here is ended. Your primarch and the Iron Warriors Legion fight for Horus Lupercal now, and all available troops and resources – including those formally under your superintendence – are required for the Warmaster’s march on ancient Terra.’

The Grand Reclusiam echoed with Krendl’s fierce honesty. For a moment nobody spoke, the shock of hearing such bold heresy in a holy place overwhelming the chamber.

‘End this madness!’ Chaplain Zhnev implored from the steps, the forge light flashing off his sable-silver plate.

‘Krendl, think about what you’re doing,’ Tarrasch added.

‘I am Warsmith now, Captain Tarrasch!’ Krendl exploded, ‘whatever rank you might hold in this benighted place, you will honour me with my rightful title.’

‘Honour what?’ Dantioch said. ‘The rewards of failure? You command simply because you lack the courage to be loyal.’

‘Don’t talk to me about failure and lack of courage, Dantioch. You excel in both,’ Krendl spat. He bobbed his head at Serapis, the splinters of frag still embedded in his face-flesh glinting in the chamber light. ‘That is how the great Barabas Dantioch came to be left guarding such a worthless deadrock. Lord Perturabo’s favourite here came to lose Krak Fiorina, Stratopolae and the fortress world of Gholghis to the Vulpa Straits hrud migration.’

As Krendl growled his narrative, Dantioch remembered the last, dark days on Gholghis. The hrud xenos filth. The infestation of the unseen. The waiting and the dying, as Dantioch’s garrison turned to dust and bones, their armour rusting, bolters jamming and fortress crumbling about them. Only then, after the intense entropic field created by the migratory hrud swarms had aged stone and flesh to ruin, did the rachidian beasts creep out of every nook and crevice to attack, stabbing and slicing with their venomous claws.

Most of all, Dantioch remembered waiting for the Stormbird to lift the survivors out of the remains of Gholghis: Sergeant Zolan, Vastopol the warrior-poet and Techmarine Tavarre. Zolan’s hearts stopped beating aboard the Stormbird, minutes after extraction. Tavarre died of old age in the cruiser infirmary, just before reaching Lesser Damantyne. Vastopol and the Warsmith had considered themselves comparatively fortunate, but both had been left crippled with their aged, superhuman bodies.

‘He then thought it wise,’ Krendl continued with acidic disdain, ‘to question his primarch’s prosecution of the hrud extermination campaign. No doubt as a way to excuse his loss of half a Grand Company, rather than laying the blame where it really belonged – the Emperor’s bungled attempt at galactic conquest and his own failed part in that. The Fourth Legion spread out across the stars. A myriad of tiny garrisons holding a tattered compliance together in the wake of a blind crusade. Our once proud Iron Warriors, reduced to planetary turnkeys.’

‘The primarch was wrong,’ Dantioch said, shaking his iron mask. ‘The extermination campaign prompted the migration rather than ending it. Perturabo claims the hrud cleansed from the galaxy but, if that is the case, what is quietly wiping out compliant worlds on the Koranado Drift?’

The new Warsmith ignored him.

‘You disappoint and disgust him,’ Krendl told Dantioch. ‘Your own primarch. Your weakness offends him. Your vulnerability is an affront to his genetic heritage. We all have scars but it is you he cannot bear to look upon. Is that why you adopted the mask?’ Krendl smiled his derision. ‘Pathetic. You’re an insult to nature and the laws that govern the galaxy – the strong survive, the feeble die away. Why did you not crawl off and die, Dantioch? Why hang on, haunting the rest of us like a bad memory?’

‘If I’m so objectionable, what is it that you and the primarch want with me?’

‘Nothing, cripple. I doubt you would live long enough to reach the rendezvous. Perturabo demands his Iron Warriors – all his true sons – for the Warmaster’s offensive. Horus will take us to the very walls of the Imperial Palace, where the Emperor’s fanciful fortifications will be put to the test of our mettle and history will be made.’

‘The Emperor has long grown distracted in His studies on ancient Terra,’ Hasdrubal Serapis insisted with venom. ‘The Imperium has no need of the councils, polity and bureaucracy He has created in His reclusion. We need leadership, a Great Crusade of meaning and purpose. The Emperor is no longer worthy to guide humanity in the next stage of its natural dominion over the galaxy. His son, Horus Lupercal, has proved himself worthy of the task.’

‘Warsmith Krendl,’ Zhnev said, blanking out the Son of Horus and taking several dangerous steps forwards. ‘If you stand by and do nothing, while the Warmaster plots patricide and pours poison in his brother primarch’s ears, then you too plot a patricide of your own. Perturabo is our primarch. We must make our noble lord see the error of his judgement – not reinforce it with our unquestioned compliance.’

‘Lord Perturabo is your primarch, indeed. Is it so difficult to obey your primarch’s order?’ Serapis marvelled at the Iron Warriors. ‘Or does mutinous Olympian blood still burn in your veins? Krendl, to have your home world rebel in your absence is embarrassment enough. I trust you will not allow the same to happen amongst members of your own Legion.’

‘Save it, pontificator,’ Krendl snapped at the Chaplain. ‘I have heard the arguments. Soon the Legion will have little use for you and your kind.’ The Warsmith turned on the silent, seething Dantioch. ‘You will surrender command of this fortress and its troops to me immediately.’

A moment of cool fury passed between the two Iron Warriors.

‘And if I refuse?’

‘Then you and your men will be treated as traitors to the primarch and his Warmaster,’ Krendl promised.

‘Like you and your Cthonian friend are to His majesty, the Emperor?’

‘Your stronghold will be pounded to dust and traitors with it,’ Krendl told him.

Dantioch turned and presented the grim iron of his masked face to Colonel Kruishank, Chaplain Zhnev and his Iron Palatine, Zygmund Tarrasch. Their faces were equally grim. Allowing his eyes to linger for a second on the visiting rector, Barabas Dantioch returned his gaze to his maniacal opposite. Krendl was flushed with fear and fire. Serapis merely watched: a distant observer – the puppet master with strings of his own. Adept Grachuss gurgled rhythmically and rotated his tri-ocular, the lenses zeroing in on Dantioch. The Warsmith’s honour guard stood as statues: their bolters ready, their barrels on the custodians of the Schadenhold.

‘Vastopol,’ Dantioch called. ‘What do you think?’

A vox-roar boomed around the chamber, causing the iron rods suspended above the Reclusiam to tremble and dance. Something large and ungainly moved amongst the giant iron sculptures of the aisle diorama. The most primitive of preservation instincts caused Krendl and his honour guard to spin around in shock. One of the sculptures had come to life. Seeming small in the choreographed throng of titan attackers, the assailant’s bulk and breadth swiftly grew as it advanced and towered over the astounded Iron Warriors.

The legionaries were presented with one of their own. A Dreadnought. A brooding metal monster, as broad as it was tall and set with chunky weaponry. The Venerable Vastopol: with his Warsmith, the last surviving Iron Warriors of the Gholghis fortress world. Wracked with horrendous injury and premature age, Dantioch had had the Space Marine entombed in Dreadnought armour, so that the warrior might continue to serve and keep the chronicles of the company alive. The war machine had been hastily sprayed black in order to blend in with the surrounding diorama and with movement the fresh paint left a black drizzle behind the beast.

As the wall of ceramite and adamantium came at them, Krendl’s armed escorts tried to bring their bolters to bear. The Venerable Vastopol’s gaping twin autocannons were already loaded, primed and aimed right at them. The weapons crashed, chugging explosive fire at the two rearguard Space Marines and filling the chamber with the unbearable cacophony of battle. At such close range, the heavy weapon reduced the two warriors to thrashing blurs of blood and shattered armour.

With more grace and coordination than would have been thought possible in the hulking machine, the charging Dreadnought turned and smashed a third Iron Warrior guard into the opposite aisle with a power claw-appendaged shoulder. The Space Marine’s glorious Maximus suit crumpled and the warrior within could be heard screaming as bones snapped and organs ruptured. With Krendl and Serapis backing for cover, silent pistols drawn, and the Mechanicum adept knocked to the Reclusiam floor, the Warsmith’s remaining honour guard flung himself at the Dreadnought. Lifting his bolter above his head, the Iron Warrior blasted the Venerable Vastopol’s armoured womb-tomb with firepower.

Sparks showered from the Dreadnought’s adamantium shell. Vastopol gunned the chainfist bayonet that underslung his autocannons. Slashing at the Iron Warrior with the barbed nightmare, the war machine chewed up the Space Marine’s weapon before opening up his armour from the jaw to the navel. With chest cavity and abdomen spilling their contents out through the ragged gash, the honour guard dropped to his knees and died. Having come away from the wall of sculpture, the Dreadnought had allowed the crushed legionary he’d pinned to the merciless iron to thunk to the ground. Lifting a huge metal foot, Vastopol stamped down on the Iron Warrior’s helmet, spattering the polished stone with brain matter and putting the mauled Space Marine out of his howling misery.

As Dantioch came forwards, flanked by Tarrasch and Zhnev on one side and the rector and colonel on the other, Krendl and the Son of Horus retreated, the rage and horror evident on their contorted faces. Both Legiones Astartes officers were backing step by step towards the Grand Reclusiam entrance, their pistols aimed at the unarmed Warsmith and his heavily armed Dreadnought. Krendl and Serapis were politicians, however, and knew that their best chance of escaping the fortress alive lay in their threats rather than their pistols.

The Venerable Vastopol plucked Grachuss from the floor with the chisel-point digits of his power claw, holding the Mechanicum adept by the temples and hooded crown like an infant’s doll. The sickly yellow lenses of the tech-priest’s tri-ocular revolved in panic while his respiratory pipes bubbled furiously.

‘I fear Warsmith Krendl brought you with instructions to catalogue our fortifications,’ Dantioch addressed the suspended Grachuss, ‘so that you might return with stories of our siege capability. A greater Warsmith than he would have done that himself, of course. Vastopol here was the chronicler for our company – he’s not much of a talker now. Vastopol,’ Dantioch called. ‘How does Adept Grachuss’ story end?’

The Dreadnought’s power claw attachment began to revolve at the wrist, wrenching the tech-priest’s hooded head clean from his spinning shoulders. His body struck the altar steps, a cocktail of blood and ichor pumping from the ragged neck stump.

‘Insanity!’ Krendl bawled at the advancing Dantioch. ‘You’re dead!’ The threats had begun.

‘Captain Krendl,’ Dantioch hissed. ‘This is an Iron Warriors stronghold. It does not, nor will it ever, serve the renegade Warmaster. My garrison and I are loyal to the Emperor. We will not share in your damnation.’ The cold pride that afflicted the Legion, as well as their Iron father, glinted in Dantioch’s cloudy eyes. ‘It seems I have one last opportunity to prove my worthiness to the primarch. I will not fail him this time. The Schadenhold will never fall. Do you hear me, Idriss? This stronghold and the men that defend it will never be yours. The Iron Warriors on Lesser Damantyne fight for their Emperor and they fight for me. You will taste failure and it will be your turn to return to the primarch’s wrath. Now run, you cur. Back to your renegade fleet and take this heretic dog with you.’

Stepping back through the archway of the Grand Reclusiam with a wary Serapis, the wide-eyed Krendl thrust his pistol behind him and then back at the Iron Warriors and their Dreadnought.

‘All of this’ – Krendl waved the muzzle of the bolt pistol around – ‘dust in a day. You hear, Dantioch? Dust in a day!’

‘I dare you to try,’ Dantioch roared, but his challenge dissolved into raucous coughing. As the Warsmith fell to his armoured knees with wheezing exertion, Tarrasch grabbed Dantioch’s arm. Patting the Iron Palatine’s ceramite, the Warsmith caught his breath. Tarrasch let him go but the exhausted Iron Warrior commander remained kneeling and head bowed. Slowly he turned to the hooded rector.

‘So,’ the cleric said, ‘you hear it for yourself, straight from traitor lips. Our brothers’ hearts steeped in warped treason.’ The rector reached inside the rich material of his robes. The soft whine of the displacer field – all but imperceptible before – died down through the frequencies, unmasking the priest and revealing his true dimensions. As the cleric lowered his hood, the reality about the huge figure fell out of focus for a moment before reassuming a searing clarity.

Their minds unclouded, the Schadenholders beheld a brother Space Marine: his ornate plate of the deepest blue. He held a plumed helmet under one arm and an ornate gladius sat in a sheath across his thigh. His surcoat robes hung from the resplendent flourishes of his artificer armour, with battle honours and commendations dripping from his glorious plate. The symbol on his right shoulder identified him as an Ultramarine; the bejewelled Crux Aureas crafted into his left as legionary champion, Tetrarch of Ultramar and honour guard to Roboute Guilliman himself.

‘You played your part well, Tetrarch Nicodemus. Are the Ultramarines usually given to such theatricality?’ Dantioch asked.

‘No, my lord. We are not,’ the champion answered, his cropped hair and fair patrician looks the mark of Ultramar’s warrior elite. ‘But these are uncommon times and they call for tactics uncommon.’

‘Let me be candid, Ultramarine. When you arrived on Lesser Damantyne with your slurs and distant intelligence, I almost had Vastopol blow you from the Schadenhold’s battlements.’ The Warsmith came up from his knees, once again with the help of Tarrasch. The Tetrarch shot him hard eyes, one of which was encircled by a neat tattoo of his Legion symbol.

‘It is not easy for an Iron Warrior to hear of his brothers’ weakness,’ Dantioch continued. ‘In that, even Idriss Krendl and I agree. You slandered my father primarch and besmirched the Fourth Legion with accusations of rebellion, heresy and murder. We’ve allowed your insults to go unpunished. You’ve allowed us the luxury of hearing kindred treason first-hand. Our accord is sealed in truth. What now would Roboute Guilliman have of us?’

Tauro Nicodemus looked about the gathering. Tarrasch and Zhnev’s bleak pride matched their Warsmith’s own; the Venerable Vastopol existed only to fight and Colonel Kruishank’s default loyalty was plain to see on his face – allegiance to the Emperor offering him solace in the face of calamity.

‘Nothing you haven’t freely given already,’ Nicodemus insisted. ‘Deny the Warmaster resource and reinforcement. Hold your ground for as long as you can. The efforts of a faithful few could slow the traitor advance. Minutes. Days. Months. Anything, to give the Emperor time to fortify Terra for the coming storm and for my lord to cut through the confusion Horus has sown and prepare a loyalist response.’

‘If we are to give ourselves for this, level Iron Warrior against Iron Warrior, then it would be good to know that Guilliman has a strategy,’ said Dantioch.

‘Yes, my lord. As always, Lord Guilliman has a plan,’ the Ultramarines champion told him evenly.

As the congregation went to leave the blood-spattered Grand Reclusiam, Dantioch asked, ‘Nicodemus?’

‘Yes, Warsmith?’

‘Why me?’

‘Lord Guilliman knows of your art and expertise in the field of siegecraft. He suspects these skills will be sorely needed.’

‘He could count on my skill but what of my loyalty?’ Dantioch pressed. ‘After all, my Legion has been found wanting in its faith.’

‘You spoke candidly before, my lord. Might I be allowed to do the same?’

Dantioch nodded.

‘The Warmaster could exploit the weakness of your primarch’s pride,’ the Tetrarch explained cautiously. ‘Your history with Perturabo is no secret. Lord Guilliman feels he too can rely on this same weakness in you.’

Once again, the Warsmith nodded. To Nicodemus and to himself.

I was there. On that tiny world, in a forgotten system, in a distant corner of the galaxy, where a mighty blow was struck against the renegade Warmaster and his alliance of the lost and damned. There, on Lesser Damantyne. I was among the few, who stood against many. The brother who spilled his brothers’ blood. The son who betrayed his wayward father’s word. And that word was… heresy.

For a bloody day beyond an ancient Terran year we fought. Olympians all. Iron Warriors answering the call of their primarch and Emperor. The cold eyes of both watching from afar. Judging. Expecting. Willing their Iron Warriors on like absentee gods drawn to mortal plight by the reek of battle: the unmistakable stench of blood and burning.

I was there when Warsmith Krendl visited upon us a swarm of Stormbirds. Disgorged from the fat cruiser Benthos and heavily laden with troops and ordnance, the aircraft blotted out the stars and fell upon our world like a flock of winged thunderbolts. Blasting through the thick cloud of Damantyne’s hostile surface, the Stormbirds would have rocketed through the cave systems and disgorged their own brand of horror on our readying position. Warsmith Dantioch had ordered the Orphic Gate collapsed mere hours before, however, and all the flock found there was rock and destruction, as, one after another, they struck the planet surface.

I was there when the mighty god-machines of the Legio Argentum, denied entrance to the gate also, had to stride through the acid hellstorms of Lesser Damantyne. Like blind, tormented behemoths they tumbled and crashed through the squalls and cyclones, their armoured shells rust-riddled and giant automotive systems eaten away. The infamous Omnia Victrum, the sunderer of a hundred worlds, was one of three flash-flayed war machines that managed to stumble to a sinkhole colossal enough to admit their dimensions. And there the screaming hordes that crewed the god-machines were confronted with the unfathomable labyrinth of the planet’s gargantuan cave system and the reality that they might be lost for eternity in the deep and the dark.

I was there when Warsmith Dantioch ordered the giant ground-pumps to life and the lake of crude promethium burst its banks, flooding the floor of our huge cavern-home with a raging, black ichor. I watched as the Nadir-Maru Fourth Juntarians and more bombardment cannon than a man could count were drowned in a deluge of oil and death. I roared my dismay as columns of my traitor brethren marched on the pumps through the settling shallows, to sabotage the great machinery. I roared my delight when my Warsmith ordered the slick surface of the crude promethium ignited about them. A blaze so bright that it not only roasted the Iron Warriors within their plate but also brought light to the cavern that the depths had never known.

I was on the Schadenhold’s battlements as our own cannon and artillery placements reduced Warsmith Krendl’s reserve Stormbirds to fireballs of wreckage. I saw the small armies they landed on our keeps and towers fall to their deaths like rain from our inverse architecture. I fought with the Sons of Dantioch – those genebred hulks of monstrous proportion – as they tore Nadir-Maru Fourth Juntarians limb from limb in the kill-zones and courtyards. I walked amongst Colonel Kruishank’s Ninth-Ward Angeloi Adamantiphracts as their disciplined las-fire lit up the ramparts and cut their traitor opposites to smouldering shreds. I looked down on a fortress swamped in carnage, where you could not walk for bodies and could not breathe for the blood that lay hanging in the air like a murderous fog.

Finally, I fought in the tight corridors and dread architecture of the Warsmith’s design. Took life on an obscene scale, face to face with my Iron Warriors brethren. Murdered in the Emperor’s name and matched the cold certainty of my brothers’ desire. Killed with the same chill logic and fire in my belly as my enemy had for me. Measured my might in the blood of traitors whose might should have measured my own. I was there. In the Schadenhold. On Lesser Damantyne. Where few stood against many and, amongst the fratricidal nightmare of battle, brothers bled and heresy found its form.

The Schadenhold shook.

Dust rained from the low ceiling and grit danced on the dungeon floor. The subterranean blockhouse seared with gunfire. Its hoarse boom split the ear and the flash of hot muzzles dazzled the eye. Barabas Dantioch had supreme confidence in his nightmare stronghold’s design. He’d told Idriss Krendl that the Schadenhold would never be his. Even at this stage – three hundred and sixty-six ancient Terran days into the murderous siege – he could count on the fortress keeping his word. With traitor Titans and Mechanicum war machines haunting the caverns, swarms of Stormbirds strafing the citadel towers and enemy legionaries storming its helter-skelter battlements, he knew the brute logic of the Schadenhold’s design and the rock from which that inexorability had been crafted would not let him down. Dantioch’s tactical genius extended far beyond the unrelenting architecture of the stronghold exterior: any Warsmith worth their rocksalt, regardless of the boasts they might make, planned for the inevitability of failure. A life lived under siege had taught the Iron Warriors that enemies were not to be underestimated and that all fortresses fall – sooner or later. A Warsmith’s gift was to make this eventuality as late as possible. The blockhouse was a perfect example of the principle in action.

Throughout the citadel, on every level and in every quarter, there was a blockhouse chamber. A fallback position for the Iron Warriors garrison within: each bolthole was equipped with its own secreted supplies of food, water and ammunition, as well as rudimentary medical and communications equipment. The chambers themselves were dens of devious geography, every one with its own unique design and layout. No lethal opportunity had been left unexploited and every fire arc and angle had been measured to perfection. In each the Warsmith had created a crenellated deathtrap of choke points, hide sites and kill-spots that doubled as training facilities for the Legiones Astartes warriors during the simpler, silent times of peace.

The blockhouses had not only provided Dantioch’s hard-pressed garrison with respite and supplies but had also frustrated any hopes Warsmith Krendl might have had of a swift victory, once his invading force had breached the citadel’s considerable exterior defences. Fighting inside the Schadenhold had been as bloody as the slaughter on the battlements beyond. The fortress stank of hot metal and swift death. Every wall was a bolt-hammered vista of splatter and gore, every chamber carpeted with armoured bodies.

Kneeling down on one rusted knee, Dantioch mused over a crumpled, blood-spotted pile of schematics. The Schadenhold diagrams covered the floor of the embrasure platform and were stained and scratched with ink, Dantioch’s strategic annotations almost obscuring the detail of the stronghold’s grand design. About the Warsmith, armoured feet shuffled and the air sang with the relentless crash of firing mechanisms. Nearby slumped an Angeloi Adamantiphract, breathing through a ragged hole in his chest, while another bled away his life as an Imperial Army chirurgeon fussed over his missing arm. The edges of the schemata vellum soaked up the growing pool, but the Warsmith – feathered quill to the mouth grate of his mask – was so involved in his three-dimensional visualisation of the two-dimensional prints, that he barely noticed.

‘Have Squad Secundus fall back to the hold point on the floor above, they’re about to be cut off,’ Dantioch ordered.

While Adamantiphracts lanced the long corridor approach to the blockhouse with broad-beam las-fire from the flared barrels of their carbines, the ranking Angeloi Adamantiphract officer in the blockhouse – Lieutenant Cristofori – carried a useless, mangled arm in a sling and doubled as Dantioch’s tactical and communications dispatch. Operating a small but robust vox-bank, set in the embrasure wall, Cristofori was the Warsmith’s eyes and ears about the Schadenhold. While the lieutenant conveyed the order through a bulky vox-receiver, he filtered the flood of reports coming in from the vox-links of individual Iron Warriors and the comms stations of different blockhouses. Replacing the receiver, he put a finger to his headset and nodded.

‘Sir, Nine-Thirteen reports enemy reinforcements on the hangar deck,’ the lieutenant relayed.

‘Legiones Astartes?’ Dantioch asked. It would be hard to believe. If the bodies were anything to go by, Krendl must have committed a full demi-Grand Company by now. The Schadenhold was swarming with Perturabo’s progeny.

‘Imperial Army, my lord. Looks like foot contingents of the Bi-Nyssal Equerries.’

Dantioch allowed himself a hidden smile. New blood. It seemed that Krendl had been reinforced. This both pleased and vexed the Warsmith. Krendl had been sent to acquire reinforcements for the primarch and Horus Lupercal, not expend the Warmaster’s valuable manpower. That would be embarrassing enough. The problem with reinforcement was that it meant that Krendl had been outfitted to see the siege through to the end. Horus could not allow word of Lesser Damantyne’s resistance and the loyalty of the Iron Warriors to reach other Legions. The end was near.

‘Nine-Thirteen have been forced back to the fuel depot. Awaiting orders,’ Cristofori added.

Dantioch grunted. ‘Tell the ranking wardsman that he has permission to use the Nine-Thirteen’s remaining detonators on the promethium tanks.’ The Warsmith slashed a cross through the Schadenhold’s Stormbird hangars on the floor schematic. ‘We won’t be needing them. Let’s deny our enemy also. Nine-Thirteen can fall back by squads to this maintenance opening,’ he continued, stabbing the quill point through the vellum. ‘Then on to Sergeant Asquetal in the North-Four blockhouse.’

‘Sir, also – blockhouses South-Two and East-Three report dwindling supplies of ammunition.’

‘Collapse all of our people on levels two and three back to Colonel Kruishank’s hold point in the Hub,’ Dantioch grizzled above the gunfire.

‘The colonel’s dead, sir.’

‘What?’

‘Colonel Kruishank is dead, sir.’

‘Then Captain Galliop, damn it! They still have some limited supplies.’

‘Yes, my lord,’ Cristofori said unfazed and began relaying the Warsmith’s orders.

This had been the order of things for as long as the Schadenholders could remember: battle coordinated a hair’s breadth under the fury of bolt-fire. Whereas the elevated embrasure was intended to provide space for such luxury, below on the chamber floor, Iron Warriors, Adamantiphracts and gene-stock ogres fought with adrenaline-fuelled frenzy. Each knew that his life depended upon the relentless taking of others and nowhere was this more evident than at the gauntlet-entrance to the blockhouse. The walls about the opening had lost their angularity and harsh edges. The perpetual assault of bolt-rounds and las-fire had chewed up the stone and returned the entrance to the rocky, cavernous irregularity of the cave system beyond. From the ceiling rained the gore of those who had failed to breach the chamber; the floor underneath was a mound of gunfire-shredded bodies and trampled armour.

At the centre of the blockhouse stood the Venerable Vastopol. The Dreadnought was too large to take advantage of much of the architectural cover and instead had stood its ground like a machine possessed, hammering anything advancing with the glowing barrels of its raging autocannons. The war machine had borne the brunt of the blockhouse defence; however, the reinforced plate of its sarcophagus body was a sizzling, bolt-punctured mess. The monstrous machine stood in a pool of its own hydraulic fluid and showered sparks from one of its clunky legs. The muzzle of its lower cannon barrel had been shorn off and the mangled chainfist bayonet below hung in a serrated tangle. About the Dreadnought, firing from loopholes and crescent alcoves in merlon walls, were its superhuman kindred. Experts in the art of encumbrance, the Legiones Astartes prided themselves on their beleaguered worth: every defending Iron Warrior had to slay so many of his traitor brothers in order to satisfy the Warsmith’s equations; algebraic notations calculated in time and blood.

‘Missile launcher!’ Tarrasch yelled from the chamber floor. As legionaries and Adamantiphracts retracted barrels and slammed their backs into protective scenery, the warhead rocketed up the passage and into the blockhouse. Striking a merlon wall the missile exploded, showering razor frag across the heads of hidden defenders.

Angeloi Adamantiphract marksmanship seared the length of the approach, hammering the plate of storming Iron Warriors and cutting up their Imperial Army opposites, las-fodder from the expeditionary fleet’s Nadir-Maru Fourth Juntarians. Those that made the gauntlet-entrance faced a storm of their own: disciplined, ammunition-conserving blasts from the barrels of garrison battle-brothers. Armoured Legiones Astartes besiegers who breached the chamber dived out of the path of withering autocannon fire and las-streams and peeled off left and right, desperate for cover. Their desire to establish a foothold in the blockhouse took them straight into the reach of the Iron Palatine and his assault troops.

The Sons of Dantioch, pumped to obscenity with hormones and fervent loyalty, came at the interlopers with the mammoth tools of their trade – diamantine-tip hammers, serrated shovels and clawpicks. If that wasn’t enough of a nightmare for the blockhouse breachers, the Iron Palatine, Chaplain Zhnev and the Ultramarine Tauro Nicodemus were leading the charge.

An Iron Warriors invader broke from a cannon-mauled throng, a yellow and black-striped blur. With his Mark IV plate alive with ricochets, the brute pushed himself away from one wall and then the other before tumbling into a messy roll. He was followed by two other traitors, who blazed away with their bolters, and a trail of opportunistic Juntarians.

Genebred hulks descended upon the spearheading Space Marine, their picks and shovels sparking off his savaged ceramite. The second turned his wild bolter straight on Nicodemus, the azure glint of the Ultramarine’s armour instantly attracting the warrior’s attention. Zhnev wasted no time with the third, firing the pistons in his replacement shoulder. His hammer-fashioned crozius arcanum swung through the air in an unpredictable, pendular-jointed arc, crashing past the Iron Warrior’s helmet. Cleaving through armour plating and bone where the Space Marine’s neck met his shoulder, the Iron Warriors Chaplain fired his pistons again, swiftly retracting the sacred relic. Spinning with the pendular motion of the crozius, Zhnev howled his fury before striking the heretic’s helmet from his body.

Tarrasch plugged the resulting bloodhaze with alternate rounds from each of his bolt pistols, cutting down the Nadir-Maru troopers streaming in through the gauntlet-entrance. Dark, shiny faces beneath extravagant turbans bared bleach-white teeth at the Iron Palatine. The former Iron Warriors captain barked directions to the Angeloi Adamantiphract warriors at the embrasure walls and the Sons of Dantioch below to bring down the Juntarians in their own inimical ways.

With an enemy legionary pounding across the killing ground at him, Brother Nicodemus of Ultramar took several practice sweeps with the gleaming blade of his gladius. On his other arm he supported the weight of a huge storm shield. The shield was as tall as the Ultramarine – a sub-rectangular plate, the curved, semi-cylindrical surface of which crackled with a protective energy field. The champion clutched it to his side like an airlock bulkhead.

Dantioch’s Iron Warriors were savage hand-to-hand fighters – equals of the unstoppable World Eaters or the Blood Angels’ loyal fervour. The Iron Warriors were deadlier still when they were cornered: cold machines of dread and determination. None had the martial grace or unadulterated skill with a blade that Nicodemus exhibited. Nicodemus batted the Iron Warrior’s bolter aside with the weight of the sizzling shield before shearing through the weapon with a murderous downward cut of his gladius. Before the dazed Iron Warrior could snatch a hammer from his belt the Ultramarine had flashed the gladius back and forth across his opponent’s armour. The blade sang through the Iron Warrior’s chestplate and helmet, spraying the chamber with Olympian blood.

Nearby, the Space Marine that had spearheaded the daring assault broke free of the geneslave mob. A chainaxe screamed from the scrum of hulking bodies. The Iron Warrior burst from the prison of muscular flesh, sweeping heads and elephantine limbs from the Sons of Dantioch in his path. Chaplain Zhnev’s crozius sang through the air on its pendular attachment, smashing the motorised axehead into pieces. The Iron Warrior responded immediately by plunging his gauntlet into a holster and drawing a bolt pistol. Before he could end the Chaplain, Tarrasch hammered the heretic with a feverish hail of bolts from his own pistols. The angle was hastily improvised and no one round found its way through the Maximus suit plating. The onslaught had cut the Space Marine’s escape dead, however, and the genestock hulks – hungry for a rematch – seized the Iron Warrior. One monster got a bulging arm around the legionary’s armoured neck while two others snatched an arm each. The ogres gave a brutal heave on the traitor’s limbs and with a sickening crack and sudden release, the suit seals and the body within tore apart.

On the opposite side of the gauntlet-entrance the ogres’ genestock brothers were murdering Nadir-Maru Juntarians with equal delight. As las-fusillades and dark faces parted, two more armoured figures were revealed. Their armour was busy with chevron designs and yellow striping, and on their backs – either side of their suit packs – were a pair of brass promethium canisters. Stomping up through the Juntarians, the Iron Warriors presented their chunky nozzles, the scorched, dribbling muzzle of each weapon situated at the end of a long firepole.

Tarrasch turned to the blockhouse with just two words on his thin lips: ‘Take cover!’

The blast wave from the erupting inferno knocked the Iron Palatine from his armoured feet. In the confines of the chamber, the heavy flamers did their worst. Everything became roasting heat and smoke, the ink-blot obscurity punctuated by blinding streams of pressurised promethium. As gouts of destruction felt their fiery way through the defensive architecture, sound and smell dominated. Above the boom of the Iron Warriors’ firepoles, the chatter of bolters could still be heard. Above this was the strangled shrieking of men aflame: Angeloi, genebreeds and Nadir-Maruvians all. Scorched within their suits, Iron Warriors stumbled through the firestorm, searching for respite.

It could have been a bolt-round, fired blindly into the darkness and fury, or perhaps a stream from the flared muzzle of a lascarbine or laspistol. Most likely it was a blast from the Venerable Vastopol’s raging autocannons, but something hit one of the brass fuel canisters. A succession of explosions rippled through the thick smoke, knocking all that still lived in the chamber onto their backs. Flame rolled across ceiling and floor; through the tactical arrangement of the blockhouse; through the gauntlet entrance and down the crowded passage beyond.

Dantioch’s gauntlet grabbed the top of the platform wall like a grapnel. The Warsmith heaved himself to unsteady feet in the swirling smoke, stamping out the small fire that was his burning schematics. Cristofori was dead, as well as the injured Adamantiphract and his chirurgeon. As the smoke began to clear, Dantioch took in the blockhouse floor. There were bodies everywhere, both loyal and traitor: a carpet of scorched armour and charred flesh. Similar destruction extended up the passage to the gauntlet entrance. There was movement, however, and it wouldn’t take their attackers long to organise an assault to capitalise on the inferno.

Leaning against the wall for support, the Warsmith came down the embrasure steps.

‘Tarrasch!’ Dantioch called. From the soot and smaze came sudden movement.

‘Sir,’ came the Iron Palatine’s reply. The explosion had knocked the Iron Warrior senseless into a wall. His words were shaky but the Space Marine was alive.

‘It’s over. We are compromised. Enemy forces imminent. Get the living to their feet.’

‘Yes, my lord.’

As Tarrasch stumbled through the carnage, searching for survivors, Dantioch ran his gauntlets along the wall. The Warsmith began to knock experimentally against the stone as he slouched along its expanse. Satisfied, he stopped and turned on the hulking Dreadnought that still stood sentinel in the middle of the blockhouse, autocannons at the ready.

‘Vastopol, are you still with us, my friend?’ the Warsmith asked.

In answer the Dreadnought just burned. The explosions had done little to the machine but scorch its adamantium and set fire to the scrolls, banners and decorative flourishes that adorned the bulky form.

‘Don’t be like that,’ Dantioch said. ‘It’s over. We could fight to the last man, but what would that achieve?’

Still the Dreadnought stood immobile.

‘This isn’t Gholghis,’ Dantioch told his battle-brother. ‘It is the prerogative of the Warsmith when to war and when not to. We are beaten here. It is time to take the war elsewhere. Now get over here and help me – you may still have a story to tell.’

As the Venerable Vastopol dragged its mangled and sparking leg across the bodies of the blockhouse floor, Tarrasch worked his way through the dead and dying. The Angeloi were all dead, as were the remaining Sons of Dantioch. The raging inferno had done for both and only a handful of legionaries, protected from the worst of the explosion by their battleplate, had survived the catastrophic accident.

‘Enemy advancing!’ Tarrasch called from the gauntlet entrance.

‘Come on, come on!’ Dantioch urged Space Marines emerging from the smoke and destruction.

Tauro Nicodemus was suddenly beside him, his immaculate armour soot-stained and blood-spattered.

‘I thought this was the fallback position,’ the Tetrarch said. The Ultramarine had accepted that he was to die there, taking as many traitor lives with him as he was able.

‘Game’s not over,’ Dantioch said. ‘Gather your weapons.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘Through this wall.’

Dantioch knocked on a section of the blockhouse wall. A deliberate, architectural weak point. ‘Vastopol.’

The Dreadnought limped at the wall, crashing through the masonry with one of its chunky shoulders. Rock and dust fell about the war machine. Extracting itself from the ragged aperture, Vastopol stood back to admit the surviving Space Marines: the Warsmith, the Iron Palatine, Brother-Sergeant Ingoldt, Brothers Toledo and Baubistra, the Ultramarine Nicodemus and Chaplain Zhnev. Beyond, a broad set of steep, rocky stairs extended, running parallel with the wall and reaching up into the Schadenhold’s cavernous ceiling foundations. With the legionaries striding up ahead, the Venerable Vastopol negotiated the steps with difficulty, its mangled leg a handicap on the shambling ascent.

The stairwell rumbled and shook.

‘What was that?’ Tarrasch called. For a moment nobody answered in the darkness. Then a quake rolled through the stone about them. The steps shook under their feet and fractures split the stairwell’s rough roof and walls.

‘It’s Omnia Victrum,’ Dantioch said. ‘Krendl finally has his Titans in position.’ The Warsmith tried to picture the acid-scarred colossi outside, the remaining war machines of the Legio Argentum. Omnia Victrum was an Imperator-class Titan. A mountain of rust-eaten armour, striding across the cavern like a vengeful god. At its sides it mounted weaponry of titanic proportion: monstrous instruments of destruction, capable of razing cities and felling enemy god-machines. Upon its hunched back sat a small city of its own: a Titanscape of corroded steeples, towers and platforms. A base of operations and a mobile barracks of waiting reinforcements.

‘She’s softening up the south face of the Schadenhold with her cannons and turbo-lasers before landing troops.’ The Imperator was huge and certainly tall enough to stand beside and beneath the Iron Warriors citadel. It could disgorge a siege-ending horde of traitor Iron Warriors and reinforcement foot contingents of the Bi-Nyssal Equerries. As fresh blood rampaged through the south section of the Schadenhold, joining Krendl and his depleted forces in the north, loyalist Iron Warriors resistance would be overrun and crushed. Even Dantioch’s ingenious blockhouse fallbacks would not be able to save the Schadenholders from the wall-to-wall carnage that was to come.

Tremors swept through the stairwell once more, knocking several Space Marines from their footing. Dantioch fell into Tarrasch, who steadied his Warsmith, but most were staring at the ceiling. Rock and dust rained down on the Iron Warriors and the walls trembled.

‘The passage is collapsing,’ Nicodemus called, holding his storm shield above him.

‘The structure will hold,’ Dantioch assured them. They were in the cavern ceiling foundations of the Schadenhold. Omnia Victrum’s artillery assault was pummelling the citadel into submission, shaking the fortress to its rocky core. From the bottom of the stairwell came the fresh chatter of weaponry. Bolters and lascarbines, clutched by the traitor Legiones Astartes and Nadir-Maru Fourth Juntarians. The enemy that had flooded the empty blockhouse had followed them through the hole in the wall. Firepower came up the stairs at the loyalists with Krendl’s besiegers climbing behind. ‘Come on!’ Dantioch shouted and continued his ascent.

‘Warsmith,’ he heard Tarrasch call and upon turning found his Iron Palatine skidding back down the steps towards the Venerable Vastopol. Although the south wall had held, it had partially collapsed, creating a bottleneck through which the Dreadnought’s broad bulk could not pass. With his armoured shoulders askew but braced between the walls of the stairwell, the war machine was trapped, held fast by the rock and unable to find footing with his mangled leg.

Enemy fire hammered into the Dreadnought’s armoured back. Brother-Sergeant Ingoldt and the Iron Palatine grabbed the war machine’s limbs and heaved at the metal monster. With the intensity of firepower beyond growing and casting the Venerable Vastopol in silhouette, the Iron Warriors fought to free their comrade. The Dreadnought’s vox-speakers trembled with the groans of the warrior inside, as the relentless streams of las-fire and bolt-rounds shredded Vastopol’s rear plating.

Baubistra and Chaplain Zhnev ran down the steps at the war machine. Brother Baubistra leapt onto the front of the sarcophagus body section and clambered up the chunky weaponry. Between the top of the Dreadnought’s mighty shoulders and the stairwell roof, Baubistra found a gap for his bolter and began answering back with ammo-conserving blasts. Zhnev came straight at Vastopol’s midriff, slamming his battleplate into the Dreadnought in the hope that his assault might dislodge the war machine. The Chaplain failed. The Venerable Vastopol had become the immovable object. Only the unstoppable force of Krendl’s traitor troops would remove him and until then, the Iron Warriors Dreadnought became a wall of adamantium and ceramite dividing the two.

Tarrasch heard a familiar whine.

‘Missile launcher!’ he called.

A rocket slammed into the back of the Dreadnought, knocking Baubistra from his perch and drawing from the Venerable Vastopol a vox-roar of agony and anguish. Two more followed, ravaging the armoured shell of the beast. Vastopol’s groans were constant now and the Iron Warrior’s hulking, metal body was failing about him. Dantioch stomped down the steps towards the Dreadnought.

‘Get him out,’ the Warsmith ordered.

‘He’ll die,’ Zhnev replied over the boom of battle beyond.

‘Do it.’

Tarrasch looked to Dantioch and his Chaplain. Then up to Tauro Nicodemus, who was waiting further up the stairwell.

‘My lord,’ Tarrasch said, ‘we need specialist tools and Magos Genetor Urqhart for such a procedure.’

Dantioch laid his gauntlets on the cold metal of the Venerable Vastopol’s sarcophagus section. The Iron Warrior within continued to moan his agonies through the vox-speakers.

‘Vastopol, listen to me,’ the Warsmith said. ‘We won’t leave you, my friend. We need to get you out. Can you help us?’

The Dreadnought’s power claw came up slowly between them. Askew as he was, the war machine still had use of the appendage, but little else. Bringing the clawtips together like a spike, the Dreadnought thrust the weapon through the armour plating of his sarcophagus. Magna-pistons and hydraulics shifted and locked in the appendage, opening the claw within. With a mighty heave the arm retracted. The Dreadnought’s armoured body fought back, resisting the act of self-mutilation, but finally the plate tore away from the machine’s pock-marked shell.

Amnio-sarcophagal fluid cascaded from the pod within, splashing the steps and nearby Space Marines. Power arced across the ruined section and the cavity steamed. The stench was overpowering. Small fires had broken out within, while lines and wires smoked and sparked. Interred, like an ancient foetus, lay what remained of the former Brother Vastopol. The warrior-poet was barely alive. His parchment skin was both wrinkled and pruned and his arms skeletal and wasted. He’d long lost his legs and his torso was a scrawny cage of bones, infested with life-support tubes and impulse plugs that ran lines between the aged legionary and his metal tomb.

‘Get him out,’ Dantioch ordered.

Chaplain Zhnev and Brother Toledo pulled the emaciated Iron Warrior from the sarcophagus, extracting tubes from between his withered lips and yellow teeth and unplugging the pilot from his mind-impulse interface with his shattered Dreadnought body. With his arms draped over ceramite shoulders, the two Iron Warriors carried Vastopol between them, his skullface and wet, threadbare scalp resting against the Chaplain’s plate.

More missiles struck the barricade of the Dreadnought’s evacuated shell and the Iron Warriors fled up the rocky stairwell. Despite being exhausted from the siege, the Space Marines made swift progress, slowed only by the fragility of Vastopol’s failing condition and the hacking cough that paralysed the Warsmith with infuriating regularity. At the top of the stairwell they encountered an iron hatch set in the passage roof. Making his feeble way up the final few steps, Dantioch ordered the hatch unlocked and the Iron Warriors through.

The chamber beyond was large and dark. The Warsmith pulled down on a robust handle set in the stone of the wall and lamps began to flicker on. The still air about the Legiones Astartes came to life with the rumble of powerful generators.

‘Seal it,’ Dantioch told Brother Baubistra, indicating the hatch. Striding across the chamber, Dantioch was followed by questions. The chamber was no blockhouse, although it did seem to house a small armoury of its own: bolters on racks, ammunition crates, grenades and several suits of Mark III plate. The Warsmith ignored his brothers’ enquiries and fell to work at a nearby runebank. ‘Sergeant Ingoldt, Brother Toledo, please be so good as to clad the Venerable Vastopol in one of those suits of spare plate.’

‘That won’t save him,’ Zhnev informed his Warsmith.

‘Chaplain, please. While there’s still time.’

‘Warsmith, I must press you for an explanation,’ Tauro Nicodemus said, after casting his eyes about the chamber. ‘I thought we were falling back to a further hold point.’

‘To what end, Ultramarine?’ Dantioch put to him as his gauntlets glided over the glyphs and runes of the console. ‘The Schadenhold is lost. Those loyalists remaining in the citadel will be overrun by Krendl’s reinforcements and Omnia Victrum will reduce the rest to rubble. This stronghold has bought the Emperor and Roboute Guilliman three hundred and sixty-six ancient Terran days. Three hundred and sixty-six days bought with Olympian blood, so that they might formulate a response to the Heresy and better fortify the Imperial Palace – to buy a more favourable outcome than our own.’

‘What is the plan, my lord?’ Tarrasch said, his words giving shape to the thoughts of all in the chamber.

Dantioch looked about their cavernous surroundings.

‘This is the last of the Schadenhold’s secret strategies,’ the Warsmith said. ‘A final solution to any siege and an answer to any enemy that might push us this far.’

‘You said the fortress was lost,’ Nicodemus said.

‘There are many moments in a battle when we can exploit our enemy’s weakness. We have, over the course of this siege, exploited nearly all of them. It is nothing less than irony that an enemy is at its very weakest mere moments before victory – when they are at their most stretched and committed in seeking such success. We are going to capitalise on that now.’

‘How?’ the champion pressed him.

‘In a siege, finalities must come first. We must accept our eventual doom and prepare for its coming. This chamber was one of the first I had constructed when crafting the Schadenhold. It is situated in the cavern ceiling, right in the rocky foundations of the fortress. It houses two important pieces of equipment, linked by a common console – a trigger for both, if you will. The first is a small teleportarium with the associated generators required to power such a piece of equipment. The second is a detonator, wired to explosives situated at key weak points in the citadel foundations. Gravity will do the rest.’ Dantioch let the enormity of his plan sink in. ‘Chaplain Zhnev, please begin the rites for teleportation. Our journey will be swift but our destination important.’

As the Chaplain approached the transference tablets of the teleporter beyond, Tarrasch helped Ingoldt and Toledo get the barely breathing Vastopol sealed in plate.

‘Where is that destination?’ Nicodemus asked the Warsmith. The Ultramarine was unused to being kept in tactical darkness.

‘The enemy has committed everything they have to taking this stronghold, undoubtedly leaving their own weak. We are going to teleport to the Benthos and take the bridge by surprise and by force. Brothers, time is upon us. Take your positions, please.’

As Tarrasch and the two Iron Warriors dragged the power-armoured form of the Venerable Vastopol over to the transference tablets, Nicodemus hefted his storm shield up onto a shoulder mounting. The Ultramarine followed uncertainly.

With his helmet to the hatch, Baubistra said: ‘I think they’ve broken through, Warsmith. The enemy are approaching.’

‘Very good, Brother Baubistra. Now join your brethren.’

As Baubistra strode by, Dantioch went through the motions of arming the explosives sunk deep in the ceiling rock of the Schadenhold’s foundations. Then he opened channels on all floors and vox-hailers across the citadel.

‘Idriss Krendl,’ Dantioch hissed. ‘Captain, this is your Warsmith. I know that you are there, somewhere in my fortress. I know you keep company with traitors and stand in the shadow of the Collegia Titanica’s god-machines. Faced with such odds, I am speaking to you for the last time. And I say to you again that this fortress will not serve the interests of our unloving father or his renegade Warmaster. But, captain, I was wrong when I told you that the Schadenhold would never fall. Idriss, it will fall…’

With that the Warsmith locked off the channels and initiated the trigger for both teleporter and detonators. Taking his position amongst Nicodemus and the Iron Warriors on the transference tablets, Dantioch straightened his cloak. Sealing his mask, the Warsmith blinked about the darkness within and felt the unnatural pull of the warp on his armour.

Somewhere in the distance he fancied he heard the first of the detonations: massive explosions, ripping through the strategic weaknesses of the fortress foundations. With his eyes closed and the horrors of teleportation about him, Dantioch imagined what he had always known he could never see.

The fall of the Schadenhold. Its literal fall from the ceiling of the cavern. Trillions of tonnes of rock and devious architecture falling to the rocky floor, taking with it the thousands of traitor Iron Warriors and Imperial soldiers that had secured the Schadenhold’s defeat. The fortress’ final defiance, issued in gravity, fire and stone: falling and crushing beneath it, in a behemothic mountain of blood and rubble, the mighty Omnia Victrum and the colossal god-machines of its undoing.

Unsealing his mask, Dantioch cast his eyes across the flight deck of the flagship Benthos. The deck was largely empty; most of the cruiser’s landing craft had been involved in deployment and aerial attacks on the Schadenhold. The Stormbird around which the Iron Warriors had materialised was pale green and bore symbols and flourishes marking it out as belonging to the Sons of Horus – Hasdrubal Serapis’ personal transport.

Tarrasch marched down the Stormbird’s ramp carrying a teleport homer. Dantioch had ordered the device secretly planted on the vessel during their meeting with Krendl and the Sons of Horus captain in the Grand Reclusiam.

‘How are we going to get to the bridge?’ asked Chaplain Zhnev.

‘With as little bloodshed as possible,’ the Warsmith told him. ‘This is the Fifty-First Expedition’s flagship. Iron Warriors are a common sight among its decks. Let us be that common sight.’

‘What about him?’ Tarrasch asked of Tauro Nicodemus. Despite the soot and gore, the brilliance of the Ultramarine’s armour still shone through.

‘The crew will not question a legionary.’

Marching out purposefully across the flight deck, Dantioch was followed by his loyalist compatriots. The Space Marines fought their desire to hold their bolters at the ready, opting for more casual or ceremonial poses. Brother Toledo and Sergeant Ingoldt carried the limp plate of the Venerable Vastopol between them, lending the infiltrators even less the appearance of an attacking force.

There were virtually no legionaries left aboard the vessel, almost every Iron Warrior having been committed to the depths of the planet below. Largely, the Space Marines encountered regimental staff and the cruiser’s multitudinous crew. Few among these mortals allowed their eyes to linger on the demigods – especially under Krendl’s brutal regime – and their passage to the command deck was uneventful. Dantioch’s strategy had been so bold and audaciously executed that none aboard the Benthos, even for a second, entertained thoughts that they were under attack.

Their silent, uneasy approach to the bridge was shattered by an unexpected klaxon. Bolters came up and the Iron Warriors fell immediately into defensive positions.

‘As you were,’ Dantioch instructed.

The loyalists could hear the thunder of power-armoured boots on the deck ahead. ‘We are not discovered. We are not under attack,’ Dantioch said. Fighting natural inclination and the brute vulnerability of their situation, the Iron Warriors let their barrels drift back down to the deck. A small contingent of Krendl’s 14th Grand Company veterans marched across an intersection in the corridor ahead. As their footfalls faded, Dantioch turned to his own veterans. ‘By now,’ he told them, ‘survivors on Lesser Damantyne will have reported the devastation below, the loss of Krendl, the Warmaster’s forces and Omnia Victrum. Whoever is in command will want visual confirmation of such an impossible report. Five fewer brother legionaries for us to deal with.’

Dantioch turned and marched with confidence up the steps to the bridge, flanked by Brother Baubistra and the Iron Palatine. As the Warsmith reached the top and looked down across the expansive bridge of the Benthos he fell into a coughing fit once more: a spasm of hacking convulsions that turned heads and drew attentions.

The bridge was a hive of activity, with petty officers and sickly servitors busy at work amongst the labyrinth of runebanks, cogitators and consoles that dominated the command deck. Two Maximus-plated Iron Warriors stood sentry on the bridge arch-egress and Lord Commander Warsang Gabroon of the Nadir-Maru Fourth Juntarians stood at conference with turbaned officers of his tactical staff. The lord commander stood as Dantioch remembered him, unconsciously twirling the braids of his beard and launching stabbing glares of jaundiced incredulity and disappointment at his inferiors.

At the epicentre of the activity and the destination of all reports, data and information were three Sons of Horus: swarthy Cthonians with superior sneers and knitted brows of insidious cunning. Among their number was one who immediately recognised what all others aboard the Benthos had failed to: the threat before them. The enemy Warsmith, Barabas Dantioch.

Baubistra and Tarrasch barged onto the bridge, past their master. Putting the muzzles of their weapons to the temples of the traitor sentries they roared at their Olympian brothers to drop their weapons and fall to their knees. Abandoning their burden, Sergeant Ingoldt and Toledo came forwards with bolters raised and pointed at the Sons of Horus. The two traitors flanking Hasdrubal drew their bolt pistols and activity on the bridge slowed to a raucous stand-off. The traitor captain screamed his disbelief and insistence as Iron Warriors and Sons of Horus held each other in their sights. With the Chaplain kneeling beside the dying Vastopol and Dantioch clutching the archway in his coughing fit, it fell to Tauro Nicodemus to break the deadlock.

The Ultramarines champion strode forwards, the only thing moving on the stricken command deck. Undaunted, Nicodemus marched past an apoplectic Lord Commander Gabroon, who was screaming, ‘No shooting on the bridge,’ at the warring demigods.

Hasdrubal Serapis’ face screwed up with rage and confusion. The destruction on Lesser Damantyne and the appearance of Dantioch and his Iron Warriors on the bridge had been disturbing enough. Now, one of Guilliman’s sons stood before him: a mysterious Ultramarine who had involved himself in the Warmaster’s business and no doubt had something to do with the Iron Warriors’ resistance on the planet below.

Hasdrubal backed towards one of the great lancet screens that towered above the bridge: the thick glass was the only thing separating the Space Marine captain from the hostile emptiness outside. His two sentinels held their ground, tracking the advancing Nicodemus with their bolt pistols. Hasdrubal looked at the Iron Warriors, with their weapons aimed up the bridge and at him in front of the huge window. Gabroon continued to screech his alarm. Hasdrubal nodded, confident that the Iron Warriors were not foolish enough to fire and blast out the viewport, dooming all on the bridge to a voidgrave.

‘Kill that damned Ultramarine,’ Hasdrubal seethed.

The Sons of Horus fired. Iron Warriors thrust their bolters forwards with an intention to respond in kind.

‘Hold your fire!’ Dantioch managed between torso-wracking convulsions. With his Iron Warriors facing the bridge lancet screens, he could not afford a stray shot to pierce the hull of the ship.

Nicodemus hefted the mighty storm shield from its shoulder mounting and brought it around just in time to soak up the first of the Traitor Space Marines’ bolt-rounds. As the shots hammered into the cobalt-blue sheen of the plate, the Tetrarch thumbed the shield’s protective field to life. The marksmanship of the Sons of Horus was a beauty to behold. Every bolt-round found its mark, and had Nicodemus not been advancing behind the storm shield he would have been run through by a relentless onslaught of armour-piercing shot.

Closing on the traitors, the pistols’ effective range shortened and the storm shield’s energy field was breached. One of the adamantium-core Space Marine killers passed through the armour plating and clipped the Ultramarine’s shoulder. As Guilliman’s champion continued to advance, Hasdrubal’s features contorted further in fury and disbelief. The Sons of Horus ejected spent magazines from their sidearms before each slamming home another and repeating the treatment. Nothing would stop Nicodemus, however.

As Hasdrubal’s Space Marines emptied their weapons for the second time, Nicodemus took a round through the thigh, one in the chest and another in the shoulder. This time the adamantium slugs found their target and punctured holes through the shield and the Ultramarine’s artificer armour. The energy field sizzled and spat to overload and all Nicodemus had was the bolt-punched plate between him and his enemies. Running the final stretch of command deck, the Ultramarines champion closed with the Sons of Horus.

Desperate now, the traitors went for their Cthonian blades. Nicodemus already had a gauntlet on his own gladius. His armoured palm was slippery with the blood that had run down his arm from the grievous wound in his shoulder. Spinning between the two legionaries, Nicodemus slammed the storm shield into the first. He felt the slash of the enemy blade on the battered plate and hammered the Son of Horus again. Extending his arm and moving the shield aside like an open door, the Ultramarine allowed the traitor a single, wild thrust. The sword stabbed through the open space between the champion’s elbow and hip. Nicodemus swept down with the blade of the gladius, cutting through the Space Marine’s armoured forearm. Gauntlet and blade clattered to the deck.

The Ultramarine pressed his advantage, one honour guard to another. He smacked the traitor senseless with the storm shield, the plate edge dashing his helmet this way and that. Dazed, the Son of Horus slipped in his own gore and hit the deck. Nicodemus buried the toe of one power-armoured boot in the traitor’s faceplate, rolling him over. Standing over his prone enemy, Nicodemus hovered the bottom edge of the rectangular shield over the Space Marine’s throat. He looked to Hasdrubal and his one remaining sentinel, who stood defiantly between the Ultramarine and his master. Nicodemus brought down the weight of the storm shield with a sickening crack. The seal between helmet and suit cracked and the shield edge cut through the traitor’s neck.

The Ultramarine’s armoured chest heaved up and down with exertion as he took a moment to recover, before hoisting the mighty shield around and running straight at the Son of Horus sentinel. Again, Nicodemus felt the pointless slash of the lighter, Cthonian blade on the bolt-shot plate. This time the Ultramarine didn’t stop. He rammed the Son of Horus straight into the thick glass lancet window. Crushed between the observation port and the Ultramarine, the traitor abandoned his weapon and tried to grab the edge of the shield with his ceramite fingertips. Nicodemus smashed him into the glass a second and third time. Finally, the Son of Horus managed to get a grip on the shield – his intention to push the plate aside and get his gauntlets around the Ultramarine’s neck.

He never got the chance. Pulling back his gladius, Nicodemus rammed the point of the blade through the back of the storm shield and skewered the Space Marine beyond. There was a gasp. Light. Almost inaudible. Retracting the blade, Nicodemus stepped aside and allowed the shield and Son of Horus to smash to the bridge floor.

Hasdrubal had turned away. Like everyone else on the bridge, the captain had thought that the Ultramarine was going to put the Space Marine straight through the window, crashing thick glass about them and inviting the void inside. The captain looked fearfully at Guilliman’s champion. Nicodemus paced up and down in front of him with the gore-smeared gladius held in one gauntlet. He unclipped his helmet and slipped the plumed helm off the back of his head. Gone was the martial grace and patrician calm. Nicodemus spat blood at the deck. A bolt pistol shook in Hasdrubal’s gauntlet. Iron Warriors surrounded them both, bolters gaping at the traitor.

‘It’s over,’ Dantioch called, his grim insistence cutting through the cacophony of a bridge in uproar. Hasdrubal turned from the Ultramarine’s fury to the cold, foreboding of Dantioch’s iron mask. ‘You lost,’ the Warsmith informed his enemy.

Hasdrubal’s bolt pistol tumbled from his ceramite fingers. As Toledo and Sergeant Ingoldt secured the prisoner, Nicodemus sheathed his gladius and limped back up the length of the bridge. Lord Commander Gabroon was still shrieking his protestations. The demigod silenced the officer with a slow finger to his lips.

Nicodemus joined Dantioch on the deck, next to the Venerable Vastopol. The Warsmith had ordered Tarrasch to take command of the bridge. Ingoldt and Toledo had been tasked with securing the traitor Hasdrubal Serapis and preparing him for interrogation. Chaplain Zhnev and Brother Baubistra were assigned to Warsang Gabroon, to ensure that the lord commander’s remaining troops and the crew of the Benthos accepted the swift and relatively bloodless change of regime and the new orders that accompanied it.

Standing over the two survivors of the Gholghis fortress world, the Ultramarine asked: ‘Is there anything I can do, Warsmith?’

Dantioch didn’t look at the Tetrarch. The Warsmith’s eyes were on the helmetless Vastopol. The ancient lay motionless in battleplate on the deck, propped up against the wall. The Iron Warrior’s grizzled and aged skull was criss-crossed with wisps of white hair and his face lined with premature centuries. Two milky orbs twitched and wandered between Dantioch, Nicodemus and the bridge.

‘Our honoured brother is taking his leave,’ Dantioch said. His words were hollow and shot through with loneliness and the simple sadness of loss. The Venerable Vastopol had not only survived the dreaded hrud on Gholghis. He’d resisted death’s cold invitation and forged on through the agonies of age to be of use to his brothers once more. Untimely ripped from his metal womb, Vastopol had still clung to life. Until now.

‘He was our chronicler,’ Dantioch said, ‘and carried with him our remembered triumphs. Once, on Gholghis, he told me that such stories of the past ground us in the challenge of the present, like a fortification or citadel built upon foundations of ancient rock. I have none of his skill – crafting in iron and stone what he would in words. I live to tell the tale, however, of the Iron Warriors’ final victory: the last loyal triumph of the Fourth Legion. He would want the story to go on. Alas, his story,’ Dantioch said grimly, ‘like that of our Legion, is at an end.’

‘Warsmith,’ Nicodemus began slowly, ‘that need not be the case. I assured you once that my Lord Guilliman had a plan. You have executed your part of that plan flawlessly, Iron Warrior. Lord Guilliman still has need of such ingenuity and skill. The Imperium is frail, Dantioch. An Iron Warrior’s eye could spot such weakness and the good grace of his hand might make it strong once again.’

‘What more would you ask of me?’ the Warsmith said.

‘To stand shoulder to ceramite shoulder with my Lord Guilliman and help him fortify the Imperial Palace.’

‘Fortify the Palace…’ Dantioch repeated.

‘Yes, Iron Warrior.’

‘Perturabo will make us pay for such fantasies.’

‘Perhaps,’ Nicodemus said solemnly. ‘But I believe the genius of your victory today lay in your acceptance that the Schadenhold – for all its indomitable art – would fall. Lord Guilliman shares your vision. Humanity’s future lies in such contingency.’ The Ultramarine let the enormity of the idea linger.

Dantioch didn’t answer. Instead he watched the remaining vestiges of life leave the body of his friend and battle-brother. Vastopol’s crusted eyes fluttered before rolling and gently closing, the dry whisper of a dying breath escaping the warrior-poet’s lips.

As the Venerable Vastopol faded and left them, he heard Dantioch tell the Ultramarine: ‘You talk of the arts of destruction. Perturabo’s progeny are unrivalled in these arts, indomitable in battle and peerless in the science of siegecraft. Show me a palace and I’ll show you how an Iron Warrior would take it. Then I’ll show you how you would stop me. I don’t know how long I am for this Imperium, but I promise you this: whatever iron is left within this aged plate is yours…’

The iron within. The iron without. Iron everywhere. Empires rise and they fall. I have fought the ancient species of the galaxy and my Legiones Astartes brothers will fight on, meeting new threats in dangers as yet unrealised. We are an Imperium of iron and iron is forever. When our flesh is long forgotten, whether victim to the enemy within or the enemy without, iron will live on. Our hives will tumble and our mighty fleets decay. Long after our polished bones have faded to dust on a gentle breeze, our weapons and armour will remain. Remnants of a warlike race: the iron of loyalist and traitor both. In them our story will be told – a cautionary tale to those that follow. Iron cares not for faith or heresy. Iron is forever.

And as our battleplate, our blades and bolters rot in the sand of some distant world, they will pit and tarnish. Their dull sheen will corrode and crumble. Grey will turn to brown and brown to red. In the quietly rusting scrap of our fallen empire, iron will return to its primordial state, perhaps to be used again by some other foolish race. And though the weakness of my flesh fails me, as the weakness of my brothers’ flesh will ultimately fail them, our iron shall live on. For iron is eternal.

From iron cometh strength. From strength cometh will. From will cometh faith. From faith cometh honour. From honour cometh iron. This is the Unbreakable Litany. And may it forever be so.

BLACK OCULUS

John French

‘Beyond the edge of the sky there is always another horizon,
Always a step further to take, always a new sun to see.’

– from Verses of the High Age
of the Great Crusade (Canto XIX)
by Calus Quintus

I know you are there. I see you in the dark of your sleep. We have not met, and we will not meet yet. You cannot even hear me, but that does not matter. You don’t need to hear to listen to the truth. So I am going to explain this to you. I am going to explain it because I can’t show you. And you must understand, because if you don’t then I will be alone with this gift. And that I cannot bear.

It began with three words spoken by the primarch.

‘We go in.’

We.

Go.

In.

‘This is my order. Carry it out. Now.’

I have to obey. It is my function. It is my life. I am the ship and its course. I go where I am ordered. The metal of the navigation throne was warm against my skin as I took my place. Sweat was running from my pores, pink with blood.

I was not alone. My cousins took their thrones beside me. They were slick and clammy to look at, like fish growing skins of slime under the sun. It took three of us, you see, three of us to pilot the Iron Blood as it threaded the warp’s needle – one to watch, and the others to watch what the first could not watch. I was the first. I was the Navigator Prime, and in the warp that great ship belonged to me as much as it did the Lord of Iron. So, as much as it was he that spoke the command, it was I who gave the ship to the black star.

I sat in my throne, and the shutters pulled back from the viewing portal.

I saw the sun.

White sheet.

The sound. Glass edges ringing against each other.

Disc of night.

I was shrinking in my throne, and the black sun was swelling. I could feel sound buzzing up my throat. The edges of my mundane eyes stung. Acid tears were upon my cheeks.

We go in.

I open my true sight.

The un-light of the sun touches the black of my third eye.

And I see.

We were made to see. I am a Navigator of the House of Thal, and our House is but one of many. We are not human, though we may seem human. We are an offshoot, a creation – a deliberate reaction to necessity, if you like. Navigators can look into the warp and read its currents, and so guide ships over distances that would take millennia to cross while keeping to the laws of time and space. For this we are set apart, our genes protected, and our Houses given privilege. The third eye in my skull is a portal between the madness of the warp, and human thought. My mind can look upon the impossible and not break.

I have looked upon horrors, and worse, and remained alive. I have remained myself.

That was, until my service to the IV Legion led me to the black star at the heart of a wound left by the birth of a god.

Yes, I say ‘god’.

What else should I call them? There is a limit to our consciousness, a limit to our understanding, a limit to our words. So I say ‘god’ knowing that it exists, that they exist, and still I know that the word cannot fully encompass what they are. They are the truth beyond the veil. They are the pattern in the warp that I could never see. They are what waits beyond the gateways.

And I saw them. I saw the heart of all.

The black star took us.

The Iron Blood slid into the throat of the darkness. Existence stretched, became a line drawn upon a black sheet. I heard the silence, and the silence screamed. Light became solid. The solid became sculptures of light and reflection. Numbers and dimensions, tumbling down from reality into the pit. A single instant, thinner than thought and longer than time, stretching on, and on, and on, until it became a sound that had always been there but that no one could hear.

Until it became laughter. An eternity of laughter.

And then it ended, and I was screaming in my throne of steel, and a world of sick sensation and cruel edges tumbled over and over and over. There were alarms sounding, and the walls were bleeding red. The crew were running. The ship was spinning – thoughts, stars – without direction. The medicae’s eyes shouted – shouted in fear – as they rushed me and held me down and I heard words – say ‘alchemical formulae’ – and the words were puffs of red vapour in my sight. And then I felt the first needle in my flesh.

Red light. Machine screaming. Needles…

…and then silence.

I dream now. I dream beneath the waves of sedatives in a pit at the bottom of a murdered world called Tallarn. The sons of Perturabo keep me here. They keep us all here, all those who went into the black star with their eyes open. They wake us to see for them, to guide them to the end of the circle they wish to complete.

They think they understand.

They cannot, and do not, and never will understand.

To understand you have to see.

I see the shadows beneath the world. I spent my whole life as a creature moving through an unreal realm with the eyes of a mortal. Now I am a creature moving through the mortal realm with the eyes of a god.

And I always see.

I see now. Even as I hang here, silent and asleep, I see. I see you, son of iron, hiding in the distant dark beyond layers of earth and stone. I see you and I tell you secrets that you will never hear. And this last secret is my gift to you, a gift from the heart of a black star burning at the point where the mundane and the eternal meet.

Seen from here – from the other side of the skin-thin membrane of reality – you are not strong or weak, noble or cruel.

You are not heroes.

You are blind.

And the universe sees you.

And it laughs.

ANGEL EXTERMINATUS

Primarch Fulgrim of the Emperor’s Children leads his brother Perturabo and the Iron Warriors in an attack upon a mysterious eldar world, in search of ancient xenos weaponry.

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TALLARN

The Iron Warriors came from nowhere, falling upon the world of Tallarn in a flash and devastating it with deadly virus weapons. A verdant world was transformed in a heartbeat into a radioactive wasteland... but that was only the beginning.

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SLAVES TO DARKNESS

As the traitor fleet closes on Terra, turmoil grips its heart. Horus lies wounded, and as the greatest battle of all time looms, it falls to Maloghurst the Twisted to hold the force together and save the Warmaster.

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WHITE SCARS

V LEGION

BROTHERHOOD
OF THE MOON

Chris Wraight

[Transcript begins.]

I am Torghun Khan, of the Brotherhood of the Moon, and the ordu of Jemulan Noyan-Khan. This is my sworn testimony.

> Tell me where it started.

From Khella?

> No, from before. You told me you were on secondment before then.

Very well.

> Hide nothing.

Do you think I would try?

> Some do. I would not recommend it.

It was during the fractured time. We had had more freedom then. This changed at Ullanor, they tell me, and by the time we were all called to Chondax there were attempts to rein us in. But back then it wasn’t like that.

I had taken my brotherhood on a mission to the plains-worlds of Urj, to repacify places we had conquered twenty years before. The Legion had moved on too soon; the roots were not set deep. It was not a heavy task – we were out on our own, five hundred mounts, and a single attack frigate to house them – but it should never have been necessary.

It took three months. It was a punitive raid, and they had no stomach for a long fight. We restored the Imperial banner over the system capital, and called in the Army to resume control. Hakeem was with me, though I did not know him well. We had served together by then perhaps… two years? No more than that. He had been keener than I on the assignment, and I came to appreciate his zeal. We were both Terrans, as were many of my warriors. It was harmonious.

With that done, we waited for orders. I had expected to rendezvous with the ordu again – we had already heard that the muster was underway for something big, but we did not know what it was. Instead, we were re-tasked, told to remain away from the main deployments.

This was the road that would take us to Khella, but not yet.

First came the Tarsch Belt, a string of worlds on the edge of the crusade’s southern front. The defenders were humanoid, but barely. I do not know, even now, if they were some offshoot of our species, xenos or something else. We killed them, and that was all anyone asked of us.

It was a long journey. We had trouble in the warp on the way, running it close with the ship. That was why we had been chosen – resupply in the Belt was proving difficult, and we were closest. The main force was the other Legion: the Luna Wolves, as they were then. They had been fighting for nearly seven months, and had been told to bring it to a swift conclusion.

So we became part of that. I delegated liaison to Hakeem initially, while I was busy digesting the scant tactical data I got from my commanders.

I had no strong feelings about it, at the time. I was curious, no more.

> On your file, it states that you were initially assigned to the Sixteenth Legion’s recruitment programme.

Yes.

> You say you had no strong feelings? You would be fighting with them.

I was a White Scar. I had been a White Scar for a long time. I was a child when the transfer was made.

> There is a supposition–

I know of it. It is false.

> We will take this up later. Continue.

Their commander was Verulam Moy, of the 19th. He was the senior officer, and had clearly been ordered to accept our help. He didn’t like it. He had a much larger contingent – mostly infantry, some mechanised support. Our presence was a slight to him, and we were aware of this, so I determined to do what I could to smooth the way between us.

We arrived prior to an assault on a city-cluster on the ninth world of the Belt, one on the edge of a large open land mass. They had been preparing for our assault for a long time, and were well dug in. They had heavy dome shielding, and Moy judged it best to assault by land. He had used this tactic before – infiltrating under the edge of the void shield dome, knocking out the generators to destroy their coverage, then launching orbital barrages to complete the task.

The Tarschi knew what was coming, and had fortified their land approaches. They did not ask for quarter, though they could not match our joint firepower and I suspect they knew that.

We coordinated assault plans on the bridge of Moy’s ship. He wanted to lead the main assault – the ‘spear-tip’, he called it. His warriors were practised in this and worked well together. He didn’t wish to have the battlefield cluttered with rival vanguards so he gave us the flanks, our forces split in half, each on either edge. That suited us. We could use our speed unhindered, hitting them hard before drawing away and letting the advancing Luna Wolves lead the main assault.

‘You will stick to the plan?’ Moy asked me, clearly sceptical of our ability to complement his own forces.

I told him that we would. Everything in his body language was adversarial, but there was little he could do – we both had our orders.

It was Hakeem who improved things.

‘This is a great honour for us,’ he told Moy. ‘Your primarch is venerated among our people second only to our own Great Khan. They share the same spirit, I think.’

Moy looked amused at that. Even then, the Luna Wolves were set apart. Comparisons with Horus, with his record and reputation, risked looking ludicrous.

‘So you are... what? The Company of the Moon?’ Moy asked.

‘Brotherhood,’ I replied. For some reason, the word seemed foolish to me.

‘We had been given your tactical designation. Sixty-Fourth Company.’

‘If it makes it easier for you, use that,’ I said.

Moy shrugged. ‘We are both lunar warriors. We can use our old names.’

I think that might have been an attempt at lightening the mood. I smiled, but Hakeem bowed deeply, and upon rising, his eyes met Moy’s. It seemed to me then that there was some prior understanding between them that I had missed.

If that made our task easier, though, then I could live with that. I did not think it could be serious.

We were dropped into position one hour before the scheduled combined assault. I took the right flank, Hakeem the left. We were a long way from the Luna Wolves’ positions, and planned to skirt wide of their intended advance to draw as much fire from the centre as possible.

We were wary of the enemy gunnery – it was precise – but we were also confident in our speed, our bike-mastery. I wished to show Moy what we could do. I wanted the city to be in flames and confusion.

Moy gave the order, and we accelerated, falling into a wide approach pattern. From two kilometres out we started picking up incoming fire. It intensified, and we dragged back in, weaving between the energy beams. I was enjoying it. We took some losses, but they were clearly struggling to target us. We reached the walls ahead of schedule, boosting the jetbikes high to clear the outer parapets.

The defenders fell back, hit on all sides by our incoming lances, giving us room to deploy heavy charges. They were wall-breachers, enough to gouge holes into the perimeter and allow ingress to the advancing infantry. We blew them just as the enemy began to regroup and bring up their heavier weapon pods. Whole sections of barricade crumbled, opening up the city beyond.

I voxed Hakeem, preparing to fall back as we had planned. Our task was complete, and we were now to stage a mock retreat, pulling defenders out from what remained of their defensive perimeter in time to meet the oncoming Luna Wolves.

‘Now we stay, khan,’ Hakeem said.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked. I could hear over the comm that his position was already being shelled. Soon, mine would be too.

‘These are Horus’ sons. They will not respect a fallback. We hold, though, and our pact will be sealed.’

I don’t know why he chose that moment to spring the new plan on me. Perhaps he judged that under fire I would be more likely to make the snap decision he needed. In any case, as soon as he spoke I saw the attraction of it. I was tired of the endless withdrawals, the strafing and the shams. We were like ghosts, never planting our feet long enough to make a stand. Other Legions were proud of their steadfastness under fire – why could we not be the same?

My warriors were looking to me for orders. Already the volume of fire was picking up, and soon it would become ruinous. I checked the augurs, noting Hakeem’s position, the Luna Wolves’ ingress routes, the timings and the dispositions...

Then I made up my mind.

‘Dismount and hold,’ I ordered, pulling my bolter from its holster. ‘We will blood them here.’

We took more losses. I am not proud of those. We were armed and equipped for fast raiding, not for holding beachheads against heavily armoured enemies, and we lacked the ranged support we needed.

But I am proud of this: we were not dislodged.

By the time Moy’s troops caught up, we were dug in deep, preventing the Tarschi squads from linking up amidst the ruined walls. The Luna Wolves marched past us, hitting the flanks of encircling enemy units and shattering them. Then we pushed on, united, burning into the city beyond. Some of us remounted, using the bikes to combine with Moy’s infantry. I stayed on my feet, and soon my battle-brothers were ranged in both white and copper-green.

It was a potent mixture. I watched the way they fought. I admired it and sought to emulate it. It is my belief that they did the same. We had become a merged force, and the blood of the enemy was bright upon our twin blades.

I was fighting in the very centre of the city when Moy reached me, his armour spattered and his chainblade glistening.

‘That was not what we planned,’ he shouted, though there was no anger in it, just surprise.

‘Would you have pulled back?’ I asked.

He laughed. ‘I would not have known how.’

After that we reduced the whole place to ashes. They tell me that the wreckage burned for weeks.

We did not return to the ships that night. Our warriors remained out on the surface, celebrating the victory. There was a rapport there – we were Legions of rawness, and killing together had shown how similar our natures were.

Hakeem returned just after sunset, his armour bearing heavy damage. He was grinning.

‘This was a good night, khan,’ he said.

‘Where have you been?’ I asked.

‘Learning new things,’ he said. ‘Will you follow? Moy is waiting.’

And I did follow. I had no reason not to. My battle-spirits were still coursing. I was as euphoric as the rest of my brotherhood. Few victories have ever tasted better to me than that night, for we had cast down expectations as well as the walls.

Moy was waiting outside the entrance to a canvas tent. Guards of his Legion were posted all around it, and torches burned within. I could see the shadows of those moving inside, and hear the sounds of raised voices.

‘This was good hunting,’ said Moy. There was a vivid light in his eyes, which I took to be the joy of the clean kill. ‘It will not be the last we share.’

I was pleased to hear it. ‘So what is this, captain?’ I asked.

‘A gathering of warriors. It is something we do in the Legion. Will you join us?’

Did I feel any reason not to? I do not remember clearly. I do not think so. It seemed… courteous. Hakeem was evidently already familiar with what was going on and went ahead of me, ducking under the tent flaps.

I could hear the chants from my brothers, victory-songs in both Terran Gothic and Chogorian Khorchin. I hesitated on the threshold, looking back at Moy.

‘A custom of your home world?’ I asked.

‘Not of Cthonia. And it has become more than a mere custom now.’

His earlier belligerence was gone. I felt that my attempts at diplomacy had been successful, and that this was the start of something new for the Legion – something that would see us become less... isolated. I felt as if I had achieved this, alongside the military victory, and it made me proud.

So I went inside.

> Here is the supposition: you had always wished to be a part of the other Legion.

I told you, no. Others joined. In the beginning, it felt natural.

> And afterwards?

Until the end, I believed it to be in the cause of justice.

> And Hakeem?

We shared the same views, though he was always further down the path than I.

> Where is he now?

I have already told you. I do not know. Either he died at Prospero, or he is gone.

> But you have a belief.

[pause]

I do not believe he was killed. He will not have recanted. He will attempt to restore things, somehow, to turn them back to the vision he was shown.

> You were weak in this. You were his khan.

I have many errors to regret. Hakeem is not the greatest of them.

> We will come to those. But what of you?

I have told you everything.

> Not yet.

What more do you wish to know? If I would enter the tent, given my time again? If I would return to my brotherhood? If I would right the wrong?

> The Khagan will rule.

I would enter it again. Of course I would.

> Be wary. You may yet damn yourself.

I will not grovel! I am Torghun Khan, of the Brotherhood of the Moon, and the ordu of Jemulan Noyan-Khan. In all these things, I took the path of honour. I believed in the Great Crusade. I believed in the Warmaster when all others believed in him. These things will not be erased. Now pronounce sentence, or give me a blade to wield. I can still serve. I can still fight.

[pause]

Then what will it be?

[pause]

What will it be? Tell me!

[pause]

I will know my fate.

[Transcript ends.]

SCARS

His hand forced by an Alpha Legion attack, Jaghatai Khan must decide where his loyalties lie, and whether his White Scars will stand with the Emperor or Horus in the war to come...

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LEGACIES OF BETRAYAL

Only from out of great conflict can true heroes arise. With the galaxy aflame and war on an unimaginable scale tearing the Imperium apart, champions of light and darkness venture onto countless fields of battle in service to their masters.

In this volume, read the story ‘Brotherhood of the Storm’.

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THE PATH OF HEAVEN

The Khan returns! After the events of ‘Scars’, the White Scars Legion have chosen their loyalties. Now, after years of battle against the traitors, it’s time to return to Terra and prepare for the inevitable invasion. But first, Jaghatai and his warriors must brave a gauntlet of enemies and the terrors of the warp...

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SPACE WOLVES

VI LEGION

BJORN: LONE WOLF

Chris Wraight

As he runs across it, the earth ignites. He goes so fast that he might be flying, barely touching the charred plates, tearing through the blue-tinged tongues that ripple out from the fissures below. The sky is alive ahead of him, riven by the aurorae of a thinning veil.

He has seen the prey, towering above the boiling mass of bodies, and that is enough. Axes rise, silhouetted against fire, hurled into the faces of the damned as they scream, but none are his.

The entire Rout fights across the sprawling battle plains of Velbayne, its fury set against a host of madness. The Wolves are loosed, thrown into the furnace, just where they wish to be. The packs fight, covering one another, forming shield walls and axe-wedges. Screaming night-creatures crash against them, though such shrieks freeze in unholy mouths as they face the wrath of Russ. The primarch still fights, though his immense presence cannot be seen – there are horrors enough on this battlefield to keep even the Wolf King busy.

As for him, he has no pack to protect his approach, none to cover his desperate charge. He has been alone for long enough now that he no longer feels the strangeness of it. His axe whirls around him like a bolas, whistling, accelerating, ramping up for the strike.

The prey looms over him. It is massive and crustaceous, boiling with black-hearted fire. Its wings unravel into the tortured night, ragged and skin-stretched. Its hooves crack the earth beneath it, its blade rips the air itself, its bellows make the world shake.

It is a vision of mortal terrors, merged and bulked into colossal proportions and forged in madness. It strides across the fields of murder, lashing out with smouldering strikes. The fires leap up to greet it, rippling across blood-dark muscles and reflected in oil-slick spines. A long taurian face is crammed with tusks, weighed down by a crown of horns, wrinkled into a snarl of wrathful contempt.

He accelerates. He has seen the creature before. He recognises the curl of the daemonic skin, the axe it carries, the runes of destruction hammered into iron ingots. He remembers what it did the last time their fates crossed.

How could he forget? He remembers almost nothing else.

It sees him, and its roar of challenge shivers the battlefield. Its leading leg crashes down, sending cracks racing out over the fire-edged plates. Its weapon moves heavily, trailing streamers of boiling blood from the edge.

By then he is going too fast to stop. He jumps, vaulting past the lesser ranks of terrors, shouldering them aside and breaking through their ineffective cordon.

He calls out for the first time in years. He frees his tongue, held silent since the last of his pack brothers burned on the pyres. They are declaimed in the order they went into battle. He promised their ghosts as much, back when the funeral embers still glowed like dying stars.

Alvi. He shouts the name as he smites the creature for the first time. Gore the thickness of magma spouts across his axe blade. Alvi, who had no deed name, who was the purest of them all. Alvi had died when his breastplate was crushed under the creature’s hooves, still hacking at its unnatural flesh even as his helm filled with blood.

The daemon howls, arcing down its own axe-edge, but he is too quick. He is moving like storm-lightning now, spinning out of contact and spearing in close – uncatchable, unhaltable.

Byrnjolf, Teller-of-Tales. The pack’s skjald, heavy-limbed but agile-tongued, the carrier of the pack saga and the memory of its slayings. Byrnjolf had died as the creature’s fist had dragged low, thrown back into the mire of Gryth’s eternal miasmic plague plains. With the Teller gone, the tales fell into silence.

The daemon tries the same trick on him, but he is too wily for that now. He is older, tempered in fires far hotter than those that harrow this world. He hastens aside, already coiled for the next thrust.

Eirik. Golden-haired, vital. Eirik had cut it deep before the end, clambering up the creature’s own body to stab at it.

He does the same now – he uses its massiveness against it, countering bulk with speed. The daemon’s axe sweeps around, heavy as a pendulum, missing him by a finger’s breadth. He plunges his blade into its chest, catching on to the chains of iron to arrest his fall and haul himself higher.

Gunnald Shieldbearer. How could Gunnald have died? What force could have ended such a bastion of defiance? Gunnald had weathered the worst of it until the end, wielding his thunder hammer and spitting curses even as his throat was throttled.

He does not try the same thing. He does not have the heft of Gunnald and so sticks to speed, clambering up the daemon’s hide of iron plates. It tries to shake him clear and fails. He can feel its mounting fear. It knows who he is now.

Hiorvard. Hrani. The twins, fighting together as always, levelling bolters and filling the air with curtains of explosive power. They had only been taken down when the creature had broken the assault and cast aside the last of the blade-bearers. He remembered the way they had discarded their guns, drawn swords and charged. They had died as they had lived – shoulder to shoulder.

No more names now. He is fighting as if maddened, clinging to the daemon’s shoulder with his artificial clawed hand, working the axe with the other. It tries to throw him off, to hurl him away like it did before, but his talons are sharper now.

Everything is harder, deeper, older, wiser, tougher. In killing his pack, it has made him into a slaughterer of apocalyptic stature. He is like the old huntsmen of legend – drawing in the strength of the slain.

The creature bats away his axe and bellows in triumph. It watches the blade tumble clear, flashing red before it hits the seething earth. In pausing to watch, it has erred.

He has been waiting for this. His wolf claw reaches for the creature’s neck. Adamantium blades, each crackling with actinic energy, clench tight around daemonic thews, pressing the stringy muscle together.

It thrashes. It claws at him. Its talons rake down his armoured back. All he has to do now is hold on. He presses harder, digs deep, pushing the physical air from un-physical lungs. He grits his fangs. He is bleeding now from the wounds it has inflicted upon him.

Its skin bursts, its vessels swell and flood, its strength ebbs. He hangs on, strangling the life from it even as it falls to its knees. The battle rages around them, a whirlpool of unfettered rage, but even the daemon no longer sees this.

Its red eyes glare at him a final time, and he stares back into them. It chokes, it writhes, but he never lets go.

Only when the creature is gone, its mortal frame turned to unmoving slag and ash, does he raise his bloody claw in triumph. He tears his helm from his head and lifts his shaggy head to the sky. Tasting unfiltered air, he howls in triumph.

His living brothers howl with him. They know that he will be coming back to them now. They know what manner of thing he has really killed.

He stands upon the smoking corpse of the daemon, grinding his boots into its slumped shoulders. Only one name remains to be declaimed, the last member of the pack, the one who hunted through the sea of stars for vengeance, the one they have called the Lone Wolf for too many years.

Bjorn.

BLOODHOWL

Chris Forrester

Bolts bracketed the Spartan’s frontal glacis.

Jorin Bloodhowl hammered his restraint release, stretching blood into his muscles. His armour groaned, its damaged fibre-bundles vomiting sparks, his freedom of movement hindered by sections of temporary reinforcement. He checked his bolt pistol, its ammunition counter flickering live on his retinal feed, and drew his power axe. Actinic tendrils of blue-white power crackled along the smiling edge of the Fenrisian steel.

Jorin’s iron-hard features twisted into a toothy smile.

Around him, twenty-four veterans in storm-grey ceramite, edged with silver and gold, readied their weapons. Iron torcs banded their arms; tattered oath-scrolls and honours earned when Leman ruled only the Russ were affixed to their armour. They locked black wolf-skull helms into place, each one the mirror of Jorin’s own blood-streaked death mask.

They were his Varagyr, the finest warriors of Dekk-Tra.

‘Two minutes.’ The vox-plate clotted the warning with static.

Jorin blink-clicked a rune on his retinal display, creating a data-bridge with the tank’s gun-picters. Dekk-Tra’s armoured spearhead closed on a narrow defile, its grass-spare slopes marked by stump, stone and scattered earth. Uprooted trees formed a palisade. Beyond it, huts of mud and straw squatted on a flat berm beside green and gold fields that waved in the gentle breeze. Beasts native to Bloodfall grazed there, fatted and ready for slaughter.

Figures fought outside the village, clad in midnight blue and storm grey.

‘Has Gunnar responded to our hails?’ Thorald asked, loading a fresh magazine into his boltgun. Jorin felt the shade of Morkai, the Deathwolf, stir in his hearts at the mention of his former axe-brother. ‘Or have the gothi led us into another Alpha Legion trap?’

‘Is anything certain in this war?’ Jorin countered.

‘We should be at our king’s side,’ Hjalmar Stormfist growled, flexing the scuffed fingers of his power fist. Amber eyes gleamed through slits in his leather mask, its surface cut to echo flayed facial muscles. ‘Not wasting time chasing rumours of errant brothers far from the real war. We are Dekk-Tra, the Old Guard of Russ, not a pack of witless kaerls.’

‘It is no waste,’ Leif snapped.

Jorin scowled, again questioning his decision to appoint Leif as his new lieutenant. Bulveye and Gunnar, once his axe-brothers amongst Russ’ first Einherjar, had served as his lieutenants during the Great Crusade, their martial skills matched by an easy charisma that Leif simply lacked. They had disappeared after Prospero, and seven long years of attrition had left him few good candidates to replace them. He needed a reliable husjarl now more than ever. Their recent defeats had shown him that.

‘We need every blade to break Horus’ armies, and succeed where our effort at Trisolian failed,’ Leif continued.

‘We do not mention that place,’ Hjalmar said. Several Wolves hissed. ‘It carries a bad wyrd, one that plagues even the Wolf King since he chose to tempt its wrath.’

Jorin suppressed a shiver. The memory of his last audience with Russ was a siren’s song that played at the edge of his mind, drawing him into its embrace.

The Wolf King was alone in his hall, food cold and mouldering in trencher and lanx. Scrolls detailing Morkai’s tithe at Trisolian surrounded him. Ash streaked his cheeks, broken by dried tear trails. He watched Jorin approach through eyes sunken into the grey hollows of their sockets, a draugr given solidity by the Allfather’s will. He had been the same for weeks. Doubt festered in his soul, questions over his role as a lord and the Allfather’s executioner.

It tore at Jorin’s soul to see his lord so conflicted.

‘I hear the gothi may have found Gunnar and his Hunt.’ Russ’ voice was a cracked echo of its former strength. ‘I hear that you wish to take ship and return them to the Legion.’

‘I do, my king.’ Jorin’s lips moved in time with his memory. ‘They have been too long without your guidance, and we need their strength to break the Warmaster’s armies.’

‘What if they prove unwilling to return?’ Russ asked.

‘Those unwilling will be slain as traitors,’ Jorin said. ‘That is what they are.’

Russ shook his head and smiled ruefully.

‘No, my son. Offer them their chance, but do not command it of them.’ Russ silenced his surprise with a raised hand. ‘They chose their own path in my father’s service, and while they continue to serve Him, they are no traitors.’ He laughed. ‘I envy them their freedom, for they alone govern their actions and fate, as all my jarls, and their companies, soon must.’

‘Thirty seconds.’ The vox-plate dragged Jorin from his reverie.

‘The runes have been cast, the course set.’ Jorin hammered his axe-throat against his plastron, fingers tightening around its sealskin haft. Morkai’s shade was boiling oil in his veins, his red howl washing Jorin’s fears for Russ away in waves of stinging excitement at the promise of bloodshed. ‘Gather your axes, warriors of Russ. The bludhaer comes.’

Jorin hammered his breastplate again. His Wolves echoed it, falling into a rhythm that steadily rose towards crescendo. The clamour filled the cramped compartment.

‘Once more, Dekk-Tra weaves the murder-make at our king’s command, to punish the craven sons of Nostramo, and restore kin lost to us after Prospero.’ Shame flushed his cheeks. Recasting his order as Russ’ own was a dishonourable act, one that would stain his soul until the Uppland called, but such was the cost of Horus’ war. No warrior could be spared to pursue foolish, self-appointed crusades.

‘Ten seconds!’

‘Cut every thread you find,’ Jorin bellowed. ‘If wyrd determines this day be your last, greet the end with courage. Ere that, let the soil run red with the tale of their lives ending.’

‘Heidur Russ!’ his Wolves roared. ‘Heidur Fenrys!’

The assault ramp clanged open.

Jorin sprinted down the ramp, squeezing his bolt pistol’s trigger. Two mass-reactives punched through a Night Lord’s gorget, his head vanishing in a crimson plume. The clunking chatter of the Spartan’s heavy bolters drove daggers of pure agony into Jorin’s skull. Tongues of fire raked the traitor line, the crack-thump of bursting shells accompanied by sprays of blood and aerosolised meat. The air shrieked, kaleidoscopic lances of pure energy spearing a Contemptor’s torso as fifty of Jorin’s Varagyr charged from their transports.

‘Fenrys hjolda!’ Jorin howled.

His brothers took up the chant, firing as they charged.

Jorin vaulted stacked corpses, the putrid stench of rotten meat and faecal matter clogging his throat as his bolts blasted apart another traitor. A stray burst staggered a second legionary, his cracked helm exposing alabaster flesh networked by cyanotic veins. A second salvo blew the traitor’s skull apart. Return fire hammered his plastron, spraying sparks across his vision, filling his mouth with the acrid tang of bolt propellant. Thick fissures cobwebbed the ceramite, and pain crackled along his ribs, blood dripping through the tears. Alert klaxons trilled. Jorin ignored them, cutting another traitor apart with a flurry of mass-reactives.

The VIII were reacting with an alacrity that surprised him.

Raptors bounded forwards on screeching jump packs, hideous avian shrieks drowning the throaty roar of tank engines and the rolling thunder of bolters brought to bear by Tactical and Terror squads. Plasma bursts and volkite beams rained on the Space Wolves like the fiery tears of Syrtyr. One burst in billows of ash, while another was roasted alive in his armour, steam venting through the soft-seals. Bolts punched two Varagyr from their feet and blasted a third apart. A Varagyr at Jorin’s side fell, shredded offal spraying through his cracked armour with the muted crumps of detonating mass-reactives.

‘Our cousins seem displeased.’ Thorald laughed, pain veining his voice as a bolt tore through his side. His biocodes flashed amber on Jorin’s retinal feed, his sensorium locating the Night Lord responsible. Jorin’s bolts split the traitor’s cuirass, shredding his vital organs. ‘These skítnah wretches held poor regard for guest-right already, but this is deplorable.’

‘What were you hoping for, brother?’ Ulbrandr Crowhame asked. His volkite serpenta shrieked, a traitor’s chest vanishing in sprays of steam and fire. ‘Bread and cheese to settle your delicate stomach? Perhaps meat and ale to strengthen your sword-arm?’

‘My sword-arm and stomach need no help, priest,’ Thorald laughed, bolter spitting death in golden flashes. ‘Though a horn of mjød among cousins is not unreasonable.’

Jorin grinned, cutting down a Night Lord with red-stained gauntlets and a tabard of flayed skin marked by Nocturnean brands. It was a fine thing to hear his brothers’ spirits lifted so. Their recent defeat at Trisolian, and a narrow escape from an Alpha Legion ambush at Akanthis, had shrouded them in a strange melancholy. There was no laughter in the mead halls, nor exaggerated boasts in the training cages.

Defeat had stolen something from Dekk-Tra, something they needed.

‘The bear is roused,’ Jorin said, another two biocodes sizzling to grey non-existence. Seven Varagyr slept on the red snows, and two suffered in healing comas, while more carried deep wounds. ‘We must spear the beast quickly, before the tables turn.’ He gunned another traitor down. ‘Unfortunately, we cannot use your jests, they make for terrible iron.’

Guttural laughter sliced through curt snaps of Wurgen as pack-alphas obeyed the battle-cant, folding their warriors into the spear point Jorin aimed at the traitors’ heart. The VIII were cowards by nature, their foes’ weakness and the terror their lords inspired the only crutches for their courage. He searched the traitor battle line for their lord, vowing to see him slain as the Wolves of Fenris tore into the Night Lords, howling in bloody abandon.

Jorin ducked the decapitating sweep of a sergeant’s chainglaive, disembowelling him on the backswing. He emptied his bolt pistol into a traitor’s skullish visor as he tried to draw his chainaxe. A third came at him, his crackling power fist painted red and slick with fresh blood. Jorin avoided clumsy swipes with contemptuous ease, severing the arm at the elbow before disembowelling him. Organs slapped wetly into the mud.

Jorin ground them to paste under his heel.

‘It baffles me that Gunnar believes these cravens worthy prey,’ Leif said, blocking the frenzied strikes of a Raptor’s power claws with his storm shield. His frostblade cleaved the traitor from clavicle to pelvis. ‘They disgrace the Legions with every breath.’

‘He has long sought to punish the Eighth Legion for their crimes during the Crusade,’ Ulbrandr said, plunging his Fang of Morkai into a traitor’s eye. He twitched, transfixed on the drill. Jorin slew a Raptor as he slunk into Ulbrandr’s blind spot, chainsword raised and ready to decapitate the Wolf Priest. The warrior cawed strangely as he died. ‘It was his obsession.’

‘What does his reason matter?’ Hjalmar snapped, power fist pulping a Raptor’s visor. Lubricant thickened the blood leaking from his shoulder, fibre-bundles showering sparks from rents torn in his plastron. ‘They deserted the Rout. They are traitors of a lesser shade.’

Jorin hesitated, hearing an echo of his own words to Russ in the Stormfist’s vitriol. Had he sounded so petty before the primarch?

Distraction caused him to mistime his parry.

Agony screamed through his fused ribs, and he felt shards moving beneath the ripped flesh. Alert runes flashed on his retinal feed, damaged sections highlighted red. He dismissed them, pain bleeding away in the warm wash of soporifics administered by his pharmacopeia. He drove his helm into the traitor’s forehead with the tock of ceramite on bone, shattering it. The Night Lord staggered. Jorin cleaved through his legs, watching them topple beneath him, enjoying his pained roar, before bisecting his primary heart with a downward swing.

‘I disagree,’ Ulbrandr said, his wolf-head crozius obliterating a traitor’s torso. ‘You are too broad, and blind, in your interpretation of treason. Independence of thought does not make a traitor. Gunnar exercises that independence, punishing the Eighth for their treason as much as their earlier crimes. His obsession with Hunderax does not detract from that.’

Jorin snarled, mud sucking at his boots. Memories of the Hunderax campaign tore at his mind. Entire populations were dismembered and ritually flayed, their bodies displayed in communal areas, screams broadcast on the vox. Raptors delighted hunting survivors through the ruins, casting them to the Apothecaries that ruled macabre skinning pits like petty lords. Gunnar had been incensed, demanding Russ mete out justice to Curze and his get.

It was one of the final times the two Legions had served together.

Jorin tore his axe free from another traitor’s chest, the mud dragging at his heels. His mind churned over Ulbrandr’s and Hjalmar’s words. Both were right in their way. Yes, the missing Space Wolves had deserted the Rout to pursue their own path, but their path still served the Allfather and Russ, weakening Horus’ armies and his chance of victory.

Was it right that he dictate the wyrd of another?

Jorin dismissed the question, beheading another Night Lord.

He was jarl of Dekk-Tra, the shield-bearer of Russ. Gunnar, once his axe-brother and husjarl, was now an honourless deserter, a disgrace to Dekk-Tra and the Rout. Wyrd or not, they would all obey Jorin’s orders, and those of the Wolf King, or meet his axe. That was their fate, until the golden halls of the Uppland welcomed their souls to the banquet tables.

Thorald’s life-rune failed, his head torn free in a Raptor’s claws. Leif hacked his killer in two, bellowing in animal rage. Jorin echoed the howl, Morkai’s shade snarling in his chest. His axe carved bloody trails through ceramite and flesh, speed rising in tandem with his fury. His breath quickened, and his snarls grew more bestial. Night Lords fell to every stroke, their bodies piling, as his eyes searched for any hint of their lord.

Another twelve traitors died before Jorin sighted him.

The traitor lord carved through Space Wolves with joyous abandon, his power sabre slick with Fenrisian blood. Dark Angels helms clacked at his waist, and a flesh tabard marked with painfully familiar tribal tattoos hung from iron chains. Human femurs were strung together on dried tendons at his chest, waist and shoulder. They clinked against ceramite decorated with hololithic representations of death and tendrils of twisted lightning. Flowing Nostraman script named him the Prince of City’s Edge, and he laughed as Jorin approached.

‘Another dog, desperate to die for his Allfather.’ The Prince’s laugh was mellifluous, his voice culture and cruelty forged together. He tipped his blade in elaborate circles. ‘I will send Him your hide when this world is my new hunting ground. I have quite the collection of your miserable kin’s hides, and my slaves cannot possibly treat them all.’

The Prince deflected Jorin’s first attacks, his bodyguard meeting Jorin’s Varagyr with blade and boltgun. Jorin swung for the Prince’s throat, blending that strike into a backswing designed to split the traitor from crown to pelvis. He pressed the Prince back, his confidence growing with each parry the traitor made. The Prince parried a blow crafted to remove his head, smashing his fist into Jorin’s helm, his blade carving a smoking rent across his chest. Alert runes washed Jorin’s retinal feed, blood seeping through the tear in his plastron.

Jorin backed away, wary.

‘No righteous words, Space Wolf? No promise of death for my crimes, executioner?’

He cackled through his chiropteran-winged helm, and Jorin took a moment to gather himself. The traitor was skilled, more so than most. Breath sawed through his vox-grille.

‘Has battle stolen your tongue, Fenrisian?’ His voice turned coy. ‘Or does fear silence you?’

Jorin ignored the taunt, swinging for the Prince’s stomach, the first strike melding into slices for his throat and limbs. The traitor parried each with ease, leeching Jorin’s momentum to fuel a blistering series of lunges and ripostes, each setting up the next. Several tore deep gouges in Jorin’s plate. Blood leaked through, and his retinal feed ran red with alert runes. He blocked a decapitating strike, locking his axe-head with the Prince’s blade, adjusting his balance and stance with micro-movements, determined to overbalance the Nostraman wretch.

The Prince chuckled. ‘Fear, then.’

The Prince shoved him backwards, blade carving a smoking rent into his vambrace. Jorin swung wildly, a ploy to buy more time. The Prince slipped under the blow, driving his knuckle-guard into Jorin’s helm, fracturing ceramite and bone. The Wolf Lord staggered, momentarily blinded. He swung for the traitor’s head and throat, stomach and limbs, but the Prince parried them all, his blade slipping through Jorin’s guard. Pain flared sun-hot in the Wolf Lord’s chest; the Prince’s blade was buried to the hilt in Jorin’s right pectoral.

Jorin fell to one knee, and the traitor withdrew his blade. The pain multiplied a hundredfold.

‘How is it you primitives phrase your final farewell?’ The Prince chuckled, relishing his power, blade held ready for a coup de grace. Jorin met his gaze, determined to show no fear before Morkai, even as the pain roared in his chest. ‘Ah, yes. Until next winter.’

He never completed the kill-stroke.

Plasma ripped through the Prince’s chest, immolating the air in his lungs. The scent of cooked meat leaked from the wound. The traitor clawed for breaths that were born and died on his tongue. Jorin hauled himself to his feet, biting back a wince at the dull throb of broken bones grinding together. Pain raked his arm and shoulders as he hefted his axe, beheading the Prince with two blows. His helmed head slapped in the mud, and Jorin leaned down, plucking the head free and casting it aside. He claimed the helm as his wargeld.

The sound of battle faded to muted cries and lone bolter-barks.

Jorin’s surviving Varagyr clustered around him, a wall of burn-scarred ceramite and flesh. He snarled, his lips folding to a thin crease as Ulbrandr applied counterseptic spray to his wounds, packed them with synth-flesh and stapled them shut. The Wolf Priest chuckled and clapped him on the shoulder, moving to the other wounded. His Initiate-Priest extracted gene-seed from the dead, offering the Emperor’s Peace to the dying.

The heavy squelch of power-armoured feet on mud drew closer. Jorin and his brothers turned to face it.

Errant Wolves approached, their body language bleeding wariness. They wore the storm-grey and lupine trappings of the Legion, the sigil of Dekk-Tra howling proud on plastrons and pauldrons. Their pack markings were strange, the filigree of the inlaid rune-marks chipped and worn. White armour cement formed lumpen hillocks over battle-damage, and sections of temporary reinforcement remained unpainted. Several plates bore the heraldry of Horus’ Legions, defaced by futharc and old blood.

‘This is a trap,’ Hjalmar growled in Jorin’s ear. ‘These are Alpha Legion, disguised as Wolves. They used the Night Lords as bait in the trap, just as they used the Army regiment at Akanthis. We must attack, now, before we are snared in their scheme!’

‘There is a difference between culling mortals and legionaries,’ Ulbrandr said, forcing Hjalmar’s power fist down. ‘Even Night Lords are worth more than sacrificial distraction.’

‘Who can guess how the Hydra thinks?’ the Stormfist countered.

Jorin forestalled further discussion with a raised hand.

‘Gunnar Thorolfsson!’ Jorin called, lowering his axe. ‘Come forth.’

A Space Wolf stepped forward, his Mark IV battleplate sullied by a single Imperial-purple pauldron, its III Legion iconography overlaid by futharc. He twisted his helm free with a snapping hiss. A thick mane of snow-white hair and a short beard framed a pale, scarred face set with gleaming amber eyes. He bared his fangs in a feral smile, a plasma pistol mag-locked to his waist. He raised his power sword in a Fenrisian salute. Blood slicked its length.

‘Jorin Bloodhowl,’ Gunnar rasped. ‘Well met, kinsman.’

Jorin ignored the nicety, fearing he may bury his axe in Gunnar’s chest. Its murderous weight was deliciously tempting. Joy warred with anger, delight with disgust. Gunnar had been his brother long years before they were bound by shared blood and fealty, before Jorin was Russ’ shield-bearer in the mortal years on Fenris. They tasted the salt and soil of Thengir’s hearth-pledge as boys, swearing their lives to him and his ward, Leman.

Gunnar deserted those bonds after Prospero.

Jorin struggled to reconcile that truth with the warrior before him, wearing a grin as familiar as his own. Morkai’s shade snarled in his hearts, yearning to be free.

‘I had not thought to see you here,’ Gunnar continued.

‘I had not thought to be here,’ Jorin lied, wrath colouring his voice. Gunnar’s warm expression curdled, and Jorin stepped into the no-man’s-land separating the Wolves. ‘But the Wolf King has issued summons. Every warship and warrior of the Rout is to return to the Hrafnkel. The Warmaster’s forces advance on Beta-Garmon, and the Allfather’s life will soon be threatened. We are too few to break him alone.’

Gunnar looked sharply to the warrior beside him, his armour draped in a Blackmane pelt, and strung with rune-marked stones and yellowed animal bones. He clutched a staff of scrimshawed mammoth tusk, and fished a set of knucklebones from a leather pouch at his waist. Murmuring in Old Fenrisian, the gothi cast his runes, then knelt to examine them.

‘Bloodhowl speaks truth. Beta-Garmon burns beneath the Traitor’s gaze.’

‘Three Legions shield their walls,’ Ulbrandr said, offering a nod to Gunnar and his gothi. Both returned it. ‘But the Warmaster’s hosts are numberless. Every minute we remain, Morkai draws closer to claiming the Allfather’s soul for Corpse Hall.’

‘Three Legions?’ Gunnar said, eyes narrowed.

‘Guilliman and the Lion harry the traitors as they advance to Terra,’ Jorin said. ‘The Wolf King gathers the Rout before he sails, and the Shattered Legions can muster only a few thousand warriors. Most are scattered warbands fighting from Ultramar to Isstvan.’

‘Should you not also petition them?’ Gunnar asked, head cocked.

‘They are not Dekk-Tra,’ Jorin said, suspicion blooming.

‘You may have met with more success.’ Gunnar wiped blood from his blade. ‘We are sworn to defend Bloodfall, and to slaughter the Night Lords. I have witnessed too many worlds cleansed of life by the Prince, and his master. I will not abandon another to that fate.’

Shock smothered Jorin’s surprise, stealing the words from his tongue. Resistance was to be expected. They were Fenryka, and defiant by nature, but the notion of outright refusal was unthinkable. That these orders were supposedly from the Wolf King only served to increase his incredulity. Tension coiled his arm muscles tight and Morkai’s shade howled in the blood thundering through his ears. Blood sizzled on his axe blade as he reactivated it.

His brothers’ fury was like heated brands pressed against his flesh.

‘Oathbreaker,’ Hjalmar snarled, power fist igniting. ‘Skítnah wretch.’

‘You dare name me oathbreaker?’ Anger honed Gunnar’s tone to a razored edge. ‘We are sworn to defend the Allfather and His people.’ He reactivated his power sword, tipping it in tight circles. ‘We cannot abandon their defence, otherwise our oaths will be broken.’

‘You refuse to heed the Wolf King’s summons,’ Hjalmar said, moving a step towards Gunnar. Jorin stopped him. Gunnar was his, no other’s. ‘Though he is your lord, and you are sworn to honour him above all other oaths. That makes you an oathbreaker.’

‘No doubt many among the traitor hosts thought as you do.’

‘This rebellion will be won and lost at Terra,’ Leif said, forcibly restraining Hjalmar. The Stormfist frothed curses at Gunnar. Jorin snarled as the husjarl’s lips pulled into a tight smile. He was enjoying this. ‘Victory here will be hollow if the Allfather’s life is lost.’

‘The Allfather has three entire Legions and uncounted billions of Imperial Army to defend Him. These people have no defence, save us. The Imperium is here as much as Terra, and it contributes as much in this war’s final decision as the Throneworld does.’

Jorin scoffed at the scale of Gunnar’s delusion.

‘This world is unimportant, brother,’ Jorin said. Fury threaded him with fresh resolve, washing away any lingering trace of pain from his shoulder. ‘Terra is the true prize.’

‘Dulan changed you, brother. You cower behind orders as a frightened child does its mother’s skirts. The matter is settled. I will not give my warriors to your cause.’

‘Your warriors?’ A disbelieving smile twisted Jorin’s lips, and his axe weighed heavy in his hand. ‘I am jarl of Dekk-Tra, sworn lord of all who bear its crest. These are my warriors, husjarl, as are you. Those who do not obey will sleep on red snows this night.’

‘I am jarl of this Hunt,’ Gunnar said. ‘Elected in accordance with the laws of the Legion and Fenris. My authority is equal to yours, and I will not send my warriors to die in a cause they have not chosen for themselves. Each chose to be here, and here they stay.’

Nods and affirmative vox-clicks passed through Gunnar’s Wolves. Jorin suppressed a flicker of irritation.

‘Let us decide with blades,’ he said, rage thickening his voice with a lupine snarl. The Deathwolf howled in red fury in his hearts, the desire to tear Gunnar’s throat out a physical sensation that prickled his flesh and coiled his muscles. ‘We form the square, and the victor shall have command of your warriors, while the other dines with Morkai in Corpse Hall.’

Gunnar shrugged, lips peeling into a grin. ‘As you wish.’

‘Allow me to fight, jarl,’ Hjalmar snarled. Rage was a red glint in his eye. Leif and Ulbrandr echoed the sentiment, as did the rest of his Varagyr. ‘I will honour you.’

‘No,’ Jorin snapped. ‘This challenge was mine, this fight is mine. Make the square.’

They grumbled and protested, but ultimately obeyed. Gunnar moved to meet him in the centre, tipping his blade in tight circles.

‘Are you certain you can fight?’ He pointed to Jorin’s injured shoulder. ‘That wound is far from healed, and there is no shame in naming a champion due to… incapacity.’

‘I am not so weak that I cannot defeat you,’ Jorin snarled, offended by the intimation of weakness or cowardice. ‘Why the concern, brother? Are your knees already trembling?’

Gunnar shrugged, then lunged.

Jorin dragged his blade into a defensive stroke, ignoring the sharp throb of pain in his shoulder. Disruptor fields clashed with miniature thunderclaps, thrusts met with parries, and diagonal strokes were deflected. Jorin swung for Gunnar’s throat, but he twisted beneath the blow, fist hammering into Jorin’s plastron. Confidence glinted in Gunnar’s eyes as he parried another series of strikes, his blade carving thick fissures in Jorin’s plastron. Agony screamed along Jorin’s nerves, his retinal feed painted red with damage reports.

Blood seeped through the shorn plate.

‘Why did you come here?’ Gunnar asked, launching another attack. ‘Truly.’

‘The Legion is wounded,’ Jorin said, diverting his concentration from the pain flaring in his chest and shoulder. He parried and thrust, axe biting into Gunnar’s side. The husjarl shoved Jorin back, slicing for his throat. Jorin pivoted aside, the awkward movement tearing muscles along his ribs. ‘Morkai’s tally has been heavy since Prospero.’

Sorrow passed over Gunnar’s face so fast Jorin almost missed it. ‘A convenient excuse,’ he panted, launching a blistering series of strikes.

Jorin parried and deflected those he could, the last strike almost cutting into his injured ribs.

‘Unless you are now dangerously naïve, you cannot believe two hundred Wolves will make a difference?’

‘I believe if Dekk-Tra regains what it lost, we can make the traitors pay.’

‘Like Bulveye and his Hunt?’

Jorin missed his counter, overextending his arm. He cursed himself for his surprise, angling his axe to defence as Gunnar pressed him. He should have expected that.

‘Bulveye was lost on Prospero.’ He spat the words through clenched teeth, ignoring the pain flaring in his injured shoulder. He swung for Gunnar’s clavicle, but the other warrior parried the blow, pistoning his elbow into Jorin’s pauldron. Pain scorched muscle and meat. ‘We searched, but the Wolf King ordered our withdrawal, and I was sworn to obey.’

Gunnar hammered his fist into Jorin’s helm, cracks cobwebbing the corner of one eye-lens. Jorin roared, Morkai’s howl blending with his own, and hurled himself at Gunnar. He slashed for Gunnar’s limbs, abdomen and throat, sparing nothing for his defence. Sparks sprayed his visor, the peal of clashing disruptor fields ripping into his ears. Blood sizzled on Fenrisian steel, his blade tearing through Gunnar’s abdominal plate. The other Space Wolf grinned, ignoring the blood that welled in the shorn ceramite, and hurled himself at Jorin once again.

Their blades locked, each warrior seeking to overbalance the other.

‘Dulan changed you.’ Gunnar pressed his weight behind his axe. ‘You thought only of your brothers before that campaign, and less of orders and proper command structure.’

‘My brothers have only ever–’

‘Do not pretend otherwise,’ Gunnar snarled, bunching his muscles. Servos squealed as Jorin pressed down harder, determined to break Gunnar’s guard. The other Wolf adjusted his grip and shoved hard, boosting Jorin backwards. Gunnar’s blade sliced low, carving into Jorin’s left thigh. Pain lanced through his leg, his armour’s pharmacopeia husbanding its last soporifics. ‘You abandoned hundreds of our brothers at Prospero. They counted for naught when the Wolf King ordered our withdrawal, so do not pretend they hold worth to you.’

Gunnar feinted for Jorin’s throat, his blade instead thrusting downward, biting into Jorin’s right thigh, severing muscles, and punching cleanly through his leg. Pain bleached his mind of thought, and a rune flashed red. Jorin hobbled back, his blood dripping into the mud, swinging his axe in a wild decapitation arc, but a deft flick of Gunnar’s blade disarmed him.

Anger twisted Gunnar’s smile into one of cruel victory.

‘Was I supposed to disobey?’ Jorin asked, meeting Gunnar’s grin with his own leering death mask. He adopted a crouch, fingers curved to claws. He favoured his left leg, agony still screaming through his right. Fury kept him standing. ‘Russ is our lord, his will our purpose.’

Gunnar swung his blade overarm, forcing Jorin to pivot on his injured leg. He crashed his fist into Jorin’s visor, the cracks in the eye-lens widening. Jorin swung his own fist, the blow connecting with Gunnar’s jaw, blood and teeth spraying. The husjarl ducked another punch, his blade slicing into Jorin’s plastron.

The hot crackle of cooking flesh filled Jorin’s ears, its scent lodging in his nostrils. He gasped for breath, his primary heart racing into overdrive as its twin ceased to function. Pain screwed his eyes shut and forced him to his knees. Jorin felt the blade tear free, the heavy slap of his plastron falling into the mud close behind as he fought to steady his breathing, his eyes open, ready to meet Morkai in Corpse Hall.

‘Your narrow perception of duty is why I can never follow you again,’ Gunnar said, lowering his blade. ‘I will not blindly obey orders I have no hand in making.’

‘Tradition demands you finish me,’ Jorin said, voice thick with pain and anticipation. He hated the pity in Gunnar’s eyes. ‘Do not make me wait. Get on with it.’

‘Tradition can hang,’ Gunnar grinned, beckoning one among Jorin’s Varagyr forward. Ulbrandr knelt beside Jorin, plunging bio-readers into the jarl’s exposed neural ports. ‘I did not save you from the Prince only to slay you myself. I am not so wasteful in my efforts.’

‘Skítnah wretch!’ Jorin bellowed, shoving Crowhame aside and baring his throat. It was not fear of death that set his heart racing but fear he would be deemed craven, and the golden halls forever denied to him. ‘Kill me, coward!’

‘I will not stain my blade with the blood of a loyal son,’ Gunnar snapped. ‘Do you not understand, Bloodhowl? To follow tradition would make me no less a traitor than Horus.’

Jorin scowled. He could not disagree. ‘Allowing me to live changes nothing between us,’ he said, helped to his feet by Leif and Ulbrandr. ‘Tradition can be ignored, but orders cannot be. They must be followed.’

‘Then answer me one question.’

Jorin blinked. ‘Ask it.’

‘Did the Allfather order us to raze Prospero?’

Shame flushed Jorin’s cheeks, and he forced his answer out. ‘No.’

‘No,’ Gunnar agreed. ‘Horus manipulated us to ensure Magnus could not pose a threat to him. We obeyed, as we were meant to, but we were wrong not to question that order. Obedience blinded us to an enemy in our midst, and made another enemy of a potential ally.’

‘That is not the same–’

‘It is,’ Gunnar interrupted. ‘You have seen Horus’ perfidy at its fullest, but still refuse to accept that we cannot blindly follow as we once did. We must temper obedience by using our judgement, and honour the spirit of our oaths if not the letter.’

Angry murmurs rose from the Varagyr. Jorin stilled them with a raised hand.

‘An oath is not flexible, nor open to interpretations. An oath is uncompromising and unyielding. That is what makes it an oath. We are sworn to obey, to serve the Allfather and the Wolf King. To ignore that’ – Jorin gestured to the dead Night Lords – ‘is to risk walking the same path Horus has set his Traitor Legions on. Is that your oath, brother?’

‘You twist my words to suit your own purpose,’ Gunnar said. He scowled. ‘We honour every tenet of our oath to the Allfather. We defend His Imperium and His people, as we will until our final breaths. We hold no master save Him and the Wolf King, and we will never place our own interests above His, or risk manipulation by those who do. The difference, brother, is we have chosen our path in His service, while you still follow the one set for you.’

Anything Jorin might have mustered in response deserted his tongue at the echo of Russ’ words he heard in Gunnar’s speech. He thought back to their meeting aboard the Hrafnkel. Russ had granted him leave to sail, but he had not ordered him. Jorin had made a choice and the Wolf King had honoured that choice.

Jorin shifted, discomforted by the symmetry between Gunnar and himself.

‘That is how we avoid the next Prospero,’ Gunnar said. ‘Do you see?’

‘I do not like it,’ Jorin Bloodhowl said. ‘But I am beginning to see it.’

A THOUSAND SONS

Censured at the Council of Nikaea for his flagrant use of sorcery, Magnus the Red and his Thousand Sons Legion retreat to their homeworld of Prospero to continue their use of the arcane arts in secret.

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PROSPERO BURNS

The Emperor is enraged. Primarch Magnus the Red of the Thousand Sons Legion has made a terrible mistake that endangers the very safety of Terra.

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WOLFSBANE

The time has come. Leman Russ, primarch of the Space Wolves, withdraws his Legion from Terra and makes all haste for Horus’s position, to try and end the traitor once and for all.

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IMPERIAL FISTS

VII LEGION

CHAMPION OF OATHS

John French

‘A sword takes the edge it is given.’

– Aphorism of the Gobinal Blade Clans,
Terra (age unknown)

‘Are you ready?’

Sigismund raised his eyes. Archamus looked back. The Master of Huscarls’ gaze was steady.

Sigismund let his breath relax through him; let the rising adrenaline drain from his thoughts; let his fingers hang, empty and still. Above him, the black walls of the Temple of Oaths rose to its vaulted ceiling. The names of the Legion looked down at him, marked in gold, etched in stone. Fires burned in bronze bowls that hung from iron chains. In the shadows, his brothers waited – two hundred warriors, armoured in black and yellow, draped with white-and-black tabards, weapons resting in their hands. The Templars. The guardians of the oaths of the VII Legion. This was the place where every warrior of the Imperial Fists made his oath to brother, primarch and Emperor, and the Templars protected it with their swords and with their lives.

Archamus was still looking at Sigismund, waiting. The Master of Huscarls had assumed his rank only a year before, but there was a weight to his presence even before he became Rogal Dorn’s chief bodyguard. Archamus was one of the First, those warriors raised to the Legion after the Emperor found Rogal Dorn. That alone would have been enough to make Archamus deserving of respect. He was there as the proxy of Rogal Dorn to see that all was done correctly. If Sigismund failed, the primarch would not be there to see his weakness.

Sigismund gave a single nod.

‘Very well,’ said Archamus, and held out the sword he had brought from the Phalanx’s armoury. Another sword hung at his back, sheathed in black leather and silver: the oath blade of the Temple, the sword that would be Sigismund’s to carry if he passed through the trial to come.

Sigismund gripped the hilt of the proffered blade and felt the weight of the weapon sink into his arm as Archamus let go. The servos in his armour purred as he turned to face the circle of his brothers.

‘Begin,’ called Archamus, and the first of the two hundred Templars came at Sigismund in a blur of steel.

Night fell over the Ionus Plateau. The drift camps covering the land were new, a consequence of Unification, and the wars that had been fought for it. Those that could flee the wars between old tyrants and new had come here and sheltered in the ruins of forgotten empires. They had made a labyrinth of metal and fabric that spread for two hundred kilometres and bled out into the rad zones to the south. It was tainted land. Not tainted in the way that the toxin-laden wastes of the Gobi were, but tainted by the stories that clung to the place. That was why it had been empty when the refugees came.

The old monarchs and despots who had carved their palaces into the faces of the mountains, and whose tombs dotted the plains beneath, had been enchanters and spirit speakers. They had vanished into the oblivion of Old Night, leaving their kingdoms to decay and half-memories of fear in the lands that bordered them. The refugees had put aside those fears, the need for sanctuary overcoming the ghosts of old stories. Still, though, few would look up at the ruins or touch the tombs.

Except the young. To them the dead past was there to be picked up and worn like a discarded cloak. The packs of youths that gathered and roamed the drift had taken the old stories and made them their own. When they went on rampages, it was in horned masks of jagged metal daubed in white, and crowns of polished scrap. Their gang names spoke to the tales of the land: Blood Spectres, Corpse Kings, the Queens of Hades. They came at night, and killed, or inflicted cruelty on those who could not defend themselves. Most of all, they preyed on the thousands of orphans that lived in the cracks of life in drift camps. Some said the gangs took those they could and made them their own, replenishing their ranks by kidnapping.

Sigismund put his eye to the boards pulled over the door into the deserted cistern. It had not rained in days, and a metallic shiver of static hung in the air with the smell of dust and the smoke of cooking fires. The drift camps extended in every direction, a sea of flotsam and tattered fabric. Ropes of scrap bells chimed in the hot breeze. Electro kites hung in the air, tethered to empty charge reservoirs, waiting for the lightning to fall. To the west, the crags of the Aflonia mesa rose to scrape the bruised sky. The bones and skulls of old fortresses shone orange and gold on its cliff faces as the last of the sun’s light cut across the land.

‘I can’t hear them,’ said Nestro, pulling his legs closer under himself and turning to look at Sigismund and Thera. ‘Maybe they won’t come…’

‘They will come,’ said Thera softly, her voice somehow calm. ‘Just stay back when they do.’

‘What are you going to do?’ asked Sigismund, his voice not hiding the fear that was rising in him.

Thera looked at him. Her eyes were dark, slashed by the cooling light falling through the gaps in the boards covering the door. One of the other children huddling in the dark, further into the old cistern, whimpered.

‘It will be all right,’ said Thera.

He heard it then, the rustle of footsteps outside.

Thera closed her eyes and rested her forehead on the metal of the iron bar in her hands. She had wound strips of leather around one end, making it a grip.

‘Why do you do that?’ he heard himself ask.

She did not reply. Above them, the footsteps outside stopped. Shadows blocked the slivers of fading light coming through the boarded-up door; firelight replaced the dusty warmth of the fading sun.

Sigismund could feel the hammer of his heart in his chest. They would not survive this. This would be it, the end of the life that seemed to have begun with a city burning and him running and running out into the night.

Something sharp rattled across the boards to the door, and a hissing laugh trembled through the air. More rose to join it until it was a rasping chorus of mockery. The light of flame torches rippled through the gaps in the entrance.

‘Come down to the kingdom, little ones…’ called a high voice. ‘Come and see the dead…’

A blow shook the board door.

Thera opened her eyes. Sigismund saw a momentary tremor in her hands, and then they went still. She began to rise to her feet. Sigismund saw a flash of pain on her face. She shifted, trying to keep weight off her left leg. Some of the smaller children moaned. Thera turned towards the door. Sigismund reached out and caught her arm. She looked back at him, the bruises and half-healed scabs merged into the shadows filling the hollows of her face. She shook her head once.

‘This needs to happen,’ she said. ‘Otherwise they won’t stop, not now. I hurt them too much, but not enough.’

He held on for a second returning her look, blood ringing in his ears.

‘There will be too many this time,’ he said. She shook her head, he could not tell whether in agreement or denial, and pulled open the door.

Anaxsus came first. Anaxsus the Grey, oldest of the Temple brothers, raised to the sword in the Northern Hives of Terra, a warrior of mark before the VII Legion even had a name to carry to the stars, and now he was first to come at Sigismund. A blow with his mace from above, two-handed, strength flowing into stone and steel. Sigismund met the blow, let it slam his sword down, let the blade pivot with the momentum of the impact, and slashed the edge into Anaxsus’ faceplate. Ceramite cracked, and Sigismund was already striking again, twice more, low and high, and Anaxsus was pivoting to drag his mace up to attack. Sigismund’s kick cracked the ceramite at the back of Anaxsus’ knee, and his sword swept around as the warrior stumbled.

‘I yield!’ growled Anaxsus. The edge of Sigismund’s sword was touching his neck. Sigismund moved the sword away.

Behind him, Ecturo was already in the circle, short sword and dagger drawn, unhelmed, face grim as he lunged. Sigismund met the lunge and cut at Ecturo’s neck. The blow did not land. Ecturo ducked under the cut, blocked Sigismund’s sword with his own, and stabbed up into Sigismund’s ribs. The strike was fast and fluid, almost beautiful.

Ecturo had come from Arcanisis and brought the play of sword and knife with him from that world of swamps and iron. Induction into the Legion and his years in the 85th Assault Battalion had blended the skills of his birth world with transhuman strength and agility. He was lethal in every way that a Space Marine and a warrior of the Temple should be.

Sigismund let the knife point almost touch him and then slammed his weight forwards, sword pressing and tangling Ecturo’s legs. The young warrior tried to move back, but he was half falling, his advantage stolen in an eye-blink. Sigismund caught Ecturo’s left arm, pivoted and threw him with a snap of force. Ecturo hit the floor, began to rise, but Sigismund’s sword edge touched the back of his neck.

‘I yield!’

But the next warrior was already in the circle, already cutting, and the dance of blades and killing strokes flowed on without cease. Two hundred blades wielded by the finest of the Legion, two hundred blades turned on him one after another until he failed or until he reached the end. There could be no other way, not for the Templars, not for the Legion. To be the First of Templars, leader of the Champions of Oaths, he had to face them all, one after another. On the battlefield, they stood together; they were brothers, made one by blood and oaths, but here he had to stand alone.

His sword met another blow and the clamour of steel echoed beneath the oath-marked walls.

Quiet. Echoing quiet and the ripple of light from flame torches spilling through the door to the world outside. No breath, no cries, nothing to undo the crack of metal on skull, and the rustle of a body folding to the floor.

Sigismund did not move.

‘Thera?’ came a small voice from further back in the cistern cave. Sigismund looked around. Nestro looked back at him, eyes wide above his knees. Nestro… Quick Nestro, not the smallest, but the one who had clung to Thera like a shadow. Nestro who had somehow come alone from Cypra after it had burned. Nestro who shook at the sight of naked flame. The boy was shivering now. ‘Thera?’ he asked again, the edge of panic and fear breaking through. ‘Where is Thera?’

‘Your kings are here,’ came the high, hissing voice from outside. ‘Come out into the dark…’

Sigismund closed his eyes for a second. He drew a breath, held it and felt the blood beat through him.

He did not want to do this. He did not want to die in the dust, bones broken, bleeding while his killers cheered like jackals. He did not want this to have to be him. He was not a fighter. He was not even the eldest after Thera. He was quick, but not strong; always the one who had survived but never the one who had won. But he was here, and if he did not move, did not step out beyond the door, then he would be surrendering for them all.

Sigismund opened his eyes. He stood, feeling himself shake as he stepped to the door. He saw them, figures in the firelight, taller than him, thin limbs under grey rags, masks made from battered metal, crowns of sharp edges, knives and chains in their hands.

He did not look down at Thera lying in front of the door. The ground was damp under his feet as he walked forward, sticky and clotted.

The crowd of masks shifted, chains clinked.

‘You here to kneel or to join her?’ asked a high voice from one of the masks.

Sigismund could hear the breath sawing in and out of his lungs. His bare foot touched the metal of the iron bar resting in Thera’s unmoving fingers. He bent down, but kept his eyes steady on the crowd of masks. The leather-wound grip of the bar was sticky with blood as he lifted it.

Laughter began behind one of the masks and ran through the crowd.

‘Another for the bone pits…’

The bar felt heavy in his hand. He had fought before – all the lost of the drifts had – but he had no idea what he was going to do. He felt his arms begin to shake.

He saw Thera in his memory, saw her raise the iron bar and rest it on her forehead, heard himself ask the question she had not answered.

‘Why do you do that?’

The breath slowed in his lungs. The tremble in his limbs stilled. The circle of watching masks froze in the unfinished second, poised on the edge of the rush that would surge forward in a blur of blows.

Slowly, carefully, he touched the cold iron to his forehead.

Blood. There was blood on Sigismund’s face and in his mouth. A blow had shattered his jaw on the left-hand side. His vision was a smeared blur. Tatters of broken ceramite shook from his frame as he lunged forwards. The servos on his right leg had gone, so he was dragging the dead weight of his armour with muscle alone. Clotting blood ran from the joins in his armour where blade edges had found an opening.

Sigismund’s lunge slid past Calivar’s stave and struck him in the chest. The force of the blow cannoned the banner bearer off his feet. With its power field lit, the sword would have passed clean through Calivar’s torso. Sigismund was already above the other warrior, spinning his sword and ramming the point down, stopping so that the killing blow hovered about Calivar’s face.

‘I yield,’ gasped Calivar.

Sigismund straightened, turning to meet the first blow of the next opponent. The blow did not come. His eyes flicked over the circle of armoured figures, familiar eyes watching him from bloodied faces and broken helms. Was it over? Had he faced them all?

His hearts slowed, his thoughts cleared. The blurs of combat defined themselves, settling in his mind.

No, he had not faced them all. It was not yet over.

‘Are you ready, lad?’ The voice was low, and crackled with static. He closed his eyes for a second as he heard the clatter and hiss of gear-driven steps.

He turned.

A mountain of black iron and yellow armour plates stood across the circle from him. It was not a Space Marine any more, not truly. Just as genecraft had pushed Sigismund and his brothers into being something beyond human, so the craft of the forge masters had pushed the warrior facing him beyond transhuman.

There were lines in the figure’s shape that echoed Adeptus Astartes power armour, and the heraldry gave no doubt as to its alliance and heritage: black cross on white, clenched fist on yellow. But it stood almost twice Sigismund’s height. A green slot sat high on the headless torso. Sigismund could see eyes in the glowing amnion behind the armourglass. Its limbs were metal, its muscles pistons. A hammer hung in the grip of the left arm, a shield of pitted metal in the right. Both were massive, beyond what even a Space Marine in full armour could lift. But this was not a Space Marine. It was one of the dead who had chained himself to life and war. Dreadnought – that was what they called them all now, all those brothers of the twenty Legions who slept the iron sleep and woke to fight the war that had killed them.

But this was not any Dreadnought. This was a warrior who had received the laurels of victory from the Emperor’s hand at Mesora while Terra was still divided, who had fought at the siege of Luna and fought at the side of great Horus when he alone stood as the Emperor’s son. Appius, the first to refuse the gates of death and take the iron sleep – Father of Dreadnoughts.

‘Master,’ said Sigismund, bowing his head for a moment but not lowering his gaze.

Fibre cables bunched under armour plates, pistons flexed in Appius’ arms.

‘Begin,’ boomed the Dreadnought, and it exploded forwards in a thunder roll of iron and steel.

Sigismund fell. The stone floor slammed into his back. He rolled, coming to his feet in an eye-blink. A blow struck his shoulder. Pain exploded through his flesh; he staggered, brought his sword up to cut, but another blow hit his arm. The force was light, precise, but it still almost shattered his forearm. He staggered again, snapped forward, and cold iron slammed into his forehead. He fell again and rolled again, but as he rose it was to see the old warrior already walking out of the training circle.

Sigismund made to kneel and await instruction, but Appius flicked a glance at him and that was enough to hold Sigismund where he was. The weapon master was cleaning the unpowered mace he had been wielding. His beard and hair were the grey of the cinders covering the practice floor. He wore a quilted tunic over a black bodyglove. The flesh of his hands gleamed as they cleaned the weapon, the scar tissue of old wars glossy under the stablights. A tattoo of a raptor head and lightning bolts sat on his left cheek.

‘What was your mistake?’ asked Appius.

‘I was too slow to recover,’ said Sigismund without hesitation.

The old warrior raised an eyebrow. ‘You are certain?’

‘You were in a position to strike me as I moved. I was not quick enough to disrupt your timing.’

Appius held his eye on Sigismund for a long moment and then turned away, hefting the mace and carrying it to one of a series of weapon racks bolted to the floor. Sigismund waited.

The training chamber was empty apart from the two of them, the air still, the deck and walls silent to the vibration of engines that shook them when the Phalanx was under power. The fortress ship of the Imperial Fists was at anchor, swallowing munitions and supplies from the void stations of Uranus before passing through the Elysian Gate and out to the edge of the Crusade. It was a rare moment of quiet in a space-borne city of war. For Sigismund, it had brought him back to the training deck and Appius’ lessons. It was as much a test as it was a lesson, of course.

He was amongst the youngest to be nominated to take the Temple Oath. Twelve years separated him from the drift camps of Ionus and the boy the Legion had taken to make a warrior. Those years had given him a purpose that he had never known existed. Always advancing, never flinching, never taking a step back, he had fought battles and faced the enemies of the Imperium, seen triumph and defeat and learned the lessons they taught: that both could undo you if you let them. He had never tried to rise in rank or position. He had simply faced what was before him.

Appius selected a sword. In size and shape it was the twin of the blade that lay on the ground in front of Sigismund. Appius rolled his wrist, letting the blade hiss through the air. The motion looked unconscious, relaxed, but Sigismund could read the variation in every cut. In the days since the weapon master had begun his training, Sigismund had realised that nothing Appius did was by accident – every movement and gesture had purpose.

‘Stand,’ said Appius. Sigismund stood, raising the sword with him. Appius walked into the circle of cinders, his own blade held loose at his side. ‘Come at me,’ he said.

Sigismund sprang forwards, blade rising for a first cut that would split Appius’ face from eyes to chin.

The flat of Appius’ sword slammed into Sigismund’s head. Light exploded behind his eyes, but he was already moving, turning his failed cut into a backhanded slash that would arc under Appius’ guard. A white-hot line slid across his shoulder. Blood poured down his arm. Another cut, and another, more blood scattering onto the floor. His sword was rising but the point of Appius’ blade was at his throat. The weapon master’s eyes met Sigismund’s down the length of polished steel.

Appius withdrew the blade, flicked it to clean the thin skim of Sigismund’s blood already clotting on its edge. He half turned and walked to the edge of the circle while Sigismund felt the flow of blood from the wound slow.

‘You are a good warrior,’ said Appius, after a moment, ‘maybe already even a great one.’ The weapon master gave a weary smile. ‘Better than me, without a doubt.’

Sigismund felt the need to dispute that last claim begin to move his tongue. He held his mouth shut.

‘You shall be a Templar, of that there is no question…’ Appius paused, and Sigismund felt that for once the weapon master was not certain what to say next. ‘Of that there is no question. The question is, what more you will be.’

He turned to look at Sigismund, amber eyes steady.

Sigismund shook his head once.

‘I am holding nothing back, master.’

‘No, you are not – always going forwards, always pressing, always the conqueror, nothing held back. But that is not what I am saying or why you have yet to lay a blade edge on me.’

‘You are a great duellist…’ began Sigismund.

‘I am old,’ said Appius. ‘Live with war as long as I have, lad, and it will teach you all I know and more. You are young and trained and ready to fight in the circle of swords, to be a Templar, and that should be enough for you to do more than let an old dog of war give you duelling scars.’

Sigismund did not move. The silence and stillness went on.

‘What is at your back?’ said Appius at last. ‘You go forwards, we all advance – it is our way of war as ordained by the Emperor and the primarch, but what is behind you? What means that you will not turn, that you go forwards like a man trying to outrun the storm?’

‘Because if we… If I do not go forwards, then no one will. Because if we do not go forwards, then we lose everything.’

‘We? It seems likely to me, lad, that you and I are going to die bloody with swords in our hands no matter what. So who is the we that loses everything?’

The light of the setting sun fell through the open door in his memory. Beyond, he could see the shapes of figures dressed as dead kings with blood on their blades…

‘Everyone that is not as strong as we are,’ said Sigismund.

Appius was still for a moment and then nodded.

‘Again,’ he said, and stepped back into the circle, blade rising.

The Dreadnought’s blow was a blur. Pistons snapped out. Sigismund spun aside as the hammer’s head crashed into the temple floor. Stone splinters showered up. He sliced his blade out one-handed, the edge aimed at the cable on Appius’ weapon arm, but even halfway to death, the old warrior was fast and a master of his craft. The pistons snapped the hammer back and the Dreadnought twisted, torso pivoting fully around with machine-driven speed.

Sigismund’s blow struck the metal of Appius’ shield. Force juddered up his arm. Pistons behind the shield rammed it forwards. Sigismund turned to deflect the impact, but a fraction too late. He cannoned backwards, falling, and the Dreadnought’s hammer was descending. All of it so fast. He struck the floor, and pushed himself aside an instant before the hammer splintered the place he had been. He was up, but the shield pistoned into him, and he was staggering backwards.

He saw an opening then, two armour plates parting for an instant to expose wires and tubes beneath. He cut, knowing that the blow would not land, knowing that Appius had shown him the possibility. The Dreadnought twisted as the point of Sigismund’s sword sliced into the exposed cables. Piston fluid and oil gushed out. The arm holding the Dreadnought’s shield froze and locked. But even as the thrust drove home, the pivoting force of Appius’ turn snapped the armour plates back together on Sigismund’s sword. The blade broke.

Sigismund jerked back just in time as the Dreadnought’s hammer drove into the space he had been occupying. Appius came forwards, striking again and again, and Sigismund was going backwards, the haft of his broken sword in his hand. He was going to–

The hammer caught him on the left shoulder. Armour cracked. Bones broke. He was falling. Now, at the end of this path, he would fail. He would not become the Master of the Templars. That honour would go to another. And down in the slow unfolding slices of his thought, he realised that it did not matter. Honour and rank were not prizes that had pulled him on. It was just a consequence of standing, of fighting, of facing fate. It was not a matter of pride. If he was not strong enough to stand, to lead, to be a champion of his brother’s oaths, then he should fail.

But who if not you? The thought sounded in the slowed time of his fall, and its voice might have been his own, or Appius’, or Thera’s. Who will stand if you will not? Who will you let die in your place?

He hit the floor. The Dreadnought was above him, hammer poised to strike down, and Sigismund could feel the haft of the broken sword in his hand. He came to his feet, broken armour grinding, his muscles driving him forwards in a blur. Within was stillness, the beats of his hearts caught between rising and falling. He struck, slicing the broken blade between armour plates, cutting and cutting, oil scattering as joints froze.

He stopped, standing before Appius, the shattered tip of his sword almost touching the glowing slot in the Dreadnought’s sarcophagus. Appius’ machine body creaked but did not move, its bulk now a statue of armour.

‘I yield,’ came Appius’ voice from the Dreadnought’s speaker grilles.

Sigismund lowered his sword.

‘The oaths of our Legion have their champion.’ The voice was low but it rolled through the temple. Every legionary knelt instantly. Sigismund felt his blood pattering on the broken stone floor as he fell to his knee. Only Archamus remained standing as Rogal Dorn, primarch of the Imperial Fists, walked through the circle of kneeling warriors. He stopped within a pace of Sigismund.

‘Rise, my son,’ said Dorn. Sigismund stood. Silence radiated from the primarch like the hush that came before a storm. Sigismund looked up and met his gene-father’s eyes. They held each other’s gaze for a long moment, and then Dorn gestured. ‘Archamus, the sword.’

Archamus stepped forward and held up a sheathed sword to Dorn, who grasped and drew it in a single movement. The light of the fire bowls flowed down the blade’s edge and the words etched into the fuller: ‘Imperator Rex,’ they read. Dorn reversed the blade and then held it out, pommel first. Sigismund waited a heartbeat and then took it. He knelt again, resting the sword point down, hands gripping the haft above the cross guard. The rest of the warriors in the temple rose to their feet.

‘Do you give yourself to the guarding of this place of oaths?’ asked Rogal Dorn.

‘I give myself to that duty,’ replied Sigismund. Inside, in the place of calm he had known in battle, he felt his thoughts tumble over and over through the steps of the past, carrying him forwards into a future of war and sacrifice.

‘Do you give your life and your sword to those that have passed through here, and those that will come?’

‘I give myself to the brotherhood of the Legion.’

‘Do you make your vow again, in sight of all who share it?’

‘I am the oaths sworn and they are my bond and blood.’

A pause, silence in the flame-lit shadow.

‘The sword and oath are yours,’ said Rogal Dorn.

Sigismund raised his head. The light from the torches and fire bowls fell across the faces of his brothers, and in his mind he thought for a second he could taste the dust on the wind as it blew across the Ionus Plateau.

Slowly, he closed his eyes and rested his forehead on the metal of the sword in his hands.

SHADOWS OF TREACHERY

rom the battlefields of Phall and Isstvan, to the haunted shadows of Terra itself – the Horus Heresy rages on across the galaxy in this collection of short stories and novellas.

In this volume, read the stories ‘The Crimson Fist’ and ‘The Lightning Tower’.

Find these titles, and many others, at blacklibrary.com or games-workshop.com

PHAROS

Just as Guilliman’s dream of Imperium Secundus seems finally to be realised, the Night Lords launch a full invasion of distant Sotha. Their target? The mysterious Mount Pharos…

Find these titles, and many others, at blacklibrary.com or games-workshop.com

PRAETORIAN OF DORN

As the first assault on the Solar System begins, the strength of the Imperial Fists and the seemingly impregnable fastness they have built is tested at last…

Find these titles, and many others, at blacklibrary.com or games-workshop.com

NIGHT LORDS

VIII LEGION

CHILD OF NIGHT

John French

‘What are the decrees of the past, but the seeds of a future reckoning?’

– common saying in the hives of Albia,
noted by Tenghost Merrin in
The Court of The Unspeakable King, Volume I

‘I submit to your judgement.’ I speak the words, and bow my head before the gun.

The legionary does not move. His finger tenses upon the trigger of his bolt pistol. A single twitch and the firing pin will strike the primer. The charge will ram the warhead down the pistol barrel and out into the still air between the muzzle and my skull. An instant later its secondary charge will fire. By the time it hits my skull it will be travelling at over a thousand metres per second. An instant after it has punched into my brain, it will detonate, scattering blood, bone and shrapnel into the air.

All it takes for that fatal chain to begin is for the warrior to twitch his finger. All it takes is for him to judge me as deserving to die. His green eye-lenses stare down at me – I can feel them upon the bare skin of my scalp.

I am kneeling, my cloak of rags hanging from me like sodden feathers. He is armoured, of course, though the colour of his battleplate is lost beneath the skin of darkness. Here, nothing remains whole; everything corrodes to shadow in the end.

I was born down here, in the prison sinks beneath Albia, down here in the abyss, which is the realm of the banished and the condemned. I was raised from this night when the Great Crusade had already left the light of Sol, though only by a few decades. That makes me old compared to most, but young compared to some. The scent of destiny was thick in the air in those days. The dark ignorance of the past fled before the illumination of truth, and nothing could defy it. It was a time when the light of glory burned bright before us all. We felt it, every son of the Legions.

In truth, that light was the first light I ever knew. Perhaps it is the only light I have ever known? Now I exist here again, cradled in the blackness that bores my idle mind, hiding from my sins, and all light is lost to me once more.

I raise my head, and look up into the green slashes of light that are his eyes. ‘Would you at least know who it is that you have come to kill?’

‘I know who you are, Fel Zharost, dream-eater of the Eighth Legion.’ The warrior’s vox-grille clicks as he pauses. ‘I have come for you.’

Clever. If this were not a warrior who had tracked and hounded me through the dark for nights on end, then I would say he was being humorous.

‘You know my name, but that is not enough to judge a life before you take it,’ I warn him. ‘Trust me on this.’

‘I need know nothing else of you.’

‘Judgement should be blind, not ignorant.’ I take a long breath and look up into the barrel of the bolt pistol and the glowing green eyes beyond. I wonder what he sees: an old man kneeling in the dirt, a ragged beard falling from a face of scars and creases? Or does he see something else? Something less… pitiful. ‘You should know whom it is you punish. That was always the way.’ I raise my left hand and touch it to my forehead. ‘I would show you that.’

He does not move. His finger remains steady on the trigger, balanced between life and death.

‘No,’ he says.

I smile, but not in humour. If I am to die then it will be on my terms. After all, what are we if we abandon the truths we lived by?

‘It was not an offer,’ I say, and I show him the past.

It began in darkness, of course – in that lost age when I was a child without innocence.

I opened my eyes, and became blind.

Gunfire burst just ahead of me as I leapt towards a ledge. The flare-light boiled through my vision, burned bright, bubbling with neon smears and white splinters. I was spinning through the air, my eyes and mind churning with blinding thunderclouds. The light was fire inside my skull. I slammed into something hard and began to slide down it, my arms scrabbling at the air. A hand grabbed my arm. I felt whipcord muscle and smooth skin. I began to fight, but the light was still burning through my senses. The arm yanked me up and slammed me down onto hard metal. Breath left me, but I kicked out and tried to scramble away. An arm looped around my throat and tightened.

‘Stillness,’ the voice hissed in my ear.

I stopped moving. I recognised the voice. It is strange to think of her now, and stranger still to speak of her. Calliope – that is how I remember her. It was not her name, though. She had no name. The tongue of the night-born was a tongue of clicks, of breath sighing through closed teeth, of sounds that do not echo in still air. In that tongue there are no names. But she needs a name. She deserves a name.

‘I cannot see,’ I replied, my breath ragged in my throat.

‘Why did you open your eyes?’

I did not reply. In truth I did not know. Sometimes stupidity does not require a reason.

‘I should have left you where I found you. I should have cut your throat and used you as a lure for the hungering ones.’

The words were real, and if she had been any other of our siblings then she would have done it too. But she had not before, and she did not then.

‘Where is the prey?’ I asked, trembling as pain drained through me.

‘Close,’ she said, as calm as still water. ‘It does not know where we are now.’

‘How many?’

‘One, just one.’

‘What is it?’

She said nothing for a long heartbeat.

‘I do not know, but it will die before we do.’

The hunter had been waiting for us when we entered the web. It was huge, but it moved as fast as anything I had ever known. Its gun had torn the dark, and we had run, scrambling and swinging through the girders as the explosions danced behind us. I had no idea who or what it was, but I understood it. Just as we preyed upon those who fell from the world of light above, so this creature had now come for us.

But we were not used to being prey. Down there, amongst the murderers and scum of the world above, we were the hunters.

‘We wait?’ I asked. The scars left by the light were draining from my sight, hunger and anger replacing fear.

‘Yes,’ she breathed. ‘And then we track it, and take its heart.’

She was grinning, the smallest wisp of light catching the sharpened points of her teeth.

‘We take its heart,’ I echoed.

I became still. The beating of my blood slowed. I could feel rust and moisture under my skin, a patina of cracks, and the lumps of rivets.

We waited, and the blackness flowed over us. The low sounds of the caverns began to manifest: the slow creak of kilometres of compressed and tangled metal sighing as they shift, the song of subtle air currents blowing through tunnels and caverns, the tap-tap-tap of moisture falling onto rusted iron.

Those who live under the light-suns, or in the glow of a furnace, or amongst the glimmer of machines, think of the dark as absence. But darkness has texture – it has folds and heights like deep water that plunges down without end. It was said that there were once natural oceans here on Terra, and that the greatest darkness lived in the trenches far beneath their surfaces. If there is any truth to such tales, then perhaps the darkness was not drained with the seas.

Perhaps it simply flowed away into deeper places. To this place.

We both became part of that darkness. We vanished. It was not a mystery, or a power drawn from beyond. It was one very simple thing: stillness. The dark takes you when you are still. It makes you a part of it. Your body dissolves into slivers of shape, the features of your face become like the folds of cloth in a curtain, your fingers like leaves in a forest. Some might say that such a trick is a quirk of survival, but not for us. Not for the children of the night. We learned it because of what we were born to be. We learned it as murderers.

Time stretched, defined only by the slow beat of my heart.

At last, Calliope spoke.

‘It is moving away,’ she said, her fingers dancing silently on my arm. ‘It makes for the upper levels. We should follow it.’

I did not reply, but unfolded from the ledge and jumped into the waiting blackness. I landed on a beam and ran upwards, feet and hands making no sound on the damp-slicked surface. I felt a void open before me and leapt. Cold metal met my hand for an instant, and I swung high, landed, and ran on. Calliope was just behind me. We were two pale ghosts dancing across the lightless web, silent and swift.

The hunter who was now our prey was fast, very fast. Even without seeing him, I could feel his strength shaking the web of girders as he moved. I was not thinking why he had come for us as I swung and ran after him. My only thought was that he was not one of our kind, that he had tried to kill us, and so would die. It was not anger, it was just fact.

Then the prey halted.

We slid closer, soft shadows amongst shadows. An electric hum filled the air, scratching against my teeth. It was turning its head as if looking around, though I doubted it could see. We moved closer. Calliope swung away to approach from a different angle – you never take prey alone, or from a single direction. Still the prey did not move. Perhaps it was lost? The deep dark can do that, can swallow direction and memory and leave only madness.

I slid the glass splinter blade from the bindings on my wrist. Softly, feeling my way, I crawled until I was above the prey. I took a long, silent breath – I could smell the blood upon it now. It had killed. There was something else too, a stink like hot wiring and oiled machines. I turned my head slowly, listening, feeling the metal beneath by skin tremble.

I tensed. Calliope would move first; that was our way, an understanding that we had never discussed and never needed to explain to one another. The splinter of glass was warm in my fingers.

Calliope swung out from the black, the noise of her leap almost imperceptible.

Almost.

The prey’s head turned with a machine whir. Its eyes lit. Red light stabbed through the girder-web. Calliope struck the prey as it turned. Light shattered from the glass blade in her hand as she rammed it into the prey’s neck. It was huge, a man made of metal and hard angles. The blade broke and the prey was still turning, blink-fast, hand snapping closed around Calliope’s throat.

I jumped, my own blade held in two hands.

The prey was holding Calliope in the air. She was thrashing, clawing at its wrist. I landed on the prey’s shoulders, and stabbed the glass blade down into its neck with all my weight and all my strength. The prey arched. Blood gushed up around my hands, thick and warm.

I dropped from its shoulders as it staggered.

Calliope wrenched herself from its faltering grip. The prey shuddered, its red eyes glowing like windows into a realm of blood. Calliope did not run. She still had a piece of the blade in her hand. She stabbed it up and into one of the prey’s red glowing eyes. Its head snapped back, but it did not fall.

It raised its hand, and fire split the red-stained gloom.

Time stopped. Everything stopped.

In those days I did not understand my gift, or even know that it was a gift. Sometimes I would see things without needing my eyes. Sometimes I would know things without understanding how. Sometimes I would fall into dreams of gold and fire. And in that moment of frozen flame, I felt the last roaring beat of Calliope’s heart, and touched the jagged ice of her killer’s mind.

Panic flooded me. I could not move. All I could see was the bloody figure standing before me, the wet plates of its armour lit by the static flare of its gun.

The world snapped back, and the roar of flame and noise drowned Calliope’s last breath. Then there was silence, and the slow patter of liquid on metal. I could not move. I did not want to. My skin was wet, my mouth and nose filled with the scent of gunfire. I was blind again, but somehow I could still see.

All I could think was that I was alone again, that I would now always be alone.

The figure before me lowered his weapon and turned towards me. Slowly it raised a hand and pulled its helmet off. The head beneath was broad and skinless, and looked back at me with its one remaining, utterly black eye. Blood seeped from the bloody ruin in the other socket, rolling down its cheek. He spoke then, his voice almost a whisper. I did not understand what he meant at the time.

Later, much later, I thought I did. Now I know that even then I still did not.

‘I have come for you,’ he said.

Mortinar, Seventy-First Prefect of the Saragorn Enclave, snapped upright, his heart racing, eyes wide, breath heaving through his open mouth. He turned his head, blinking at the clean light which filled the council chamber.

‘Sir?’

Hasina was looking at him. Her false-flesh face did not allow for expression, but her eyes glittered with confusion. Behind her, the rest of his aides and staff waited, shifting in nervous silence. He looked around again, still breathing hard. Carved and gilded faces looked back at him from niches in the walls, their blank eyes reflecting the lamp glow.

‘A nightmare,’ he managed. He looked down at his hand trembling at the end of his velvet sleeve. ‘Yes, just a nightmare.’ He looked up again in time to see glances pass between the gathered aides. 

‘Sir…’ began Tolrek, his eyes averted. The young guard captain looked uncertain, his tongue pausing on his silvered teeth. ‘You have not been asleep. You called us here to discuss the Fourth Program’s progress. You were just saying that–’ 

It came back to the prefect then, the rushing panic, the blare of alarms. Why were they all standing around like cattle? Why were they just staring at him?

‘How far have the attackers advanced?’ he snapped, hurrying over to his desk and triggering its hololith data display. ‘What are our casualties?’ His eyes flicked across the cone of luminous data, searching for the status of the enclave’s garrison.

Corimino, his third life-ward, broke the silence next.

‘My master, there are no attackers.’

‘They are here!’ he roared, slamming his fist into the stone top of his desk. ‘Don’t lie to me! Don’t you dare!’ Images were creeping back into his mind, images of the enclave burning under a bruised, black sky. He strode to the window, and slammed his palm down on the shutter control. The leaves of gilt plasteel folded into the frame. ‘They are–’

Sunlight, bright and clear, shone from a clear sky above the enclave’s spires and domes. He stepped back, blinking in the brilliance. 

It was there, all there, untouched by darkness or fire. He blinked, smudges of gunfire still clinging to his memory. He turned slowly to his staff. They were all looking at him, and he could see the unease on their faces.

‘Is something wrong, sir?’ asked Hasina, carefully.

He opened his mouth to speak.

Behind him, black cloud poured across the sky like ink poured across clean paper. And from the spreading night, the fire fell. He opened his mouth, and–

He awoke, the expanding dream blinking into the real nightmare which surrounded him.

Alarms screamed. Dust tumbled from the ceiling. The metal shutters over the windows shook in their frames. Armed guards crowded the spaces by the doors. His aides were shouting at each other. A hololithic display was flickering in and out of focus above his desk. Maps, data and information fizzed through the static, telling a story that simply could not be true. Distortion wailed from the speakers embedded high in the walls. Hasina was hammering at the vox-console keys, shouting for someone in the enclave guard, demanding help, demanding a report. Her voice was raw and cracked with panic.

The vox popped suddenly, screeched and then cleared. A voice rose from the speaker horn, as clear as if it were coming from within the room.

The prefect recognised the voice. It was Tolrek. The guard captain had gone to the northern bastion an hour before.

‘Sir…’

Everyone in the chamber went still and quiet.

‘S-sir…’

The prefect leaned forwards, his hands clenched into fists on the tabletop.

‘Tolrek, what is the situation?’

A noise came from the vox, low at first then growing. The prefect did not recognise it for a second – then he realised that Tolrek was weeping.

‘They… They took my eyes, sir. They took my hands. They say that they will take my tongue once this is done. They say that I belong to the darkness now.’

‘Tolrek–’ the prefect began, rage blending with the terror in his blood.

‘They say that you must understand their judgement before…’ A wet sob bubbled into the silence. ‘They say… They say that they are coming for you.’

The prefect stared at the vox, his tongue still in a dry mouth. Behind him, the shutters stopped rattling. ‘Who,’ he began, fighting to force authority into his voice. ‘Who are you?’

The new voice that came in answer was soft, and edged by distortion, but it seemed to fill the room.

‘We are retribution.’

The vox cut out. For a second he did not move, and then he turned slowly to the windows. The shutters clattered open, and he–

He awoke, cold flooding through him, a shout dying on his lips. He stumbled up from his chair, and his leg slammed into the corner of something hard. He yelped as the pain bit.

Pain. That meant that what he was experiencing was real, at least, and not another part of his endless nightmare.

He tried blinking, but still could not see. He reached out, feeling the polished surface of the desk which he had just walked into. The activation stud for the lights should be just–

His fingers touched upon something wet and warm.

He snapped his hand back. His heart was hammering.

Water. It must be water, he thought. He rubbed his fingers. The fluid on their tips felt sticky. He thought of the sweet wine he’d ordered before retiring to read the reports, and imagined how it must have spilled from the glass when he knocked the desk. He reached out again, careful not to touch the surface. He found the activation stud, and pressed it.

The room filled with light, and he screamed.

He awoke, his eyes snapping open, the scream trembling in his throat. He was lying on the floor, his back against the wall beneath the shutters. The room was dark, but an aching pulse filled the air, like the growl of an active machine. He thought that he had been dreaming, that it had just been–

The eye-lenses of my helm lit up. I stood from where I had crouched beside him. The prefect tried to scream again, but vomited instead. I looked down at him, and around my head the crystal matrix of my psychic hood began to glow with a pale light.

‘Who are you?’ he choked. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘You know what I am.’

His eyes darted across the midnight plates of my armour, the thunderbolt and eagle-wing markings, the numerals etched onto the bronze solar disc upon my breastplate. I leaned on my staff, both hands resting upon the crystal-cored iron. Recognition and fear formed in his mind even as part of his brain tried to deny it.

‘I have done nothing,’ he stammered. ‘I serve the Emperor. I am true to the Unity of Te–’

‘The gene-warrens, prefect. The Wet Vaults, the millions spliced together as flesh and bone – the First Program, and the Second, and the Third. The city beneath this city which swallowed all those who fell outside acceptable ranges of variation. The smell that meant that you decided to dissolve the cast-offs rather than burn them.’

He began to weep, tears rolling from the corners of his eyes. I watched him for a few seconds, and then I spoke again.

‘We are not here to determine innocence or guilt. That time is past. We are not here for justice, or to save the millions that you have tainted. We are here to reward you. We are the consequence of your actions. We are its hand, and its kindly edge. And…’

I bent down, the joints of my armour whirring, and touched the trembling man’s face.

‘…we have come for you.’

He shook, trembling with terror and defiance. ‘Your judgement is atrocity. That is not justice, it is hypocrisy!’

‘But we are not creatures made to live those ideals, only to bring them into being.’

For a moment he simply hugged his arms close around himself. He was nothing to look at: a thin man, his age hidden but not banished, wrapped in velvet and silk, weeping in the dark. A stale reek rose from his huddled form. He had soiled himself several hours earlier, in his feverish nightmare state.

‘Everything I saw before, everything I dreamed…’

‘It was only a dream.’ He looked up at me, and his pupils showed that desperate spark of hope that mortals can yet summon even in the bleakest of moments.

‘But that does not mean that it was not real. You have dreamed those moments twenty times already, and you will dream them again.’ I ran the finger of my gauntlet across his tear-dampened upper lip. ‘This is the eighth time we have talked, and the eighth time you have wept these tears. It will not be the last.’

‘You…’ he stammered. ‘You are waiting for me to ask for forgiveness?’

‘No. You have already asked for that eight times.’

He began to laugh then. He was still laughing as I dragged him back into the wheel of nightmares.

‘What is your judgement?’

My voice rolled through the vast space. The throne room was silent and bare. The gloom which filled its vaulted space felt lifeless, like an absence left by something intangible. I kept my gaze steady on those ghost-pale features, and the black eyes watching me from the foot of the empty throne. I did not kneel – authority was one thing, respect was another. The pale face twitched, the lips twisting into the mockery of a smile.

‘My judgement?’ He paused, and tapped one finger upon the haft of his chainglaive. ‘My judgement is that if I have to spend any more time in your company then I might be tempted to do something you would regret.’

Sevatar stepped from the throne’s dais to the floor. His movements, even in armour, were like those of a cat. I did not move. Out of habit I made to lean on my staff, but like the hood which had once circled my skull, it was gone. Their absence felt as though I had lost a limb, like a part of me had been stripped away.

That, of course, was precisely the point, and the reason why I stood in a deserted throne room with the First Captain of our thrice-humbled Legion.

‘The edict from the Council of Nikaea cannot be ignored,’ I said. ‘You are the most senior commander of the Legion while the primarch–’

‘While our father-in-darkness is being schooled again by his brothers.’ Sevatar turned away, rolling a shoulder absent-mindedly. ‘Yes, I suppose I am.’

‘There must be a judgement upon the Librarius.’ I paused, the next words I must speak catching in my throat. ‘And upon me.’

Sevatar glanced back at me, the shark’s smile on his lips echoed in his dark eyes.

‘I could always cut your throat?’ He turned to look at me, cocking his head and raising an eyebrow. ‘Yes. That could solve several problems.’

I let out a slow breath between my teeth. To say that there was little brotherly affection between us would be to call the sun a candle.

I kept my gaze steady on his face. Those who did not know us always said that Night Lords from the under-realms of Terra and the spoil heap of Nostramo were much alike – true, pale skin and eyes polished black by night marked us all, but to the few who looked further we were altogether different creatures. The black sinks bred a flatness to our features. Our eyes are more sensitive to sunlight even than theirs. We rarely blink. Our skin is naturally hairless, our teeth sharp without the need to file them. There were few enough of us left in the Legion by then, an ill-favoured and withering remnant. I wish that I could say that those of us who remained were an island of slowly fading nobility, but that would have been a lie.

There were few who saw the difference between what we had been and what we had become. Even those who had once served judgement were now servants to terror. Sometimes I wondered if there ever was a difference.

‘The decree…’ I began carefully.

‘You really hate us, don’t you? All of us who came after, who came from a different kind of night.’

I said nothing, and the First Captain’s corpse grin spread wider. ‘Oh, I am not judging your hatred. I share it. It just hurts me less.’

‘Sevatarion…’

I paused, and forced control into my voice. A little of my anger bled into the air between us as a sparkle of frost. Strangely, he had gone very, very still.

‘Jago Sevatarion, you will give me what I demand of you.’

The words melted the mockery of humour from his face. He crossed the room in a flash of lightning battleplate and servos. The deactivated chainglaive struck me in the chest before I could even raise my hands.

I fell, but his hand caught my throat and pulled me in close. When his voice came, it was a hissing whisper.

‘If you are so desperate for judgement, then here is mine – I cast you out. You are no longer of the Eighth, if you ever were. I stain your hands red. I condemn you to death, should we ever meet again. You are outcast. You are nothing.’ He shoved me away, and I hit the floor with a clatter of ceramite on stone. He stood, his face still, shadows pooling in his eye sockets. ‘Does that satisfy?’

I rose. I was not shocked, or broken. I was angry. I could taste blood on my tongue. The rage twisted and burned brighter even as I tried to restrain it.

But I was not angry at his judgement. No, this anger was nothing so small in scope.

‘And the rest of the Librarius?’

‘I do not care,’ he spat, and turned to walk back towards our primarch’s throne.

‘It was about something once, Sevatarion,’ I called, my voice brittle with rage. He looked over his shoulder, his smile back in place. ‘We were more than this once. It was all for a reason.’

‘Spare me from the guardians of nostalgia,’ he said with a roll of his eyes.

It happened then, before the thought could form in my conscious mind, before I was even aware that I had lost control. Green flames spread up the walls. Sevatar was turning, chainblade roaring to life as the wave of force struck and slammed him into the throne. Between the flicker-pulse of flame and shadow, my hand was at his throat, the fingers closing around the neck seal and the flesh beneath.

‘You murdered us,’ I snarled.

My teeth were bared, and lightning crawled across my scalp. The teeth of the chainglaive were still spinning, but my mind was wrapped around his limbs, squeezing, crushing. I had no thought for what I was doing, or of the decree which forbade it.

‘You are killing our Legion.’ I slammed his head into the iron of the throne with only a twitch of thought. Servos whined as he fought against me. ‘You and your poisoned world are–’

Flash. Jagged un-light. Brain-fire. Agony.

I staggered back, blood pouring from my mouth, splattering down my armour and onto my bare, empty hands. Truly marked by blood, now, was the only thought I could manage as my head whirled with sights and memories that were not my own.

Sevatar did not rise to follow me. He was sitting on the primarch’s throne, breathing hard, his eyes fixed on the empty space where I thought I had seized him.

‘Go,’ he rasped.

‘Sevatarion–’ I began, gulping air through clotting blood.

‘Get out of my sight!’

I regarded him carefully for a few heartbeats, then turned and left the throne room.

I look up again at my shadowy executioner. Frost has spread over his armour. He has shared my past for an eye-blink of time, but in that instant I have shown him every moment of my life – from the day that the Legion came to me, to the steps that led me back into the darkness below Terra’s crust. To the only home I ever knew.

I allow him to recover, and then I speak.

‘I knew you would come. Judgement comes for us all in the end, cousin.’

I let out a breath, and draw another. It will be my last, of that I am sure. It tastes of damp and blood, of a world that has never known the light of day. For a moment I wonder which sin has brought my end. Was it Nikaea, and the fact that I walked free still using my gifts? Was it the blood that flows in my veins, my Legion’s conduct finally fallen beyond the last limits of Imperial tolerance? Or has the new age finally come, the age in which mankind no longer needs monsters and heroes?

I dismiss the notion. The reason does not matter, only the consequence. 

‘I will ask one thing more from you, though,’ I say to the warrior standing over me. ‘I would see the light of the sun one last time.’

I reach into his mind then. Until now it has been my thoughts and memories projecting into the space of his thoughts. Now I take his measure and see through his eyes. I see Sol hanging in the void, and the scattered light of countless stars beyond. Even after these last waning years spent down in the darkness, it is still as beautiful and terrible as I remember.

And then I see why he has come for me. 

I see betrayal, and broken oaths, and the deaths of sons at the hands of their fathers. I see what the vision of Imperial Truth and light has now become.

I let go of his mind. He shudders, and his finger tightens upon the trigger.

Can this be true? Can this really be what the galaxy has come to? And there in the darkness, at the core of everything I was and everything I became, is the answer, laughing at me through sharpened teeth.

The Space Marine, armoured plainly in grey, stares at me for a long moment, then lowers his pistol. ‘I am not here to judge you, Fel Zharost. That right belongs to another.’

I nod. I know now why he has come for me, and what awaits me after this moment. I have seen it in his thoughts, like a final jest.

‘Rise,’ he says.

SHADOWS OF TREACHERY

From the battlefields of Phall and Isstvan, to the haunted shadows of Terra itself – the Horus Heresy rages on across the galaxy in this collection of short stories and novellas.

In this volume, read the stories ‘Prince of Crows’ and ‘The Dark King’.

Find these titles, and many others, at blacklibrary.com or games-workshop.com

PHAROS

Just as Guilliman’s dream of Imperium Secundus seems finally to be realised, the Night Lords launch a full invasion of distant Sotha. Their target? The mysterious Mount Pharos…

Find these titles, and many others, at blacklibrary.com or games-workshop.com

ANGELS OF CALIBAN

The First Legion go to war, and their primarch’s brutal actions threaten to tear apart the fragile alliance of Imperium Secundus.

Find these titles, and many others, at blacklibrary.com or games-workshop.com

BLOOD ANGELS

IX LEGION

LOST SONS

James Swallow

I commit these words to vox-thief.

Know that it is day one hundred and eleven of the fifth year of our vigil, and the third year since the reckoning of the betrayal. My temper grows no longer, my blade’s edge ever more wicked as I sharpen it and wait.

And I wait.

I am Arkad, Warden of the Blood Angels and for now, as I have been since the order was spoken by my Lord Sanguinius, I am custodian of Baal and all her environs.

We are twenty in number, my brothers and I. A handful of sons from our Legion’s great sum, here upon the rusty sands of our home world. We march the halls of the fortress-monastery and we drill endlessly. We spar against one another and the combat-slaves. We meditate and supervise the army of human serfs who keep the hearth of the Legion burning, the glories of the Blood Angels polished and perfect and always ready.

But we wait.

Five years is not the blink of an eye in cosmic time; it is barely within the notice of a warrior of the Legiones Astartes. We live on scales that common men do not comprehend. Campaigns that span decades are the meat and drink of our lives.

Five years? I have slumbered longer in stasis-sleep. It means nothing!

It means…

Time is a strange, malleable thing. I have known an age to pass between the draw and exhale of my breath, but these years have moved as if every day grows longer than the last. I rise before the dawn of Baal’s red sun each morning and it seems an eternity elapses before it drops back below the horizon.

Inaction chafes at me, and the others. We do nothing. We occupy ourselves with trivia and training and accomplish no advance! All this occurs while out in the galaxy a war unlike any other burns stars to ash. A civil war, a nightmare of Legion against Legion. A conflict that… and I whisper it… may have taken the greatest toll upon us.

I hope that this day will be the last. That today the order I swore to obey will be lifted from my shoulders.

Imperial Memoranda # GHJRHVE/334/DXGJ/7316/Theta

+++DATUM BEGINS+++

Let it be known that by the order of Horus Lupercal, Warmaster, First Among Equals (other titles omitted) it has been commanded that The Angel Sanguinius, Primarch of the IX Legiones Astartes, Lord of Baal (other titles omitted) is to gather the Great Companies of the Three Hundred, the entirety of the Blood Angels Legion [refer to: addendum] and carry the battle standard of the Emperor of Mankind to the worlds of the Signus Cluster. Lord Sanguinius will bring the Imperium’s displeasure and its illumination to the errant and the lost under the yoke of the alien race known as the nephilim [refer to: Melchior pacification, extermination pogroms of the White Scars], until the extermination of the xenos.

This will be done, in Terra’s name.

+ADDENDUM+

To maintain operational parity in the Baal System and the Legion structure, a token force will remain in situ. Minimum recommendation requires six capital ships and attendant supplement vessels, servile crew thereof, and no less than twenty Space Marines.

+++DATUM ENDS+++

I climb to the black basalt landing pad in the eastern donjon, and Brother Hezen is there waiting for me. He looks out over the roof of the Grand Annex, the towers and domes of the fortress-monastery.

Hezen doesn’t turn, even though I know he hears my approach. There is little sound up here beyond the low keen of the razorwinds. It seems unnatural for our citadel to be so quiet. As I walked here along the arcades, I heard only my own footfalls. Hezen is the first Blood Angel I have seen today, the bright crimson of his wargear polished to a lustre that glimmers in the noonday light.

He still does not turn to me.

My armour, ebon black as the Warden’s office decrees, is as fine and undamaged as his. Cleaned and polished each night, even though the need may not be present. At my hip hangs the bone-white winged-skull device of my crozius arcanum, the signifier of my rank and status. I have to think for a moment to recall the last time I activated the weapon’s destructive power-aura; for now it remains inert and forever ready, as do we.

‘Hezen.’ I call his name and at last my old friend graces me with a look. He has his helm tucked under one arm and the wiry silver threads of his hair are caught in the breeze. A line of service studs forms an accent over his right eye, giving him a permanently quizzical expression.

‘Brother Arkad.’ He bows slightly. ‘Word comes from the orbitals.’ He taps his vox-bead. ‘A small craft has left the target and broken atmosphere in the last few minutes. Landing permission was granted.’

‘What about the starship?’ The vessel, a Dauntless-class light cruiser, had first been met by picket patrols beyond the orbit of Ammonai, the most distant outpost of the system.

‘Under the guns of a dozen battlecraft,’ says Hezen. ‘If it so much as lights a plasma torch without permission, they’ll open fire.’

I consider that appropriate. Communication has been terse; the shipmaster spoke only to inform us that he was delivering a messenger bearing the authority of the Regent of Terra. The pennants and codes are all present and correct, so I am left with little choice but to agree.

But these are times when trust is no longer in abundance, and I have made certain that every tower within line of sight contains a warrior armed with a Stalker-pattern boltgun. We have all heard the stories of the treachery at Isstvan, Calth and elsewhere, when battle-brothers who supposedly came in good faith were shown to be disloyal, murdering out of hand those who welcomed them. It will not happen here. I have made that a vow.

I hear the distant noise of thrusters and I remove my own headgear with a snap of connectors. The skull-faced helm locks to my thigh plate and I turn my eyes to the clouded sky. Some say I have the aspect of an unfinished man; I am hairless, the after-effect of poisons that almost killed me on Vaddox Prime. I wear my disfigurement proudly, it must be said. If a man will not return my gaze at first meeting, I think I will never truly trust him.

Now a drop-ship, incoming. I see it to the west, moving fast. Grey like slate, and even my genhanced sight cannot pick out any identifying insignia. My hand drops to the hilt of my crozius.

Hezen sees it too. He rests his grip on the bolt pistol holstered on his belt. We are both ready to kill or be killed today. And I think it is true to say we both secretly wish for an excuse for battle.

It is a Storm Eagle. It makes one pass over the pad and lands in a skirl of thruster exhaust. The drop-ramp opens before the dust has settled, and a figure is silhouetted in the hatchway.

A Space Marine; he can be nothing else, the bulk of power armour filling the interior of the transport ship. But what colours does this so-called messenger wear? I do not know at first sight.

I remember another messenger, five years ago. The moment is clear and crisp in my thoughts, my eidetic memory bringing it to life as if it is happening now.

I was on the Heartcease, the battleship. The vessel is an old friend. I was aboard it when the Emperor came to Baal for the first time, and I was young, so very young. We became whole when Sanguinius rejoined us.

But in this memory, the Great Angel was not with us.

The bulk of the Legion’s fleet had been deployed across the galaxy, much of it to the Kayvas Belt for the past year, but now that mission was over and the Blood Angels prepared for a new endeavour. We were to go to Signus Prime on the orders of the Warmaster, and punish the xenos who sought to impose their will upon it. In an unprecedented move, the astropathic signals told of the intent to take the whole Legion to those blighted stars.

I admit I was taken with the ideal. All of us, the grand army of the crimson, the Angels of Death turned to one singular purpose. Oh, I wanted so much to be a part of that campaign. Such glory would be found in it.

But it was not to be.

The orders came from the primarch. He would not allow another to give them, for he knew full well how we would feel when we took up the duty. I heard the echo of his voice in the repetition of the astropath Ser Jesper, the Master of Speakers, as he relayed the command.

Stand down.

I actually flinched.

Jesper spoke twenty names, and I distinctly remember the flashes of regret on the faces of the men who were not chosen. Regret for us. As they left for the assemblage, they bade us farewell with rueful smiles. They felt sorry for us, but they were glad they were not us.

A great and singular mission was now ours in their stead; we were to stand sentinel over the Baal System and the home of our Legion, protect and nurture it while the remainder of our kinsmen fought the alien. We were to be guards, then. Caretakers entrusted with the security of our home world, but not warriors free to take to battle.

It was a bittersweet thing. On the one hand, a high honour that we twenty were trusted with the beating heart of the Blood Angels; on the other, a great tragedy that we would not taste victory in the assemblage of our Legion at Signus.

I accepted it, with the humility and stoic mien that was expected of a Warden. But not all followed my example.

The messenger wears no Legion sigil, no rank insignia. His armour is featureless, except for a small icon etched high upon one shoulder. But none of that shocks me more than the fact that he openly wears a Librarian’s psychic hood, in direct contravention of the Decree of Nikaea! The Legiones Astartes are forsworn from the use of psionic powers, and yet this one shows the tools of the psyker without fear of censure.

Before he can set foot on Baal, I am at the base of the ramp, denying him egress. Hezen is behind me, his pistol drawn.

The psyker eyes me with something that might be grim amusement. I see him better now, a shorn scalp and a stubbled face, eyes that are watchful, a nose broken by countless blows. He knows the question I am going to ask before I speak it, not through use of his powers, but because he has heard it a hundred times before. ‘I am Brother Tylos Rubio, agent of Malcador the Sigillite. I carry his authority and that of the Emperor.’

The rest is unspoken; the Sigillite’s word is permission enough for anything, so it would seem.

After a moment, I step back and allow him to disembark. ‘I would know your rank and Legion, brother.’

Rubio’s expression is neutral. ‘I have neither, as you would reckon it. I exist here as a tool for the will of the Regent.’

‘And what does Lord Malcador want with us?’ Hezen asks. ‘I hear a civil war is going on out there.’ My battle-brother makes no attempt to mask his bitterness.

‘Aye,’ Rubio nods. ‘And now that war has come to Baal.’

‘We see no traitor ships.’ My hand is on the crozius. I am willing the opportunity to draw it. ‘Horus Lupercal, may death blight him, has not yet seen fit to test our defences.’

‘But you know of the tumult in the immaterium?’ Rubio presses me with the question. ‘The great swathe of warp tempest that men are calling the Ruinstorm?’

‘I know.’

How can one not? Several of Ser Jesper’s astropaths have perished in the wake of the massive metapsychic effect. We have heard the reports, sporadic and conflicting, of a huge maelstrom of nigh-impenetrable space storms cutting across the galaxy. Some say it is an engineered thing, made by the turncoat Warmaster and his traitor allies, others that the Emperor caused it as a firebreak to blockade Terra. Whatever the cause, while it churns and boils through the void, the skies are cut in two.

I know the Ruinstorm. It hangs like a bloody curtain between Baal and the far stars where our kindred have gone. It is the barrier we would need to penetrate to peer towards the Signus Cluster. It is what denies us word of our Legion and our primarch.

‘Then you know that the map of the galaxy has changed.’ Rubio reaches into a pack hanging from his belt. ‘Perhaps forever. That change has forced Lord Malcador to make hard choices for the good of the Imperium. For the future of mankind.’

He is holding a matt-black tube in his hand, the case for a message scroll of photic parchment. The black scroll is a document of such rare import that it is more legend than eventuality. I see it and at first I do not understand.

Twice before in living memory such messages were delivered to the home world of an Astartes Legion. I reach out and take it, because I know I must. I am Arkad, Warden of the Blood Angels, guardian of Baal, and only I can do so.

The tube breaks open with a twist and the parchment unfurls in my hands. The ceramite digits of my gauntlets hide the tremor in my fingers.

‘I am sorry, brother.’ I hear Rubio talking, but the words are distant. My every iota of being is trapped by the writing on the scroll. Silver, on black.

‘The Blood Angels are no more.’ I speak, although the voice is disconnected from me. The words it utters are not what scream through my thoughts, the denials and the howling defiance. ‘Our Legion… has been declared null.’

Hezen rounds on the grey-armoured warrior, his gun rising as high as his fury. ‘What lies are these?’ he shouts, taking aim at Rubio. ‘You cannot say such a thing, you have no right to issue that diktat! This is madness!’

‘It is the Regent’s command,’ replies the psyker, and not without compassion. ‘I regret to say that if you disobey, you will be considered excommunicatus traitoris.’

I hold the scroll numbly in my hands, and I remember speaking those same words.

Only months had passed since the fleet was dispatched to Signus. But so much had changed.

The stinging buzz of the teleportarium effect briefly overwhelmed my senses, and abruptly I was no longer in the transit chamber of the citadel, but there in the middle of the tacticarium aboard the Heartcease.

I drew my crozius but did not ignite its power field. I hoped that the sight of the weapon might be enough.

Nagal and the others turned to face me as I stalked across the compartment. Crewmen scattered out of my way. Nagal and five brethren, each of them clad in full battle regalia, bolters loaded and ready.

Ready to go to war.

‘You should not have come, Warden!’ Nagal fumed. He had his boltgun in his grip, but he did not quite point it at me.

‘Stand down.’ I gave the command, and it was only after the words left my mouth that I heard Sanguinius’ echo in them.

Nagal gave a bitter laugh. ‘Not this time. We are going, and you will not stop us.’ He gestured around. The command crew of the Heartcease were at combat stations, prepared to take the ship out and into the warp. The fools; the storm would kill them if they attempted to cross it. I told him this, but Nagal was not swayed. ‘We’ll take that risk. It is better to perish in the attempt than remain here and allow our will to corrode.’

‘Brother, heed me. Stop now. It is the primarch’s will. If you disobey, you will be considered excommunicatus traitoris.’

That gave them all a moment of honest pause, but Nagal rode over it. ‘I seek no violence, Arkad. Just turn your back and let us leave. It is for the best.’

‘I will not.’ A part of me wanted to go with him. ‘I share your anguish, your frustration. We all do!’ I scanned the faces of the other warriors, and the crewmen. Yes, we all felt it. ‘But we have our orders. We must remain here and protect Baal until we are relieved.’

‘Protect it from what?’ The question exploded from Nagal in a snarl. ‘We cannot delay!’

He stabbed a finger at the viewport and the stars beyond, taking in the blackness, and I knew what he meant. Out there, hidden in the marrow of warp space, a hellish fault was growing like a cancer. The spacers were calling it the Ruinstorm. It thickened with each passing day, and with its arrival we had lost contact with the Legion fleet and the Angel. A dark pall fell over all of us. I feared the worst.

I said the name. ‘Horus. We must stand ready to oppose him–’

Nagal wouldn’t let me finish. He spat on the deck. ‘Lies and idiocy! I refuse to accept these stories denigrating our lord’s beloved brother! Horus would never turn his face from Terra! This is all a plan to divide us, engineered by some unseen enemy! That is why we must go to the Angel’s side, to learn the truth.’ He stopped, losing his momentum, the terrible possibility of it weighing him down. I knew that feeling, oh yes. ‘And if… if by some horror it is true… then all the more reason to find Sanguinius.’

‘If Horus is a traitor,’ said one of the other warriors, ‘we’ll find him and kill him.’

My battle-brother rounded on me, his eyes alight with dread. ‘What purpose is there to hide here if our father is lost, if he is…’ Nagal could not bring himself to say the words.

If Sanguinius has been killed?

I took my crozius and returned it to its scabbard. I approached Nagal and met his gaze. ‘Do you think the Angel is dead?’ I asked it of all of them, and none could reply. ‘Answer me, kinsmen. If you truly believe that Sanguinius is lost to us, then I will let you take this ship and go.’

The silence that followed seemed to endure forever.

‘No,’ said Nagal, at long last. ‘I do not believe he is dead. We would know.’ He tapped his chestplate, over his primary heart. ‘Here.’

Nagal glares at me, and he hates me. He hates me for making him stand down, and he hates me for the news I have brought before the twenty of us. I am the focus of all his rage and frustration. I cannot blame him.

The black scroll is in his hand, and he crushes it in his grip before angrily dashing it to the floor of the Grand Annex. The massive domed chamber, built to house conclaves of Blood Angels a hundred times the size of our gathering, resonates with the sound of our voices. ‘This is unacceptable!’

The others are in agreement. They have listened to me repeat Brother Rubio’s words and they rebel against them. The psyker stands outside the great hall, waiting for our word, but I have no doubt his preternatural gifts let him hear everything that transpires within.

‘What proof does the Sigillite have?’ asks another legionary. Like all of us, he does not want to accept the possibility that we are now all that remains of the Sons of Sanguinius. ‘The word of fools and humans?’

And yet, I have seen the datum Rubio brought with him. Observations from Imperial warships, reinforcement vessels sent from Terra at the outbreak of the rebellion. A handful of wrecks have clawed their way back through the madness of the Ruinstorm, a handful out of hundreds.

The crews of these ships turned their sensors towards the Signus Cluster as they crossed the light years towards it, their scry-scopes probing for any contact from the Blood Angels flotilla, their astropaths calling out for their like aboard the flagship Red Tear and its sister vessels.

I have seen, and now I show the others, what those crews saw. Blackness and the absence of light. A new void at the galactic coordinates where the stars and worlds of Signus once shone.

The Signus Cluster no longer exists. A monumental dark mass has taken its place, swallowing up whoever did not fear to tread on those blighted worlds. Some say that those within have been taken to hell, if such a thing exists. I would weep for my Great Angel if only I could.

The tragedy of it thunders in my mind, almost too big to comprehend. The Legion, erased from existence. All my brothers, my comrades in arms, my angelic father, gone.

Do I truly believe Sanguinius is lost to us? It shames me to say it, but in this moment, I do. I believe that all is lost.

Hezen is nodding. ‘The Regent cannot simply expect us to go quietly into oblivion! He must know that we would not accept dissolution without argument!’

Dissolution. Such a weak word for so great an act, so final a judgement. The systematic decommissioning of a Space Marine Legion; the repossession and redistribution of every last item of materiel, from bolt-shell to battleship. It is the closure of the book of hours on a legacy that has endured since the days of Old Night, the promise of the final end of the Blood Angels.

Not in glorious battle, fighting an intractable enemy until the very last of us perish – but a death by pen and ink, the work of administrators, politicians and strategists. It sickens and enrages me in equal measure. This is not the way of the Imperium I am oath-sworn to fight for!

‘We are not dead!’ shouts Nagal, and a handful of others take up the cry. ‘Even… Even if this is true,’ he says, glaring at the black scroll, ‘there are still twenty living sons of Sanguinius! Twenty souls are enough to rebuild this Legion.’

‘One would be enough,’ growls Hezen. ‘No matter if it takes a thousand years, we can restore our strength.’

‘If you had millennia, that would be so.’ I turn, and I see Rubio standing behind me. How he entered and approached without my knowledge is disturbing. ‘But these are difficult times, Blood Angel. The hardest times our Imperium has ever faced.’

‘You have no right to be here!’ says Nagal. ‘The Annex is for the scions of our Legion and no other.’

Rubio ignores him, looking to me instead. I feel the psyker reading me, knowing the dread in my hearts. He nods grimly. ‘The war with Horus threatens to rip the galaxy in two. Priorities change. As a surgeon must sacrifice a limb to save a life, so the Sigillite makes the difficult decisions. I regret that your Legion has fallen on the scales of such a choice.’

‘Speak plainly.’ I find my voice again. ‘If you are to be our executioner, Rubio, then grant us that!’

He bows slightly, and takes in the scope of the fortress-monastery with the motion of his hand. ‘The war machine that powers a Legion, the gene-engines and the weapons stocks, the whole of it… The strategic value of such hardware is incalculable, and it cannot be allowed to fall into the hands of the traitors. It must be protected, nurtured, so that reinforcements can be brought to the battle in due course.’

‘The rebellion will not last that long,’ says Hezen.

‘Can you be sure?’ Rubio replies. ‘The Sigillite foresees all possibilities. Even now, on distant Titan, he makes ready a new weapon, a new breed of warriors. Malcador prepares.’ He indicates his armour. ‘I, and others like me, have been called to assist in his deeds.’

‘You would gut our fortress for this?’ Nagal’s tone is flat and cold. ‘When we are at our lowest ebb, the Regent would come to Baal like a carrion eater and strip it bare? Is that why you are here?’ He advances on Rubio, fists clenching. ‘To pick us to the bones?’

‘Yes,’ replies the psyker. ‘Cargo leviathans are coming, crewed by recovery battalions from the loyal factions of the Mechanicum. They will remove what is needed.’

‘Get out,’ Nagal snarls.

‘I have more to say–’

‘Get out!’ bellows the warrior. I watch Rubio pause, then bow again. When he is gone, Nagal’s ire returns to me. ‘You should have let us go, Arkad. Damn your blood, you should have let us go!’

I face him. ‘If I had, then there would be nothing left of us.’

‘Look around,’ Nagal demands. ‘Soon that will be so.’

His words remind me of the dream.

We never speak of the dream, although we all shared some iteration of it.

Those in true slumber – if a Space Marine can ever truly sleep – saw it most strongly, but even those of us who were awake, standing our posts or at practice, experienced a measure of the…

I hesitate to call it a vision.

What did I see? A jumble of images, flickering through my thoughts like a half-recalled memory. A world of blood-red sands, but not Baal. Fire in the sky. A great creature, more beast than man, but blurred so that I could not define its characteristics.

An axe in the creature’s hands. A mighty blow and hundreds of my kinsmen dead.

Among it all, Sanguinius, his wings spread wide. I saw him falling, even as I knew that the Angel never falls.

Then it was gone, but in the wake a terrible, brief fury awoke in me. It was a strange kind of anger, far removed and hard to grasp. I felt somehow… tainted by the passing of its touch.

In the times before the Emperor’s illumination, this dream would have been called an omen.

But after that day, no warrior among the twenty spoke of it again, as if to give voice to what the dream suggested would make it a certainty.

The summons brings me to the landing pad, where Rubio’s Storm Eagle remains, poised like a patient raptor ready to throw itself into the sky.

I confess I had already made my decision, as I walked through the Silent Cloister and along the upper galleries. Nothing the psyker can say will change my mind.

‘Speak,’ I insist, as he emerges from the interior of the lander.

‘I have an offer for you and your brothers, Arkad. An opportunity.’ His tone seems genuine. I wonder for a moment, did Rubio once stand where I do now, a loss so great it cannot be measured weighing upon him? The warrior removes the power sword on his belt, scabbard and all, and shows it to me. ‘Before, you asked me my rank and Legion. I was once a warrior of the Thirteenth, the Ultramarines.’ Rubio turns the weapon so I may see the shape of the revered Ultima upon the hilt. ‘I am lost to my Legion as certainly as if the sons of Macragge were dead and gone.’ There is no exaggeration to these words; I hear the pain in his voice and I believe him.

‘And now you are Malcador’s agent?’

He nods. ‘One of many. Some of us legionaries, from brotherhoods on both sides of the insurrection. Others mortal and… otherwise. I have a new purpose now.’

He speaks of the Sigillite’s works in the Sol System, the deeds done in the Emperor’s name, but not with true openness. All across the stars, he tells me, measures are being taken. Ships and men silently diverted to where they will be most needed in the battles to come. Military equipment, gene-tech and the building blocks of a Legion’s infrastructure. All to Lord Malcador’s design, all to combat not Horus Lupercal’s treachery, but the dark forces the Warmaster has awakened.

I find it hard to follow, until he makes the offer. Then I see.

Rubio holds out his hand. ‘Join me, Arkad. You and your brothers. The black scroll may mark the ending of your Legion, but it need not be the end of your duty to Terra.’

‘You would have us give up our colours for those?’ I study his ghost-grey wargear, and tap the winged blood drop across the chest of my night-black armour. ‘I will die before I surrender that. If Sanguinius has been taken from us, we lost sons… then to shrug off our identity like some discarded cloak would be the greatest insult to his memory!’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘I understand.’ Rubio stands his ground as I advance towards him. ‘I speak for all my brothers. Your offer is refused.’

To his credit, he does not waste breath trying to convince me otherwise. ‘Very well. I have one last demand of you, then.’ The psyker returns his sheathed blade to his belt and offers me a vox-module. ‘Your ships in orbit, the guardian flotilla… I have given them Malcador’s orders to disperse and strike their colours–’

A smile comes to my lips, a swell of pride to my hearts. ‘But they do not obey?’ In that moment, the humans, the crew-serfs and the mortal officers, they remind me that one need not be a legionary to be of the Legion.

‘The shipmasters refuse to accept the Sigillite’s commands unless you authorise them. Arkad, you must release the fleet from their oath to the Blood Angels.’

‘I will not.’ I hear footfalls. Ceramite boots upon the stone, the sound of armoured warriors rising to fill the ranks behind me. I turn to see their faces, but each one of my kinsmen has hidden his visage behind his helmet.

And their armour…

They no long wear the blood-crimson of our Legion. Dark layers of inkstone stain have blackened their wargear to a shade similar to mine. The only marks of incarnadine that remain are brazen red saltires that cross over their chests, their shoulders. The stark lines of scarlet are like bloody wounds.

It is Nagal who leads them. ‘If we are truly in the company of death,’ he intones, ‘then it is fitting that all who look upon us shall know it.’

My pride grows ever stronger, and I see the questions in Rubio’s gaze as I turn back to him. ‘Where is Horus Lupercal, brother? Under what blighted rock does the turncoat hide?’

Rubio reads our collective intent immediately. ‘You seek to face the Warmaster. The twenty of you against the might of his armies, his Traitor Legions? You will die.’

‘By the Sigillite’s word, we are already dead,’ snarls Hezen. ‘We will find Horus and kill him. Or die in the attempt.’

‘What other end can we aspire to?’ I ask, and I see Rubio’s manner hardening. ‘Anyone who has given their fealty to the Great Angel may follow us, if that is their wish.’

The psyker draws his Ultramarines gladius, slowly and deliberately. The sword’s blade glows, and in concert with it, the crystals of his psychic hood come alive. ‘I cannot allow that. Master your own fates if you will, for you are of the Legiones Astartes and that is your right. But those ships belong to the Imperium, and Terra.’ The tip of the blade points at my head. He still holds out the vox-module. ‘Tell them to stand down, Brother Arkad.’

‘No.’ The crozius arcanum is suddenly in my hand. The aura crackles into being, glowing blue-white.

In this moment, I am fully ready to commit the most unthinkable of acts. I am ready to kill another Space Marine for what I believe to be right, and I know that the battle-brothers standing behind me will not stay my hand. They will see it good and raise no reproach. I am ready to end the life of Tylos Rubio if that is what it will take.

In a way, the feeling is… liberating. Is this what Horus’ traitors so desired? And once it is done, will it be easier to kill again, and again? For that is the threshold we now stand upon, and the path beyond will be marked with the blood of warriors we might once have called brother, might once have fought alongside.

And then a cry comes from human lips before our weapons can meet. ‘Wait! Wait! Hold your blows, in the Angel’s name!’

Nagal, Hezen and the others part like a dark curtain, to allow a man’s approach. A spindly thing he is, clad in velvet robes. He stumbles as if he is dizzy. Ser Jesper, the Master of Speakers, tries his best to run to us. Behind him trail cords of rope-wound wires and ritual bonds. He has come at a mad pace from the fortress-monastery’s astropathic seclusium, and done so with such urgency that he is in great disarray. It concerns me to see Jesper in this state, for whatever news he brings must be of the greatest import. The poor astropath is not properly decompressed from his psi-sendings. Weak, watery blood runs from the corners of his eyes.

The astropath collapses, but Hezen is there to catch him. He brings him to us, bearing the weakened, fallen man like a child.

‘Heed me,’ croaks Jesper. He is barely awake, but something in the waif-like form keeps him conscious long enough to speak. His tone becomes the sing-song of mimic repetition as he gives the meme-codes that prove his message to be authentic. He is relaying a communication from the stars. ‘Raldoron speaks across the wild and screaming distances,’ he whispers.

‘The First Captain?’ Nagal stiffens at the mention of the name. Our brother Raldoron was called to be at the Angel’s side at Signus. Suddenly, Jesper’s near panic is understood.

‘He speaks…’ The astropath is dying. He has killed himself to rip this message from the tumult of the Ruinstorm, sacrificed his life because he knew it would save us. I am humbled by his act. ‘Sanguinius lives. The Legion endures.’

It is the last communiqué Ser Jesper grants us; I hear the final beat of his heart.

Rubio cannot deny what he has heard, even as his vox-bead crackles with confirmation from his own astropaths aboard the cruiser. His sword sinks towards the ground.

I raise my crozius, Baal’s red sunlight casting it like spilled blood. ‘Go back, Rubio. Take your ship and your orders, and go to Malcador with empty hands and empty holds.’ My hearts sing as I say the words.

‘He counted you lost too soon,’ says the psyker.

‘We were never lost.’ I shake my head. ‘We are Blood Angels.’

And that is answer enough.

FEAR TO TREAD

Sent on a fool’s errand by his trusted brother Horus, the primarch Sanguinius and his Blood Angels must face all the warp-spawned armies of Chaos upon the plains of Signus Prime.

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THE UNREMEMBERED EMPIRE

Having weathered the Word Bearers’ attack on Calth and the subsequent Shadow Crusade against the Five Hundred Worlds, the Ultramarines primarch, Roboute Guilliman, now draws all loyalist forces to Macragge as he contemplates a new future for mankind.

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RUINSTORM

With Imperium Secundus a failed dream, the primarchs of the Triumvirate swear to reach Terra and defend the Imperium’s heart. But danger awaits them, and their destinies are in their hands…

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IRON HANDS

X LEGION

IMMORTAL DUTY

Nick Kyme

I have erred, and so I must atone.

I lived when I should have died, and so I must become Immortal.

– Oath of the Immortals

On my knees, I faced the ship’s deck. The contorted faces of my brothers stared back, frozen in their last tormented moments.

My name is Ahrem Gallikus and I am Immortal, but this was the day that I was supposed to die.

It was my right. My destiny, one that I alone set in motion long before the fields of our greatest ignominy. Long before Isstvan.

A chill pricked the skin at the nape of my neck, between the black adamantium gorget and a closely shorn scalp of coal-dark hair. At first I thought it was the starship’s atmospheric recirculation lacing the air with frigidity, until I realised it was the axe blade poised in judgement.

Mercifully, the edge remained enervated or I would surely have been dead already. But then why imbue it with an actinic sharpness when a simple heft and cleave will do the job just as well?

Logic. Efficiency. Temperance.

Forged together, these words were our creed. A bond of iron, I always believed. Where was this alloy in our father when he needed it most? Again, as they often did in those days of bereavement and grief, my thoughts turned to melancholy.

‘Ahrem,’ uttered a voice from the shadows surrounding me, as sharp as the naked blade against my flesh. ‘Tell us.’

He used my given name, the one afforded to me by the chieftain of Clan Gaarsak, and it grated in my ears. He had no right to use that name.

‘I am Legionary Gallikus, Order Primii,’ I replied with minimum respect. Back then I saw it as needless theatre, all of this.

‘Gallikus, then,’ uttered the voice a second time, the irritation in its timbre unmasked. ‘We have questions. You will answer them.’

The axe blade descended incrementally, nicking my skin to draw a bead of blood. I saw my breath fog in the cold, stagnant air; felt the thrum of the Obstinate’s impulse engines resonating from the lower decks; heard every minute adjustment of my interrogator’s posture in the low, predatory growl of his armour.

I was at peace, ready for my duty to end. My immortal duty. I lowered my head a fraction in gentle supplication.

My interrogator took that as an indication to proceed, which it was. In a way.

‘Tell us of the Retiarius.’

The name of that vessel put fire in my veins, banishing the cold of the hangar deck as my mind was cast back to hot halls, crimson and black. Sweat, blood, death… it all collided in a moment of searing recollection. It did nothing to warm the frozen flesh of the battle-brothers who stared back at me, dead eyes fixed wide in their decapitated heads.

I wondered briefly if the method of execution was meant to be symbolic, ironic or inadvertently in bad taste.

‘Tell us what you remember.’

I remembered fire in the upper atmosphere of Isstvan, and hell reigning across the heavens. But this was amorphous, an impression only. An emotional response.

I considered the possibility of sanction if I had admitted that. Emoting is supposed to be anathema to the Iron Tenth. I am sometimes led to wonder if life itself is, too. Instead, the first memory hit me. It felt like a mailed fist, but sang with the thunder of a battle-barge’s opening broadside…

‘Blood of Medusa!’

Mordan was seldom given to such outward expression, but our path to the Retiarius was proving volatile.

Harnessed in the assault ram’s dual prows, my brothers were giving off the same, albeit unspoken, sentiment.

Katus gripped his breaching shield double-fisted and held it across his chest like a totem. The bionic eye he wore in his right socket flared with nerve-induced auto-calibration.

Sombrak ground his teeth. He was my shield-brother and did it before every battle. It was loud and discordant because his jaw was cybernetic. Most of us were patched up thusly, our broken bodies rebuilt so that we could wage war one final time.

This was my eighth ‘final time’. Fate could be cruel like that.

Azoth was the last brother I knew well, though in all there were ten souls armoured in Medusan black in the hold. The rate of attrition was grievous amongst our ranks, and I soon found little need to learn names.

Of all my brothers, those known and unknown, Azoth was the most prone towards rhetoric. When we were made Immortal, our father stripped us of rank and title. Reforged, our new calling was a badge of shame to all in our Legion, and we lost our old identities. I believe that Azoth had been a Frater Ferrum – an Iron Father – before he fell from grace. He still had the gaps in his armour where they had unbolted his servo-arm. Whatever he had been before, now he was our sergeant.

He called out to us, bellowing against the tumult within the hold. ‘Forlorn hope! Our ranks have never been breached. Be steadfast.’ I could hear the servo-grind of his gauntlet as he gripped the haft of his thunder hammer. ‘Be resolute. Our dishonour demands it of us. Death awaits. We do not fear it! For what is death…?’

‘To those who are dead already!’ I roared in unison with my brothers.

He had a way with words, old Azoth. I think I will miss him the most.

Warning klaxons sounded, coinciding with a rush of crimson light flooding the low ceiling above us. We were close, but that was no guarantee of us reaching the Retiarius intact.

Over thirty assault rams had been cast out into the void, all ridden by Medusan Immortals. I doubted that even half would make it through.

A Caestus was a durable vessel, fashioned specifically for this purpose. It was fast too, but the sheer amount of weapons fire erupting between the two larger vessels across the gulf of space was intense.

Great tracts of the void separated the Gorgonesque and the Retiarius, littered with silent explosions like scarred nebulae, and immense clouds of rapidly dispersing shrapnel. To us, aboard our diminutive assault ram, it was a long and perilous journey. To those two great behemoths, it would be regarded as close range.

As our hull shuddered with every close impact, the inertial suppression clamps held us steady. I closed my eyes and imagined our destination.

I had seen the Retiarius before, during the Great Crusade. Back then it had been an ugly, hulking vessel, well suited to its brutish occupants. Its flanks were stained azure and dirty white, the echo of legionary war plate. Slab-nosed and upscaled with muscular fighter bays and ablative armour plating, it was reminiscent of a pugilist in the form of a starship.

I felt our punch resonate through the Caestus’ hull, a glass fist striking a jaw of steel. Were it not for the magna-meltas burning furiously to soften the Retiarius’ formidable hide then we would have been dashed to wreckage in an eye-blink.

As it was, we bit deep. Our glass fist had shards, and these had cut the outer flesh of the much larger vessel.

We broke through amidst an evaporating cloud of ferric smoke, our small assault ram having bored through the starship’s hull and clamped securely in place. Disgorged onto a dark, semi-lit hangar, we had little time to get our bearings before counter-boarding troops arrived to try and repel us.

‘Lock shields!’

Azoth bellowed out the command, but we had already begun to form up.

It was an archaic tactic, reminiscent of the Romanii or Grekans of Old Earth, but it was effective. Much about war endures, fraternal conflict being foremost in my mind as we breached a vessel that we had once considered to belong to our allies.

But it was mortal armsmen and not our erstwhile brothers in arms, the World Eaters, that we faced upon that deck.

A strong, determined fusillade hit us first, hot las raining in from hastily erected weapon teams and broken firing lines. We held, soaking up their fire, taking everything they threw at us without flinching. Then we pushed on, moving as one, the aegis of our breacher shields impenetrable to the brave men and women who had come to stop us.

Despite their obvious disadvantage, the Retiarius’ mortal troops went in close. Three further assault rams had struck this section of the ship and all four squads came together before the armsmen hit us. Their solid-shot weapons and mauls proved fatally ineffective.

The feeble momentum of their attack was dispersed when they shattered against our shield wall, and we absorbed the impact before returning it tenfold. Medusan war-oaths cut the air as cleanly as any blade.

And almost as deadly.

The mortals quailed before our seeming inviolability and fury.

I battered my first opponent, letting the blood from his broken skull spray against my shield before I finished him. The stomp of my foot was all it took, and suddenly I was pushing forwards with my immortal brothers. I shot a second through the cheekbone, his face erupting into mist as the mass-reactive shell exploded. I barged a third, splitting ribs. A fourth fell back in front of me against our advance and I severed his neck with the edge of my breacher shield, barely noticing the blood wash against my armoured boot.

Our purpose made us ruthless. A blockade around Isstvan’s upper atmosphere was preventing the X Legion from reaching its father, with the Retiarius just one of the vessels impeding our path. Our mission was simple. Our Iron Fathers had been clear. Destroy the ship by any means possible. If that meant our deaths, so be it.

Inexorable, inevitable, we crushed the counter-assault forces from the Retiarius. Then we cut down the weapons teams, then the deckhands, until every crewmen in sight was slain. It was an honourless but necessary act.

After this, we broke ranks to quickly neutralise the rest. The deck was slick with enemy blood, but it was hard to discern in the dull light.

‘Where are we?’ asked Mordan.

‘Aft of the enginarium, I think,’ I replied. I knew a little of the vessel’s layout, in so far as it would adhere to extant expeditionary fleet schemata. ‘In one of the smaller hangar bays, near the ship’s outer skin.’

A relatively small chamber with a low ceiling and bare deck plate underfoot, the hangar would have been used to cloister the Retiarius’ various smaller interdiction craft. For now, it was empty of starfighters and assault craft, the World Eaters having disgorged their entire complement to duel with the Iron Hands vessels attempting to break through the blockade. Instead, ammo hoppers and riggers crowded the narrow space. Rigging chains hung down from overhead pulleys, gently swaying in the aftermath of the battle. Steam plumed from vents in the walls, and it was sweltering. A pervasive, animal heat lathered every surface in a fine veneer of sweat. It stank.

The vox-feed in my ear crackled. Communal channel. As expected, the voice of Brother-Captain Udris of the Gorgonesque came through the void-static.

Azoth told him that we had successfully made ingress and were moving deeper into the vessel. Resistance had been minimal.

We all knew that would change.

‘The blockade?’ asked Sombrak, when Azoth had finished receiving his orders from the Gorgonesque.

‘Still intact,’ Azoth replied. ‘We’ll know if it isn’t. These halls will be filled with fire, the walls will shatter and we’ll be cast to the void. For now, they stand. So we must sunder them. The Avernii are dying below us, brothers.’

‘I would have liked to stand with the Gorgon one last time,’ said Katus, his head bowed.

Azoth clapped a gauntleted hand on his shoulder. There was an underlying anger in the former Frater’s tone. At the betrayal unfolding on Isstvan or the stripping of his rank, it could be either or both.

‘Aye, Katus. So would I, but we have our lot and it is here aboard the Retiarius.’

We moved out, leaving the dead to fester in the heat.

As soon as our breach had been detected by the bridge crew, the Retiarius locked down its bulkheads and sealed all blast doors, seeking to contain us in a non-vital part of the ship.

While two of my brothers with lascutters went to work cleaving open the blast door to the hangar, the rest of us adopted a defensive posture. Azoth took me aside. His mood was grim.

‘No word from the other squads,’ he told me. ‘Cunaeda, Vorrus, Hakkar…’ He shook his head. ‘Thirty-three assault rams went out. Currently, I only know of four that reached the Retiarius and they stand in this hangar. How far is the enginarium?’

‘It’s relatively close,’ I said, recalling the schematics eidetically, ‘but there are warrens of tunnels and chambers beyond those doors before we reach it.’

Azoth nodded, looking to my side rather than at me, as if I had just confirmed what he already knew in his gut. He spoke with some resignation. ‘This was always a suicide mission…’

Of all the Immortals I had known and fought beside, Azoth seemed the least sanguine about dying to restore his impugned honour. Or perhaps it was dying with what he felt was his honour still impugned. Azoth was brave, the equal of any Iron Hands legionary – including the noble Avernii – but I suspected his fervent wish was to return to the order of Iron Fathers before he fell in battle.

But we were ghosts now, all of us, our honour as incorporeal to us as smoke. We had erred, and so we had to atone, or so the oath went.

The blast door from the hangar went down, heralded by a resounding clang as it hit the deck on the other side.

More gloom, more visceral darkness. Sweltering heat struck us like a fist, even more palpably than before. Impulse droning from the nearby enginarium was deafening. The thunderous report of broadsides trembled the deck underfoot and the walls shook with vibrational recoil. Petrochemical stink merged with the actinic aftertaste of recently discharged laser batteries wafting upwards from the lower decks.

A starship at war was as brutal a battlefield as any, but the Retiarius deserved infamous acclaim for its severity.

The power-armoured warriors who came at us from the sweat-drenched shadows were testament to that.

First blood went to the World Eaters.

Clad in beaten up war plate, festooned in spikes and studs, the sons of Angron looked worthy of their name. Blood and grime tarnished them, lending further ferocity to an appearance where no more was needed. Froth bubbled up through their rebreather grilles and fever-sweat scented the air. Savage, snarling, brutal – I saw animals coming at us from the shadows, not men. Their martial prowess was daunting, even to us.

An Immortal I did not know cried out, shield arm hanging slack with his vulnerable shoulder joint cut and the tendons beneath it severed. A second blow went from left clavicle to right hip. After overcoming inertial resistance, the two body halves slid apart and spilled my brother across the deck.

A plasma pistol at close range evaporated the head of another Medusan who reacted too slowly. Three more in the front few ranks were savagely gutted. Chainblades – both swords and axes – growled bestially.

Like an animal that was suddenly aware that it had been wounded, we recoiled. First we closed the breach from the door, keeping our enemy on the far side, so they couldn’t spill out and surround us. Then we fought back.

A strong push that was as much about Medusan tenacity and grit as it was the durability of our breacher shields saw us gain a footing in the first corridor section beyond the blast door. Our enemy yielded to us, surrendering ground without choice, but then trammelled any further progress with ferocity and sheer weight of bodies.

It was impossible to count, but I reckoned twice our number thronged the warren of corridors before us. We breached, every legionary in our forsworn company, and then the sons of Angron hit us like a hurricane of swords.

Hot sparks flashed angrily off the edge of my shield as it met the burring chainblade of a World Eater. My enemy was unhelmed, revealing a face puckered with scar tissue and metal piercings. A chain looped from his ear to his nose and a spiked bar skewered both cheeks. Tattoos that looked like kill-tallies marked his neck, though the darkness made it hard to tell for sure.

I mashed my shield into his body and he staggered, grunting. Pressing my bolt pistol into the purpose-forged groove of my breacher shield, I shot him almost point-blank in the throat. Skull fragments and red matter rattled against my faceplate as the World Eater’s head exploded.

Grimly, I advanced a step.

We all did.

Azoth rallied us.

‘Hold steady!’ he roared. ‘Shields as one!’

They hit us again, raging, foaming at the mouth like rabid dogs. I felt the frenzied, repeated axe strikes against my shield resonate down to my shoulder. It burned and a numbness born from excessive muscular tension spread into my arm.

Azoth was unrelenting. ‘Hold!’

A few more seconds of battery passed before he said, ‘Now… heave!’

Unified, ordered, strong, we advanced and threw our aggressors back. Their killing lust made them fearsome but profligate with their effort. One man, however skilled and ferocious, cannot hold back a tide. A hundred men, if acting individually, will find themselves similarly disadvantaged.

After their initial wild flurry, the World Eaters were struggling to break us down. After herding them from the breach in the blast door made by our lascutters, we found ourselves several metres into the warren of corridors. Compared to the hangar it was confined, but wide enough for six shields abreast.

‘Form ranks!’

Azoth was trying to impose further order. Unable to match their ruthless fury, it was the only way to break the World Eaters.

Thrust to the front, I was shoulder to shoulder with Mordan and Katus. The former was an arch fatalist who had surprised us all by living this long. The latter was a zealot who believed that strength came from adversity, and who revelled in his Immortal calling. Different though they may be, the mutual determination bleeding off my brothers was both infectious and galvanising. Behind us, I could sense Azoth’s desire to be a part of the fighting rank, to prove that his shaming had been unjust. His shield was against my left shoulder guard, stalwart and unyielding. Sombrak had the right, as staunch as an iron buttress. Not once had I seen him ever take a backward step in combat.

As well as our former ranks, our clans were also scoured from us. To be Immortal is to be alone, but despite this abject form of penitence, I felt as closely bonded to these warriors as if they were all from Gaarsak and not spread the length and breadth of Medusa.

The World Eaters hit us hard with a renewed strength born of rage. Bloodied, they carried on unbowed, proving as tough and determined as we knew them to be.

I had seen their war-making first-hand, not as an enemy but as an ally.

I earned my shame that day on Golthya, during the Great Crusade, not long after we were reunited with our father…

Inside the Retiarius we reached as far as a cross-junction before our progress was arrested. A hulking Dreadnought almost filled the corridor ahead of us with its sheer bulk. Our sudden stall also prompted World Eaters to attack us from either flank. Our steady advance was stopped at the nexus of the junction, forcing us into an arrow wedge.

Katus and three others stormed the monstrous war engine.

One of its weapon arms was missing, and I suspected it had been in the midst of ground deployment preparation when we breached the vessel. Instead, it had been reassigned to stop us getting any further. Sombrak carried a melta-charge. So did three other Immortals in the boarding party. Allowed to detonate in the enginarium deck, these incendiaries would wreak havoc on the Retiarius.

Leading with his shield, Katus took a bruising blow that dashed him against the wall. His power pack ruptured and the small explosion threw him forwards into the Contemptor’s lightning claw.

He spat blood. It sprayed the inside of his helm and leaked out through a crack in his faceplate. He was dead before he hit the ground. Bolt-shells caromed off the Contemptor’s armoured hide from the other three Immortals who had charged with Katus, but they were no more than irritants. The Dreadnought battered two of them down with its claw, gouging one through his shield and crushing the other under its armoured foot when the Iron Hand lost his footing.

The fourth Immortal was Mordan, the only one to be alone out of the group that had gone forwards to engage the monstrous Contemptor.

He wasn’t alone for long. A renewed shield wall rushed up to join him.

I tried to suppress a twinge of envy at my brothers’ glorious death as I advanced on the Dreadnought. It swung again, blood boiling on its energised talons and filling the corridor with the stench of burned copper. Mordan and I put up our shields as one, but I felt every pound of the Contemptor’s piston-driven force rattling down through my body. It put us both on our knees.

‘Your mistake…’ I snarled, as Azoth waded into the gap left by Mordan and staved in the Dreadnought’s head with his thunder hammer. Sombrak’s volkite speared it through the chest in the same coordinated attack. It staggered as if unable to comprehend the immediacy of its own demise and fell back into an inert heap of metal.

The Dreadnought’s death barely registered with the other World Eaters. They were of the killing mind now and would not relent until either they or we were dead. For the first time since we had boarded the Retiarius, the thoughts of the Iron Tenth and the World Eaters aligned.

We rode the storm of their fury. Without the Contemptor to break our ranks, the close confines of the corridors suited us.

‘Take it!’ shouted Azoth, now part of the front fighting rank where he belonged. ‘Take everything they’ve got!’

Hammer blows pummelled our collective defence, but we held. The shield wall held and we were able to advance.

The base of my shield scraped the floor with every hard-won step. My shoulder burned from having to thrust it into the reverse side of my shield to keep the enemy from overrunning us. Our strength came from cohesion. If one link failed then our entire chain would unravel.

They hit us; we hurled them back. Each time we stood firm and absorbed the punishment, the World Eaters became more frenzied in their attempts to break us, and more reckless.

It took over eighteen minutes for us to kill every warrior-berserker in the warren. By the time it was over, blood slicked the walls, and drenched the deck beneath us, and we emerged into the next chamber weary but victorious.

I had expected to see the enginarium. What we found was something quite different.

A wide slope led from the corridor section’s upraised bulkhead. We barrelled out onto it, maintaining good order and swiftly redressing our ranks in the process. It led to a pit, little more than a hollow basin of bare, bloodstained metal. It had been recently cleansed but some marks remained, the indelible legacy of a Legion’s bloodletting.

More of our Immortal brothers were waiting for us in the pit, impaled from groin to crown on ugly iron spikes. I counted thirty and balked at the realisation that so few of us had even reached the Retiarius, let alone died on it.

I heard the clenching of fists in impotent wrath, the muttering of vengeful oaths against the World Eaters. I kept my own emotions buried, but felt the deepest stirrings of hate begin to flare like a hot, angry welt against my pride.

Azoth had been right in his assessment – this was a suicide mission.

Glory and honour were not the rights of the damned, and we were damned men. Our shame had made us that.

My shame had condemned me to that fate. On Golthya.

It had been a bleak, ugly world. We were arrayed against the kethid, a hairless, perversely humanoid alien species who had, like so many others during the coming of Old Night, subjugated the native human populace. Deep into the yawning mouth of Jreth Valley, we deployed clouds of phosphex to kill the grey-skinned aliens, but the kethid had fashioned anabatic winds through their crude science. It turned our deadliest, most loathsome weapon against us.

How we burned, the green flame flaying our flesh and turning our iron to nought but charred matter…

Croen died first, our company’s vexillary. Then Laeoc, Garric, Maedeg… until there was only me, Sombrak and a handful of others left. Our flank had been crippled and we too surely would have died were it not for the berserkers clad in blue and white that descended from on high.

We fought with them, but only in a supporting role. It was meant to be our victory. The World Eaters lauded us for our courage. I stood at the shoulder of Varken Rath, a legionary of singular skill, who thanked me personally for my efforts. Sombrak and the rest of our surviving iron-kin made similar sword-brothers.

Alas, our father did not see it thusly. I have wielded a breacher shield ever since.

I have often reflected on the cruelty of that and how the Battle of Golthya mirrored that aboard the Retiarius in both its desperation and ferocity.

At the edge of the pit on board the Retiarius, the World Eaters were waiting for us. Unlike the ones we had defeated in the warren, these men were armoured more like gladiators.

I knew them. I had seen them emerging from the burned metal teardrops of their deep insertion pods, through the dissipating phosphex mist that had claimed over half my company before the alien kethid attacked.

Savage, even back then, the Rampagers were much changed.

Unhooded, they wore their facial tattoos openly. Chains and thick veils of iron ringlets accented their white-and-blue power armour, the spikes entwined between the links presaging a darker aspect to come. Head to foot, they were swathed in gore, baked hard over their war plate by the Retiarius’ immense enginarium heat. Without needing it confirmed, I knew in my marrow that the blood was Medusan, wrung from the tortured bodies of our brothers in the pit.

One of the Rampagers stood out amongst the rest. He nodded towards us, I thought. Then I realised he was actually gesturing to me.

‘Gallikus…’ his voice boomed across the echoing space, resonating off the pit and the shattered breacher shields lining its walls. ‘Well met.’ It almost sounded genial, a greeting.

It was, of sorts. Or rather, a challenge.

It was Rath. There could be no mistaking my former comrade in arms. It was blunt nomenclature for a genhanced instrument of war that was anything but. He was an exemplary swordsman and wielded a blade in each hand as if to prove it. I needed no such proof. He had gutted kethid on those blades like they were swine. Falax, they were called, or so Rath had told me.

‘If you want to reach the enginarium then this is the battleground you must cross to do it,’ he said, calmly gesturing to the pit where they had staked our brothers out to die. He nodded to me again. ‘I’ll give you a good death. You’ve earned that right.’

I wanted to crush him. For his unintended condescension and the barbarous way his kin had treated mine. I almost heard our sword-bond break in his casual laughter.

‘Some yet live!’ cried Sombrak, who jabbed a finger at an Immortal twisting on his metal spit.

‘Blood of Medusa!’ Mordan’s gauntlets cracked as they clenched tighter around the handle of his shield.

Rath was smiling. All the Rampagers were smiling.

Azoth had seen enough.

‘Kill them! Avenge the fallen!’ he roared, and every Iron Hand in our slowly dwindling company drew swords and mauls.

For what the Rampagers had done, we would have our vengeance at close quarters.

Our desperate assault was over. All we had left was retribution and, some believed, a last chance for honour. Our immortal duty.

To their martial credit, the World Eaters waited until we were halfway across the pit before they rushed to engage us.

Then we clashed. There was no order to it, no unity. Just blood.

We outnumbered the Rampagers two to one, but in the first eight seconds of the battle those odds were slashed drastically.

As I closed on Rath, briefly allying with Mordan to bring down one of the Rampagers and watching the World Eater gut one of my brothers in return, I considered the very likely fact that we had been allowed to get this far. That we had been drawn here for the prospect of a good fight. Perhaps Angron needed his psychotics to have their blood up before he unleashed them?

That arrogance would unstitch them, I decided.

Rath and I met in the centre of the arena. I still had my shield – it would be a vital barrier against my opponent’s twin falax – but had drawn a gladius in lieu of my holstered pistol.

Blade to blade. Honour demanded no less.

At first, Rath seemed to appreciate the gesture but then his face locked up in an expression of pure, agonised rage. His eyes widened, the spontaneously rupturing veins turning the sclera a deep, visceral red. No trace of the man remained; now there was only a beast.

For almost three minutes he hacked into my shield as I mustered a desperate defence. He only stopped when Sombrak tried to wade in and relieve me. Despite his murder-blindness, Rath reacted on instinct. He half-parried Sombrak’s thrust and let the blade pierce his side. With the other falax, he cut off Sombrak’s head.

I sagged back, too exhausted to take advantage of Rath’s distraction. My breacher shield was split down the middle, the arm holding it numbed to lead. I watched Sombrak’s body slump to its knees and his head roll away into shadow.

Then Rath turned, exultant with the kill, and came again for me.

No martial quarter was given this time. Rath was drunk on murder-lust.

His falax came in high and I twisted to let my shoulder guard take the blow. It found the vulnerable join between the metal plates of my armour and cut all the way down to the mesh beneath, cleaving through to my flesh. Blood welled instantly. I felt it seep into my armpit and gum around my chest.

The second blade I blocked, turning it aside before aiming a stabbing thrust that sank my gladius two-thirds of the way into Rath’s midriff.

It was a debilitating wound, meant to slow and eventually incapacitate. Rath showed no sign of either. We were up close. I could smell his charnel breath. A savage headbutt smashed my faceplate, cracking the retinal lenses and sending the glass splinters back into my face. An elbow strike put me on one knee before Rath brought the falax round into my flank, where it lodged like a nail.

I screamed. He roared.

The end was near, my immortal duty almost dispensed at last. I saw my breacher shield, smashed apart and discarded on the deck. Other shields and the bodies of my brothers had joined it.

We should never have broken our ranks, given in to hate and fury. Ours was a colder creed, one of reason and the inviolability of tactical logic. We had erred, and now our atonement was due.

Head bowed, I felt a chill progress through me. It matched the cold disembodied sensation of my cybernetics.

But the blow did not fall. My neck and head remained attached.

Instead, I heard the klaxon drone of emergency sirens as the arena was flushed with red, urgent light.

Azoth had fought his way from the pit. He was wounded, and his thunder hammer was bloody, but he still stood. He was venting the chamber, releasing everything into the void.

The World Eaters had not cleansed the pit before. They had purged it in the vacuum of space. My brother had found the mechanism and did so again, only with us and our enemies present.

In the few seconds I had left, I saw the grim resignation on Azoth’s face. This wasn’t how he had wanted it to end.

Then I was yanked out by the venting pressure. I felt light and not just because of the absence of air and gravity. Rath’s last defiant roar was stolen in that rushed exhalation, pitched into silence in dark and starless space. He swung for me, out of compulsion from whatever fuelled his rage rather than petty impotence, but the slow cut of his falax missed its mark.

Las flashes cut through the darkness, spearing us on their incandescent beams. Rath was shredded, so too were my brothers. I saw Azoth impaled through the chest before I was struck a glancing blow.

I spun, fading in the endless void, just another piece of debris.

The vista of the battling starships expanded before me, terrible and beautiful at once. Broadsides carved through kilometres of space. Explosions bloomed, abject in their quietude. The Gorgonesque was listing, her engines dead, her shields and armour stripped bare.

Her warp drives going critical was like the dawning of a miniature sun, a silent flash of awesome light that seared my retinas. I rode the resulting bow wave of pressure, my armour crystallising with hoarfrost even as I felt the explosive burn of the Gorgonesque’s dramatic last breath.

‘I remember little more after that,’ I told my accusers, the Obstinate’s black deck resolving before me as I left the memory of the Retiarius behind, ‘save waking in your apothecarion and being marched to this hangar bay for summary judgement.’ I could not keep the bitterness from my voice.

‘You believe you are being treated harshly, Legionary Gallikus?’

I declined to reply, my head bowed with the cold weight of the axe blade upon my neck. The dead stares of my decapitated brothers frozen on the deck seemed mocking. And I was about to join them.

‘Before you kill me,’ I said at length, ‘tell me, did we break the blockade?’

My accuser came forwards into the light. I heard some gesture he made, the whirring of old servos in a wrist or elbow, and felt the pressure against my neck ease. I looked up into the face of an Iron Father, but not one that I recognised.

He was badly scarred and his left cheek and part of his skull shone dully in the half-light. A tight grey beard like wire wool was shaved into a spear-tip on a jutting, imperious chin. The venerable Iron Father looked down upon me like I was the dirty oil he had to scrape from his weapons.

‘We failed,’ he replied. ‘We were weak.’

There were two others with him, a Salamander and one of the Raven Guard.

‘This is barbaric…’ I heard the son of Vulkan mutter, despite the low hum of the Obstinate’s impulse engines partly masking his voice. His eyes flared like burning coals.

The Raven Guard gently raised his hand, warning the Salamander to silence, and they stepped back as one. This was Iron Hands business, conducted in the Medusan way as our father had taught us.

I was finding it hard to process the situation, the incongruous presence of the other Legion warriors, the mood of fatalism emanating from the Iron Father. Then there was the last figure in the room with me, my would-be executioner, one I felt I recognised and that stirred a disquiet in me that I could not explain at the time.

‘Then what are our primarch’s commands? Is Horus defeated? Is Isstvan still contested?’ I had so many questions. ‘What of the Retiarius?’

The Iron Father shook his head, sadly. ‘It’s over, Legionary Gallikus. You were the sole survivor of the attack on the Retiarius. The war for Isstvan is done. We lost…’ He paused, as if to telegraph the blow that was coming so I could be ready for it. ‘Ferrus Manus is dead.’

‘Dead?’ I tried to rise from my knees but a strong hand held me down. ‘Release me!’ I snapped, turning to meet the haunted eyes of an old friend. For a moment, I let slip my other concerns. ‘Azoth?’

He gave no recognition of the fact I had just spoken his name. I thought he had died and yet here he was, aboard the Obstinate. But something was very wrong. His flesh looked cold, gelid, like the severed heads in front of me. Azoth’s fire had been extinguished. Ice filled his veins and countenance. A dead man stood before me with the axe, dead and yet animate, bereft of any sense of cognition that would mark him out as the warrior I once knew.

‘What have you done?’

‘What was necessary. Horus defeated us, scattered us. Shattered our Legions.’

Looking back at the Iron Father, I saw he held my breacher shield. It had been reforged, made whole, even as we ourselves had fractured.

‘You have erred,’ he said, ‘and so you must atone…’

I took the proffered shield, stunned into silence by the revelations I had just heard.

The Iron Father met my gaze and I saw the determination in his eyes, the bitterness and soul-shriving desire for revenge.

‘Such is the fate of all Immortals…’ uttered a voice behind me. The voice of Azoth, the echo of our damnation.

THE PRIMARCHS

Four tales of the primarchs, the Emperor’s own sons and liege-lords of the Space Marines. From the Great Crusade to the end of the Heresy itself, what roles have they yet to play?

In this volume, read the story ‘Feat of Iron’.

Find these titles, and many others, at blacklibrary.com or games-workshop.com

FULGRIM

As the Great Crusade draws to a close, primarch Fulgrim and the Emperor’s Children continue their pursuit of perfection. But pride comes before a fall, and this most proud of Legions is about to fall a very, very long way...

Find these titles, and many others, at blacklibrary.com or games-workshop.com

THE DAMNATION OF PYTHOS

A group of battered legionaries regroups after the Dropsite Massacre, on a seemingly insignificant death world. But a darkness gathers that threatens to consume Pythos forever…

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SHATTERED LEGIONS

After the massacre at Isstvan V, the broken remnants of three Legions formed a guerrilla force dedicated to slowing Horus’s advance on Terra. The ten tales in this volume relate exceptional stories of heroism by these Shattered Legions.

Find these titles, and many others, at blacklibrary.com or games-workshop.com

WORLD EATERS

XII LEGION

AFTER DESH’EA

Matthew Farrer

‘You don’t have to do this,’ said Dreagher, breaking the long silence, and the relaxing of tension from the other War Hounds was audible even without Astartes senses. Khârn looked around the loose square of warriors and saw sneaking relief in their expressions. Someone had finally come out and said it.

‘You need not do it.’ Dreagher could not quite bring himself to step between Khârn and the doors, but his voice was steady. ‘You should not do it.’

But other signs gave the lie to the composure in Dreagher’s voice. Khârn watched his fellow captain’s respiration move at just below combat-preparation speed, watched the veins in his face and shorn scalp tick at an elevated rate, took in the motions of his eyes, the subtle shifts of his shoulders as his body went through the muscle-loosening routines that had been part of their deep conditioning. Dreagher’s skin carried the scent of scouring-gel, but underneath it, coming off his skin, was the scent of adrenaline and the inhuman essences that the Astartes body made for itself when the danger instincts rang.

They were all keyed up; Khârn’s own metabolism was escalated too. He could hardly have helped it. The air cyclers had not yet been able to carry away the tang of blood that had washed through the anteroom the last time the double doors had opened.

As Khârn worked his palate and tongue, processing and tasting the air, he realised something else: the rest of the ship had fallen as silent as the anteroom they stood in. The anteroom’s semicircular outer wall opened through to the barrack decks, and normally the broad colonnade was alive with sounds. Voices, the clank of boots and the softer tread of the menials and technomats, the distant sound of shots from the ranges, the almost subsonic buzz of the new power weapons, all gone now. The decks were as silent as the great chamber beyond the steel-grey double doors at Dreagher’s back. The strangeness of that silence tautened his nerves and muscles further still.

Khârn ignored his body, letting it do what it would. He kept his eyes cold.

‘Eighth Company makes me the ranking captain aboard, now,’ he told them. ‘My rank, my oath and my Emperor. Together they close the matter. In case anyone is insolent enough to think there’s even a matter to close.’

‘No,’ came a voice from beside him. Jareg, the master shellsmith from the artillery echelon. ‘The matter to close is that we must find a way to, to…’ Jareg motioned wordlessly towards the doors, face twisted in distress.

‘We… don’t know how this will end,’ said Horzt, commander of the Ninth Company’s Stormbird squadron. Khârn watched the man’s hands form fists, shaking to match the shake in his voice. ‘And so we have to plan for the worst. One of us here, now, may need to command the Legion yet, and–’

He broke off. In the space beyond the doors, a voice, deeper than a tank-rumble, mightier than a cannon-blast, was roaring in anger. If there were words to it, they were blurred and muffled by the slabs of metal in the way, but still the War Hounds fell silent. They had shouted oaths and orders and obscenities over the clamour of gun, grenade and chainaxe, over the scream of Stormbird jets, over the keen and bellow of a dozen different xenos, but Khârn was the only one who dared to speak now over that distant, muted voice.

‘Enough,’ he said, and his voice was flat. ‘I’m not stupid enough to deny what we all think and know. You all owe Horzt a salute for being the only one to find enough Astartes guts in his belly to say it. The Emperor has brought us our lord and commander. The heartspring of our own bloodline. That is who is with us now. Our general. The one of whom we are echoes. Do you remember that? Do you?’ Khârn looked from one to the next, and the War Hounds stared back at him. Good. He would have struck any of them who hadn’t met his eyes. On the other side of the scarred grey plate of the doors, the distant voice roared again.

‘Now, this,’ he went on, ‘this thing we are doing here, this is right. It is not for any lord commander, it is not for any high-helmed, gilt-edged Custodian, it is not for anyone’ –his shout stiffened their backs, widened their eyes‘– to come between the War Hounds and their primarch and live. Only for the Emperor himself will we stand aside, and the Emperor has shown his wisdom. He has taken this duty and has laid it on our shoulders.’

He looked at Dreagher again. Like Khârn, the man was dressed in white, bands of blue glittering across the high-collared tunic, boots and gauntlets a dark ceremonial blue rather than functional shipboard grey. The Emperor’s lightning-bolt emblem gleamed at his collar and shoulder. His dress matched Khârn’s own: the formal garments with which the War Hounds symbolised they were about their most solemn business. It was obvious why. Dreagher wanted to go in Khârn’s place. Wanted to go in and die.

‘We have our primarch now,’ Khârn told them, and even now he felt a little shiver at the words. All these years since they had launched outwards from Terra, watching as one mighty creation after another emerged from unreclaimed space to take their places in the ranks. Khârn had heard how the Salamanders had waited in orbit around the burning moon, waited for the Emperor’s word that the one he had found there was indeed their sire. He remembered the first sight of chilly-eyed Perturabo walking at the Emperor’s shoulder the day they took ship for Nove Shendak, and the change in the Iron Warriors when they knew who was to command them. Every Legion still with that empty place at its head felt the same longing, sharper with every voyage, every campaign. Would this next star be the one where their blood-sire lived? Would this ship, this communiqué, bring the news that their father-commander had been found, out there in the dark? And then that electric day when the word had come to the mustering docks at Vueron, the news that their own primarch had been found, their lord, their alpha, their…

And it had come to this.

‘We have our primarch now,’ he repeated, ‘and he will lead his Legion in whatever manner he chooses. We are his just as we are the Emperor’s. What we wish or plan no longer matters. The commander of the War Hounds will meet the primarch of the War Hounds, and what happens will be as the primarch wills it. So be it. No more talk.’

Besides, he thought as Dreagher saluted and silently walked to the doors, I don’t suppose it will be long before he works his way down to you. He was surprised at the thought, but surprised also at the lack of emotion that came with it. For all that the War Hounds were a hot-blooded Legion, Khârn found his thoughts flat and colourless. He took a moment to wonder if this were how others felt, the enemies who had advanced to their doom under War Hounds chainaxes, or the condemned men of the auxilia in the days before the Emperor had banned the Legion from decimating allies who disgraced them on the field.

Dreagher worked the key controls and the doors swung silently outwards. Beyond them, oddly prosaic, a plain set of broad steps went down into shadows. Another roar, wordless and deep-throated, came echoing up from the gloom.

Khârn shook the thoughts away, walked forwards, and let the darkness fold over him as Dreagher swung the doors closed at his back.

Khârn came down the broad, shallow steps into the great space that had been built into the ship as Angron’s triumphal hall. He had been in it many times but it was a different space now, even with most of it lost in the dark. It felt different. Khârn registered that sensation, of walking into a strange space unfamiliar to him, and wondered if any room that held a primarch could feel the same again. He walked three slow, measured paces onto the smooth stone chamber floor, and pushed his enhanced vision through its darkness adjustments – the primarch had shattered most of the lights, or torn them from their mountings. Here and there the survivors cast glow-pools that did little more than texture the darkness around them. Some of the glows showed dark spatters and puddles across the floor, but Khârn did not bother to look closely. Even if the smell of it were not drowning his senses, he had seen the aftermath of death too many times not to know it.

He felt the urge to look around him for his brothers. Gheer, the Legion Master, who had come in here first when the Emperor had told the War Hounds they must take this duty upon themselves and then taken ship to meet the Thirty-seventh Fleet at Aldebaran. Kunnar, the First Company Champion, who had donned his formal cape, taken up his axe-staff and walked down the steps after the noises coming through the doors had convinced them that Gheer was long dead. Anchez, who had captained the assault echelon, had walked down next. He had joked with Khârn and Hyazn as the doors had been opened for him, despite the blood they could already smell on the air. The man had never known what fear was. Hyazn had been next, and two of the banner-bearers from his personal command coterie had insisted on marching down the steps into the dark with him. They had meant to block the primarch’s fury for long enough that Hyazn could speak with him. It hadn’t worked. Vanche, the master-at-arms to old Gheer, had insisted on being next, even though the next to inherit the Legion’s command, and so the duty of taking up embassy to their lord, should have been Shinnargen of the Second Company. The point was moot now. Shinnargen had met his end in here an hour after Vanche.

I am, primarch, the servant of your will, thought Khârn, and I would never dare to pronounce you the servant of mine. But still, my new-found lord, if you would make your peace with your Legion while there are still any in your Legion to draw breath…

He exhaled, and took another step into the room. For a moment he thought he could hear movement, the padding of feet, a rush of air that felt like breath, before everything splintered and whirled and he crashed into a pillared wall to land hard on his back, gasping in pain.

By the time the gasp had entered his lungs, reflex had taken over and he was up on one knee, turning to put his broken right arm and shoulder to the wall and holding and tensing his left arm ready to ward as he scanned for motion, eyes sifting the gloom, pushing into infrared to see the hulking shape hurtling forwards to fill his vision–

Will overrode reflex, and with an iron effort Khârn forced his hand towards his side. Then he was skittering on his back across the floor, breath hammered out of his lungs and cracked clavicle flaring. Unthinkingly he drew his knees to his chest, turned the skidding tumble into a backwards roll. Training, determination and Astartes neural wiring let him shunt the pain to the back of his mind as he came up into a combat crouch.

Then will took over again, and Khârn made himself stand upright and placed his hands by his sides. He looked back and found the spot where he had rested a moment ago, but the floor was empty – no shape or heat-trace.

Was this how it was for the others? He caught himself wondering, and stopped thinking about it when the lapse in concentration started him swaying on the spot. He focused, half-heard movement closing in behind him, and opened his mouth to speak, and a moment later was jerked up from the floor, the back of his head and neck in the grip of a hand that felt bigger and harder than a Dreadnought’s rubble-claw. Will, will over instinct: Khârn stopped himself from kicking backwards, trying to wrench free.

‘Another one? Another one like the rest?’ The voice in his ear was a rasp, a rumble, words like handfuls of hot gravel. ‘Warrior made, warrior garbed, uhh…’ For a moment the grip on the back of Khârn’s neck juddered and his body shook like a Stormbird hitting atmosphere, then the animal growl from behind him became a roar.

‘Fight!’

He was being carried forwards one-handed in long blurring strides across the width of the hall.

‘Fight me!’ With the words, a slam into the wall hard enough to leave Khârn’s wits red-tinged and reeling.

‘Fight me!’ Another slam and the red was shot through with black. His limbs felt sluggish and only half there. The voice was bellowing, drowning his hearing, pouring into his head and trampling his jangled thoughts.

‘Fight!’ Another steel-hard grip closed about his broken arm, and for a brief moment Khârn whirled through the air. Another impact and his back was to the wall, his feet dangling, broken shoulder incandescent with pain as one of the great hands pinned him against the dark marble.

It took a moment for things to clear. Astartes biochemistry stabilised his pain and his cognition, glanded stress hormones slammed into his system and Khârn looked at his primarch’s face with clear eyes.

The cabling from crude cranial implants tumbled away from a high brow, pale eyes sat deep behind cheekbones that angled down like axe-strokes to an aquiline nose and a broad, thin-lipped mouth.

It was the face of a general to follow unto death, the face of a teacher at whose feet the wise would fight to sit, the face of a king made for the adoration of worlds: the face of a primarch.

And rage made it the face of a beast. Rage pushed and distorted the features like a tumour breaking out from the skull beneath. It made the eyes into yellow, empty pits, debased the proud lines of brow and jaw, peeled the lips back from the teeth.

And yet it was a face so maddeningly familiar, the face of the sire whose template had made the War Hounds themselves. Khârn could see his brethren in the bronze skin, the set of the eyes, the lines of jaw and skull. Pinned there and staring, the thought that flicked into his mind was of the Legion’s battles against the capering xenos whose masks wove faces out of light, taunting them with distorted mockeries of themselves.

The primarch’s grip tensed, and Khârn wondered if he had heard the thought – didn’t they say some of their sires had that trick? Slowly Angron’s other hand rose up before Khârn’s face. Even in this light he could see the crackling shell of quick-clotting blood coating the fingers. The hand made a trembling fist before his face that seemed to hang there for an age before it slowly opened to make a stiff-fingered claw. Khârn could tell how the claw would strike: a finger in each eye, powerful enough to punch through the back of the socket and into his brain, the thumb under his jaw to crush his throat, the whole hand then ready to clench and rip away the front of his skull or pull his head from his neck. Astartes bone was powerfully made – did the primarch have the power for that in just one of his hands? Khârn thought he did.

But the hand did not strike. Instead Angron leaned forwards, the snarling gargoyle-mask of his face closing, closing, until his mouth was by Khârn’s ear.

‘Why?’ And his whisper was like the grate of tank-treads on stone. ‘I can see what you’re made for. You’re made to spill blood, just as I am. You’re not born normal men, any more than I was.’ A long, savage growl. ‘So why? Why no triumph rope? Why no weapon in your hand? Why do you all walk down here so meek? Don’t you know whose blood I really– eh?’

They were close enough that he had felt Khârn’s smile against his cheek, and now he pulled back to see it. Angron’s eyes squeezed shut for a moment, then flashed open again as he twitched Khârn away from the wall and slammed him back again. It seemed to Khârn that he could feel the fingers of the hand that held him thrumming with checked violence.

‘What’s this? Showing your teeth?’ Another slam against the wall. ‘Why are you smiling?’ By the end of the question, the voice was once again at that shattering roar, and even Khârn’s hearing, more resilient than a human’s, rang for whole seconds before it cleared. And in those few seconds, he realised that the question had not been rhetorical. Angron was waiting for an answer.

‘I am…’ His voice, when he found it, was hoarse and brittle. ‘I am proud of my Legion brothers.’ He swallowed to try and soothe his dry throat so that he could speak again, but before he could take another breath he was pulled from the wall and dropped. Angron’s kick lofted him into the air in a long curve that fetched him up against a cold, torn corpse. When Khârn dragged in a breath, it was full of the reek of blood and offal. There was no way to tell whose the body had been.

Bare feet thumped along the stone floor, counterpointing growling heaves of breath as Angron closed the distance. He leapt and landed in a crouch beside Khârn as he tried to make his body move. The grip clamped around him again, around his jaw and face this time, and he was dragged half-upright to stare into the primarch’s eyes again.

‘Proud.’ Angron’s lips worked as though he were chewing on the word. ‘Your brothers. No warriors. None of you will fight. Why… are… you…’ He was shaping his words with difficulty, and one hand had risen to clutch at his head. ‘How, uh, how can, nnn…’ And then he lifted Khârn by the front of his tunic and slammed him back down. The ragged remains on the floor gave a bloody squelch as Khârn’s back came down across them.

‘No pride!’ roared Angron, in a voice that Khârn thought dizzily could finish the job of bone-breaking that his fists had started. ‘No pride in brothers who stand there with their wits slack! Dull-eyed as a steer on a slaughter-chute! None of you fight! My brothers, my brothers and sisters, oh…’ The grip on Khârn’s tunic lifted, and he blinked his vision clear and looked up. Angron was not looking at him any more. The primarch had sunk back onto his haunches, one great hand over his eyes. His voice was still a powerful rumble, but barely formed and harsh with accent. Khârn had to concentrate to make out the words. ‘My poor warriors,’ Angron was murmuring, ‘my lost ones.’

And then he dropped his hand and looked into Khârn’s eyes. The fury was still in his stare, but it had been banked like a furnace, glowing a dull vermilion rather than roaring crimson.

‘Your brothers,’ he said in a drained voice, ‘are not like my brothers, whoever you are.’

Whoever you are. It took a moment for the words to sink in, and the next thought was, He doesn’t know. How can he not know? Still flat on the floor, Khârn took a shuddering breath.

‘My name is Khârn. I am a warrior–’

‘No!’ Angron’s fist shattered the floor beside Khârn’s head. Stone chips stung his skin. ‘No warrior! No!’

‘–of the Legiones Astartes, the great league of battle-brothers in service to our–’

‘No! Dead!’ screamed Angron, his head back, muscles corded in his neck. ‘Uhhh, my warriors are dead, my brothers, my sisters–’

‘–beloved Emperor,’ said Khârn, fighting to keep his voice cool and level, facing down the urge to gabble and plead, ‘humanity’s master, our commander and general, by whose–’

At the mention of the Emperor, Angron had begun to shudder and now he threw his head back again, baying like a beast up into the dark, shocking Khârn into silence. Then, snake-fast, his hand closed around Khârn’s ankle and, with a single wrench of his body, he threw him spinning through the air.

There was no time to twist in the air or curl. Khârn managed to get his arms around his head before he crashed into a chamber wall and dropped limp to the floor. Through the red-grey mist in his head he could hear Angron’s voice, still filling the chamber with deafening, wordless howls. Within his own body he could feel twitching and roiling as his implanted organs worked on his system: somewhere in there Angron had damaged something badly. Something for the Apothecarion to study, he thought. If they’re up to the challenge of identifying which scraps are mine after all this, he found himself adding, and the grim little mental chuckle from that thought was what gave him the strength to push himself, groaning, up onto his elbows and knees.

Angron’s foot landed like a forge-hammer between his shoulder blades and flattened him back to the floor, cracked sternum sending out ripping bursts of pain, feeling the fused shell of his ribcage creaking as he fought for breath.

‘You don’t injure easily, do you, you meek little paperskins?’ came Angron’s voice from above him, the words bitten out in curt growls. ‘Who makes warriors who won’t make war? Your murdering bastard commander, that’s who.’

More shifts in him as Khârn’s metabolism noted the dwindling breath in his lungs and changed its pace to use its oxygen more efficiently. He felt the tickle of pressure as his third lung shifted to higher functioning to take up the shortfall, and a warm sensation in his abdomen as his oolitic kidney worked on the heightened toxins in his blood.

‘Sends his cowardly little paperskins to die for him, oh yes, I know his sort.’ Angron’s words were running together into an almost continuous growl. ‘Hands that’ve never felt the heat of blood. Skin that’s never parted. Brainpan that’s never been kissed by the Butcher’s Nails. Tongue that’s never… huh.’

The weight had shifted on Khârn’s back. Angron didn’t have the leverage to keep the crushing pressure with his foot, and his other foot had started to come up off the floor. Then suddenly the pressure was gone, and Khârn whooped for air with all three lungs as Angron kicked him over onto his back.

‘You’re not dying the way I’ve seen men and women die.’ Angron stood over Khârn for a moment, head high like a ceremonial statue, then began to circle where he lay, back bent and head thrust forward, a great hunting cat scenting prey. ‘You take wounds the way… hnnn…’ He dug the fingers of one hand into into scalp for a moment, and Khârn could see his fingers tracing the lines of deep, runnelled scars. ‘…the way I do. Your blood crisps itself like mine, it… smells…’ His hands balled into fists, and Khârn saw the tension roll up the forearms, into the shoulders, into the neck and finally once again pulling the primarch’s features into the rage-mask. Slowly, clumsily, Khârn managed to sit up and rise onto one knee, braced for a new strike, but Angron kept circling him.

‘You carry yourselves like men used to iron in their hands, not air. If I were killing you on the hot dust, I’d know your names, because you’d have paid me the proper salute and we’d have turned the rope together.’ Around and around him the padding footsteps. Khârn could feel the primarch’s gaze on him like heavy chain draped over his shoulders. ‘Does it bother you, dying to one who will never know your names?’

Did it bother him? Khârn wondered. But of course that wasn’t the question. He was an emissary, here to deliver a message, not to debate.

‘We are your Legion, Primarch Angron. We are your instrument and yours to command. The deaths of our enemies are yours to command, and so are our own.’

Not a punch or a kick or a grip this time, but a ringing, open-handed clout to the side of his head that pitched him sideways.

‘Mock me again and I’ll crumble your skull in my fingers before your mouth has finished the words.’ Angron’s voice was shaking with a precarious restraint that was more frightening than a bellow. ‘My warriors. My brothers and sisters. Oh my brave ones, my brothers, my…’ For several seconds Angron simply paced, his jaw opening and working soundlessly, his head twisting from side to side. ‘Gone they are, gone without me, I…’

Angron’s fists began to move. He beat them against his thighs and chest, brought one fist and then the other around in long looping motions to smash into his mouth and cheeks. In the new quiet of the chamber, the sounds of his own flesh splitting and his grunting breaths seemed magnified, textured. Khârn watched, unable to speak, as Angron dropped to his knees, fists doubled in front of his face, muscles locked taut and body shaking.

There was a silence. Finally, Khârn broke it.

‘We are your Legion. Made from your blood and genes, crafted in your image. We have fought our way from the world where you, my lord, were conceived. We have spilt blood and burned worlds, we have shattered empires and hounded species into oblivion. Searching for you.’

Just let me speak, lord, he thought as he felt the strength coming back into his voice. Just let me bring our petition to you and then my mission is fulfilled and I am content. Do as you will.

‘We do not fight you because you are our primarch. Not just our commander, but our blood-sire, our fountainhead. No matter what, I will not raise a hand to you. Nor will any of my battle-brothers. We are ambassadors to you now. We are here for our Legion and our… our Emperor.’ Khârn tensed, but this time Angron did not respond to the word. ‘We are coming before you to plead with you to take up the rightful place that was set for you at your creation.’

He began moving, wanting to shuffle closer to where Angron knelt and hunched and shook, but even now the violence that the primarch exuded like heat made him pause. Khârn took an unsteady breath. Pain from his wounds kept sawing at the bottom of his consciousness, nagging at him. He squeezed shut his eyes for a moment, pushed himself through the battlefield exercises that had been hypnoconditioned into him on the mountainsides of Bodt, smothered the pain with will.

That gave him a moment to think, and with the respite he brought his mind to bear on this task the way he would a battlefield, a fortification, an enemy’s swordwork. He thought about his own mission, about the reports he had heard from the Emperor’s own flagship before and after the disastrous visit to the planet’s surface, about the primarch’s own words. There had been a battle down there, they all knew that. Khârn felt a flicker of envy. The rebels now lying as corpses below had already had the glory of their primarch, their primarch, leading them in–

Understanding came in a flash, given a weird focus by the pain.

‘I envy them,’ he said quietly. ‘Those ones who fought with you. I wish I had known them. They followed you to battle. That is all any of my brothers and I ask of you, sire. The chance to fight with you as they did.’

Slowly the primarch’s hands lowered from his face. He was kneeling with his back to the nearest unbroken light, looming over Khârn in silhouette, but Khârn’s vision took in enough infrared to let him see the bitter little smile on the giant face.

‘You? No nails, no rope. Hope you’ve got a good head for mockery, Khârn of the so-called Legion. We’d have had sport with you in the camps. Jochura would have been merciless. Sharp-tongued, that boy was.’ The smile lost a trace of its bitterness. ‘I’d watch him bait the others. In the cells at first and then after, when we were roaming. He’d mock, they’d laugh, and he and the one he mocked would laugh harder than all the rest of them. It… was… good. Good to watch. Jochura always swore he would die laughing at his killer.’ The smile vanished and Angron’s mouth took a brutal downward twist. ‘I told him… told him… uuh,’ and Khârn felt the impact as the great fists smashed into the floor again. He made to speak but the words were cut off as Angron’s arm shot out, quicker than sight, and then his hand was locked around Khârn’s neck and jaw, dragging him in.

‘I don’t know how they died!’ Angron’s shout was so loud that the words seemed to fuzz into white noise in Khârn’s ears. The hand shook him like a sack. ‘We swore! Swore!’ Khârn was being yanked backwards and forwards, and Angron’s other hand beat the floor in time. Amidst all the clamour a sharp new scent imprinted itself on his senses, and Khârn realised it was the primarch’s blood, freshly shed. Angron had battered his hands bloody against the stone.

‘We swore an oath,’ Angron went on, his voice dropping to a groan like wrenching steel. ‘On the road to Desh’ea I had each of them cut a new scar for my rope, and I cut theirs. And we swore an oath that by the end of all of our lives, we’d cut the high-riders a scar that would bleed for a hundred years!’ Despite himself, Khârn’s hands came up as Angron’s grip tightened around his neck and he fought the urge to try and grapple free. ‘A wound their great-grandwhelps would still cry from! A wound to haunt any of them who dared look on the hot dust again!’ Angron’s grip shifted, and air flooded back into Khârn’s lungs. He hung half-kneeling with one of the primarch’s hands pressed into each side of his head. ‘All this,’ Angron said softly, ‘and even my sworn oath wasn’t enough.’ He parted his hands and let Khârn crumple to the floor. ‘Because I don’t even know how they died.’

When Khârn opened his eyes Angron was sitting cross-legged a little way from his feet, elbows on knees, head thrust out in front of his shoulders, watching him. He could no longer smell the primarch’s blood as fresh as he had – had he lost consciousness for a time? Or had he just lain disorientated in the gloom? Or did Angron’s blood clot and seal even faster than his own? He thought it probably did. He took a breath, torso flickering with pain, and pushed himself up on his elbows.

‘And so how do you meet death, paperskin?’ The coolness in Angron’s voice was startling after the raving beast that had battered and flung him like a puppet. ‘Do you make your salutes when you’re on the dust? Declaim your lineage like the high-riders? Declaim your kills like us? Tell me what you do while you’re waiting for the iron in your hand to warm up to blood-heat.’

‘We–’ Khârn began, but the unbecoming sprawl was cramping his chest. He pushed himself the rest of the way up and knelt, sitting back on his heels, keeping his breathing steady and composing himself through the pain. Even slumped over as he was, Angron was taller than Khârn by half a head.

‘The oath of moment,’ he said. ‘Our last act before we embark for combat. Each of us prepares our vow to our brothers in the Legion. What we will do for our… our Emperor,’ Angron snarled at the word, ‘our Legion and ourselves. We witness the oaths. Some Legions write them and then decorate themselves with the written oaths.’

‘Did you take one of these oaths before you came in to see me?’ Angron asked.

‘No, primarch,’ replied Khârn, slightly wrong-footed by the question. ‘I did not come in here to fight you. I say again, no one in the Legion will raise a hand to you. Oaths of moment are for battle.’

‘No challenge,’ rumbled the looming shape. ‘You do not ask their names when you walk the dust, and you don’t give yours. No salutes and no showing of ropes. This is how they fight who say they are my blood-cousins?’

‘This is how we fight, sire. We exist to make the Emperor’s enemies extinct. We’ve no need of anything that does not serve that end. And we rarely fight enemies who have names worth knowing, let alone saluting. What the rope is, forgive me, primarch, I do not know.’

‘How do you show your warriorship, then?’ The puzzlement in the primarch’s voice seemed genuine, but when Khârn hesitated over his answer, Angron lunged forwards and punched him over onto his back.

‘Answer me! You little grave-grubber, you sit there and smirk at me again like some high-rid… uhhh…’ The primarch had sprung to his feet and now he picked Khârn up by the throat, yanked him into the air and dropped him flat on his back again. By the time Khârn had shakily pushed himself back up, Angron had walked away to stand under one of the lights. He turned to make sure Khârn was watching, then turned and spread his arms.

The primarch’s torso was bare, packed with inhuman musculature on the Emperor’s design, broad, heavy and angular to accommodate the thickened bones and the strange organs and tissues that Astartes legend said the Emperor had grown from his own flesh and blood, modified twenty different ways for his children. Khârn found himself wondering for a moment if Angron had grown up with the slightest idea of what he truly was, before he realised what the primarch was showing him.

A ridge of scar tissue began at the base of Angron’s spine. It travelled up his backbone, then veered to the left and around his body, riding over his hip and curving around to his front. Angron began to turn in place underneath the light, and Khârn saw how the scar seemed to expand and thin again, ploughing and gouging the skin, in some places vanishing entirely where the primarch’s healing powers had overcome it. The scar looped around and around Angron’s body, spiralling up over his belly, around his ribs, towards his chest. A little past the right of his sternum, it abruptly stopped.

‘The triumph rope,’ Angron said. His hand moved to indicate the upper lengths of the scar, where it was smoother, more continuous, less ugly. There were no healed patches in its upper reaches. Khârn jumped as Angron thumped a fist against his chest with a report like a gun.

‘Red twists! Nothing but red on my rope, Khârn! Of all of us, I was the only one. No black twists.’ Angron was shaking with rage again, and Khârn bowed his head. His thoughts were bleak: I’ve started this now, and I wish to finish it, but primarch, I don’t know how many more of your rages I can withstand. Then Angron’s hands had gripped his shoulders, cruelly grating the bones in the broken one, and the muscles in Khârn’s neck and jaw locked rigid as he worked to stop himself crying out.

‘I can’t go back!’ came Angron’s voice through the pain, and the note in his voice was not fury now but an anguish far greater than the pain of Khârn’s injuries. ‘I can’t go back to Desh’ea. I can’t pick up the soil to make a black twist.’ Angron flung Khârn away and dropped to his knees. ‘I can’t… uhh… I need to wear my failure and I can’t. Your Emperor! Your Emperor! I couldn’t fight with them and now I can’t commemorate them!’

‘Sire, I, we…’ Khârn could feel little stings and blooms of heat inside his abdomen as his healing systems worked on wounds inside him. ‘Your Legion wants to learn your ways. You are our primarch. But we haven’t learned them yet. I don’t know…’

‘No. Grave-grub Khârn doesn’t know. No triumph rope on Khârn.’ Khârn kept his eyes on the floor but the sneer was all too audible in Angron’s voice. ‘For every battle you live through, a cut to lengthen the rope. For a triumph, let it scar clean. A red twist. For a defeat you survive, work some dust from where you fought into the cut to scar it dark. A black twist. Nothing but red on me, Khârn,’ said Angron, spreading his arms again, ‘but I don’t deserve it.’

‘I understand you, sire,’ Khârn answered, and he found that he did. ‘Your brothers, your brothers and sisters,’ he corrected himself, ‘they were defeated.’

‘They died, Khârn,’ said Angron. ‘They all died. We swore to each other that we’d stand together against the high-riders’ armies. The cliffs of Desh’ea would see the end of it. No more twists in the rope. For any of us.’ His voice had softened to a whisper, heavy with grief. ‘I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be drawing breath. But I am. And I can’t even pick up the dust from Desh’ea to make a black twist to remember them by. Why did your Emperor do this to me, Khârn?’

There was silence after the question. Angron, still standing, had let his head fall forwards and was digging his knuckles into his forehead and face. The lights made strange shadows across his skull, lumpy with metal and scars.

Khârn got to his feet. He swayed, but his balance held. ‘It isn’t my place to know, sire, what the Emperor said to you. But we–’

Angron wheeled, and Khârn flinched. The primarch’s eyes were alight, and his teeth were bare, but it wasn’t a snarl now – it was a broad, vicious grin.

‘Didn’t say much to me, no, he did not. Think I let him? Think I did?’ Angron was in motion again, prowling to and fro under the light, his head snaking from side to side. ‘I knew what was happening. I’d stood there and seen the high-riders’ killers coming up for my brothers and sisters at Desh’ea, I knew, I knew. Ahhh!’ His hands shot out and blurred as they clawed the air in front of him. ‘Had his own brothers, didn’t he, his kin-guard. All gold-plated, fancying themselves high-riders even though their feet were in the dirt like mine. Pointing their little blades at me!’ Angron spun, leapt, hurtled at Khârn and slammed him backwards with an open palm. ‘They drew weapons on me! Me! They… they…’

Angron threw his head back, palms pressed to the sides of his skull as though sheer physical pressure could keep his boiling thoughts on track. For a moment he was frozen like that, and then he wrenched his body forwards and drove his fist into the stone by Khârn’s head. Stinging grains of rock flew out from the impact.

‘Killed one, though,’ spat Angron, rearing up and starting to prowl again. ‘Couldn’t put my hands on that Emperor of yours. Ahh, his voice in my ears, worse than the Butcher’s Nails…’ Angron’s fingers swiped and rubbed across the metal in his skull. His gaze was transfixing Khârn again. ‘Took one apart though. One of those gold-wrapped bastards. No stomach for it, your Emperor, paper-skinned like you. Pushed me back, into that… place… the place he took me from Desh’ea…’ The shadows over Angron’s face seemed to deepen at the recollection and his body hunched and folded inwards.

‘Teleport,’ said Khârn, understanding. ‘He teleported you. First to his own ship, and then to here.’

‘Something you understand, maybe.’ Angron was still moving, further away now, harder for Khârn to pick out except as a smoke-warm shape in infrared. He had his head back and his arms out, as though he were addressing an audience in a high gallery. ‘My sisters and brothers and I, owned by the high-riders, floating over us with their crow-cloaks. Their maggot-eyes buzzing around us while we drew each other’s blood instead of theirs.’ He growled, punching and clawing the air above his head. ‘And you, Khârn, owned by the Emperor who draws your blood and puts his gold-shiny puppets into the fights he won’t…’

Khârn was shaking his head, and Angron had seen him.

‘Well now,’ his voice rumbled out of the shadow, and all the menace was back in it. The sound reminded Khârn how weak he was, how wounded, how unarmed. ‘Khârn calls me liar. Khârn thinks he will question his primarch for the sake of his Emperor.’ Once again Angron came out of the darkness in a leap, landing in front of Khârn with one hand cocked back for a pulverising punch.

‘Admit it, Khârn,’ he snarled. ‘Why won’t you say it?’ The cocked fist shook but did not swing. Angron pushed his face forwards as though he were about to bite Khârn’s flesh. ‘Say it! Say it!’

‘I saw him once,’ was what Khârn said instead. ‘I saw him on Nove Shendak. World Eighty-Two Seventeen. A world of worms. Giant creatures, intelligent. Hateful. Their weapons were filaments, metal feathers that they embedded in themselves to conduct energies out of their bodies. I remember we saw the surface roil with the filaments before the worms broke out of it almost at our feet. Thick as a man, and longer than you, sire, are tall. Three mouths in their faces, a dozen teeth in their mouths. They spoke through the mud in sonic screams and witch-whispers.

‘We had found three systems under their thrall, burned them out of their colony nests and chased them home. But on their cradle-world we found humans. Humans lost to humanity for who knows how long, crawling on the land while the worms slithered in the marsh seas. Hunting the humans, farming them. Killing them.’

Angron’s eyes were still narrowed and his fist still raised, but he no longer shook. Khârn’s eyes had half-closed. He remembered how the War Hounds’ blue-and-white armour glimmered in the worm-world’s twilight, remembered the endless, nerve-sapping sucking sounds as the lunar tides dragged the mud oceans to and fro across the jagged stone continents.

‘The Iron Warriors were with us too, and Perturabo landed with the assault pioneers after our lances scoured our drop zone bare and dry. He worked out how to dredge and shape the ground. The earth there, well, there barely was earth. Just muddy slops, full of trace toxins, the bedrock deep enough that a man’d drown if he planted his feet on it.’

‘How did you stop them?’ demanded Angron. ‘If you couldn’t stand on the ground?’

‘Sentries with high-powered lasguns, sire. Devices to read the movements of the mud to hear them moving through it towards us, explosives we seeded around the earthworks and allowed to sink to where the worms burrowed.

‘Perturabo’s earthworks were a miracle. He built trenches and dykes, penned in the mud seas and drained them, drove the worms back, reclaimed land these wretched humans could build on. And when the worms came out to fight us, they met the Emperor and his War Hounds.’

‘You’re speaking of yourself,’ said Angron. ‘Yourselves.’

Khârn nodded.

‘The War Hounds. Twelfth Legion Astartes. Made in your image, as your warriors, primarch. He saw us fight in the Cephic hive-sprawls and named us for the white hounds the Yeshk warriors in the north used. He did us an honour with the name, primarch. We are proud of it, and we hope you will be too.’

Angron gave a growl, but he did not speak. The hand that had been a fist had opened again.

‘The southern anchor of Perturabo’s earthworks was a rock, the closest thing that place had to a mountain, the only one the sludge tides hadn’t been able to wear down. When the worms saw the Mechanicum begin to change the world’s face, they mustered to break us under the peak.

‘They buried themselves in the sludge beyond our range and came forwards under it to meet us.’ Khârn’s voice was speeding up as his memory filled with the sharp reek of the poisoned ground and the warning cries from the Imperial Army artillerists as the mud ocean heaved. Angron had backed away, his head pushed forwards and his eyes full of concentration.

‘They first came in a wave,’ Khârn said. ‘They had skulked around the fringes of the earthworks, carried off some of the crews working the pumps and dredgers. We had not fought a decisive action against them for months. But now Gheer and Perturabo had read the patterns of their attacks and placed us for the counter-assault. We formed up among Perturabo’s aqueduct walls, only half-built they were and still blocked half the sky. We took our oaths of moment and primed our bolters.’

‘Bolters?’

‘A firearm. A powerful one. The weapon of the Astartes.’

‘Ehh. Get on with it. The worms came for the earthworks.’ Angron was staring over Khârn’s head, yanking his hands back and forth, shuffling his feet. It was a moment before Khârn realised the primarch was playing the defence out in his mind, ordering the lines, mapping out the ground. ‘So they came up like chaer-dogs at a spike-line? Stupid to rush a shield wall. Tell me what you did.’ Khârn closed his eyes, focusing past his injured body to run the conditioned routines that ordered his memories.

‘The first line of them broke the mud with their jaws and filaments,’ he said, ‘and they came at us behind a wall of their power-arcs. The mud steamed in front of them and where the arcs converged they shattered rock. They sent a rolling bombardment ahead of them. We worked to break it with thudd guns, dropping shells behind their blast-front, and we broke up the rock in front of them with grenades. We thought we had their measure when the counter-bombardment made their front lines shiver, but they were simply filling up our attention, measuring where our own line was wavering. When their blasts dropped away they came in force to the weak points. Drove wedges into our front. To flank and envelop we’d have had to go out onto the mud where we could barely walk, and where the mud was shallow enough for us to try it, they had second and third lines ready to drag the flankers under or cook them in their armour. To break the assaults we had to get them onto rock, where we could manoeuvre better than they. Perturabo had built traps into his earthworks. False outer walls, double emplacements, killing zones along the drainage canals.’

Angron nodded approvingly, looking up and down the dark chamber as though he could see the great rough walls, lit by orange bolter flare and the blue-white power-arcs of the worms.

‘But still we had to bring them inside our lines to break them. Hold them back and then fall to second positions, one formation at a time, through the Army lines to where we were waiting to drop the axe. There were a lot of worms, primarch.’ Khârn grinned. His wounds throbbed as the vividness of the memory prompted his metabolism to begin glanding combat stimms. ‘Our axes weren’t dry for a month.’

In answer Angron growled again, making a quick double motion of his arm as though swinging a blade forwards and backwards at something below his own height. Barely thinking about it, Khârn’s warrior brain filed away the primarch’s footing and balance, his arm and shoulder motions, noted where a riposte might land home. Then, still in his combat stance, Angron pinned Khârn with his gaze again.

‘The Emperor. You talk about fighting down there in the mud but you don’t talk about the Emperor. High-rode, did he? Hung above you, did he?’ Angron’s voice was rising, turning ugly and ragged. ‘Laughed at you, did he? Called your blood-spills, did he? Admit it, Khârn!’ In a blur he crossed the distance and knocked Khârn to one knee with a looping, glancing arm-sweep.

‘The Emperor,’ Khârn said, and couldn’t stop himself from smiling at the memory. ‘The Emperor was a golden storm descending onto Nove Shendak’s filth. When the worms were in amongst us he came down from the peak and it was as if he had brought a fragment of a star down for us in amends for the sun we couldn’t see through those filthy fogs. He shone out over the battle lines like a beacon. His Custodians were like living banners, the troopers rallied to them, but he…’ Khârn closed his eyes, looking for the words.

‘Imagine, sire, did they fight in your home with grenades? Explosive weapons, small enough to hold in the hand and throw?’

‘High-rider weapons,’ snarled Angron. ‘Not fit for a warrior on the hot dust.’

‘But imagine, primarch, some’ – he searched for the word Angron had used – ‘some paperskin who takes a grenade and simply grips it in his fist until it explodes. Imagine how it would destroy the hand, shatter the arm, ruin the body! Wherever the Emperor met one of their columns head-on, it shattered like that. He didn’t repel them, sire. Didn’t defeat them. He ruined them. Assault after assault, not even Perturabo when he came down to the lines for the final–’

‘You’ve said that name already,’ boomed Angron from behind him. ‘Who is he?’

‘Forgive me, sire. Another primarch. One of the first I ever saw. I was new to the War Hounds when the message went through the fleets, and I almost didn’t understand what it meant. Not until I saw the Iron Warriors and how they reacted. The very air seemed to change around them. They and we and the Ultramarines, we were travelling together. We envied them both. They had found their blood-sires and their generals. Now we have found ours.’

‘Another. Another one.’ Khârn risked a look around and up. Angron was standing still, hands pressed to his face again, teeth grinding as he concentrated. ‘Another one of me?’

‘Not like you, primarch. A brother to you. Made for conquest and kingship as you are. The Iron Warriors, they’re his Legion now.’

‘Brave fighters?’

‘Brave enough,’ Khârn answered, ‘with a wall to sit on or a trench to stand in.’

‘Walls.’ Angron growled the word. ‘Walls can be broken.’

‘So we tell them, sire. Perhaps you can–’

‘Walls,’ Angron cut him off. ‘When we first broke out of the caves and walked on stone, not dust, we were nearly trapped within walls. We had the weapons we’d drawn one another’s blood with and they were ready for a change of flavour. The high-riders laughed, the way they always laughed as they looked down on us on the dust, and they called out taunts the way they goaded us when we fought.’ Angron whipped his fists through the air as though he were batting at insects. ‘Sent their voices through the maggot-eyes they watched us with. Voices, voices. “Oh, do oblige, wonderful Angron!”’ Angron’s voice was suddenly, eerily imitating a higher, softly accented, sing-song voice. ‘“We wagered you’d take a wound from a dozen enemies, surely a single wound, won’t you oblige and bleed for us?”’ His tone shifted and he imitated another. ‘“My son is watching with me, Angron, what’s wrong with you? Fight harder, give him something to cheer!” The eyes, the voices. The Butcher’s Nails in my head… hot… smoke… in my thoughts…’ A wolfish look stole over Angron’s face. ‘It was good to fight without the eyes and the voices. They tried to trap us but we wouldn’t stop for them. Every line they formed we rushed before they were in formation. They were everywhere, but we were fast.’

Angron was suiting actions to words, loping back and forth, smashing and lunging and ripping at imaginary enemies.

‘Jochura with his laugh and his chains. Cromach, he fought with a brazier-glaive. Hah! I gave him the first black twist in his rope, and he and I burned the watchtowers at Hozzean together. Klester riding her shriekspear through the air, you should have seen her, Khârn, so fast, and, ohh…’ Angron was clutching at the metal tracery jutting from his scalp. ‘Fast we moved – fast, not hanging between walls, entrapment is death, fast, trust and discipline… Never rest, always forwards, hunger for the enemy, that’s what they taught us… Uhh, my brothers and sisters, oh, if we had known how it would end, we didn’t know!’ Angron fell to his knees and howled. ‘All that valour! The eaters of cities, they called us! All the mountain fastnesses, burning like beacons! All the Great Coast painted in blood! We devoured Hozzean with flames! Meahor! Ull-Chaim!’ Weeping and roaring, he leapt to his feet, oblivious to Khârn looking on. ‘We broke them at the river before Ull-Chaim! Hung half a thousand high-riders and kin-guard from the vine bridges! The princelings’ heads floating on the river, down to the lowlands as our heralds! The silver lace from their skulls, ahh, ripped from their skulls, wrapped on my fists!’

The furnace rage was back. Khârn thought to shuffle away, and dismissed the idea. He would not hide from Angron any more than he would fight him. And Angron would find him anywhere in this room anyway. And no sooner had he finished that thought than he had been wrenched from the ground by each arm and swung over the primarch’s head to be slammed into the floor. Stone cracked under him.

‘They paid! They paid! We made them pay!’ Angron kicked Khârn across the floor, bellowing. ‘Paid for my brothers and sisters! Who will pay?’

Dizzy, fainting, Khârn felt himself picked up and slammed down again, kicked again, grabbed by the neck.

‘Pay, War Hound! Pay! Fight me!’ Something – fist? Foot? – crashed into his chest and Khârn sprawled on the floor, choking. ‘Get up and fight!’

The end of it, then, Khârn thought. Well, I carried my embassy as well as a War Hound could. He tried to rise and couldn’t, so he lay full-length on his back and spoke weakly into the air.

‘You are my primarch and my general, Lord Angron. I swore that I would seek you out and follow you, and I will not fight you. And if I must die, then yours is the hand I will die by. I am Khârn and I am loyal to your will.’

While he waited, he faded from consciousness then jerked back as his system shifted itself to rouse him and the pain of his injuries sharpened. He could not see or hear Angron, but he could feel the stone floor underneath him and the cool air in his lungs. When it came, Angron’s voice was frighteningly close, almost by his ear.

‘You are warriors, Khârn,’ the primarch said. ‘I know warriors when I see them.’ Khârn tried to answer but pain rippled through his neck and chest with the effort.

‘This… Emperor,’ Angron said, palpably struggling to keep his voice level. ‘He is the one you swore to?’

‘We swore to each other,’ Khârn managed to get out, ‘in his name and on his banner.’ His breath took a long time to come. ‘That we would not… raise a hand against you.’

Angron said nothing for a time. Khârn’s consciousness had begun to flicker again by the time he spoke.

‘Such devotion… from such warriors…’ His voice tailed off, faded and returned. His hands were pressed to his head again. ‘A man who can… a man… to whom… your oaths… for him you would…’

Minutes passed. Angron’s voice came again.

‘This room. I can leave it?’ It took Khârn a moment to work out how to answer.

‘This is the flagship of the War Hounds. Our greatest vessel. It is the instrument of your will and yours to command, primarch, as are we.’

For a long time there was no answer, just quiet and dark, and just as Khârn was starting to feel his consciousness go again he felt himself lifted, slowly and gently now, and carried through the dark.

They had looked at one another when the booming knock came on the doors, unsure of what to do, but only for a moment. Then Dreagher worked the openers, and when the locks clanked and the portals groaned open he was there. The War Hounds gasped and moved back as the giant shadow on the steps grew, advanced, came into the light. With his right hand the primarch supported Khârn, battered and hanging barely conscious.

Angron stood, wary, wound tight as a bowstring, his free hand opening and closing. His breath rumbled in his throat. For long minutes each War Hound in turn blanched under the primarch’s gaze, until Khârn managed to lift his head and speak.

‘Salute your primarch, War Hounds. Salute he who shed blood on the hot dust and made the high-riders pay for their arrogance. Salute your blood-sire and the general of the Twelfth Legion. Salute the one whose soldiers were named the Eaters of Cities. Salute him, Astartes!’

And the War Hounds answered him. Hands and voices lifted in salute and axe-heads were crashed against the floor. Gathering around the warrior towering silently at their centre, they shouted and saluted again, and again, and Khârn found the strength and voice to stagger to join the circle and add his shouts to theirs.

‘Primarch,’ said Angron. His voice was a murmur, but it cut the War Hounds’ voices straight to silence. ‘I am a general again.’

‘Primarch!’ shouted Dreagher in response, ‘General! Your warriors were the eaters of cities, lord, but with you to command us the War Hounds will be the eaters of worlds!’

For a moment Angron swayed, his eyes and fists closed. But then he looked at Dreagher, from there to Khârn. And he smiled.

‘World Eaters,’ he said slowly, tasting the sounds. ‘World Eaters. So you shall be, then, little brothers. You’ll learn to cut the rope. We shall bleed, and be brothers.’ This time they all met his eyes. Slowly, one of Angron’s great fists came up to return their salutes.

‘Come with me, then, World Eaters. Come down with me and we will speak.’ Angron turned on his heel and walked back into his chamber.

Silently, supporting Khârn in their midst, the World Eaters followed their primarch down into that darkness that stank of blood.

GALAXY IN FLAMES

Having recovered from his grievous injuries, Warmaster Horus leads the triumphant Imperial forces against the rebel world of Isstvan III, where Horus’s treachery is finally revealed...

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BETRAYER

As Calth burns, the Word Bearers and World Eaters begin a bloody crusade across Ultramar. Worlds will burn, Legions will clash... and a primarch will fall.

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SLAVES TO DARKNESS

As the traitor fleet closes on Terra, turmoil grips its heart. Horus lies wounded, and as the greatest battle of all time looms, it falls to Maloghurst the Twisted to hold the force together and save the Warmaster

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ULTRAMARINES

XIII LEGION

THE LAUREL OF DEFIANCE

Guy Haley

They called him the killer of Titans.

Lucretius Corvo did not care for the title. He was captain of the 90th Company of the XIII Legion. That was honour enough for him.

In Martial Square, Corvo stood with the veterans of the Shadow Crusade and the atrocity at Calth. Ten files of thirteen: officers, battle-brothers and neophytes ordered without deference to rank. They were joined by brotherhood of a kind that transcended the boundaries of Chapter, station and company.

Inhumanly large and resplendent in their battleplate, they scintillated in the bright sun of Macragge, their badges of service and recognition crisp with fresh paint. Many times Corvo had stood in noble assemblage with his brothers, but never in one quite like this.

A Legion once uniform in everything, the hammers of war had wrought the Ultramarines variously, beating out a different tune on each of them. Armour of differing marks mixed in their ranks and within individual sets. Battle salvage and worn elements had been lovingly restored by the Legion artisans rather than replaced. Commendation studs, non-regulation weaponry and unique war plate revealed the identity of their bearers for all to see. Personal foibles sanctioned and let speak of victory, victory, victory!

They bore the marks of their actions proudly. They had prevailed against all odds, and they were to be honoured for it.

Amongst this august company, Corvo nevertheless stood out. He was taller than many of his gene-kin – that was a factor, yes, as was the massive suit of Mark III armour that singled him out as a void-war specialist. But it was the unique nature of his colours that set him truly apart. The cobalt-blue of his plate was quartered with bone-white. His personal banner, hanging from a pole mounted on his power plant, was likewise divided. It bore the emblems of the Ninth Chapter and the 90th Company. In the top left field was a spiked, hollow circle: a dark blue starburst.

This was not of Legion origin.

Serried ranks filled the rest of the square, representatives of every military force currently on Macragge – three Legions, the Imperial Army, and others. At the north and south, a pair of Warlord Titans stood sentinel. The eyes of millions of citizens watched the ceremony, hundreds of thousands in the vast crowds beyond the square alone. They were quiet. All of Macragge listened respectfully.

Three primarchs occupied a grand dais beneath the massive Propylae Titanicum.

Sanguinius stood forward and centre as befitted his status as Imperial Regent. He shone with his customary radiance, but appeared troubled even so. He said little, and the enigmatic Lion El’Jonson even less. Today belonged to their brother Roboute Guilliman – the master of Ultramar and the XIII Legion. Today the sacrifices of his realm, his people, were to be remembered. His words boomed out across the square – dozens of names, dozens of victories, dozens of heroes born from the horrors of defeat.

Guilliman honoured the unenhanced first, scores of mortal men and women who had defied the traitors, whether by lasgun and blade, or through acts of less obvious heroism: a scholam mistress who had led three hundred children to safety, a fabricatory adept who had worked for ten days without rest when his fellows had fled, and the sole survivor of a hundred port workers who had marched their industrial loaders into the enemy.

The legionaries waited motionless in the sun. Hours passed. The bulk of the southern Titan draped Corvo in welcome shadow for a while, but soon enough he was in the sun’s full glare again. Half the standard humans had yet to be feted.

The sun was westering when the last bowed before the giant lords of men and walked away. A scroll was unfurled by Guilliman’s equerry. Now it was time for the Ultramarines to pay respect to their brothers.

These were the champions of Ultramar.

The first name was read out. Honours were stated and bestowed. Short words from the primarch. The receiver renewed his oaths of loyalty. He was only the first to do so.

Corvo’s hands twitched.

The night before. With Guilliman there was always a night before, or a night after. Feasts and parties went with his honour-giving like bolts went with boltguns. He held it important for his sons to mingle with the citizens, another chore in preparing themselves for peaceful duties once war was done.

It was clear now that those days would never come. Corvo expected ambivalence at the thought – he was made for war, after all – but found melancholy instead. Guilliman’s dream was fading.

The whole of the Regia Civitata had been given over to the function. Inside its baroque halls, the one hundred and thirty mingled with the common mortals of Ultramar. The Space Marines stood like adults in a room of children, but the two strands of humanity were, for the most part, at ease with one another. The primarchs were absent from the pre-feast socialising, a calculated decision on Guilliman’s part.

Corvo wore a simple, formal uniform, like all those who were to be honoured. Even so, he carried his gladius and bolt pistol on a broad belt. Events of the last few months had taught the XIII to be cautious. Members of the Invictus Guard stood garbed for battle at the main entrance. Around the perimeter and on the roof, the Praecental Guard and legionary brothers of the First Chapter patrolled. This heightened security saddened Corvo further. As much as the captain disliked company, Guilliman did not. It was important for his lord to be comfortable among his people. Distance was growing between the shepherd and his flock.

A woman was talking to Corvo. He reminded himself to pay attention to her.

‘So much heroism,’ the woman was saying.

‘War breeds heroes,’ said Corvo, and immediately felt foolish. ‘The larger proportion of them perish uncelebrated.’

The woman was not fazed by his bluntness. She’s used to this, he thought. Some women enjoyed flirting with legionaries, though he could not fathom for what reason. Women had been a mystery to him before his ascension to the XIII, and they only seemed more obtuse afterwards. She was very beautiful, and finely dressed. It did not matter to him.

Theoretical, he told himself, you’re behaving like an oaf.

Practical, he added, you are an oaf.

‘Something amuses you?’ she said. An ironic smile played on her lips, a smile that seemed to say: Where is the power if there is no potency?

‘No, no. A memory, that is all.’

She looked at him expectantly.

‘It would not translate well,’ he said awkwardly. By the old gods, he wanted to get away.

Corvo held out his glass, an oversized thing made for his oversized hands. A server stopped – his ewer was fit for men, but Corvo’s glass was fit for the sons of demigods, and the server used his full measure in charging it. The liquid ran up the side as it flowed into the bulb, the thick swell of it trailing a lesser curve of clear alcohol as it found its equilibrium.

Not at all like the wall of blood that burst from the coffin ship. Not like that in the least.

‘That is some drink,’ said the woman. ‘If I were to drink it, I would not wake for a week.’ She was trying for levity, Corvo supposed. She was not intimidated by him.

‘Our lord is still at pains to make us feel part of humanity,’ he said. ‘A lesser amount would have no effect upon me whatsoever. We are supposed to be enjoying ourselves.’ He tried to hide his irritation, unsuccessfully.

He sipped the drink. There was a hard burn to it. A good, strong Macragge pine brandy. Very fine vintage.

‘Will that help you to enjoy yourself, good sir?’

‘Only if I drink a lot, and quickly,’ he replied.

The woman cradled her own glass in both hands, the drink untouched. ‘Does it work then? All this, talking to the little people. Does it make you feel like one of us?’

Corvo looked over the gathering of humans and transhumans. They ignored the monster outside as they conversed and pretended that the sky was not red. They acted as if the galaxy had not been ripped asunder by fratricide, as if the order of all right things was not upset. If they could just pretend all was well, then all would be well. It was as much a pantomime as serving humans and giants from the same jug, or of pretending that their chairs were of equal size because they were made in the same style. He looked down upon the woman. She was so tiny, so frail. Of course it didn’t work.

‘I am one of you,’ said Corvo, and tried his hardest to believe it. ‘It is better not to forget our humanity in the first place, rather than seek to remind ourselves. That is my opinion.’

‘We have all heard what you did at Astagar. I doubt any human soldier could have done as you did.’

Corvo’s smile became fixed. She sensed his irritation, and formed an expression of concern. ‘Oh no, no! Not just the Titan, sir. I do not talk of that – no doubt you are sick of it.’

She was right.

‘I talk of your efforts in the rebuilding. I have family there,’ she explained.

Corvo dipped his head in gratitude. ‘If only I could have seen it to the end. I was recalled for this ceremony. One week to destroy Eurythmia Civitas, and two years later it is still not set right. And I fear it never shall be.’

‘He is right, our Lord Guilliman.’ She cocked her head, appraising him. ‘You are as much an asset in peace as in war.’

‘We strive to be so,’ he said. ‘Now, if you will excuse me, mamzel?’

‘I am Medullina,’ she said with a slight curtsey.

‘Well then, Mamzel Medullina, I bid you enjoy the rest of the evening.’

Corvo dipped his head to her and made his way through the crowd of worthies. He was courteous enough to move with purpose, as if he had somewhere else to be, though he did not. He headed for solitude, offered by the tall doors leading out onto the balcony. It was hard to navigate such fragile beings without damaging them – not a consideration he’d had in some while.

The greatest luxury in Corvo’s recent life had been preparedness. He only heard the true, appalling scale of what had happened at Calth later, but by the time the enemy approached Astagar he was at least aware of the treachery. Corvo set the operational mark running as soon as the Word Bearers and World Eaters translated in-system, and his erstwhile cousins were met with a wall of fire.

Why they even attacked Astagar was beyond Corvo, his incredulity at the waste of resources vying with the outrage of betrayal. It made no sense. Astagar had little strategic or symbolic value. He had not known then that wanton destruction was the traitors’ main intent.

The force that attacked was commensurately small: five battle cruisers and attendant support – enough to ravage a lightly defended world, no more, no less. Good theoretical, perhaps, but the enemy’s intelligence was lacking. They reckoned without him.

Corvo was not supposed to be there. He was en route to the muster at Calth but had been diverted by a malfunctioning warp engine on his command ship. Call it fate. Call it luck. Corvo believed in neither. He was there, and that was all that mattered.

The manner of the enemy’s approach told him they were intent on a ground battle. So be it. He landed his own men and ordered his fleet to run out ahead of the enemy. A raid cost the foe five Army transports at minimal damage to Corvo’s ships. Satisfied that the enemy would thereafter have one eye over his shoulder, Corvo had his fleet withdraw. He would save the ships, if nothing else.

Astagar’s modest orbital defences accounted for a portion more of the enemy’s strength before being overrun. Light bombardment of the principal habitation zones opened hostilities on the ground. Corvo was appalled at this prioritisation of civilian targets, but had had the presence of mind to send the population to the shelters away from the city. When the enemy commenced orbital insertion over Eurythmia Civitas it was empty but for six hundred Ultramarines and the seventy thousand men of the Astagarian Light Rangers.

All this was in his report. Corvo was diligent. He put everything into the report, even the parts that he didn’t believe.

Corvo was granted a brief respite. The balcony was typically grand in the Ultramarian style, running all the way around the top of the Regia Civitata’s extensive arcade. Intimate groupings of couches were dotted about, coloured lanterns and braziers of cheerful coals at their centres to blunt the bite of Macragge’s night. There were few people seated near them. Guilliman’s attention to detail in all things extended as far as ensuring that light pollution from the city did not drown out the stars, and the sky should have been ablaze with distant suns.

It was not. It glowered a dull red. Only a single star burned beyond the lights of the orbitals and ships at anchor, and that was false – the Pharos, xenos technology illuminating Macragge from afar.

Corvo walked to the balustrade and looked out. There were only a handful of cities so perfect. There were prettier, certainly, and definitely livelier ones. None, however, could match Magna Macragge Civitas’ perfect marriage of form and function.

He breathed deeply. The sight of such order gave him pleasure.

‘The entire galaxy should have been like this.’

Titus Prayto of the Librarius joined him at the rail. He wore his full plate, his head shadowed by an ornate technological cowl.

‘Librarian,’ said Corvo.

‘Captain.’

‘And what is your role in this charade, Prayto? Do you not undo our lord’s intentions, alienating the people as you stride about with witchfire in your eyes and your body cased in ceramite?’

‘An assassination attempt by the Alpha Legion. Konrad Curze so recently at large, here in the city. The creatures from beyond the veil embraced and welcomed by our kinsmen? Alienation is the least of concerns.’

‘You are another watchdog then.’ Corvo offered his drink. Prayto took it carefully in his gauntleted hand. His armour whined softly as he lifted it to his lips and drank half of it down. He handed it back.

‘Call me that, for that is what I am. My talents and those of the rest of the Librarius help to safeguard our lord and his brothers. There are three of the Emperor’s loyal sons here, together. Such a target. The Pharos lights the way for our enemies just as it does for our allies.’ They looked up at the Pharos shining in the red sky. ‘And what horrors I look for…’

‘You will find none in me.’

‘I will not?’ asked Prayto.

‘Surely, you have looked.’

Prayto gave a little laugh. He did not take his eye from the Pharos. ‘I have. You are what you say you are, a loyal son of Ultramar. You do not say much, though, and you are hard to read. You are a closed man, Captain Corvo.’

‘I find chatter tiresome,’ he said. ‘I prefer to leave talk to those who enjoy it.’

‘You put me in mind of the Lion.’

Corvo shook his head. ‘The Lion is a master of secrets. It is in the nature of the secretive to hold their own thoughts mysterious, yet to demand the revelation of the thoughts of others. I care as much for secrets and revelation as I do for conversation.’

‘This gathering is a chore for you, then.’

‘It is.’

‘Each to his own. Be careful you do not appear too aloof or ungrateful.’

‘Thank you, centurion,’ said Corvo. ‘I am always mindful of that. It is the burden of those who share my mindset. Talkers talk, and they do not understand those who do not feel the need to speak. To sidestep their concern, we are forced to perform against our inclination, engaging in pointless discourse, while they prattle on and do not listen to what we have to say anyway.’

The Librarian laughed again, louder this time. ‘A joke from you, Corvo?’

‘I am not without humour.’

‘No, no.’ Prayto was silent a space. He pressed his hands onto the balustrade twice. The metal clicked on the stone. ‘I will not detain you.’

‘Speak what is on your mind. I do not have your gift, but I know you did not follow me out here to talk of man’s temperament.’

‘I did not,’ he agreed. ‘I came out because I have a sense of what you intend to do tomorrow. I would give you some advice, if you’d take it.’

Corvo looked out over the city. Warning lights winked on cranes over the Via Decmanus Maximus. There, a new proscenium was being raised. He wondered what kind of victory it was for Ultramar, when more than a hundred worlds had died.

‘I am not surprised you sense my intention,’ he muttered. ‘It is at the forefront of my thoughts. What is this advice you have?’

‘I urge you to reconsider.’

‘I will not reconsider,’ said Corvo. ‘Our lord will understand.’

‘Of course he will!’ Prayto exclaimed. ‘But your peers will likely not.’

‘My deeds speak for themselves.’

‘Our deeds do not always speak the truth for us,’ Prayto countered.

Corvo downed his drink and left his glass on the stone rail.

‘That is not my concern. Only the truth is true, whether people believe it to be so or not. That is all I care for. Good evening, brother.’

He went back inside.

The coffin ship was hit several times and came down trailing fire, damaged braking thrusters on its port underside guttering. A lance beam slashed down from orbit, missing the craft by a hundred metres and demolishing a tower block. The shockwave staggered the lander, huge though it was, and it yawed dangerously, functioning jets shooting intense bursts of flame. It struggled upright, drifting out over the Via Longia towards the city centre, where the buildings were densely packed.

It was coming down too fast. Corvo didn’t think that it would manage to land intact. True enough, when it hit, it levelled entire civic blocks and sent out a wash of gritty dust that billowed through the dying city’s streets.

‘Report hard landing of enemy war engine transport.’

‘Acknowledged, Sergeant Phillipus,’ said Corvo. ‘I’m looking right at it.’

The coffin ship’s scorched-umber bulk reared up over the buildings of Eurythmia, battered but still whole. Lighter enemy landers were following. Streaks of fire criss-crossed the smoking sky, more coming down now than going up. Corvo’s interdiction emplacements were being picked off. He tracked the assault crafts’ vectors, calculating where they would land.

‘Tertiary group, divert to Mnemsyne district, south side. Looks like a major landing. If engaged, hold and await further orders. Do not advance, or they will be coming down on top of you.’

Acknowledgements snapped back at him. The vox was still crisp, but that wouldn’t last.

‘Squads four, seven and nine with me. Crassus, bring up the Shadowswords. Let’s see what we’ve got here. If there’s anything in that coffin ship still alive, let us ensure it does not remain so.’

‘Theoretical, captain,’ Lieutenant Apelles voxed to him from inside the command tank. ‘You are in overall command, you should remain here, with me.’

‘Practical,’ Corvo responded. ‘I want to kill some of these bastards myself.’

No one argued with that.

‘Redeploy, Apelles, take the remainder of the men with you. Await my order.’

‘Yes, sir.’

There was movement in the rubble and shattered buildings. Half of Corvo’s total company strength was there. The thumping growl of multi-fuel engines roared up behind. Corvo’s Land Raider pulled back, turned and headed away. Several squads of Space Marines followed it. Three super-heavy tanks in cobalt-blue moved forward when it was clear, their tracks grinding rubble to dust and tearing up the road surface.

Corvo’s group set out.

The Space Marines scouted ahead, moving fast. Quiet fell for a few minutes, the space between the last weapon-strike and the first real ground assault. It didn’t last. More and more craft streaked through the air. Plumes of dust rose where they landed.

‘I don’t understand this,’ said Sergeant Crassus from atop the lead Shadowsword. ‘They are not establishing proper beachheads. They’re coming down all over the place. Where is their discipline?’

‘Same place as their honour,’ cracked Brother Ligustinus, squad nine’s resident wit.

Corvo was also astounded at the sloppiness of the assault. He followed pict-feeds from the first drop zones – World Eaters rushed from drop pods as soon as they touched down, not waiting for their fellows, while the ragged Army units supporting the traitor legionaries seemed little better than a mob, pouring out of their transports right into loyalist gunfire. For now, this worked to Corvo’s advantage. His lieutenants directed XIII Legion response teams and local Army to where the enemy was most numerous.

He had to leave them to it. He had the situation on the ground and in orbit to monitor. And now this possibility of war engines…

Vox traffic increased exponentially, until it chattered incessantly at him: casualty reports, the constant repositioning of his mobile command centres, the status of refugees in their shelters. He dearly wished to mute most of it, sticking to the close-range squad bands, but he had to see it all. His visor was so crowded with tactical information that he was left with only a small, clear space to look ahead. His bodyguards, Glabrio and Aratus, recognised his distraction, and walked close by him in support as his eyes and ears.

A tangle of wrecked vehicles, burning trees and collapsed city blocks forced Crassus to take the Shadowswords a longer route. After a moment’s consideration, Corvo had his men clamber through the ruins, heading right for the Titan lander.

‘Sergeant Crassus, find a good firing solution for the Shadowswords. Squad nine, stick with them.’

Voxed assent. Fifteen of his men peeled away, falling back to join the tanks. The Titan-killers rumbled around on the spot and lurched off down a clearer street.

Corvo came onto the Via Longia, Astragar City’s main avenue. The Mechanicum ship had landed perpendicular to the line of the city grid, its kilometre-long bulk scoring a fresh street through at least five blocks. The prow sat on the pavement of the Longia, atop a fan of shattered stone. Its high, humped back was crooked. Landing on such a surface without control had broken its spine.

The battle was becoming more fierce. A number of feeds went dead.

A moment later, Lieutenant Apelles’ voice crackled on the vox. ‘I’ve lost contact with Verulus. Fighting’s fierce in the northern deme. He’s probably dead.’

‘Acknowledged,’ said Corvo. ‘Assess situation there. Take command of his forces.’

Two command tanks left. Was it good theoretical to abandon the command bunker in favour of mobile targets? he wondered. This tactical situation was unexpected. No pre-existing theoretical told of how to slay one’s own legionary kin. He was forced to innovate.

They moved up to the coffin ship cautiously. ‘Be advised, Crassus, Apelles, approaching Mechanicum lander. No sign of enemy activity.’

They crept down the Via Longia, right up to the steaming flank of the vessel. After a moment’s consideration, Corvo chanced crossing the front with a squad of his men.

The ship leaned ten degrees out of true, its hull battered by atmospheric re-entry and weapons fire. Flames flickered in the buildings and rubble around it. It was quiet there, the crump of explosions and howl of landing jets muted by the high buildings around them.

‘Perhaps the war engines are destroyed,’ said Glabrio.

‘I doubt it. I saw the same thing happen in the Coralan compliance,’ said Aratus to the younger warrior. Glabrio had not been with the Legion as long as he had. ‘Ships all smashed to wreckage, and the Titans came out anyway.’

‘I don’t see any sign that the doors are–’

Corvo held his hand up. His men froze, dropping into cover. ‘Hear that?’ he said.

A banging sounded from inside.

‘Theoretical – the doors are jammed,’ said Aratus. ‘No Mechanicum support. The only practical for the engines is to batter their way out.’

‘Crassus, get ready,’ voxed Corvo. ‘Are you in position?’

‘Via Macraggia is blocked, sir. We’re having to push directly through the buildings fronting Platea Lata.’

‘You are heading for the Agora?’

‘Yes, sir. Should get a good line right down the Longia once there.’

‘Be quick,’ said Corvo. ‘Do not leave yourself exposed. There is not much cover there.’

‘Sir…’ said Aratus.

The coffin ship’s doors vibrated as something pounded at them from within.

‘Fall back,’ the captain ordered.

They dropped back squad by squad, retreating down the Via Longia. Away from the crash site the city was dusty, the glass from broken casements slippery underfoot but otherwise oddly untouched. A roar, like that of a trapped animal, rumbled in the guts of the downed transport.

‘That’s not normal, is it?’ asked Glabrio.

‘Tricks. Psychological warfare,’ said Aratus. ‘Some of the Titan Legios do it on compliance actions. Growls rather than war-horns. Scares the hell out of the natives.’

‘Get back,’ said Corvo. ‘Crassus, are you getting a good line here? Can you hear it? Something about this is not right.’

The clanging from within grew to manic levels. With a grinding of torn metal, a giant chainfist emerged from the doors. A spray of sparks and red liquid came with it.

Glabrio gasped. ‘Is that…?’

The doors were wrenched apart. A torrent of blood poured from the interior of the ship, slopping up the buildings on the opposite side of the street. A wall of red seven metres high bore down the Via Longia in both directions, staining the walls almost to the second storey. Fierce, animalistic howling rent the air.

The Ultramarines ran. Corvo was bowled over by the sheer weight of the flood, his men scattered.

The red wave subsided as quickly as it had come. Space Marines were sprawled across the road, all of them coated from head to foot in slippery blood. Corvo wiped at his helmet lenses, his armoured fingers clattering off the conductive crystal. Red smeared his vision.

‘Squads! Report!’

‘By the Throne!’ said Glabrio.

The shattered frame of a Reaver engine tumbled out of the door, its cockpit smashed, limbs lifeless.

And then its killer came.

Whatever the monster was, it was no longer a Titan. Terrible modifications had been inflicted upon it. The cockpit had become a brazen skull. Long horns swept back from its brows over the lower edge of the carapace. It moved with a sinuous grace alien to its machine body. A long, articulated tongue of metal probed the air between sword-long teeth, a tail of similar material curling around its legs. The Warlord, if that was what it still was, crushed its mangled sibling beneath heavy feet as it struggled out onto the street. It wrenched itself free of the broken doors and staggered into the buildings opposite, bringing them down in a cascade of rubble and dust.

‘Crassus!’ cried Corvo.

‘I’m still not in position, sir!’

The Titan’s head moved back and forth, for all the world like it was scenting the air. It hit upon something, let out an unearthly, blaring howl from its war-horns, and smashed its way through the ruins, heading west and away from the downed ship.

Corvo, sprawled in the gritty gore of the Titan’s afterbirth, watched it go.

‘What have those fanatics done?’ asked Aratus in disbelief. ‘What are we fighting?’

Corvo moved around the function – room to room, hall to hall – as if he were clearing a building in a firefight. Dancing was underway in the ballroom. In others, large tables were piled with food. More Ultramarines were to be found there than in the dance hall, as was to be expected. His brothers knew him by reputation if not in person, and greeted him briefly and respectfully. It was some time yet to the feast and the arrival of the primarchs. He engaged in polite conversation with the unaltered where it was unavoidable.

‘They say you killed a Titan,’ they would declare.

‘Not I. My men. It was my men. And it was no Titan.’

Many of his interlocutors left disappointed. He would not be drawn further on the event. Let others tell their stories. He had no stomach for boasting.

He caught sight of Captain Ventanus – the Saviour of Calth and Guilliman’s new favourite – attentively conversing with some functionary or other, a broad sash across the Space Marine’s chest thick with fresh honours. His adjutant, a sergeant by the look of him, was engaged with another group of humans close by. Adoration and laughter rose around him. Corvo wished that he shared their facility for small talk.

He found a server and took both of the jugs of brandy that he was carrying. He consumed them as quickly as decorum allowed, enjoying the faint buzz of mild intoxication for the few minutes before his transhuman metabolism purged it from his body.

‘Brother-captain,’ said a Space Marine he did not know. The rank marks on his collar marked him out as a sergeant.

‘Brother,’ said Corvo.

The other legionary held out his hand. ‘I am Sergeant Tullian Aquila, 168th Company.’

‘Lucretius Corvo, 90th Company.’ He grasped Aquila’s forearm in a warrior’s handshake.

‘I know who you are, sir. I just wanted to come and greet you. I was caught in an engine battle at Ithraca on Calth. What you did greatly impressed me. Your action on Astagar is the talk of my company, or what’s left of it. It would have been good to have you with us. If there were only more of you and Captain Ventanus’ kind…’

Corvo held up his hand. ‘Please, you embarrass me. We all march for Macragge.’

‘We march for Macragge,’ Aquila replied automatically.

‘If you are here, then you too must have performed well.’

‘So they say,’ said Aquila.

‘You do not seem convinced.’

Aquila looked pained. ‘I fought hard enough, but I doubted we would survive. I almost despaired. That is not what the primarch taught us.’

‘We all despaired, sergeant. What else could we have done?’

Aquila shrugged. ‘But tomorrow, I will be honoured for my doubt as much as my achievement. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.’

‘If Lord Guilliman has chosen you for honour, then be assured – you are deserving,’ said Corvo.

‘Perhaps. But the doubt came first.’

‘Without doubt, how can we construct a foolproof theoretical? Without doubt there is only arrogance.’

Aquila was mollified by this. ‘Tell me, sir, did you ever doubt?’

Corvo stared back, stony-faced. ‘In truth? No. Not for a second.’

The mark was a little over six days. Facing stiff resistance from Corvo’s forces, the traitors had laid siege to the city. Why they had not ended it with a single, decisive orbital strike was a matter for conjecture, but still they did not. Instead, probing assaults searched for the Ultramarines’ weaknesses. They displayed none.

Corvo’s subordinate officers gathered around the table of an empty bunker. Dust sifted down from the ceiling with each artillery hit above, covering everything in a grey shroud. Cogitators were choked with it, hololiths sparked and would not cast their images properly. The Space Marines were forced to rely on paper maps.

‘Theoreticals? Anyone?’ asked Corvo. ‘We have no engine support, and our heavy armour can’t catch it.’

‘It is wary of the Shadowswords,’ said Apelles.

‘And well it might be,’ snorted Aratus.

‘They will soon be occupied elsewhere,’ said Lieutenant Sextus. He spoke to them via vox, since Corvo would not gather all of his command assets into one place. ‘There are signs of an imminent enemy armour attack. Since Verulus fell, they’ve been bringing their heavy landers in unopposed. They are mustering to end the siege and crush us.’

‘I do not understand why they did not wait to land this engine until then,’ said Apelles. ‘Why send it in first? It is vulnerable.’

‘Is it now?’ said Corvo softly. ‘It moves faster than any war engine I’ve ever seen. And it seems… indiscriminate in its slaughter. The enemy, my brothers, are not playing by the rules.’

Their muted laughter was cut short by a particularly loud detonation on the surface. Debris pattered on the table. Eyes flicked upwards to stuttering lumen strips.

‘If we can’t get the Shadowswords into range, how do we kill this damned Titan?’ asked Corvo.

‘It is hardly a Titan,’ Sergeant Domitian muttered. ‘Not any more.’

‘Whatever they have done to it,’ said Glabrio, ‘it behaves more like a beast than a machine.’

‘He is right,’ said Aratus. ‘Perhaps we should divert our efforts to tackling the Seventeenth Legion. Let’s take our chances that the beast is too stupid to act in concert with them. Kill them first, bring it down later when it is alone and vulnerable.’

‘What did you say?’ asked Corvo.

Aratus was taken aback. ‘I meant no…’

‘No, no, about hunting.’

‘He said it’s like a beast, sir,’ said Glabrio.

Corvo nodded. He brushed grit from the map. ‘We need to fell this Titan. It is a focal point for their forces – not tactically, but emotionally. It is a kind of idol, I think, to those Seventeenth Legion fanatics. I am certain we can lure a portion of their forces into the city to save it, should it come under threat. Once they are inside we shall destroy them. As to the Titan’s destruction, we are plotting practicals from the wrong theoretical position. This is not a machine, Aratus has that right. Not like any we have faced before. But we have fought beasts. And if it is a beast, then so shall we trap it like one.’

His finger creased the map at Konor’s Forum.

‘FELGHAAAAAAAASSSST!’

The pretence of its war-horns had been cast aside. The Titan had a voice. Diabolic, but a voice nonetheless – a deafening whisper, the rush of stale air from an opened tomb. The name it uttered was not the one on the Titan’s identification plaques.

‘Now,’ Corvo ordered.

He watched his Rhino’s vid-screens as Astagaran troopers broke cover and fled before the beast. Each sprinted eighty metres or so before diving out of sight; troopers further ahead taking up the flight. The Titan’s head swung round, attracted by the movement.

‘Go, go, go!’ ordered Corvo. ‘It has the bait!’

‘FELGHAAAAAAAASSSST!’

The corrupted Titan levelled its giant las-blasters at the fleeing troopers. Deafening thunderclaps rolled out as focused light cleaved the sky. Repeated shockwaves of superheated air blew out windows and flipped the wrecks of groundcars onto their sides. A handful of men were caught and incinerated. Others were thrown aside, organs pulverised by overpressure.

‘Come on! Come on!’ said Domitian, stationed in the forum some four kilometres down the road.

‘It will come,’ said Corvo. ‘Patience.’

A half company of the XVII and a selection of mismatched armour followed the thing. The droning chants of the traitors set Corvo’s teeth on edge. The sound was pervasive, coming from everywhere and nowhere.

But their fanaticism had made them predictable. Half of them broke off to engage the Shadowsword detachment. This time, Corvo had the tanks remain in place. The enemy would find themselves walking into an ambush.

His plan was working. Eager on the hunt, Felghast broke into a run, outpacing its supporting armour and infantry.

‘Sir, it’s moving too fast for the men.’

‘All troopers, stand down!’ voxed Corvo. ‘Fall back to muster points! Stand by to engage supporting ground forces. Strikeforce Alpha, prepare to assault siege lines at quadrant three.’ He turned to his driver. ‘Ready, Crassus?’

‘Ready, sir.’

Corvo watched as the Titan pounded down the street. A thousand metres, seven hundred…

‘Now!’ he roared.

Crassus slammed the Rhino out of its hiding place in a demolished shopfront, cracked columns bouncing off the tank’s glacis as it careened onto the street. Corvo went out through the gunner’s hatch and aimed the Rhino’s searchlight at the creature’s face.

‘FELGHAAAAAAAASSSST!’

The Titan let off a rattle of inaccurate fire, smashing buildings into ruin.

‘We have its attention, sergeant!’

Crassus was the finest armour specialist under Corvo’s command. He was a master of all aspects of tank warfare, but he was also a particularly gifted driver. He accelerated the carrier to maximum speed.

Ultramarian streets ran long and straight, but slumped buildings had narrowed the Via Palatine. Wrecked civilian vehicles cluttered what space remained. Corvo was slammed into the hatch rim as the Rhino burst through the shell of a burnt-out tram. Colonnades crashed down as Felghast spat fury all about them.

The fog curled in vortices around the pursuing Titan. It was gaining.

A missile hammered into the road. The Rhino slewed along the blast-front as Crassus fought for control.

Konor’s Forum lay ahead, a large market square paved in marble now thick with dust. Great idealised statues of the long-dead Battle King stood at each corner.

Ramps led down underneath, where the streets intersected the square. If Felghast had been behaving to tactical norms, it would never have ventured into the forum.

But Felghast was not operating to tactical norms.

A spear of light slashed into the Rhino as it entered the square, sending it spinning across the pavement. It crashed to a halt in one of the arcades running around the edge.

The Titan roared and then slowed, approaching its prey.

Corvo cursed. He dropped back inside the tank. Fire licked out of the driver’s cabin. Crassus was clutching at his neck and moaning.

‘Release your belt!’ said Corvo. ‘Squad seventeen, lure it in. Lure it in!’

Corvo kicked the side door open and pulled Crassus free. Felghast looked down at them, looming out of the fog like a monster of legend. Old gods help him, if Corvo didn’t actually see the metal nose snuffling.

A beam of ruby las-light connected with the Titan’s void shields, sending up an oily flare. The beast swung around to find its source, already firing.

Corvo dragged Crassus into the lee of a toppled column.

The giant foot of Felghast moved over the square, throwing it into shadow.

‘Now,’ voxed Corvo.

Explosive plumes ripped up the sides of the plaza. A rain of shattered ferrocrete pinged off his armour. He held his head down, shielding Brother Crassus. His body shook as a large piece of stone clanged off his armoured backpack. Warning indicators on his visor display climbed to critical, alarms sounded in his ears, but he blink-clicked them to silence. His power plant was compromised. Coolant jetted from the cracked left exhaust, and the bars indicating its level dropped dangerously low.

The rain of debris stopped. Corvo raised his head.

Felghast’s uncanny war-horns blared in alarmed tandem with its voice. Machinery squealed as its torso twisted, trying to arrest its progress. Walking was little more than controlled falling – now that there was nothing solid to place its foot upon, Felghast fell uncontrollably.

The stacked layers of the subterranean spaces beneath Konor’s Forum were open to the air, and the Titan’s foot plunged into the hole. It roared in anger, its awful brazen jaws clacking. Weapons discharged furiously, pulverising the grand Administratum buildings around the ruined square.

Slowly, it toppled.

Corvo watched tensely.

The metallic tail of the Titan lashed backwards and forwards, sweeping up a storm of rubble as it raked the ground. With a whip-crack, the thin end of it wrapped itself around the pediment of the statue of King Konor closest to Corvo. The whole structure held, though it shifted at this new load.

Felghast hung over the precipice, and then it began to haul itself back upright. A daemonic laugh rumbled out from its engines.

‘Stay here!’ Corvo ordered Crassus. He mag-locked his bolter to his hip. ‘Heavy support squad Calorem, hold. Stand ready to execute. Anyone else, with me!’

Space Marines came running from cover. To their rear, up the Via Palatine, gunfire rattled. The supporting units of Felghast were nearing, fighting running battles with the loyalist forces set to catch them.

‘To the statue! To the statue!’ Corvo roared.

He sprinted, his body and armour working as one to propel him at speeds that his bulk would suggest impossible. He charged at the pediment without slowing, slamming into it. The impact made his visor display fizz. Alarms sounded again as his suit’s ruptured coolant system struggled to keep the temperature of his labouring power armour down. He ignored it, trusting to his superhuman metabolism to save him from heat exhaustion.

‘With me, brothers!’

Others crashed into the statue. They pushed at it, grunting in effort, armoured boots skidding on the rubble at the square’s edge. Brother Vestorious drew his gladius, leapt up, hooked his arm around the tail and hacked at the ribbed flesh-metal as he hung there. Molten metal spurted from the wound and splashed on his visor, but he did not stop.

‘Heave!’ cried Corvo. ‘Heave!’

More Ultramarines hammered into the statue, but there was no space for anyone else. The newcomers pushed against their fellows’ backs or dropped broken slabs underfoot, giving purchase to sliding feet on the treacherous ground.

‘Heave!’

Small-arms fire came in, pinging off their battleplate, followed by the deranged howls of the XVII’s supporting Army units. Bolter fire barked in return as Corvo’s rearguard squads moved up to engage from neighbouring streets. Popping bangs rattled around the dusty fog as mass-reactive projectiles detonated. The intensity of the firestorm suggested a larger force of traitors than he had anticipated.

‘Heave!’ shouted Corvo.

The statue jolted, spilling Space Marines onto the ground. ‘It’s going! It’s going!’ shouted someone at the back of the group.

Corvo’s vox was a torrent of feeds coming at him from all quarters. He had no effort to spare for their ordering.

‘Heave!’

The defiled Titan was still trying to drag itself upright, its foot pawing at the air, seeking solid ground. They did not have much time. His men brought up a girder, and rammed it into the widening gap, levering the pediment upwards.

‘Heave, brothers!’ yelled Corvo. ‘Heave!’

The statue lurched. With the sound of grinding stone, the pedestal came free of its foundations and toppled over. King Konor slid from his perch and shattered upon the flagstones.

Felghast gave out a withering howl as it fell. Its void shields breached themselves on the jagged lip of the pit, bursting in a storm of lightning that ran sparks over the Ultramarines’ power armour. It crashed down through the open sub-layers, bringing its armoured torso to ground level and jamming its weapon arms wide.

The Titan was down. One leg was splayed behind it, wrenched at an awkward angle, the other buried hip-deep in the hole. Machinery protested violently as it tried to drag itself up, but it could not. Its tail cracked back and forth in anger, catching three Space Marines and sending them crashing into the ruins.

‘The tail! Get clear of the tail. Stand ready to repel ground forces.’

Shapes were coming up through the dust. Enemy armour. Corvo dismissed them – in the choked avenue they posed little threat. Poor theoretical, worse practical and XVII Legion idiocy as they raced to save their downed idol. In confirmation, a loud whoosh and clang heralded a rocket going into the side of one of the enemy tanks. It stopped dead, hatches blown, further blocking ingress to the forum.

There were other shapes in the mist. Power armoured. Legionaries. These did cause him concern. Still, if they were in the city, then they were not outside it, waiting them out. Corvo’s plan was working. He had drawn the enemy in.

‘Calorem, execute! Execute, now, now, now!’

At the other end of the downed daemon-machine, the heavy support squad advanced out from the shelter of a courtyard. Armourglass eyes caged by sloped brass brows stared hatred at the Space Marines as they approached the Titan’s head. Carapace guns swivelled hopelessly. Its jaw clacked on the ground, seeking to bite. Heavy melta cannons were arrayed by the Space Marines, five of them, and set to maximum power.

The roar of the fusion weaponry was audible on Corvo’s side of the square.

The Titan screamed. They fired again.

‘That is not the cry of a machine,’ said one of his men.

The scream trailed off. Felghast writhed in its pit, the crashing of its death throes drowning out the sound of battle.

Corvo blink-clicked his way into Squad Calorem’s helmet feeds. He saw a cooling puddle of molten brass where the Titan’s head had been. There was no sign of a princeps or moderati within what remained, nor any indication of a cockpit cavity – only a fibrous, organic mess shot through with bands of distorted metal. He clicked off.

‘Good work,’ he said, drawing his gladius. ‘Move up to square east side. Prepare to engage Seventeenth Legion elements. Strikeforce Alpha, commence assault. We march for Macragge!’

‘Captain Lucretius Corvo! Ninetieth Company, Ninth Chapter. Step forward!’

Corvo approached the dais. Corvo knew no fear, but this convocation of demigods gave him pause. Sanguinius’ glorious visage in particular was hard to look at up close.

He came to the end of the carpet, to the top of the steps, and knelt before his lord.

‘Look at me, captain.’

Corvo forced his eyes upwards.

Lord Guilliman looked upon him benevolently, as proud a father as ever there was.

‘For you, my son, there is great honour.’

He held out a hand. A man came forward, bearing upon a velvet cushion a laurel wreath, so cunningly wrought from metal that it looked as though it were fashioned from fresh-cut leaves.

‘The Laurel of Defiance!’ called out Guilliman. He held up the award for all the world to see. ‘One of our Legion’s highest honours. For the Titan killer, for the saviour of Astagar, for Captain Lucretius Corvo!’

Corvo bent his head. The primarch placed the wreath. It clicked as it mag-locked itself around Corvo’s helm.

‘The honour was my men’s, not mine alone, lord,’ said Corvo.

‘You led them well, captain. By honouring you, we honour them all.’

An expectant air formed. An uncomfortable silence followed.

The Lion spoke. ‘Are you not forgetting something, captain?’

‘Am I, my lord?’ said Corvo.

‘All others honoured here today have renewed their oaths to your Legion, and to the Imperium. Will you not do the same?’

‘No, my lord.’

There was a sound akin to a soft wind, the sound of a world gasping.

The Lion’s face hardened. Sanguinius looked to his brothers.

‘Are you a traitor, then?’ asked the Lion.

Corvo drew his gladius. The Space Marines on the dais brought their weapons up, but Guilliman stayed them with a hand. Corvo held the sword high above his head, blade flat upon his palms.

‘I do not renew my oath, my lords, for the oaths of an Ultramarine are forever binding. I am not like my traitor kin to renounce their solemn promises. I have sworn already to serve the Imperium, the Emperor, the Legion and all of mankind, and through those oaths my lords have my sword until death takes me. You ask me to renew that which needs no renewal, for the oaths of an Ultramarine are eternal. To speak them again implies a weakness inherent to them. And there is no weakness. Not in my arm, nor in my mind, nor in my word. I am an Ultramarine. I march for Macragge and the Emperor for evermore, as I have pledged. I need not do so again.’

A slow, gauntleted clapping broke the silence.

Guilliman. Guilliman himself applauded his words. ‘Well said, my son, well said!’

‘Insolence, brother,’ muttered the Lion.

‘Honour,’ Guilliman corrected him. ‘Captain Corvo, put away your sword.’

Corvo did. His primarch’s hand fell on his shoulder.

‘Stand, my son. Stand and face your brothers.’

Corvo turned, and saw the Legions arrayed in the square as the primarchs did. Behind the expressionless visors of his brothers, he knew that some faces would show displeasure. Prayto had been right. He did not care.

‘Do you hear his words, warriors of the Thirteenth?’ said Guilliman. ‘Listen, for he speaks the truth. The honour of our Legion is unimpeachable! We march for Macragge!’

The response rumbled out from the square, heavy as thunder.

‘Return to your brothers, Lucretius.’

‘Wait!’ said the Lion.

Corvo paused.

‘Tell me, I understand it the custom in the Thirteenth to allow captains to modify their heraldry, but yours is a bold departure. Might I ask why?’ asked the primarch.

At this, an image flickered through Corvo’s mind. The eidetic memory of the Legiones Astartes was a great gift, but carried a high price. It made all recollections that came before its bestowing pale and unreal in comparison. Another irony in a life of ironies, that every image of death seen by his transhuman eyes remained sharp, that every privation could be recalled and felt anew in painful clarity. He fought for humanity, while his own youthful experience of being human was reduced to sun-bleached flashes, opaque moments of dreamlike quality that could not be trusted.

He treasured them all the same.

This was what he remembered.

The forecourt of his father’s house one hundred and twenty years ago. Bone-white flags snapped in the breeze bearing the badge of the Corvo line – a hollow, spiked circle. A stylised sunburst.

His father was the last to fly that flag. There were no male heirs beyond Lucretius.

Natural memory was imprecise but in its looseness was found the miracle of evocation, and it was far more emotive than the cold exactness of his Legion-gifted mind. Lucretius again felt his hair stir, he felt the goosebumps rise on his bare arms. Autumn was chill that year, and already the wind had turned to come down from the mountains. There was something invested in this recollection, so deep and fundamental to who he was as a human being, not as a Space Marine. Something that he had almost forgotten how to feel, and struggled daily not to forget.

His father knelt before him, the proud scion of an old and powerful house. Corvo had never seen him kneel before. Not even in the old picts from when Sulustro was taken back into the fold of the Five Hundred Worlds.

‘My son, Lucretius,’ he had said. ‘You go from us, and for this I grieve.’ He grasped his son’s shoulders. His voice was unsteady. ‘I am proud of you. The Corvo name will die with you, and still I am proud.’

Corvo could not speak. What could he say? How could he be strong for the Emperor if his father – the strongest man he knew – was not?

Corvo’s father searched his eyes for a glimpse of the man he would never know. They stayed like this, his father’s hands warm on his shoulders, the wind cold on his skin.

He embraced his son and stood. ‘Go now, Lucretius. Be proud of what you are to become, but never forget who you are or what you were.’

‘I swear, father,’ said Lucretius. ‘I swear I will not forget.’

His father smiled. Corvo had never seen a sadder sight, before or since.

The memory faded. He was with a different father now.

It was hard to hold the Lion’s eye. Perilous, even. But Corvo did.

The Lion glanced at Sanguinius. They seemed amused.

‘Well, captain?’ said the Lion. ‘What is the significance of your colours? Would you care to explain?’

‘It is simple, my lord.’

‘Yes?’

‘I made a promise,’ said Corvo. He bowed from the waist.

They were calling out the name of the next hero as he walked away.

BATTLE FOR THE ABYSS

As Horus deploys his forces, a small band of loyal Space Marines from disparate Legions learn that a massive enemy armada is heading to Ultramar, home of the Ultramarines, headed by the most destructive starship ever constructed.

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KNOW NO FEAR

Mustering for war against the orks, the Ultramarines Legion is attacked by the Word Bearers on the planet of Calth, and the forces of Chaos openly reveal their part in the Heresy.

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MARK OF CALTH

The Heresy came to Calth without warning. In just a few hours of betrayal and bloodshed, the proud warriors of the XIII Legion – Guilliman’s own Ultramarines – were laid low by the treachery of their erstwhile brothers of the XVII.

In this volume, read the story ‘Calth That Was’.

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BETRAYER

As Calth burns, the Word Bearers and World Eaters begin a bloody crusade across Ultramar. Worlds will burn, Legions will clash... and a primarch will fall.

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THE UNREMEMBERED EMPIRE

Having weathered the Word Bearers’ attack on Calth and the subsequent Shadow Crusade against the Five Hundred Worlds, the Ultramarines primarch, Roboute Guilliman, now draws all loyalist forces to Macragge as he contemplates a new future for mankind.

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PHAROS

Just as Guilliman’s dream of Imperium Secundus seems finally to be realised, the Night Lords launch a full invasion of distant Sotha. Their target? The mysterious Mount Pharos…

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RUINSTORM

With Imperium Secundus a failed dream, the primarchs of the Triumvirate swear to reach Terra and defend the Imperium’s heart. But danger awaits them, and their destinies are in their hands…

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DEATH GUARD

XIV LEGION

DAEMONOLOGY

Chris Wraight

The world was called Terathalion, named for the species of jewel found in its equatorial belt under mountains of copper and iron. Even during the long interstellar silence before the Ipsissimus had made himself known, those swirled green-orange jewels had been mined and cut and polished, adorning the chief treasures of the planet – these were always books.

For Terathalion was a world of words where documents stored in a thousand human tongues were collated, analysed, annotated and catalogued.

A library world, they had called it later. A place where knowledge coalesced, all under the benign guidance of distant masters on Prospero. For a hundred years after its incorporation into the Imperium, sapphire-armoured magisters had been welcome and frequent visitors, prompted by curiosity or sent on assignment by their venerated primarch in search of myriad fragments of learning. Those visits had slowly dried up as the demands of the Great Crusade had drawn more of the XV Legion away from the loose-thrown Prosperine empire until, one day, they had ceased altogether.

During this new isolation, the world’s temporal masters did not worry unduly, nor did they seek especial clarification. The galaxy had been made safe for study, and so Terathalion’s patient work continued unabated. They knew that the Legions would return in time, for it was widely understood that Space Marines left no task unfinished.

In that, the temporal masters were of course entirely correct, except the ships that eventually emerged from the Mandeville point in the Imperial year 007.M31 and spread out through the local system were not the sleek and gloriously decorated system-runners of the XV Legion, but corpse-grey, vast-hulled leviathans.

Moreover, it was no mere squadron that had arrived, but an entire battle group. And as the warships took up position above Terathalion’s risibly meagre orbital defences, even the most trusting of the planet’s overseers felt a sense of unease.

They sent messages to the lead battleship, a colossal Gloriana-class monster with the tactical ident Endurance, but no response was received. Orders were frantically transmitted to the defence grid to mobilise, but by then even that gesture was made far too late.

The placid people of Terathalion had never witnessed the full firepower of a Legion fleet before, and so they could hardly be blamed for not knowing what to expect. They were still looking up into the skies when the bombardment began, turning the skies white as the clouds boiled away. Mass drivers annihilated the outer ring of defences before pinpoint lance strikes destroyed every command-and-control node across the northern hemisphere. A rain of incendiaries ripped through the urban centres, falling for hour upon hour in an unrelenting barrage that left barely one stone standing atop the next. Sheets of promethium flame swept through what little remained, scorching it black.

The books burned. Millennial tomes that had been secured in vacuum chambers were ripped apart as the armourglass casings shattered. Archives became white-hot tunnels, atomising irreplaceable volumes in puffs of burning dust.

When the bombardment finally relented, the few survivors crept slowly from whatever refuges they had been able to find, their ears ringing and their eyes streaming. For a moment it seemed to them like some awful error had been committed, and that the worst was over, and that – satisfied with the apocalyptic destruction they had wrought, for reasons that were still entirely mysterious – the attackers would now move on to their next target.

But then dirty contrails of drop pods split the smoke-barred skies. All across Terathalion’s newly tortured surface, clusters of adamantium teardrops crashed to earth, disgorging squads of pale-grey Space Marines from the impact-rubble. More and more landed, until whole battalions of warriors stalked through the rapidly toxifying atmosphere, their faces hidden behind slope-grilled helms. With horrifying efficiency, they ground their way from one ravaged hab-section to the next.

They asked no questions and made no demands. As aftershock thunderheads boiled across the rubbled cityscapes and heavily acidic rain began to drum from still-hot metal, the survivors of ruined Terathalion were hunted down like vermin.

In Geryiadha, once the world’s fifth most populous city and home to satintree groves and fountain-gardens, the concentration was more intense than anywhere else. In the main boulevard – now a pitted trench of smoking rockcrete debris – the air itself shimmered and broke open, leaking arcs of neon. Dust swirled and whipped into serpents, and masonry blocks rolled clear. A sphere of silver suddenly flashed into life, laced with writhing black energies. A sharp snap rang out, shattering the orb’s fragile skin and sending shards bouncing away across the detritus.

At the centre stood eight massive figures. Seven of them strode out immediately, hefting long scythes in heavy gauntlets. Their thick battleplate was gouged and charred, as though they had just come from some furious battle against sterner foes than anything a library world might reliably muster.

The eighth towered over even those leviathans. His archaic armour, lined with rust and marked with what looked like deep blade-cuts, steamed with warp-frost. Yellowed eyes glinted from beneath a shroud-white cowl, set in a gaunt face ringed by rebreather tubes and feeder-vials. His expression was haunted, even though there was nothing on the planet that could possibly harm him, and his fingers twitched as he hauled his own great scythe into position.

The crackle of flames rumbled on in the distance, punctuated by the muffled crack of bolter fire. Forge-hot winds tore across the disintegrating urban vista, fuelled by the infernos raging in the hollow hab-spires.

The primarch Mortarion drew in his first rattling breath of Terathalion’s smog-choked atmosphere, and swept his gaze across the boulevard.

‘Find it,’ he rasped.

Seventy years earlier, and half a galaxy away, Malcador the Sigillite had been occupied when the alert came through. The First Lord of Terra was always occupied, for the civil affairs of the expanding Imperium were more than one man could possibly handle.

In a sense, of course, he was far more than one man. He was an aberration, just as all the powerful of the galaxy were aberrations – a random fluctuation in the psychic tides, an anomaly amidst the quadrillions that made up the burgeoning mass of humanity.

Still, that did not enable him to escape from the burden of all empires. Whenever one executive order was signed off, another nine would take its place. With every compliance came more demands for iterators, cultural assimilators, remembrancers, terraformers, trader treaties. He looked down at the long list of incoming diplomatic communiqués, and his ancient heart sank.

When the alert flickered across his display feed, then, it was welcome.

‘My lord,’ came the voice from the comm-bead in his collar, the one reserved for urgent transmissions. ‘My lord – he is here, and he will not be dissuaded.’

Malcador rose from the antique writing desk and reached for his aquila-topped staff. ‘Understood. I will be with you shortly.’

He walked quickly through his private chambers, then out into the corridors of the Imperial Palace. The courtiers and political delegates shuffled out of his way; either they had no idea who he was and had no interest in meeting his gaze, or they knew exactly who he was, in which case they did not dare to. He passed through the image-lined colonnades, garden chambers and libraries, padding softly on soft-soled shoes.

Gradually the ranks of unaugmented courtiers fell away, to be replaced by the red and gold of the Mechanicum and the Legio Custodes. None barred his passage – down in the subterranean levels, all knew his name and what his simple aquila staff represented.

He reached the excavation stratum, and the functionary who had called him hurried over, an apologetic look on his face.

‘I am sorry, my lord,’ he said.

‘That is all right, Sefel,’ Malcador replied. ‘Where is he?’

‘In the outer portal.’

‘Then you should have summoned me sooner.’

He went more quickly then, ignoring the towering vaults around him, and the low rumble of the creation engines and flashes of light from arc-welders. The air became hotter. Soon he was walking across bare rock, still scored from the drills that had delved into it, and had to step over the bronze-lined cables that lay like serpents across his path.

Malcador found him just inside the first gate, with the sound of macrohammers ringing through those dark arches. He was standing, staring up at the unfinished portal, his grey face lost in thought.

Following his gaze, Malcador drew up alongside him. It was an octagonal gateway, three hundred metres across, reinforced with an adamantium collar and ringed with the runes of Old Earth.

A Titan could have walked through that gate. Perhaps, in time, one would.

‘What is it for?’ the watcher asked.

The question felt premature. The portal would not be finished for decades yet. Its immense frame opened up onto nothing but bare rock – it was a door to nowhere, fashioned at enormous expense and in conditions of the utmost secrecy.

‘Why are you here, Mortarion?’ Malcador asked, as gently as he could.

‘What is it for?’ the primarch repeated.

Malcador placed a withered hand upon Mortarion’s back, making to usher him away but not being so foolish as to actually push. ‘Come with me. We should talk.’

The primarch glared down at him, his toxin-scarred features etched with contempt. ‘One day, old man,’ he said, curling his gauntlet into a fist, ‘one of us will leave you gasping in the dust. Perhaps it will be me.’

‘No doubt you are right. Now, please, come away from the gate.’

‘Why? Is it dangerous?’

Malcador didn’t look up at it. He never liked to look at it.

‘Not yet,’ he said.

Lermenta didn’t run immediately. She’d known that it was the end as soon as she had seen the first augur-pinpricks confirmed. As one of the higher-ranking syndics of Geryiadha’s administrative archival cadre, she was privy to things that others weren’t, although on that day she found that she couldn’t take any particular pleasure in that.

She had made her way quickly down from the main collation spire and jogged through the rows and rows of bookshelves, allowing herself a momentary twinge of sorrow as the titles passed by in the gloom. By the time the warning sirens were sounding, she had made it out of the core and into open air. She’d looked up, as if she might catch a glimpse of the ships that she knew were falling into position above her. The sky had been a pale, pure green, just as it was every morning during the tithe-season. Like most things on Terathalion, it had always had a sparse beauty to it.

Now that was all gone, stirred up into fire-edged storms that shed acid rain-like tears. Everything stank of cordite, mingled with the hot-metal aroma of plasma-discharge. She crouched under the shadow of a shattered medicae unit, feeling numb even amidst the burning. Her scholar’s smock clung to her, driven by the racing fire-wind.

She’d seen whole kill-squads of Space Marines moving through the city zones, cutting down survivors with chilling expertise. They had never made a sound, save for the crunch of boots on bone and the coarse bark of their outsized bolters.

They didn’t scare her, but it drove the others mad with fear. Those that could still run sprinted for the city limits, no doubt hoping that if they could just get clear of the drop zone then they might have a chance.

Lermenta watched them from her inadequate shelter. They were doing what every instinct told them to do, though it made them terrifyingly easy to kill. She could only watch as men, women and children were gunned down at range, cut apart up close or crushed beneath the treads of tanks brought down by bulk landers. Terathalion had been home to a population in the billions, and it took a while for even the Legiones Astartes to track them all down.

When she had to move, she kept her body low and hugged the remnants of whatever buildings still stood. The rockcrete was hot to the touch, burning through the soles of her regulation sandals. She didn’t have a plan. There was precious little to plan for when the entire planet was clearly being torn apart, and all that remained was a dumb, animalistic sense of wanting to stay intact for just a little bit longer.

She went south, towards the old rivercourse where industrial hoppers for the jewel-trade stood. Those were made of plasteel and adamantium, enough to withstand the smelters, so some of them might still be standing. As she flitted between hollow wall sections, she felt her heart thudding in her chest, tight and rapid.

She was so wrapped up in picking a route that she heard the boot-falls too late. Cursing under her breath, she did what all the others did and broke into a sprint. She did not look back.

Perhaps they hadn’t seen her, in which case she might still race through the shadows and get away.

Perhaps they hadn’t seen her.

The absurdity of the thought was amusing, in spite of what it portended. These were Space Marines. They heard everything, they saw everything. Still, she ran on, gasping in the ash-thick air, weaving through what remained of an old manufactory depot. She veered hard around a corner, skidding on the rain-washed stone.

Ahead of her, a long alley stretched away, lined with the empty corpses of drive-housings.

At the far end, she saw him waiting.

He was massive, far bigger in the flesh than she had ever conceived he might be, radiating an aura of such astonishing psychic authority that it made her want to gasp out loud. The elements themselves seemed to sheer away from him, though his scythe’s energised blade ran with boiling rainwater. She wanted to look away but the yellowed eyes held her fast. He walked slowly towards her, looming through twisting palls of smog, cracking the road surface under his heavy tread.

For a moment, as she stared up at the approaching face, she was only struck by one thing in particular.

Pain. The primarch’s grey visage was twisted into what looked like a permanent wince, half-hidden behind a hissing rebreather intake.

‘What do you want here?’ she managed to blurt out, hearing the arrival of more Death Guard coming up behind her.

Mortarion shot her a withering look, as if to say, Don’t try that with me. He grabbed her chin and held it up, pinching it between the plates of his elaborate gauntlet and held her gaze for a little while longer. It felt like knives being shoved into her lungs. Then, mercifully, he released her. He gestured to his entourage, and Lermenta felt two hands grip her by the shoulders.

‘We have it,’ Mortarion announced, though not to her, and in a voice that sounded like a flail being dragged across rusted iron. ‘I will return to the ship. You may destroy what remains.’

Malcador took Mortarion back up to his personal chambers, high up on the slopes overlooking the vast sprawl of the Palace’s grand halls and spires. The Sigillite had spent more than a mortal lifetime making it a place of beauty and sanctuary, but Mortarion seemed barely to notice what had been placed there. The primarch simply stood on the polished marble, exuding vapours, his breathing a coarse scrape.

‘I would see my father now.’

‘The Emperor is not available,’ Malcador replied.

‘Where is He?’

‘I do not know.’

Mortarion snorted. ‘You know His every movement. You know His every thought.’

‘No. No man knows those things.’

Mortarion started pacing, kicking aside priceless pieces of antique furniture as he went. ‘He cannot keep me here for much longer. He tries my patience.’

‘Your Legion awaits you, and the last preparations are being made. You will join them soon enough.’

Mortarion turned on him, his eyes flashing with frustrated anger. ‘Then why imprison me here? Did He do this to any of my brothers?’

Malcador noticed the edge of unreason in his guest’s face, and wondered if it was getting worse. All the gene-progeny of the Great Project had been damaged by the scattering, but Mortarion’s wounds ran deeper than most. Angron had been physically damaged, and Curze’s mind had sunk into darkness, but Mortarion seemed to have inherited something of both afflictions. The Emperor’s desire to keep him a while on Terra prior to joining the Crusade had been motivated from the highest intentions, just as all the decisions they had jointly made had been. That did not mean that it was the right decision, nor that the poisons could all be extracted…

‘You were all given different gifts,’ explained Malcador patiently. ‘You have all had different trials.’

‘None had more than I,’ muttered Mortarion.

‘I know you believe that.’

Mortarion turned back to the view, wrinkling his grey skin against the glare. ‘You have done nothing but preach at me since I was brought here. You talk of the Imperial Truth, and yet you are neck-deep in witchery.’ He grimaced beneath his rebreather, making the skin around his temples wrinkle. ‘I can smell it on you. As soon as I leave your presence, you will be back at your spellbook.’

Malcador suppressed a sigh. This again.

‘There are no spells, Mortarion. You know that.’

‘What is the gate you are building down there?’

‘I did not say it was a gate.’

‘It has eight sides. It is surrounded by numerological symbols. I could smell the incense.’

‘Your father has many projects.’

The primarch nodded. ‘He does. He starts many things, and discards them when they no longer keep His interest. There are times when I think He may have started too many, and that they will come back to haunt Him.’

‘There is a purpose,’ Malcador replied. ‘A design. Some things He is able to explain now, and some He will explain later. All we ask – all we have ever asked – is for a little trust.’

When Mortarion made his move, it was surprisingly quick.

He whirled, his gauntlet flashing out, catching the frail lord by the neck and gripping tight. Malcador struggled for breath, looking up into the mask of sudden hatred now looming over him. The primarch still bore the stench of Barbarus upon his armour.

‘Trust?’ Mortarion hissed. ‘I see your foulness before me, as plain as the sun. You are a sorcerer, old man, and the stink of it makes me wish to vomit.’

For once, Malcador struggled for the right words. He could have used his art to defend himself, but that would only enrage the primarch further. There was so much subtlety at stake – the nature of the psyker, the proper use of the human mind – but such arguments were hard to formulate with a gene-forged fist around one’s throat.

Then Mortarion let go as suddenly as he had grasped him and snorted contemptuously as Malcador only barely found his feet.

‘You must think me stupid,’ he snarled. ‘A peasant of Barbarus, not fit to walk the same paths as my illustrious brothers. But I see through you, old man. I see what you are, and I tell you this – I will never serve in your Crusade while there are witches among us.’

Mortarion’s toxin-spoiled voice shook with fervour, but Malcador composed himself. At one time or another, all of the primarchs had exerted their strength in his presence. They seemed to enjoy demonstrating their physical prowess over him, as if perpetually resentful of his privileged place at their father’s side. He had got used to letting the slights pass.

‘Do you… really mean… that?’ Malcador managed to ask, and Mortarion’s glower was all the confirmation he needed. ‘Very well. I had hoped to show you this later… when matters were at a greater stage of readiness… but perhaps now will serve.’

He brushed down his robes, trying not to show just how much Mortarion’s choking grip had pained him, and gestured towards a pair of mahogany doors that led to a chamber normally off-limits to all but himself and the Emperor.

‘After you. I think you will find this… interesting.’

The primarch’s chamber aboard the Endurance was cluttered and claustrophobic. Lermenta let her eyes run across it, taking in the piles of old equipment scattered across the black pressed-metal floor. Perhaps once it had been a finely appointed space, decked with fine items more in keeping with a private retreat of an Emperor’s son, but now it looked more like the domain of a mind teetering on the edge of insanity. Rolls of crumpled parchment spilled across collections of ephemera from a thousand worlds – stuffed xenos heads, astrolabes, divination boards made of rosewood and iron, leather-bound manuals on numerology, or knapped-flint knives of all sizes tied with lengths of twine.

The floor had been etched with concentric circles, each marked with a different rune. Iron lozenges, also marked with sigils, hung on chains from the arched ceiling, twisting gently under the dim light of flickering torches. The air was close and as hot as blood.

Lermenta was shackled tightly by her wrists, neck and ankles, bound to an iron frame that stood at the far end of the ramshackle chamber, facing in towards the circles.

She had to twist her head to catch a glimpse of Mortarion. An eye-shaped viewportal stood over to her left, taking up nearly the entire height of the outward-facing chamber wall. Terathalion could be seen through the armourglass, still glowing brightly in the void and betraying little of its ongoing pain. Mortarion stood before the portal, breathing deeply, watching the planet die. Every so often he would twitch, or his gauntlets would clench, or his rebreather would emit a faint choke of expelled air. He had been standing there for over an hour. Since the Legion menials had pinned her to the frame and left the two of them alone in the chamber, he had said nothing.

‘So, you did that all just to find me?’ asked Lermenta, growing tired of the enforced silence.

Mortarion turned upon her slowly. His every movement was deliberate, as though weighed down by a terrible weariness. Up close, Lermenta could see barely healed wounds beneath the shadow of his cowl.

What could wound him? What could even scratch him?

‘Not all of it,’ he rasped throatily, his rebreather clicking as it filtered his words. ‘It is good to destroy a world. It purifies the soul.’

Lermenta raised an eyebrow. The primarch’s voice sounded strangely febrile.

He limped past her, coming to rest at the epicentre of the rune-circles. He folded his arms and regarded her. ‘For a long time,’ he said, ‘I believed what my new father told me. I told myself that you were a myth.’

‘Well, you can see that’s not true.’

‘I see a mortal woman.’ Mortarion said. ‘I could snap your neck with my fingertips.’

‘Such a charmer.’

Mortarion advanced towards her, his tortured face looking oddly distracted. He stared at her like a man might stare at a newly discovered tumour.

‘How long were you down there with them?’

‘Twenty-five years,’ she replied.

‘And the mortal you consumed?’

‘I forget. I can’t ask her any more – she quickly lost her mind.’

‘Why were you sent?’

‘I was not sent,’ Lermenta snapped. ‘I chose it. There were priceless things down there and now you have destroyed them all. Your brother Magnus will be angry, when he returns.’

‘Do not speak to me of my brothers. Any of them.’

Mortarion was studying her intently. Close up, Lermenta could smell the chemical tang of his armour-systems, the ripe edge to his extruded breath. She could see the minuscule darts of his pupils, and the faint hidden spasms around his mouth.

‘You are foul to me,’ he pronounced at last.

Lermenta bowed as much as her bonds would let her. ‘Yet you are nothing less than astonishing to me. I am full of admiration. Truthfully, I did not expect to endure long enough to see you at such… quarters.’

The flattery made no impact – Mortarion’s psyche was so inured to disdain that he could no longer see anything other than veiled contempt. Lermenta could almost hear that paranoia echoing in his mind, pursuing him, dragging at his mighty, wounded soul.

‘My brothers are already using your kind,’ Mortarion told her. ‘They tell me Lorgar willingly infects his warriors. And there is Fulgrim.’ Mortarion shuddered. ‘I wonder at it. The hypocrisy.’

‘You should not. They have seen the order of nature and accepted it.’

Mortarion smiled joylessly behind the rebreather. He turned, gesturing to the collection of esoterica in his chambers. ‘These are wards,’ he said. ‘Protections against the dark. Sorcery is a cancer. We must guard against it. Push it back.’ He shuffled over to one of the scrolls and idly traced a finger over the text. ‘The ancient Terrans believed in one god. Infinite. Omnipotent. That gave them a conundrum – how to describe perfection? What words could possibly suffice?’

Mortarion crumpled the parchment in his fist. His fingers were almost trembling.

‘All they allowed themselves was the via negativa – to speak of what their god was not like. And when they had exhausted all the things that were not true, what remained in the blind spot was his nature.’ He looked back at her, and the evident loathing returned. ‘I surround myself with all that is not the warp, for it is hateful to me. Whatever remains is corruption. I seek it out. I destroy it.’

‘And yet,’ said Lermenta, ‘of all that world’s souls, you chose to preserve me.’

Mortarion’s right eyelid twitched. ‘For now.’

‘Why?’

He drew close again, and it was all Lermenta could do not to shrink back in her bonds. ‘I am surrounded by the damned,’ he said. ‘Jaghatai was right – I am on my own with them. The ether stains everything. But I will understand it. And I will overcome it.’

‘Oh, for pity. Nothing can overcome it.’

The primarch loomed over her, and his shadowed face boiled with an old, old resentment. ‘All things can be overcome,’ he hissed. ‘Your final task, daemon, is to show me how.’

Malcador ushered Mortarion into a narrow chamber. The only furniture was a long, low table draped in black silk. When the doors were closed behind them, the room sank into a velvety darkness.

Malcador gestured with his index finger and a hololith emerged over the table, tiny points of light glinting like diamonds in the air. It was a tri-map of the galactic sector.

‘It took us a long time to find a suitable location,’ Malcador said, as the display gradually zoomed in. ‘A very long time.’

He watched as Mortarion’s shrewd, suspicious eyes took in every detail – the inbound ship trajectory markers and the manifest logs that flickered in scrolling lists.

‘Then there were the negotiations with Mars. I thought they’d be pleased to help, but there are always difficulties to unravel. But the work, I am happy to say, is now advanced.’

The hololith continued to cycle in closer. A planet swam into focus, its surface wracked by tectonic fault lines.

‘Where is this place?’ asked Mortarion.

‘You tell me you will refuse to serve if psychic potential remains in the Legions,’ said Malcador, watching the view continue to expand. ‘I believe you. It has been at the forefront of the Emperor’s mind for many generations. There are complexities to overcome, but much of His labour has been expended on that very question. This is a part of it.’

Mortarion gazed at the planetscape before them. There were rainy images of vast Mechanicum void-engines hanging in low orbit, and terraforming crawlers being lifted down through a volatile atmosphere. Other projections shimmered into life – a huge complex, rising out of a desolate landscape of volcanic ash, radiating out from a massive central arena.

‘Imagine it,’ said Malcador. ‘If a way could be found to remove the warp from the arteries of the Imperium. If the armies of humanity could travel without use of the Navigator gene. If the psykers could be withdrawn from the Legions, steadily and with caution. We have already begun to prepare for this day. It will not be easy, for there are powerful forces ranged against us, both within and without.’ Malcador arrested the zoom, hovering over the half-built arena. It was a colossal space, a palace in its own right, carved out of the volcanic wound of another world.

‘This is Nikaea, Mortarion. It is a world with a destiny, and you will have a part to play there.’

Mortarion appeared to be caught between emotions – the perennial distrust, leavened by an undoubted curiosity.

‘What are you telling me?’ he asked, grudgingly.

‘That you are valued, Mortarion. You will be mighty, as strong as the bones of the earth, and a pillar of your father’s vision.’ Malcador dared reach out to him, to rest a hand on the primarch’s colossal wrist. ‘Remain true to us, and He will give you this. You will speak there, to make your case before the eyes of the entire Imperium, to unburden yourself of the things that you now carry unaided. For now, we must perforce build an empire with forbidden tools. But a day will come when all these things are no longer necessary.’

Mortarion’s eyes remained fixed upon the arena. It was as if he were already imagining himself standing there.

For a long time, he said nothing. Then, slowly, his demeanour changed.

‘Tell me more,’ he said.

‘You are a fool,’ said Lermenta, interested to see how far she could push the primarch. She guessed that it would not be very far – he was already teetering on the precipice. She had heard of what had been done to him on Barbarus, and did not wonder at the monster that had been produced. In some ways, it was a miracle that he still had any sanity left at all.

‘I have learned many things,’ wheezed Mortarion, gesturing to the arcane objects strewn across the floor. ‘Your kind can be warded against. You can be bound. You can be used, like blades, and then sent back to the hells that spawned you.’

Lermenta felt like laughing in his face. She had heard the same screeds from a thousand other mortals over the aeons, each one convinced that he alone had found a way to negotiate with the gods for no price at all.

‘Let me tell you of the empyrean,’ she said. ‘There are many great forces in the ether, and one of them has your name etched over his rusting throne. He is waiting, though not for very much longer. It matters not how many trinkets you rattle or wave – he will not be denied. He has claimed you.’

‘None have claimed me!’ snarled Mortarion. ‘Even my father could not claim me! Me, who was guilty of patricide long before the seeds of treachery were sown in the Warmaster’s heart. I have seen them all off – the tyrants, the witches, the xenos filth. Only I remain – pure of it all, free of corruption.’

‘You do not look pure to me.’

The primarch glowered. ‘I can compel you, daemon. I know the words, the numerical constants that bind you, dragging you from one form to another. I have studied these things. It is not witchery, but scientific reason.’

Lermenta felt real contempt then. The damaged figure before her had no true knowledge, just false hopes and gleanings. Her own master’s favourite, Magnus – ah, now there was one who really understood the mysteries of the empyrean, and even he had been deceived.

‘You wish to know the truth?’ she asked.

Mortarion came closer. ‘I will know the truth,’ he hissed.

‘I can show it to you.’

‘I destroyed a world to find you. Give me the knowledge.’

Lermenta smiled sweetly. ‘Very well.’

Exerting her power was trivially easy. Most of the wards and cantrips Mortarion had assembled to keep her in place were embarrassingly weak, and only one thing in the chamber had the power to really hurt her.

‘This is the truth.’

Her bonds shattered. Her human shell peeled away, sloughing from her like a bloody cloak and revealing a glossy, insectoid true-form. She launched herself at the primarch, her jaws gaping obscenely wide, her claws raking.

She took him by surprise. It was her only advantage and she pressed it, gouging at his grease-streaked armour and trying to gnaw at the flesh within.

He hammered a heavy fist down, trying to take her head off, but she evaded him with ease. She punched a claw into his midriff, biting deep, eliciting a roar of pain.

By the gods, she was enjoying this.

His physical strength was enormous, but that would not help him, for she was a creature of anti-physics, shackled only by laws that he feared to invoke. She wounded him again, goading him like some huge taurodon, driving his anger deeper towards mania.

‘Banish!’ he roared as she laughed at him. ‘Go back!’

His fists were flailing now, trying to latch on to her, to drag her down. She slipped through his fingers like an eel, bloodletting as she went, adding freshly scored lines to his already battered war plate. The two of them rocked back towards the circle, and she felt the power of the wards overlap in the air, tearing at her flesh even as she ripped through them.

‘Do it!’ she taunted, slapping him across the face. ‘Do what you came to do!’

He resisted, trying to tear her apart with his hands, still relying on the immeasurable strength in his post-human musculature.

Lermenta spat at him, and the acidic spittle clogged in his eye.

That did it.

‘Barbaroí!’ he roared, and the runes etched around the chamber flared into life. A hot wind suddenly howled from the centre of the circles, snatching at her revealed true-form and harrowing it. ‘Gharáz! Baghammon’echzhaza!’

She couldn’t help but scream, though the pain was mingled with a cold satisfaction at what she had provoked.

Mortarion kept up the chant, and now his fist-strikes, spiralling with warp-lightning, caused real damage. He smashed her back against the iron frame that had held her, and the blows drove into her carapaced stomach.

‘So it comes for you at last,’ she hissed through bloodied fangs, grinning. ‘You could not resist.’

The glorious stink of learned sorcery and hedge-magick was now pungent and inescapable. It was within him, and he was using it, in spite of every protestation.

‘Never mock me,’ Mortarion growled, spraying spittle from the vents of his rebreather. ‘Heijammeka! Never goad me!’

Lermenta sagged back against the wall, feeling her soul pulled back into the empyrean. The primarch was crunching her to pieces now, hammering furiously with his fists, pouring out all of his fury onto her broken physical shell. It was hard not to be awed by it – she was the first to see a fragment of what he would eventually become.

Here, above the burning remains of Terathalion, was the future of the Death Lord being born.

And so as she died, and her quintessential matter sucked itself back into the maw of the ether, she managed a mock salute. ‘Hail, Master of the Plague!’ she cried through the ruin of her jaws. ‘By the gods, you learn fast.’

Then the mortal universe ripped away, and the warp came rushing over her like a tide.

Mortarion stood over Lermenta’s crushed form, breathing heavily. He could smell the ichor upon his gauntlets. It wasn’t blood, but it stained just as richly.

His hearts were beating as one, though the combat had sickened him. He wanted to vomit, to expel the curdling sickness that hung heavily in his stomach.

But there was something else there, too. He remembered Malcador’s promises; the smooth words spoken, so it seemed, an age ago.

A day will come when all these things are no longer necessary.

The Sigillite had been wrong about that, either lying or mistaken. That day would never come now, and there was no point pretending otherwise. Perhaps all the old certainties would have to be overturned now, even the oldest, forged in the gas clouds of the foundling world he had both loved and hated.

He remembered, too, the words that he had spoken.

I will never serve in your Crusade while there are witches among us.

For too long, he had been used by all sides – Nikaea had been and gone, and the promises made for it had all been hollow. The void now seethed with witchery, more virulent than ever, and he could feel its tendrils grasping for him.

He looked down at the etched floor, at the wards and the symbols and the runes. He would have to learn more. He would have to master all the paths of ruin. He would, as perhaps he had known for a long time now, have to become the very thing that he had always hated.

‘So be it,’ he growled, retreating back to the centre of the arcane circle. ‘It starts here.’

GALAXY IN FLAMES

Having recovered from his grievous injuries, Warmaster Horus leads the triumphant Imperial forces against the rebel world of Isstvan III, where Horus’s treachery is finally revealed...

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FLIGHT OF THE EISENSTEIN

Having witnessed the terrible massacre on Isstvan III, Death Guard Captain Garro seizes a ship and sets a course for Terra to warn the Emperor of Horus’s treachery.

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THE BURIED DAGGER

For long years, the Horus Heresy has ground on. Now, the Death Guard have been sent to begin the final battle. But Mortarion and his sons must face their gravest challenge first – for Nurgle has claimed them as his own, and he will not be denied…

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THOUSAND SONS

XV LEGION

REBIRTH

Chris Wraight

I have no idea how long I’ve been out. I should have; my enhanced memory and catalepsean function should have retained some trace, but everything is blank.

Presumably, that is part of the process. They want to induce doubt, to make me question whether I am up to this. If that is so, then they have succeeded. My total lack of recall preys on my mind. I do not like not knowing. It feels, certainly, like I’ve been ignorant of far too many facts for far too long.

But I am alive, and my hearts beat. That is something. Since coming round, I have had several minutes to reflect on my situation. That is useful too, though also no doubt part of some planned sequence.

I run down the basics, the physical aspects of my predicament. It helps, to force my mind into something mechanical. As I do so, I feel a degree of mental alertness returning.

I am in a chair. I am naked. My wrists, ankles, neck and chest are shackled with iron bands.

No, not iron – I’d be able to break that. Something similarly blunt and uncomfortable.

There is almost no light. I can make out the outline of my limbs dimly, but little else. My breathing is light, and there is an old pain behind my rib-fused chest. My secondary heart is still beating, indicating that I am recovering from some extensive trauma or exertion. I can feel no major wounds on my body, though there are many hundreds of bruises and abrasions, consistent with having been in action recently.

I have no mind-sight. I sense no souls nearby. For the first time since ascending into the ranks of the Legion, I remember what it is like to be alone with my own thoughts. At first, this is strangely comforting, like stumbling across a memento of a happy childhood.

But I do not take comfort for long, since my non-psychic senses are not as truncated. As my body adjusts and my faculties return, I realise that I am not alone. There is someone in the chamber with me, invisible in the dark. I cannot see him, but I can smell him and hear him. There is blood on his hands, and it makes the air of this confined chamber sharp and unsavoury. He breathes in ragged, shuddering draughts, like a panting animal held briefly at bay.

For the moment, that is all I sense. We sit in silence for a while longer, and I try to recall the events leading up to this moment. They come back to me only slowly, and in disconnected parts.

It takes a long time for him to speak. When he does, the voice takes me by surprise.

It is magnificent. There is tightly contained savagery in that voice, a throat-wet growl that slips round the words and underpins each of them with a precise degree of mordant threat. I suspect this is no charade to make me uneasy, but simply the way my interrogator talks.

So the process begins the way these things always begin, the way a million interrogations have started since the dawn of organised violence.

‘Tell me your name and company designation,’ he says.

And for a moment, for a terrible moment, I realise that I cannot remember.

The Geometric pulled into high orbit, running silent, hull-lights extinguished. Two hundred kilometres down, the planet was almost as dark. It was void-black, laced with cracks of angry red where magma, or maybe surface fires, scored the crust.

Brother-Captain Menes Kalliston stood on the bridge of the destroyer and watched the approach through the realspace viewers. He was wearing battleplate, but his head was bare. His dark eyes stayed fixed on the curve of the planet, now filling most of the plexi-glass screens above him. His blunt, severe features were characteristically static. A slender patrician nose bisected rough-cut cheekbones. His flesh looked dry, like old parchment, and his burnt-umber hair was cropped close to the scalp. A single tattoo marked his right temple, the burning eye symbol of the Athanaean cult discipline.

His armour was a deep, glossy red. His shoulder guards were decorated in white and gold, picking out the icons and numerals of the Fourth Fellowship of the XV Legion, the Thousand Sons.

As he stood in contemplation, another figure came to join him. The new arrival had a stockier, shorter, more vigorous frame, and his features were closer to the Space Marine median – bull-necked, angular jaw, taut flesh over heavy bones. He might have been younger than the first, but the vagaries of gene-conditioning always made it so hard to tell.

‘No enemy signals?’ asked Kalliston, not turning.

‘None,’ confirmed Brother-Sergeant Revuel Arvida.

‘And you sense nothing?’

Arvida, who was Corvidae, gave a rueful smile.

‘It’s not as easy as it used to be.’

Kalliston nodded.

‘No. That it isn’t.’

To Kalliston’s left, a control column blinked with several runes. A hololith emerged above it, a rotating sphere marked with precogitated atmospheric descent routes.

‘Landers are prepared, captain,’ said Arvida. ‘We can do this whenever you want.’

‘And you’re still not sure we should.’

‘You know I’m not.’

Only then did Kalliston turn from the viewers and look his subordinate in the eye.

‘I’ll need you down there,’ he said. ‘I don’t care what the augur readings say, it’ll be dangerous. So, if your hearts aren’t in this, tell me now.’

Arvida returned the gaze steadily, the ghost of a smile on his lips.

‘So I get to choose which missions I go on?’

‘I won’t force you to come on this one.’

Arvida shook his head.

‘That’s not how it works. You’ll go, and I’ll follow, as will the rest of the squad. You’ve convinced them, at any rate.’

‘They needed little convincing.’

‘There are other mysteries to solve, and I don’t see how coming here helps with those.’

Kalliston let a flicker of exasperation escape from the edges of his severe expression.

‘We have to start somewhere.’

‘I know. And, like I said, if you’re sure about this, then I’ll be with you. Just be sure.’

Kalliston looked back up at the vision in the realspace viewers. The planet had a deathly aura to it, one that would have been evident even to the most warp-blind of mortals. The gaps between the rivers of fire were a deep sable, like shafts opening out onto nothingness. Something vast and terrible had happened there, and the residues of it were still echoing.

‘I am sure, brother,’ he said, and his voice was firm. ‘We were preserved for a reason, and that gives us responsibilities. We’ll make planetfall on the night-side of the terminator.’

His dark eyes narrowed, scrutinising the close view of the planet’s hemisphere. It looked like he was trying to conjure up a vision of something long gone, something destroyed beyond recovery.

‘Less than six months since we were ordered to leave,’ he said, talking to himself now. ‘Throne, Prospero has changed.’

‘Menes Kalliston, captain, Fourth Fellowship, Thousand Sons.’

I remember that after a few moments, and the words come quickly to my parched lips. That is what one is meant to say, I believe – name, rank and serial number.

Perhaps I should resist saying more, though I feel strangely reluctant to stay silent. They may have injected loquazine into my bloodstream, but I doubt it. I see no reason not to talk for a while. After all, I have no idea why I’m here, or what’s going on, or how long I will be alive.

‘What are you doing on Prospero?’ he asks.

‘I could ask you the same thing.’

‘You could. And I could kill you.’

I think he wants to kill me. There’s something in the voice, some timbre of eagerness, that gives it away. He’s holding himself back. He’s a Space Marine, I guess. There’s very little else like that voice, rolling up from those enhanced lungs and that muscle-slabbed gullet and that great barrel chest like water from a deep mill.

We are brothers then, of a sort.

‘What do you know of the destruction of this planet?’ he asks.

His voice hasn’t been raised yet. He speaks carefully, keeping the tide of violence in check. It would not take much to break that dam.

‘We were ordered to leave orbit six months ago,’ I say. The truth seems the best policy, at least for now. ‘Some questioned it, but I did not. I never doubted the orders of my primarch. It was only later, when we could not make contact, that we realised something was wrong.’

‘How much later?’

‘Weeks. We’d been in the warp.’

‘Why did you not come back at once?’

Ah, yes. I have asked myself that many times. As the questions come, I remember more of myself. I still cannot recall what led me to this place, though. The blank is complete, like a steel mask over the past. There is an art to making such a mask, and it is not easy to master. I realise the calibre of those who have me captive.

‘I wanted to. Others did not. We made enquiries through astropaths, but our battle-codes were rejected whenever we made contact. Soon after that, our ships were attacked. By you, I presume, or those in league with you.’

Does my guess hit home? Am I nearing the truth? My interrogator gives no sign. He gives nothing away but the smell of blood and the hot, repeated breathing in the dark.

‘Did many of you survive?’

‘I don’t know. Dispersal was the only option.’

‘So your ship came here alone.’

‘Yes.’

Should I be more evasive? I really don’t know. I have no strategy, no objective. None of the information I give him seems important. Perhaps it would do, if I could remember more of the circumstances of my capture.

My mind-sight remains dark. To be confined to the five senses of my birth has become crippling. I realise then that the withdrawal will only get worse. I don’t know whether it’s permanent, or some feature of the chamber I’m in, or a temporary injury. As an Athanaean, I have become used to picking up the mental images of others shimmering beyond their faces, like a candle flickering behind a cotton sheet.

I’m handling its removal badly. It’s making me want to talk, to find some way of filling the gap. And, in any case, I don’t need psychic senses to detect the extremity of my interrogator. He’s cradling some enormous capacity for rage, for physical violence, and it’s barely in check. This is either something I can use, or it places me in terrible danger.

‘Even so, it took you a long time to come back,’ he remarks.

‘Warp storms held us. They were impenetrable for months.’

My interrogator laughs then, a horrifying sound like throat-cords being pulled apart.

‘They were. Surely you know what caused them.’

I sense him leaning forwards. I can see nothing, but the breathing comes closer. I have a mental image of a long, tooth-filled mouth, with a black tongue lolling out, and have no idea how accurate it is.

‘You were either blessed, or cursed, that you made it through,’ he says, and I feel the joy he takes in the control of my fate. ‘I have yet to determine which it will be, but we will come to that soon.’

There were no Stormbirds left in the hold, and the Geometric had never carried Thunderhawks, so the descent had to be in a bulk lander. The destroyer’s crew had been whittled down to a bare skeleton – a couple of hundred mortals, some still in Spireguard livery. In times past they would have looked up at their Legiones Astartes masters in awe as they worked to prepare the lander, but the events of the last few months had shaken that hold. They had seen the ruin of Prospero for themselves, and it had crushed what spirit remained in them.

Many, perhaps, had had family still on the planet when destruction came. Those connections, Kalliston knew, were important to mortals. He himself couldn’t remember what it was like to find such things significant, but he felt the loss in other ways.

After launch, the lander fell through the thickening atmosphere clumsily, responding to the pilot’s controls like an overenthusiastic steed. The control column had been designed for smaller hands than a Space Marine’s, and the atmosphere was still clogged with clouds of ash, blown across the charred terrain below by the angry remnants of continent-wide storms.

The lander made planetfall hard, jarring the crew against their restraint-cages as the retro-burners struggled against the inertia of the plummet. None of the squad members spoke. The cages slammed up, freeing them to take up their weapons. Kalliston, Arvida and the other battle-brothers in the load-bay mag-locked bolters and powerblades smoothly before the rear doors wheezed open.

The air of Prospero sighed into the load-bay. Kalliston could taste the afterglow of the furnace through his helm’s rebreather. The atmosphere was still warm, still bitter with floating motes of ruin.

Night had fallen. The sky was the dark red of an old scab, broken with patches of messy shadow where the smog clouds raced. Ruined buildings broke the horizon in all directions, skeletons of libraries and treasure houses, armouries and research stations. There was no sound save the winding down of the lander’s twin engines and the enervated brush of the hot wind.

Kalliston walked down the ramp first. His boot crunched as he came off the end of it. He looked down. The earth of Prospero glistened. A carpet of glass fragments lay there, as deep and smooth as a dusting of snow.

Everything was glass, once. The pyramids, the libraries, the galleries. Now, it is our dust.

‘Sweep pattern,’ he ordered over the vox. ‘Ranged weapons. Rendezvous point Aleph.’

The remaining Space Marines spread out slowly from the embarkation point. The two who’d piloted the ship during the descent remained to guard it, stationed at the end of the ramp under the shelter of the rear fuselage. The seven others lowered bolters and walked as stealthily as they could across the glittering glass-dust. They organised themselves into a rough semicircle, each brother heading for a different point in the line of buildings ahead. They stayed within a hundred metres of one another, opening out into a wide net. Steadily, they began to sweep through the devastated streets ahead.

Kalliston blink-clicked a rune to enhance his night vision lens-feed. The terrain around him shimmered into false colour contours. There were no target runes, no life signs, no proximity warnings. The sterile bones of the shattered buildings loomed up towards him from the heat-hazed dark.

There was no chatter over the comm. The battle-brothers went reverently. They were treading on the tombs of their home world.

Kalliston raised his head fractionally, watching as a tall spur of metal emerged from the dark. It was over a hundred metres tall, but as thin as a burned-out tree trunk. It had once supported a much bigger construction, but now tottered alone, a rare survivor of the firestorms that had raged through Tizca.

The City of Light. The home of our people.

‘Are you getting anything, brother-captain?’ came Arvida’s voice over a private channel.

Arvida had moved slightly ahead of the others, and his route had taken him out of formation. On another mission, Kalliston might have rebuked him for that.

‘Negative,’ replied Kalliston, keeping any emotion out of his voice. He could sense Arvida’s scepticism even from a hundred metres distant. Back on Prospero, Kalliston’s mind-scrying abilities had returned to their peak, and the moods of his squad were transparent to him.

‘There may be nothing left to get,’ said Arvida.

‘It’s possible.’

‘So how long are we going to look?’

‘I’ll determine that. Reserve your energies for the hunt, brother.’

Kalliston cut the comm-link.

The squad pressed on, passing deeper into the shattered city. Darkness clung to the bases of the ruined walls, squatting in the eaves of plasma-charred doorways that led nowhere.

Kalliston felt his boot crunch through something fragile, and looked down. A ribcage lay there, shattered by his heavy tread, as brittle and black as coal. It wasn’t big enough to be an adult’s.

He looked further up the street. Bones were strewn everywhere ahead, all of them human-sized.

Briefly, something flickered on his helm display. Kalliston was instantly alert, though the signal, a threat rune on the edge of his armour’s detector range, disappeared as soon as it had come.

‘Captain,’ voxed Phaeret, one of his squad members. ‘You’ll want to see this.’

Kalliston blink-clicked an acknowledgement. The threat rune didn’t make another appearance on his display. Possibly a false reading, or some malfunction in the long-range augurs in his armour.

Both those possibilities were unlikely. Kalliston kept his boltgun muzzle in firing position as he walked towards Phaeret’s location marker, and his senses remained alert. He was perfectly aware of the danger, and perfectly aware of the opportunity.

Something else was alive on Prospero.

‘So how did you feel, seeing the destruction of your home world?’

The question surprises me. What does it matter, what I feel about anything? If this is an interrogation by a member of the forces occupying the planet, I would have expected questions on the disposition of the remains of my Legion, on the lingering capabilities of the survivors – something, at least, about military matters.

But then, there is much that is strange about this interrogation. I have the overwhelming feeling that I am not just here for the information I can provide. No, this unseen questioner wants something else.

‘Uncomfortable,’ I reply. ‘But nothing more than that. We knew something of what to expect. My deputy is a seer, and he had made us aware of what had happened in its broadest outline.’

At the mention of Arvida, I wonder if he still lives. Perhaps he is being questioned in a cell like this too, or maybe he lies dead in the glass-dust of the city.

‘Uncomfortable?’ he repeats.

The word seems to irritate him, and the breathing becomes more erratic.

‘You were spineless,’ he says, and the voice is harsh and accusatory. ‘You come back here, like damned reclamators, picking through the rubble of what you let be destroyed. If this had been my world I’d never have left it. I’d have killed any invader who dared come close to it, and damned be my primarch’s orders. You were weak, Captain Kalliston. Weak.’

He insists on the term, spitting it out. I sense his body coming closer. He is looming in the dark now, just beyond the ends of my chair-arms. Exhalations brush against my face, hot and caustic, like the breath of a dog.

‘If we’d known–’ I begin, starting to defend myself. I don’t know why I feel the urge to do this. It doesn’t matter what the questioner thinks of me, for my own conscience is untroubled.

‘If you’d known!’ he roars, cutting short my half-hearted response. Droplets of spittle hit my face. For a moment I think he’s flown into a rage, but then I realise he’s laughing. ‘Listen to yourself, Thousand Son. You’ve always been so proud, strutting across worlds conquered by the prowess of other Legions, glorying in your superior understanding of what we uncovered for you. Not for you the dirty work of fighting with your hands. Oh, no. There were always other fighters to do that for you, to take on the danger at close quarters, freeing you up to spend those hours in your libraries. Did you ever guess how much we all held you in contempt?’

‘We knew well enough,’ I say.

It’s perfectly true – we knew just how much our brothers mistrusted us, and as a result worked hard not to provoke them. He’s entirely wrong that we gloried in our superior understanding. Instead, we hid it, tried to show it as little as possible. Those instincts, as it turns out, may well have been mistaken.

‘You knew? You could have fought like warriors, rather than drift into witchery. You had choices. I don’t understand you.’

Did we have choices? Prospero was a world soaked in the psychic possibility of the Great Ocean. We were all touched by it, for better or worse. I don’t think we could have turned down the opportunities that gave us, even though we knew it made the other Legions uneasy.

Ultimately, though, the question is pointless. We did what we did, and no power in the universe has ever been able to undo the past.

‘We fought,’ I reply, remembering the conquest of Shrike, when Magnus himself had led us in war. He’d been magnificent, unstoppable, just as much as Russ or Lorgar, every bit the vision of the Emperor’s most favoured son. ‘We played our part.’

‘No longer,’ comes the riposte, savage with satisfaction. ‘Your part is over. Your pyramids are destroyed, and your bastard primarch’s back broken.’

He hates us. The hatred has not diminished with the humbling of my Legion. That may be why he brought me here. To gloat. My mind-sight is beginning to return, and I sense enormous frustration boiling within him. He has been left behind while others have departed for further conquest. This is one source of his anger. Soon, he will vent it on me.

But I cannot believe that is the only motivation. I am aware still how little I know. Why was Prospero destroyed? What, exactly, brought that doom upon us? The ignorance of that is more torture than anything this interrogator has planned for me. To die without uncovering those truths would be the most shameful way to go, and one that would vindicate Arvida’s doubts about coming back.

Can I use the instability in my questioner to my advantage? Would he let slip secrets if I goaded him? A dangerous course of action – his cooped-up rage is like that of a beast, wild and indiscriminate. But then, there is little for me to lose. My Legion is scattered, my primarch missing, my home world blasted into a ball of lifeless slag. I would like some answers before he loses control of the furnace within him and ends this conversation for good.

‘Magnus is not dead,’ I say. ‘I would know if he’d died. It was in the hope of finding him that we came back here. You, though, seem to know everything about us and what happened to our planet. You hint at more, things that I can only guess at. Since you know so much, and I know so little, should it not be me asking the questions?’

In the near-complete dark, I make out only the sharpest flash of dirty grey. A gauntlet plunges out of the shadow and grabs my neck. The fingers squeeze painfully, just below the chin and just above the metal band that holds my head in place.

‘You are prey for me, traitor,’ comes the bloody rumble of a voice. ‘Nothing more than that. Forget it, and I will end you with agony.’

The threat means little. As I struggle to breathe, though, I realise something else. My ether-drawn powers are returning. They are weak, to be sure, but they are creeping back to me in drabs. Perhaps he knows this, perhaps he doesn’t. In any case, I have a glimmer of a chance now. The longer this thing lasts, the stronger I will become. Maybe, just maybe, strong enough to break these bonds.

The Ungifted Warriors have always underestimated what can be done with the mind, no doubt because we gifted have always been reluctant to use our skills unless pressed by necessity.

He releases his fist, and I gulp in draughts of blood-tanged air. He withdraws, though I can still feel him seething. He keeps his anger on an uncertain leash, as if it were a ravening predator continually tugging at its inadequate restraint.

‘How many were in your squad?’ he asks, recovering his poise with difficulty.

That’s good. I hope he has many such questions. I will answer them all fully, all the while letting my control over the ether return.

‘Nine,’ I say, and though my speech is grudging and surly, in my mind there already kindles an eager anticipation for what is to come. ‘There were nine of us.’

By the time Kalliston arrived, Phaeret was crouched down before the base of a pillar. The shaft was broken off about two metres up and rubble littered the surroundings. There were more ruined remnants of other buildings ahead, some no more than swaying spurs hanging over the curves of blast craters.

‘What is it?’ Kalliston asked, coming down to the same level.

Phaeret gestured towards the ground, saying nothing.

There was a gauntlet lying amid the blasted stone. Kalliston picked it up, turning it over to make the most of the light. It was gunmetal-grey and ready to fall into pieces. The construction was Legiones Astartes power armour – no mortal would have been able to wear such gear. Two of the fingers were missing, and the hollow stumps were black from burning. On the back of it, where the main ceramite plate guarded the warrior’s fist, a rune had been inscribed. There was nothing clumsy about it. Even Kalliston, who was by no means an expert on artificer tech, could see the careful workmanship.

‘And which of our brothers makes use of the runes?’ he asked, speaking to himself.

His mind went back to the assault on Shrike, the name his Legion had given to Ark Reach Secundus. It was there that Magnus and Russ had first clashed over the preservation of the avenians’ libraries. That had been a terrible day. Kalliston had been there when the Wolf King had stormed across the causeway with terrible violence in his eyes, and it had seemed as if Space Marine would fight Space Marine. He remembered the sheer majesty of the Wolves of Fenris, the terrifying potency locked into their single-minded frames. True, they had been stopped by sorcery for a time, but the barrier would have broken eventually. They would have kept on coming, heedless of the casualties, spinning into contact like a shell loosed from a gun barrel.

Remorseless. The power that, once loosed, can never be called back.

‘This is their work,’ said Phaeret, and his young voice was savage with emotion. ‘The Wolves of Fenris.’

Kalliston stood, his eyes still locked on the gauntlet.

They had always been the primary suspects. The bad blood between Magnus and Russ was well known, as was the capability of the Wolves for sudden and unpredictable brutality. The trial at Nikaea had been at the instigation of Russ, so it was rumoured. The Wolf King’s hatred of sorcery had given him the pretext, and it seemed that he had acted on his intolerance at last.

But how had such a thing been dared? Had Russ gone rogue, finally giving in to the barbarism that burned in his feral soul? Or had this thing been sanctioned by a higher power?

The more Kalliston gazed at the gauntlet, letting his eyes run over the single rune etched into the ceramite glove, the more questions clamoured at him. It was one thing knowing the perpetrator of an act, quite another to understand his reasons.

‘Captain,’ voxed Arvida, breaking into Kalliston’s train of thought. ‘Evidence. There are traces of Space–’

‘I know it,’ said Kalliston, a dead weariness hanging on the words. ‘Russ’ dogs.’

‘Armour fragments,’ confirmed Arvida. ‘And they’ve carved things in the walls. Some of them are... obscene.’

Kalliston felt a stab of anger then. They were brutes, the Wolves, as shallow and thuggish as greenskins. He’d never understood what place they’d had in the Great Crusade, other than to ruin the reputation of enlightened humanity and stain the achievements of Unification. Only Angron’s berserkers were worse, and at least they’d been taken under the wing of the Warmaster. There had been no such wise, restraining hand to keep the Wolves of Fenris within civilised parameters, and it looked like they’d finally lost any semblance of control.

‘We’re getting more signs, the further we go,’ replied Kalliston, speaking to the whole squad over the mission channel. ‘Head to the Pyramid of Photep, where we’ll regroup.’

Phaeret started to move off immediately, but Arvida maintained the comm-link.

‘There may still be Wolves on the planet,’ he warned. ‘Is this zone clear of targets?’

‘I read nothing,’ replied Kalliston, giving away his irritation. Arvida was only doing his job, but something about the sergeant’s drip-feed of scepticism was getting under his skin. ‘Move to heading–’

Even as he spoke, Phaeret’s head and shoulders disappeared in a cloud of whirling armour, bone and blood. The booming report of heavy weapons echoed down the street, followed by the sharp clatter of bolter fire.

Kalliston threw himself behind the pillar, feeling the stone tremble as the reactive rounds thumped into it and blasted the stone open. He scrambled backward, away from the firestorm and into the lee of a more solid wall-section. As he went, more shells impacted around him, throwing up glittering waves of glass.

There were cries of alarm over the comm, and a thin recording of bolter fire. His squad were all coming under attack. Two more life-sign runes dropped out of his helm display.

Throne, where are they coming from?

‘Heavy incoming!’ reported Orphide, two hundred metres away. ‘Getting multiple–’

Then his signal wavered and died, leaving static on the channel.

‘Lock on to my position!’ ordered Kalliston, whirling round, trying to make the best sense of the terrain around him. There were plenty of cover-points in the ruined cityscape, but nothing much that would stand up to concerted assault. ‘Fall back to this location. Repeat, fall back to this location.’

He risked a look through a gap in the wall, keeping his helm as low as possible. There were still no target runes on his helm display, but auspexes could be jammed.

Two hundred metres distant, at the far end of the desolate street, he saw movement for the first time. Something pale grey flitted between cover, head low, moving fast. The profile was unmistakable – Space Marine power armour. Kalliston saw no others, but knew there’d be more out there. He checked the magazine was locked in place and that the ammo counter read full. His hearts had begun to beat in that steady, deep rhythm that always preceded action. He felt the familiar prickle across his skin as stimms entered his bloodstream and primed the muscle-nerve interfaces of his carapace.

‘This is my world, dogs,’ he snarled, his voice eager. ‘So you’re going to have to fight me for it.’

‘Nine of you,’ he says. ‘Nine fools. You seem to have had few plans, other than to sniff around in the ruins and look for scraps. Did it never occur to you that the destroyers of Prospero would leave troops behind?’

‘Of course it did.’

‘And you still came.’

I briefly ponder whether to try my luck again. I can make him angry so easily, but there is the question of timing. For the moment, I restrain myself.

‘Yes. Our position was in any case bleak. We were alone, separated from what remained of our fleet. In such a position of ignorance, we were vulnerable. I decided to seek survivors on Prospero, perhaps the primarch himself. We knew that there were unlikely to be any, but there were other reasons to – as you say – sniff around in the ruins.’

There was a minuscule pause then, a slight catch in the otherwise metronomic regularity of the breathing.

‘Other reasons?’

I decide to keep talking, to stick to the truth. This interrogation will be coming to an end soon in any case.

‘Prospero was the greatest seat of learning in all the worlds of men,’ I say, and make no effort to keep the pride out of my voice. ‘There were libraries here that were the envy even of the ancient races. There were secrets in our vaults, secrets that even we hadn’t fully had the time to unlock properly. While you were sailing across the sea of stars, plundering and maiming, we were learning.’

As I speak, I recall using much the same words to persuade Arvida of the wisdom of returning home. He’d listened just as intently as my questioner did now.

‘You speak of witchery,’ I say. I dare a little more. ‘You know nothing of it. There are subtleties to the Great Ocean that only we understood. We could peer into the very stuff of the warp and make sense of the patterns there. We saw glimpses of the future, of possibilities more magnificent than there are words to describe.’

I begin to enthuse myself. I remember the devices that we used for learning, for discovery, for healing – the enormous potential that they had. We were like children, stepping into a dimension of wonder, our eyes glistening from the reflected glory.

‘I thought that, if some of those things survived, then we could retrieve them. If the fates determined that we were to be cast adrift, we could at least make some use of the tools that we’d accumulated.’

‘Did you find any?’

He is still eager, hungry for information now. The scorn has left his voice, replaced by something like need. Perhaps he has no idea how transparent he is. Odd, that he should be so brittle. I’d always imagined the Wolves being more sure of themselves.

‘No,’ I say, deflating his hopes as bluntly as I can. ‘We had no time. And, in any case, I doubt anything could have survived the mess you made of this place. You have destroyed everything. If I’d known it was you behind this carnage, I’d have expected nothing less. You are butchers and psychopaths, sadists and morons, the lowest of the–’

I know what I’m doing. His psychology is increasingly open to me. I raise his hopes, then dash them. I sense the fragility of his mind, and strike where I know the pain will be greatest.

I only stop speaking as the fist crashes into my jaw. Even inured as I am to physical shock, it staggers me. He moves fast; far faster than I could have done. I feel bone breaking, my jawline fragmenting, and my head jarring back against the metal of the chair. Pain flares up, hot and bright behind my eyes. Then a secondary bloom of agony, rolling across my face.

‘You know nothing of us!’ he roars, and the voice is instantly unhinged with rage.

Groggily, I realise I have unleashed something of incredible magnitude, and my stomach tightens.

He strikes me again, using his other fist, and my head bounces painfully from its bonds. What little vision I had disappears, to be replaced by a red-black, blotchy haze. Something else – a boot? – thuds into my exposed midriff, cracking my fused ribs and driving the plates in.

‘Nothing!’ he bellows, and a whole curtain of saliva slaps across my ruined cheeks. He is screaming into my face.

I can summon nothing against this. I have moved too soon, and he will surely kill me. More hammer blows impact, breaking my skin, tearing my muscles, shivering the bone beneath. My head rocks on my neck like a top, cracked back and forth by the casual, deadly fists. If it were not for my restraints keeping me in check, my neck would be severed clean by now.

Then he stops. Merciful Throne, he stops.

I hear him raging still, incoherent with mania. He paces back and forth, trying to rein in whatever dark forces I have unleashed. I gasp for breath, feeling my punctured lungs labour. My head feels swollen with blood. The world reels around me, thick and dizzy with pain.

His breathing is like an animal’s, ragged and laced with moisture. For a long time, he doesn’t speak. I don’t think he can. It takes time for the rage to subside.

‘You know nothing of us,’ he growls again, and the voice has resumed its terrifying, purring threat.

I cannot respond. My own lips are puffy and cracked, and I feel my blood clotting in hard nodes within my wounds.

‘So certain,’ he spits, and I feel a slug of oily phlegm hit my body. ‘You’re so damned certain. And yet, as it turns out, you know even less than you think.’

He comes close again, and I smell his sour aroma. That odour gives much away. There is a bestial quality to it, like the sodden flank of an old hunting dog, but there’s something else. Chemical, perhaps.

‘You still don’t know why I brought you here,’ he says. His contempt is needle-keen. ‘Time to shed some light.’

As he says it, wall-mounted lumens flare into life. The sudden exposure only adds more pain to the riot of it in my head, and my bruised eyes screw shut. It takes time for them to open again, gingerly, the lids trembling under flakes of dried blood.

For the first time, I can see my questioner. As I look into his face, blurry and floating amid the harsh lights, I finally make out some detail, some identity.

It is then that I realise, just as he said I would, that I know nothing at all.

Revuel Arvida ran fast, keeping his head low, watching where his boots fell carefully. He reached his destination, a tall column of semi-melted metal on the corner of what had once been an intersection between two transit corridors.

He slid down against the broken column and risked a look round the corner. The body of Orphide lay in the middle of the open street. On either side of him, the hollow carcasses of buildings stretched away down the long avenue. There was no visible movement.

He glanced at the proximity readings on his helm display. No enemy signals, and three of his battle-brothers dead. Three other active signals were converging on Kalliston’s location, a few hundred metres distant. Arvida was furthest away, out of position and isolated.

The city was whisper-quiet, but Arvida’s aural amplifiers picked up a faint shuffling from a long way down the street. Something was moving towards him, sheltered by the drifting smog and the urban ruins.

He crouched down with his back against the metal. Arvida was Corvidae, a master of the shifting patterns of the future. Back on his home world and surrounded by its familiar resonance, he felt particularly powerful. He allowed his consciousness to rise quickly through the enumerations.

He saw paths stretching away from him, overlaid onto the pattern of the streets around him. There were many clear possibilities, each running amid the others like a herd of panicked, stampeding prey. Some routes were obscured, but many were clear. He saw the approach of his enemy, their movements and their tactics. They had encircled Kalliston’s position. There were dozens of them.

‘Brother-captain,’ he voxed. ‘Advise retreat to the lander. There’s too ma–’

Arvida broke off, sensing footfalls closing rapidly. The footfalls hadn’t happened yet, but they would soon. His future-sense was shadowing the world around him, exposing the immediate course of events in a ghostly superimposition on the present.

He got to his feet and retreated back the way he’d come. He went quickly, keeping his bolter held ready at chest height.

There was no reply from Kalliston over the comm. Jammed, perhaps. The enemy seemed to know all their weaknesses. How long had they lain in wait, planning for this?

He reached the end of another shattered avenue. Four roads met there, and a blackened statue of Qeras the Episteme still stood at the intersection. The charred eyes gazed east, though lines of oil ran down the stone.

Arvida saw the incoming future-trails of the enemy like hololiths, and acted accordingly. They were moving to intercept him. Several had come down the street where Orphide lay. Two others had tracked back across a block and were heading towards his current position, closing fast.

Arvida shrank back into the shadow of the statue, waiting for them to come into view. They arrived in moments, only just behind their future-trails, hunting eagerly as if they knew their own doppelgangers were almost within blade range.

Arvida let them pass him, then whirled round and out of cover. He took aim quickly, loosing two shots from his bolter. They were locked at the heads of the enemy, one for each. The first shell impacted perfectly, exploding as it snapped into the back of a pale, bloodstained helm. The target rocked, stumbled forwards, and smashed heavily to the ground. A flurry of glass shards flew up as he crashed earthwards.

But precognition was never perfect. The second shell grazed the other Space Marine’s armour, knocking him off balance but failing to drop him. The warrior regained his poise almost instantly, falling low and twisting round. A brace of white-hot plasma bolts flew directly at Arvida.

By then, the Corvidae had already moved, darting back into the protection of the statue as the energy-pulses hammered into the stone. It broke open on the second impact, cracking from head to foot and toppling into pieces. Arvida burst left from the tumbling remnants, squeezing off another controlled salvo from his bolter.

His enemy hadn’t stood waiting to be hit, but had closed in for the kill. He had a chainaxe in his left hand, buzzing like a furious swarm of insects. His movements were powerful and fast, aimed perfectly and backed up with crushing force. The chainaxe whirred in close, going for the chest then suddenly banking up towards Arvida’s neck.

Without precognition, he’d have been dead. His adversary was stronger, quicker and had the momentum behind him. But when the blades whistled into position, Arvida had already moved, weaving away from the preordained pattern of the cutting edges. Shifting his weight expertly in the wake of the axe-head, he pivoted out of contact and fired three rounds into his enemy’s face at point-blank range. They detonated immediately, throwing both of them apart with the crack of the explosion.

Arvida checked his fall, springing back up, and prepared to fire again. He didn’t need to. His enemy’s face was ruined, a hollow shell of blood, armour chips and skull fragments.

For a moment, Arvida stood over the defeated warriors, feeling his pulse throb in his veins. It was the first time he’d got close to those who’d hunted his squad through the ruins.

As he looked at the livery on the shoulder guards, his satisfaction at the kill was replaced by shock.

Then there were more sounds of pursuit, echoing in his future-sense like the memory of a dream. Other warriors were closing fast.

Arvida broke into a run, heading into cover past overhanging building-remnants and loping quickly towards the lander coordinates. There was no way he could fight to Kalliston’s position alone, and he’d help no one by getting pointlessly killed. The only option was to gain the ship, take off and attempt an airlift recovery.

It was as he went, darting between shadows like a ghoul, that he tried to make sense of his attackers’ identity.

But it made no sense. No sense whatsoever.

My questioner’s armour, which I had thought was grey in the near-total dark, is a dirty white. The shoulder guards were once a bright blue, though every exposed surface on his battleplate is covered by a translucent layer of brown-red filth.

So he is a War Hound. Or, as I believe they’ve started calling themselves, a World Eater. The assumed name is ludicrous, a perversion of everything the Legiones Astartes used to stand for. However, to the extent that I understand the ways of other Legions, it is perfectly accurate. They do devour planets. I have heard tales of outrages under Angron’s insane tutelage that make my stomach turn. The only Legion with a comparable reputation is the Wolves, so perhaps it’s not surprising that I found it so easy to believe I was held by one of Russ’ dogs.

In the dark, I had imagined my interrogator being something akin to a beast, slavering on the edge of madness. The reality is only a little less disconcerting. The World Eater’s head is uncovered, exposing the full distortion of his features. His flesh is bronzed and supple, though there are deep wells of shadow under his low brow. He has long cheekbones and a blunt, slabbed chin. His head is shaved bare, the scalp puckered with scars. There are regular marks on his temples and a series of iron studs further up on the smooth skin. In another Legion, those studs might have indicated long service, but I know their purpose on him. As with all his kind, there are implants under the flesh, implants long forbidden by the Emperor. The prohibition is for good reason. They accelerate the rage and stoke it, amplifying an already testosterone-charged kill-factory into a bringer of truly ludicrous levels of violence.

And there is something else. The Space Marine before me is no ordinary World Eater, if such a thing could even be said to exist. A few select members of that terror Legion have carved a name for themselves outside their closed, brooding brotherhood. This is one of them. I know, without needing to use my fractured mind-sight, that I am in the presence of Khârn, captain of the Eighth Assault Company and equerry to the primarch. If I needed any confirmation that my death is close, I have it now.

He stares at me. His eyes are the yellow of curdled milk, rimmed with red where the lids are pulled back. Veins pulse at his temples, bulging darkly against taut skin. He has a line of drool still, glistening against his chin. If I ever wish to conjure up the image of a psychopath again, I will have this picture to bring to mind. Khârn is almost a parody of himself, the apotheosis of martial insanity, a walking furnace of unfettered bloodlust.

He was not always like this. Even in the stories I have heard, he was ferocious but not mad. Something has happened to change him. Something terrible.

‘Why have you brought me here?’ I ask.

Khârn smiles, but there is no mirth there. It is as if his facial muscles pull naturally into a leer unless continually suppressed.

‘I am here for the same reason as you,’ he says. ‘Hunting through the wreckage, looking for something to salvage.’

Even in my weakened state, that image brings a choking, bitter laugh to my lips. I cannot imagine World Eaters salvaging anything. They are the soul of destruction and nothing else.

‘And did you find what you were looking for?’

Khârn nods.

‘There is a cavern, far below the surface of Tizca. You will know of it – the Reflecting Cave. We speculated that the Wolves might have missed it, despite their reputation for thoroughness. There was something down there I was ordered to retrieve.’

He withdraws an iron pendant from his armour. It is fashioned into the shape of a wolf’s head howling against a crescent moon. The metal is black, as if placed in a fire for too long.

‘The Moon Wolf,’ says Khârn. ‘Your primarch used it to make contact with Horus. It was a part of the Warmaster’s armour once, and so has a sympathetic connection with him.’

He speaks as if those words should mean something to me, though I struggle to see the significance of them.

‘It could be used again, and Horus has no wish to be reached for further discussions. It will be destroyed, and another potential chink in our defences will be closed off. Then, thank the gods, I shall be free to undertake more fulfilling work for the cause.’

‘I do not understand,’ I say, and the passing reference to gods makes me uneasy. ‘What has Horus to do with this? What has happened here?’

Khârn doesn’t smile this time, but I can sense a vicious amusement cradling in him. I sense more than that, too. He is burning with agony, an agony that can only be discharged by murder. The Moon Wolf was not the only reason he came to Prospero.

‘You really know nothing,’ he says. ‘I had planned to torture you for your secrets, but I see that you have none. So I shall torture you another way.’

He leans forwards, and I recoil at the raw-meat stench of his breath.

‘Listen to me, son of the Cyclops, and I will tell you a story. I will tell you of the great movement that is taking place across the galaxy. I will tell you of the ruin of all your primarch’s hopes and the final triumph of the virtuous strong over the craven weak. And then, before I kill you, I will tell you of the final destination of this crusade, the crusade men are already beginning, in their infinite ignorance, to call the Heresy.’

The volume of fire was deafening. Bolter rounds exploded into the surrounding walls, shredding them into dust. Heavier weapons were being brought to bear, too. A missile screamed overhead, crashing into a stone balustrade less than five metres from Kalliston’s position.

The Thousand Sons captain was hunkered down in an old blast crater somewhere deep in the centre of the city. Two of his squad were with him, crouched against the lip of the torn-up earth, their shoulders juddering as they loosed streams of shells into the night. The quantity of incoming fire was far greater than anything they could match, and the warm night air was streaked with tracer rounds heading in their direction. A fourth body lay, immobile, at the bottom of the crater.

‘Prepare to fall back,’ announced Kalliston, watching his magazine empty. He was running out of choices. It was difficult to make out numbers in the dark and at such range, but there must have been more than thirty Space Marines closing in on them. Those numbers made holding ground impossible.

‘Where to, brother-captain?’ asked Leot, one of the two surviving Thousand Sons. There was no fear in his deliberate voice, but there was an undertone of reproach. He knew how slim the options were.

‘To the lander,’ replied Kalliston, ejecting the magazine and slamming home a replacement. ‘But not direct. We’ll break back towards the colonnade, and then cut round.’

He gauged the likely location of the closest enemy targets by the pattern of fire, threw himself onto the edge of the crater and let fly with a controlled salvo before dropping back again. As he landed out of harm’s way, the thick crust of earth, glass and rubble exploded in a plume of fire. Then there were more bolt impacts, and the second whine of a missile launch.

‘Now,’ Kalliston ordered, beckoning his men to go ahead while he covered the retreat.

The two Space Marines fell back quickly, keeping in the lee of the crater shadow and moving to the far side of the bowl. As they reached the ridge, they broke out quickly. Kalliston stood up, releasing a final burst before racing to join them. He ran quickly up the uneven slope, feeling the thud of the incoming shells as they landed only metres short.

Then he was out, back onto the street level, running behind his battle-brothers, searching out fresh cover.

Too late, Kalliston realised that there were more attackers closing in from the very point they were heading towards.

‘Incom–’ he started, seeing the missile contrail at the last moment.

The shoulder-launched missile slammed into the ground just ahead of him, throwing him into a roaring confusion of pain and tumbling movement. Kalliston felt several further heavy impacts, including one that exploded against his chest. His body cartwheeled through the air, buffeted by the backwash of the multiple blasts, before slamming into something unyielding. His spine compressed agonisingly, and he felt the bones of his right leg fracture. His vision went cloudy, and the world reeled around him in a blur of lurid colour.

Dimly, he heard treads rushing towards him in the dust, and the ragged bark of bolter fire. A muzzle was pressed against his temple, clinking sharply against the smooth curve of his helm.

‘No,’ came a voice from close by, bestial in character and alive with a barely suppressed pleasure in the kill. ‘Alive.’

Then agony surged through Kalliston’s body, forking through his frame like storm-lightning. There was a numb falling away. Then there was nothing.

I had always considered it a gift to be able to peer inside the veils of a man’s mind. I had always valued my ability to tell whether my interlocutor was lying or telling the truth, just as an ungifted mortal might make imperfect use of pulse rates, sweating, or evasive gazes. Such a capability seemed to me one of the most precious of possessions, just one more piece of evidence for the ineluctable progress of mankind towards mortal godhood.

Now I recognise the price for such perspicuity. I cannot doubt the things I have been told. I cannot reassure myself that Khârn is concealing the truth from me, because his mind is like a translucent vial and there is no concealment possible.

So I must believe. I must believe what he says about the ruin of the Great Crusade and the turning of the primarchs to darkness, and the gathering storm that even now extends its pinions towards Terra. I must believe that my gene-father, whom I had revered along with the rest of my brothers, was guilty of the most terrible miscalculation, and has passed beyond the confines of the physical universe with the remnants of our Legion. I must believe that my survival is a pointless thing, a piece of unresolved business from a war that I have been denied any meaningful part in.

As he speaks, my recovery accelerates, and my ability to make use of my powers returns more quickly. My body embarks on the astonishing process of repair that it has been able to conduct ever since the implant of my enhanced organs. I am preparing to extend my life again, to resist whatever fresh assault comes my way.

That is what I have been turned into, a vehicle for survival. Even in the face of such overwhelming trauma, my blood still clots, my sinews pull back into shape and my bones repair the cracks in their structure. By telling me these things, in such agonising detail, he has given me the space to become myself again. I have weapons. I have the ability to hurt him, perhaps even the ability to kill him. Does he know this? Is my degradation so complete that he no longer sees me as any kind of threat?

He may be right. My spirit, my certainty is gone. The actions of Magnus are either incomprehensible or evil. In either case, I cannot focus my thoughts on anything but the betrayal.

Why did he send us away? He must have known we’d seek to return, or that the vengeful forces that destroyed this world would come after us in the void. He was the mightiest of us all, the magus, the one who saw the snaking paths of the Ocean most clearly of all. So I cannot put it down to simple omission. There are patterns here to be read. There are always patterns.

‘So, Thousand Son,’ asks my tormentor. ‘What do you make of that?’

He delights in my misery. It draws his attention from his own discontent. It is a cliché as old as the universe, the bully inflicting pain in order to send it away from himself.

It won’t work. The pain will catch up with him in the end, even if he has to kill every other sentient life form in the galaxy first.

‘You allied yourself with the traitor,’ I say, and I hear the hollow ring to my words.

‘You call him traitor. History will call him redeemer.’

‘And you tell me the Wolves of Fenris did this to punish our treachery. Then why do you hunt us?’

‘They came for you because they believed you had turned. We come for you because we know that you didn’t. Not truly. Not reliably. Our cause demands commitment.’

‘So you never did believe in Unification? It was always a sham for you?’

Khârn grimaces. He is like a child, and his emotions play across his face nakedly. My mind-sight is overkill here – the rawest practicus could read him now.

‘We believed in it completely,’ he growls, and the raw emotion rises to just below the surface. ‘None believed in it more than we did. None laid their bodies on the line to the extent that we did.’

He comes closer. His eyes stare at me, glistening in the bright light.

‘We are fighters,’ he says. ‘We are made in the image of our primarch, just as you are made in the image of yours, and he has been betrayed and cast aside, even as the rule of the galaxy passes from the warriors to the slavemasters.’

I do not understand the reference to slavemasters, but it scarcely matters, for Khârn is no longer talking to me.

‘They will use us again to fight their battles while they remain in the audience, laughing. They are the audience, who watch as we come for them in their stalls. We will do to them what Angron should have done in Desh’ea. We will fulfil the potential within us.’

I see his pupils flicker, and can only guess at what scenes he is seeing. Like a prophet trapped in his own visions, Khârn is locked in a world of unreliable memory and paranoia. The damage done to his mind is heartbreaking. All that energy, all that raw potency, has been harnessed to an engine of lunacy.

Enough. It is time to show him how much I understand.

‘You didn’t come here for the Moon Wolf,’ I say, keeping my voice quiet. ‘You came here because you knew what devices once existed on Prospero. You hoped to find a cure.’

That halts him. He glares at me, and a fleck of spittle shines on his hanging lip like a jewel.

‘There is still time,’ I say, knowing the danger it places me in. I begin to wonder if this encounter was foreseen after all. ‘The devices have all been destroyed, but I can replicate their functions. I can heal your mind. I can remove the implants and give you back your sleep. I can take away the fire that drives you onwards, the fire that goads you to the acts you abhor. Even now, I know that a part of you still abhors what you have done.’

The spittle hangs, trembling, on his unmoving flesh.

‘I can help you, brother. I can heal your mind.’

He remains locked, frozen in indecision. If I had been Corvidae, I could have seen the paths of the future bisect within him, one going left, one going right. He is at the juncture now, what the ancients called crisis. He has the power to choose, to pull back or to plough on. I cannot intervene. The slightest nudge now will unleash the inferno, one that would toss me aside like dried brush in the hurricane.

I dare to believe in him for the space of a heartbeat. He looks at me, and I see the vindication of my guesses. He is lost in a universe of pain, one that is only temporarily forgotten in the action of killing. I know that my words have reached the sliver of his old self that still endures. I know he can hear me.

And so we remain, alone, locked away somewhere in the ruins of Prospero, a tiny mirror of the battle of wills taking place all across the galaxy.

And for that single heartbeat, I dare to believe.

‘Witch!’ he roars then, and the spittle flies from his lips. ‘You cannot heal this!’

Like a prey-beast springing away from the spear, he drags up a cry of tortured rage, shaking his head from side to side, flailing sweat from the bronze skin. He balls his massive fists, and I know they will come for me soon. His face contorts into a vice of bitter anguish, the expression that it will surely wear for millennia hence if I cannot stop him now.

He has chosen.

I cry aloud words of power, words I had forgotten existed until this moment. I am weak, crippled by the rigours of my captivity, but the lessons of my long conditioning are strong.

I am Athanaean, a master of the hidden ways of the mind, and there are more weapons in the galaxy than fists and blades.

My bonds shatter, freeing me to move. I rise from the chair, wreathed in the blazing light of the unbound ether, ignoring the protests of my broken limbs.

He comes at me then, the Eater of Worlds, and there is murder in his red-rimmed eyes. I have hurt him by exposing the source of his anguish, and I know then he will not stop until I lie dead and my blood paints every wall of this cell.

But we are on my world, the wellspring of my Legion’s ancient power, and the very dust of Tizca fuels my mastery of the warp. I am more powerful than he guesses.

He howls, this ruined abomination, as he thunders into strike range. I meet the challenge, and my conscience is clear.

I cannot cure him, so I will have to kill him.

Arvida arrived at the landing site just in time.

Just in time to see the corpses of the pilots being dragged across the ground, leaving furrows in the sharp-edged dust. Just in time to see the krak-charges being laid around the flanks of the lander. Just in time to hear the rasping laughter of victory from the berserkers who’d stormed the vehicle.

There were twenty-seven World Eaters clustered around the empty crew-bay. One of them lay in the dust, his armour punched open from bolter impacts. The only other casualties were the two Thousand Sons who’d been left to guard it. They hadn’t stood much of a chance.

Arvida ducked down, keeping hidden behind a tangled hedge of semi-melted girders thirty metres away. As he watched, the helms of his brothers were torn off. Their exposed faces were punched, over and over again. The heads lolled lifelessly, turning into raw lumps of gore and gristle under the pointless barrage. The World Eaters laughed some more, cheering as each fist hit home.

Arvida turned away. He felt angry enough, but not towards Angron’s warriors – they were just savages, and had long ago ceased to be capable of anything more than boneheaded thuggery. His real anger was directed towards Kalliston, the one who had led them here against his counsel. The captain had always had too much faith in the providence of fate. The very idea that Magnus might have been fallible, that the primarch’s leadership might have been badly misguided, was anathema to him. Clearly, it had been. They should have remained in space, searching for more survivors before heading into the emptiness of the void to recover. Prospero was nothing but a graveyard.

Even so, that left much to be explained. Arvida might have understood if there had been Wolves on Prospero, but World Eaters were another matter. Had the two Legions been acting in concert? Had all the other Legions turned against the Thousand Sons? If so, then why now? And for what reason?

The World Eaters began to strip the rest of the armour from their captives, and the desecration of their bodies began in earnest. Whoops and roars filled the otherwise tranquil air as they set to work.

Arvida glanced at his helm display. His squad were all gone, their life signs inactive. He was alone, facing an enemy he couldn’t hope to contest.

The safest course of action would be to retreat, to flee back through the silent streets and wait for something to turn up. He knew he would have to withdraw soon enough, but the senseless barbarism in front of him offended his highly developed sense of pride in the rules of war. His Legion had never broken them.

He rose from cover and drew his bolter up in a single, flowing movement. As he took aim, he saw the path of the shell that he would fire snaking into the future, and took some solace from the certainty of the kill. He squeezed the trigger, then turned and sprinted back into the shadows.

Arvida didn’t see the captain of the World Eaters collapse to the ground, his helm carved in two by the detonation of the bolt-round, but he heard it. Then he heard the roars of anger, and the thud of four dozen boots as the warband wheeled and charged towards the source of the shot.

He ran, keeping his head low, ducking and weaving through the thickets of blasted iron. The noise of the pursuit echoed in his ears, harsh and brutal. If they caught him, he’d be lucky to suffer a quick death.

Arvida upped the pace, pushing his body into a new burst of speed, barely noticing the skeletal buildings rush past in the night. He knew it had been reckless to fire that shot. Stupid, even.

But, and just for a moment, it had felt good.

His strength is breathtaking. It is as if every aspect of the Legiones Astartes has been stripped away in favour of that single facet. His fists move in blurs of speed, backed up by the prodigious power of his massive body. He has no weapon, but that scarcely seems to matter. He is used to carving up his foes with his hands.

He is always attacking, always looking for the way in. I parry as best I can, holding him back by attacking his only vulnerable part. I see his mind now as it will become in the future – a cauldron of seething, perpetual violence. The brief window I had on another Khârn has closed, and the corrupted half is all that remains. I can hammer away at that, flexing my psychic muscles as he flexes his unnaturally stimmed physical ones, though I fear my attacks have little bite.

He wades through warp-born attacks that would floor a lesser adversary. I know I must be hurting him, but he brushes it off. Perhaps there is no pain I could inflict that is greater than the one he inflicts on himself.

‘Witch!’ he roars again, coming at me in a barrelling, swaying charge.

I leap to the side, crashing against the metal walls of the cell, only evading his outstretched hands by finger-widths. I unleash everything I have then, a whirling torrent of memory-scorching agony capable of ripping the sanity from a man and dissolving it like magnesium in water.

But there is so little sanity to rip away, and he barely stumbles.

I make use of the gap I created, and throw a heavy punch at his exposed head. My fist connects. It is a well-aimed blow, and impacts with all the force I can deliver. His skull rocks back and blood joins the trails of saliva in the air.

Then I am moving again, evading the furious response. He is like a whirlwind, a morass of hurtling limbs. I feel a heavy thud as his boot rises, catching me on my hip. There is a jarring crack as my pelvis fractures.

I scramble away from him, sprawling face down to the floor. Another foot connects, breaking the femur in my trailing leg. Out of my armour, I have so little defence against attacks of this quantity and magnitude. The absurdity of my defiance is laughable.

I roll over onto my back, spinning away from a floor-breaking fist-plunge.

Khârn towers over me. Froth spills from his lips, and his eyes bulge from their swollen sockets.

It is my pity that has doomed me. Pity is the only emotion he can no longer tolerate, the one that reminds him of what he once was. If I had not offered to cure him, perhaps I would have lived. Perhaps he would have persuaded me of the righteousness of his cause, and I would have joined the movement that he says will liberate the galaxy.

It is that thought that persuades me I was right to try. As I gaze up into the mask of trembling fervour above me, I see what fate would have awaited me as a part of that dark crusade. He has lost himself, and what remains is now much less than human.

His clenched gauntlet swoops down, hitting me square in the face. The bones, already weakened, crunch inwards. I feel the back of my head drive a dent into the metal floor, and the hot stickiness of the blood in the well as it rebounds out again.

The world tilts, rocking on an axis of nausea. I only dimly feel the second blow, cracking into my ribs. My body becomes a chorus of pain, resounding in discordant polyphony.

Through blood-swelled eyes I see the fist coming that will finish me. It is fitting, to witness the cause of my own death. As a loyal son of the Imperium, I never wished for more than that.

I have time for only one more thought before the end comes.

I gave you the choice, Khârn. When the murder and madness are over, you will have the leisure to reflect on that. You could have turned back.

That knowledge, I know, will haunt him. I dread to think what he will become when his rampage ends and he is forced to confront that.

I can guess. I guess that he will become uncontainable, and will turn on whatever force has sought to channel his rage for its own purposes. None shall master him, for he has lost mastery over himself.

When the fist lands, that is what I am thinking. There is no comfort in it. And, of course, there will be no comfort in anything again.

Arvida kept moving. The dead city was crawling with World Eaters kill-squads, roving through the empty hab-blocks like underhive murder-gangs. For the time being, he was ahead of them. He knew Tizca better than them, and remembered the intricate pattern of its streets perfectly. What was more, his future-sense still lingered, warning him away from taking wrong turns and preventing fatal missteps.

It wouldn’t last forever. Sooner or later, he’d have to rest, to sleep, to find something to eat. His enhanced constitution could stave off that need for days, but not forever. The Wolves had burned Prospero almost completely to the ground, so there would be meagre hunting ahead.

His only chance of survival would be to stay in the city, evading the predators and searching for some kind of transport off-world. He assumed the Geometric was still in orbit, though his attempts to send a signal had failed. The ship was not without its defences, but it would struggle against a well-crewed World Eaters warship.

So. The options were limited, and the odds long.

Kalliston had been a fool. Coming back to Prospero had been a predictable error, one caused by excessive faith in the primarch. Arvida had never shared that faith, not even when the Legion had been intact. Whatever cataclysm had occurred here had been beyond Magnus’ power to prevent, so it was folly to retain faith in his stratagems. Any survivors from the sack of Prospero were alone now, a scattered band of warriors cast adrift on the rip tide of the galaxy like the spars of a ruined galleon.

Arvida had no idea how many of his brothers still lived. Perhaps there were hundreds. Perhaps he was the only one.

He reached the end of a long, shallow climb away from the mass of the central conurbation. Arvida turned then, looking back the way he’d come. He had a view far across the centre of the city. Under the starlight, the fields of glass glittered with a pearlescent sheen. It was beautiful.

The City of Light.

He paused for a moment, lost in the vision of what had once been. Nothing moved. Even the drifting clouds of smog were still, suspended in a rare moment of calm.

Only one certainty remained. Arvida knew, as only a Corvidae could know, that death would not find him on Prospero. That was no consolation for what had been lost, but at least it lent the task of planning his next move a certain urgency.

He would survive. He would discover the true causes of his Legion’s destruction, and live to fight them. He would neither pause nor stumble until everything had been revealed to him, everything that would give him a weapon to employ.

‘Knowledge is power,’ he breathed.

Then he turned away from the scene, and stole quickly back into the occlusion of the ruins. As he went, the dim red light of the angry magma fires caught on his shoulder guard, exposing the serpentine star set about the black raven-head of his cult discipline.

Then he was gone, a shadow among shadows.

A THOUSAND SONS

Censured at the Council of Nikaea for his flagrant use of sorcery, Magnus the Red and his Thousand Sons Legion retreat to their homeworld of Prospero to continue their use of the arcane arts in secret.

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PROSPERO BURNS

The Emperor is enraged. Primarch Magnus the Red of the Thousand Sons Legion has made a terrible mistake that endangers the very safety of Terra.

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THE CRIMSON KING

Exiled, hunted and reviled, the Thousand Sons Legion are adrift – as is their primarch, Magnus. But with his power and personality fracturing, drastic action is needed by the Legion if they are to avoid losing their gene-father forever.

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SONS OF HORUS

XVI LEGION

LITTLE HORUS

Dan Abnett

‘Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it.’

– Litus, Remarks.

Let us speak of Little Horus, Little Horus Aximand. His aspect was the half-moon, and his disposition, according to the humours, was inclining towards melancholia. This explained, many thought, his prevailing mood of sorrow and inner trouble, though he frequently denied it. ‘The melancholic humour is misunderstood,’ he said. ‘You think too literally. It has, in fact, the quality of autumn. It is the spirit of contemplative change, the accelerator of death, the enabler of ends and beginnings. Autumn clears away the world so that a new one may rise. This is my purpose. I am not sad.’

Of course, once they reattached his face, all he ever really looked was angry.

Dwell lay in their path, and illumination was required. The Dwellers were not old way ignorant. The shadows of Old Night had been previously banished from their shores, and they had been compliant since their recovery thirty-two years earlier. The Dwellers had supplied eighty fine, loyal regiments to the Crusade armies.

Isstvan was fresh in the memory, however, and bloodstained rumours of the infamy were spreading. A ferocious series of repercussive combats had flared through the Momed, Instar and Oqueth sectors. The instigator was a leader of the Iron Tenth, a flesh-spare warleader of the Sorrgol Clan named Shadrak Meduson, and it was he who marshalled the loyalists against the approaching fleet of the Warmaster’s 63rd Expedition. Meduson and his formations had come too late to stand with their iron-handed master at Isstvan V. Rage, and calculated vengeance, smoked in his alloy heart. He had gathered fifty-eight full battalions of the Imperial Army about him, war hosts from the Momed voidhives, along with a flotilla of siege hulks from Nahan Instar, a half-broken cadre of Salamanders, some Mechanicum claves, and a White Scars raid-force from the Chondax war front.

Dwell, with its fortified cities, orbital batteries, ship schools, and eight million pinnacle-grade fighting men, would be the cornerstone of Meduson’s line. And any fool could see the Elders of Dwell would never side against the Throne.

It was a matter of priority that their ignorance be illuminated swiftly, before they fell in step with the determined son of Medusa.

Aximand’s face had earned him his name, though he was not the only member of the XVI Legion who resembled the primarch. For a good many, including the First Captain, elective genetics had guaranteed it. They were sons, true sons, amongst the Sons.

Aximand was the most alike of them all. It was not only the face; there was something in the manner of him.

Of course, he was Horus too, a common Cthonian name made popular because of the primarch. They were all sons of Horus in the end.

Little Horus. That’s what he was called, in tones simultaneously affectionate and mocking: Little Horus Aximand.

There was nothing little about him. Captain of the Fifth. One quarter of the Mournival.

‘He who serves as a captain here would be as a primarch in the company of others,’ said Abaddon, and he was talking of Aximand when he said it.

The reattachment left a scar. It set the character of the face differently, altered the seating of the muscles. Somehow, the wrongness, the imperfection, made him more like Horus, not less.

Steel forged on Medusa has such a fine edge.

He had a dream he never shared with anyone. First Captain Abaddon had indeed proclaimed that dreams were a weakness to be eschewed by all the Legiones Astartes. The dreamless Luna Wolves were surely the purest of all.

But times changed. The Luna Wolves had become the Sons of Horus. Kin had become unkind. The Master of Mankind had become the enemy. And, since Isstvan, Little Horus Aximand had begun to dream.

Every dream was essentially the same. Aximand would dream about the events of the day. The dream would match, in all particulars, his experiences, except that someone else was present. Someone else had come to join him, an intruder who remained just out of sight or in distant shadows, in the next room, or the corner of his eye. Aximand could not see the intruder’s face, but he knew he was there.

Aximand could feel him watching. He could hear him breathing.

Little Horus was afraid of the dreams at first. He was afraid to have started dreaming, afraid of what Abaddon might say if he found out, afraid of the faceless intruder watching him whenever he slept.

But he was not afraid of change. Change was, he insisted, part of his ruling character.

‘The melancholic humour is protean,’ he said. ‘It possesses the quality of autumn. It is transformative, the accelerator of death, the enabler of ends and beginnings. Autumn clears away the world ready for renewal. This is my purpose. I am not afraid.’

Then again, after they reattached his face, all he ever really looked was unlike himself.

Another change, forced on them by the circumstances of Isstvan, was the loss of the Mournival. Changing the name of the XVI, changing the colour of their armour, those transformations had been embraced willingly as positive reinforcements of their resolve. They had never changed their allegiance: they still followed Horus and the Imperium.

The Mournival, though, the Mournival was a painful loss. That small clique of sons, of peers, of brothers, selected to counsel the Warmaster had always been vital, organic.

Little Horus still wore the mark of the half-moon on his helm, above the right eyepiece.

As the fleet translated into the Dwell System, he spoke to Abaddon on the subject.

‘It is an antiquated concept,’ said the First Captain. ‘See how poorly it served us at Isstvan?’

‘People served us poorly,’ Aximand replied, ‘not the Mournival. The Mournival was always intended to provide even-tempered advice. It was supposed to provoke discussion and dissent, so that we could properly debate each issue and be sure of arriving at balanced reasoning.’

Abaddon looked at him, uncertain.

Aximand smiled back.

‘It is true to say,’ he added, ‘that the decisions we had to make at Davin and Isstvan were so extreme, the natural dissent was...’

‘Was what?’ asked Abaddon.

‘Intense. Those who lost the argument could not be permitted to live. It is the way of things. When the matter is so great, those who speak against it become our enemies. They had to say no, for in their no our yes was consecrated.’

They. Abaddon and Aximand never spoke the names any more. Previous members of the Mournival, perhaps: Berabaddon, Syrakul, Janipur and dear Sejanus. All of them were spoken of, as one would speak of beloved ancestors. But the last two to come and go, their names were never uttered. They were memories too painful for even a transhuman to bear.

‘The mechanism always worked,’ Aximand pressed, dropping his soft voice to a leaf-rustle whisper, making Abaddon bend closer to hear. Below them, the vast bridge bustled with activity.

‘The mechanism always worked, even when we had to kill our dissenters. The method was valid and valuable. The Mournival provides balance, and guarantees the right decisions.’

‘So you would reinstate it?’ asked Abaddon.

‘Do we not need balance now, more than ever?’

‘You would reinstate it?’ Abaddon repeated.

‘It was never gone,’ said Aximand. ‘There are simply vacancies.’

‘Who would you approach?’ asked Abaddon.

‘Who would you?’

Abaddon sniffed.

‘Targost.’

Aximand shrugged.

‘A sound suggestion. Serghar Targost is heartwood like us, but he is also lodge-master. The lodge needs him clear-minded, not compromised by Mournival duties.’

Abaddon nodded, seeing the sense of this.

‘Falkus Kibre,’ said Abaddon.

‘Hmm.’ Aximand smiled again. The Widowmaker Kibre was a true son, but he was also captain of the Justaerin, and thus Abaddon’s second. Too much weight in one corner of the Legion.

‘Kibre’s an excellent man–’ he began.

‘Kalus Ekaddon,’ said Abaddon, before Aximand could finish.

Ekaddon. Captain of the Catulan Reaver squad. Another of Abaddon’s company. Aximand wondered if Abaddon properly understood the concept of balance.

‘You make a suggestion, then,’ said Abaddon.

‘Tybalt Marr.’

‘The Either? He’s a good man, but he hasn’t got the stomach for the job, not even now he’s shaken off Moy’s shadow. Kibre is a good–’

‘Jerrod,’ said Aximand.

‘He’s got his hands full taking the reins of the Thirteenth now Sedirae’s gone,’ Abaddon replied.

‘He’s more than able.’

‘He is, but he has new responsibilities,’ said Abaddon.

‘Grael Noctua,’ said Aximand.

The First Captain paused.

‘Of the Twenty-Fifth Warlocked?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s just a squad commander.’

Aximand shrugged. He took up a silver cup from the side table and sipped.

‘There is no rule that members of the Mournival be seniors or captains. In fact, if it were just composed of senior men, where would its point be? The Mournival is about balance and perspective. Wouldn’t a good squad leader’s insight complement the judgement of a First Captain?’

‘Noctua is a fine soldier,’ Abaddon mused.

‘A captain in the making.’

‘He’s young.’

‘We were all young once, Ezekyle.’

Abaddon took up a cup of his own, not to drink, just to have something to toy with while he considered.

‘There is precedence, of course,’ said Aximand. ‘To remind you, Syrakul was a squad leader when Litus proposed him. He was ascendant. He was young, but Litus saw his qualities. You’ve said yourself, Syrakul would have been First Captain if he’d lived.’

‘The same could be said for many,’ Abaddon replied. ‘We should consult Lupercal and–’

‘Why would we?’ asked Aximand. ‘The Mournival has always been an autonomous body. Lupercal likes it that way.’

Abaddon frowned.

‘I suppose. So, Kibre and Noctua?’

‘Yes.’

‘You will approach Noctua, if I make the overture to Falkus?’

‘Agreed.’

‘Put him in the line with you at Dwell,’ said Abaddon. ‘Measure him one last time to be sure. You know the old saying? Measure twice, cut once.’

The Mausolytic Precinct was regarded as one of the top three objectives, along with the primary port and the City of Elders. The Precinct was sited on a high plateau overlooking Tyjun and the Sea of Enna. In its great stone structures lay the dead of Dwell, each previous generation interred in ritual cybernation so that their collective thoughts, memories and accumulated knowledge could be accessed and consulted, like books in a library.

The Mausolytic Precinct was Aximand’s responsibility. First Company would lead the attack on the City of Elders. Lithonan, the acting lord commander of the Army forces, would take responsibility for the port, with Jerrod and the 13th as their spearhead.

‘I would be disappointed if we were forced to lose a resource like the Mausolytic Precinct,’ the Warmaster told Little Horus. ‘But I would be more disappointed if we lost this fight. Burn it only if the alternative is losing.’

‘Yes, my lord,’ said Aximand.

‘I would be disappointed if we were forced to lose a resource like the Mausolytic Precinct,’ the Warmaster told Little Horus. The only light in the chamber came from the fire crackling in the great stone bowl.

‘But I would be more disappointed if we lost this fight. Burn it only if the alternative is... Aximand?’

‘Yes, my lord?’ said Aximand.

‘Your attention is elsewhere, I think.’

‘Lupercal, I’m sorry. For a moment there...’

‘What?’

‘I could hear breathing, my lord.’

The Warmaster regarded him with what looked like amusement.

‘We all do it,’ he said.

‘No, I mean... Do you not hear it?’

‘I hear weakness,’ said the Warmaster. ‘Where is this frailty coming from, Aximand? You’re jumpy.’

‘My lord, is there somebody else in your quarters with us?’

‘No. No, there isn’t. I know this for a fact.’

Aximand rose to his feet.

‘Then who is that?’ he asked. ‘Lord, who is that, standing just there, on the other side of the fire?’

‘Oh, Little Horus,’ said the Warmaster, ‘you are beginning to speak with the tongue of madness.’

And just as Aximand realised that he was, he woke.

He assembled his squad commanders, and reviewed the tactical data. Aximand was, perhaps, the most scrupulous of all the XVI Legion’s captains. He was not one, like Targost for example, who only ever wanted to know the fundamentals of a target, or was annoyed by extraneous detail. Aximand liked to know everything, every last facet. He studied climate charts. He learned the names and phases of Dwell’s eighteen moons. He studied the intelligencer plans of the Mausolytic Precinct, and had the fleetmaster’s strategic architects fashion a sensory simulation he could walk through.

He learned the names of his foe. The Tyjunate Compulsories, a high-calibre division of ceremonial city troops whose duty it was, by tradition, to protect the Precinct. The Chainveil, an elite corps named after the ritual screen surrounding the thrones of the Elders of Dwell, who were rumoured to be supplementing the Mausolytic defence.

No confirmation had yet come of Meduson or any of his agents reaching Dwell. If he had beaten the 63rd in the race, it was thought unlikely he would position himself at the Precinct. This role would probably be handed off to one of his trusted warleaders, perhaps Bion Henricos, or to one of the White Scars captains such as Hibou Khan or Kublon Besk.

‘Let us hope for the Fifth,’ said Lev Goshen, captain of the 25th Company, who was to command the second wave behind Aximand. ‘Ill-favoured for static defence, they will make themselves crazy waiting for our overture, stuck in one place.’

‘The Scars should not be underestimated,’ said Grael Noctua, sergeant of the Warlocked Tactical squad.

Goshen glanced up from the strategium display, looked at Noctua, and caught Aximand’s eye.

‘He’s got a voice, then,’ he remarked.

There had been some murmuring amongst the upper ranks of the Legion when Noctua’s role as second to Aximand for the Mausolytic assault had been announced.

‘I have been advised I had better use it well, captain,’ said Noctua. There was a reserve to him, a restraint that reminded Aximand of someone. Noctua had that true son face, but the balance of humours was unusual: there was less of the arrogant charismatic and more of the calculated intellectual. Abaddon described Noctua as a blade weapon rather than a firearm.

Goshen grinned.

‘Let’s have your wisdom, Noctua,’ he said.

‘I had the honour to serve alongside a detachment of the Fifth Legion seven years ago during the Tyrade System compliance. They impressed me with their battlecraft. I was reminded of the Wolves.’

‘The Luna Wolves?’ asked Goshen.

‘The Wolves of Fenris, sir,’ Noctua replied.

‘That’s two enemies you’ve mentioned,’ said Goshen. ‘You understand they are our enemies, don’t you, Noctua?’

‘I understand they are both utterly lethal,’ replied Noctua. ‘Should we not appreciate the qualities of our enemies above all else?’

Goshen hesitated.

‘This terrace here, this parade,’ he said, returning to the chart display. ‘We will need air cover to achieve it.’

The briefing continued. Aximand thought for a moment that someone else had something to say, someone who had come into the room late, to stand at the back of the grouped officers.

But there was nobody there.

‘I hear you’re considering Kibre and Noctua,’ said the Warmaster.

‘You hear everything, as usual,’ Aximand replied.

‘Not Targost, then?’

‘He has other responsibilities,’ said Aximand, ‘and we did not wish to dilute them.’

The Warmaster nodded. He moved another carved bone counter across the board between them. Of all his sons, Aximand most enjoyed the practice and discipline of strategy games. The anteroom was furnished with many fine sets, most of them gifts from war leaders or brother primarchs. There was Regicide, chatranj, caturanga, go, hneftafl, xadrez, mahnkala, zatrikion... It was rare to find a primarch’s home world where a skill-honing wargame had not evolved.

‘Ezekyle favoured Targost, didn’t he?’ asked the Warmaster as Aximand studied the field and contemplated his reply.

‘He did, sir.’

‘And when you persuaded him against the choice, did you tell him the real reason, or did you manufacture one that would be more palatable to him?’

Aximand hesitated. He remembered the conversation with Abaddon, wherein he had not chosen to say that Targost, the captain of the Seventh Company, was not a son, a true son. He was Cthonian stock. Aximand had not chosen to reveal that part of his disinclination.

‘I didn’t–’ Aximand started to say.

‘Tell him?’ asked the primarch.

‘I didn’t... recognise my true motive,’ Aximand replied, with reluctance.

‘Interesting when you see it, though, don’t you think?’ the Warmaster asked, sitting back. ‘You and Ezekyle, Widowmaker and Noctua, all of you... What is it you call it? True sons?’

‘True sons,’ Aximand echoed.

‘So, do you suppose,’ the Warmaster chuckled, ‘it is because you prefer the reassurance of a familiar face? Or is there another face you wish to block out?’

Dry air, cool, a faint hint of salt. The Sea of Enna in the flat rift valley below, like a sheet of glass in a culvert. Along its shore, the teeming city of Tyjun, collected like flotsam, like multicoloured shingle. On the far side of the immense valley, across the back of the sleeping sea, the block line of the opposite valley wall, squared off and velvet black in the dawn light. The sky was violet, shot with stars and occasional moons. To the north, the pre-glow of the rising sun. To the east, the false dawn of the port, on fire since midnight. That was the handiwork of Jerrod and the 13th Company.

In the high morning of the Mausolytic Plateau, the buildings of the Precinct stood like stone hangars for vast airships. Rectangles, unadorned, they were faced with yellow stone rendered gold by the early light. In places, they were linked by soaring colonnades and porticos, gold stone columns the size of ancient redwoods. The pavements were made of etched steel, polished like mirrors. The atmosphere held a dry, static charge, as if great electromagnetic machines operated nearby.

The vaunted Chainveil made no appearance in the direct line at the Precinct. Chainveil soldiers caused a brief delay to Abaddon’s advance into the City of Elders. The First Captain made curt, grudging reports of their determined resistance. Goshen’s advance took a bastion west of the city where the defenders boasted they were Chainveil, but Goshen was sure they were merely regular army claiming to be the elites, so as to seem more intimidating.

He slew them all, anyway.

The Tyjunate Compulsories, resplendent in silver-and-crimson wargear, formed the main defence. The troopers were armed with long power swords, with energised axes and pikes, with munition-loaders, with sonic tubes, with plasmic-system weapons and lasrifles. Entering combat, they engaged individual, segmented force shields, light-absorbing fog that dimmed the glory of their ritual uniforms and made them look as if they’d each been enveloped in a hand-cut piece of storm cloud.

The shields were annoyingly effective, and deflected most gunfire over a certain range. When a Legiones Astartes bolt-round did pierce them, either through a direct hit or by finding the joint between segments, the Compulsory inside detonated, and his explosive demise was contained, pressurised, within the shield, like a firecracker destroying a piece of soft fruit inside a bottle. The noise of it was dull, muted, like the slap of a muffled bass drum.

It was infuriating. Dug in around the looming structures of the Precinct, the Compulsories were actually retarding a Legiones Astartes assault. They were holding the line against the XVI.

Yet they were men. Just men. Aximand felt a sense of injustice. The force shields, certainly not the best he’d ever seen, but made effective by their individual mounts and portability, were giving the Compulsories enough of an edge to bother the Sons of Horus. It was an aberration brought about by circumstance. Human soldiers, no matter how good they were, did not resist transhuman soldiers. Aximand wanted to crush them, pulverise them for their temerity, to call in an orbital barrage, ranged shelling, or even one of the squadrons of super-heavy armour pieces that were basking nearby like vast crocodilian predators in the rising sun, waiting for his word to send them slipping down to the kill.

However, any of those actions would also raze the Precinct. The Compulsories were protected by the very buildings they were defending. Aximand had latitude, but he sincerely intended to prove he didn’t need it.

Less than twenty minutes from drop landing, the assault on the Mausolytic Precinct had grown bitter and choked. The Sons of Horus and their Army auxiliaries had lost momentum, their offensive stalled, all their advantages cancelled out by the clear-sighted deployment of professional soldiers exploiting their combat assets.

Yade Durso, second captain of Aximand’s company, cursed all the spirits of vengeance and destiny over the vox-link, but Aximand knew Durso was actually cursing him. Xachary Scipion of Metallun Reaver reported his assumption of squad command. His sergeant, old Gaspir Yunkwist, was dead. There was heat in Scipion’s voice. He was calling for an Apothecary. Zeb Zenonius of Bale Tactical reported two fallen.

Somewhere, someone was breathing.

Taking hits, driven into cover, Aximand looked up at the sky above the plateau. It was still flooded with the blue ink of night, but the pale margins were increasing. He could see four of Dwell’s moons in the sky, one large, the other three not much larger than stars. Because of their relative positions, they were each in a different phase: full, gibbous, half, new.

The sight of it let his anger breathe out for a second. It was, what? A sign? A portent?

His vox tapped. Visor display identified the link as Grael Noctua.

‘Forget bolters,’ said Noctua. ‘Blades.’

‘Indeed?’ Aximand replied.

‘Get in close, and the fools do not stand a chance,’ Noctua replied.

Aximand smiled.

‘Blades! he yelled. He locked his bolter to his hip, and unsheathed his sword. Double-edged, power-active, Cthonian bluesteel, etched along the fuller. He’d called it Mourn-it-all. His combat shield was already on his left arm.

He didn’t wait to see his order observed. He powered out of cover, las-bolts clipping his shield face and dinking his leg plates. Two big, bounding strides put him on the colonnade, moving fast, head down, blade up. He saw the first of the Compulsories up ahead, fogged in their shields, dug in around the massive pillars, firing at him. He could see their faces, pale and astonished.

Transhuman dread. Aximand had heard iterators talk of the condition. He’d heard descriptions of it from regular Army officers too. The sight of a legionary was one thing: taller and broader than a man could ever be, armoured like a demigod. The singularity of purpose was self-evident. A legionary was designed to fight and kill anything that didn’t annihilate it first. If you saw one of the Legiones Astartes, you knew you were in trouble. The appearance alone cowed you with fear.

But to see one move. Apparently that was the real thing. Nothing human-shaped should be so fast, so lithe, so powerful, especially not anything in excess of two metres tall and carrying more armour than four normal men could lift. The sight of a legionary was one thing, but the moving fact of one was quite another. The psychologists called it transhuman dread. It froze a man, stuck him to the ground, caused his mind to lock up, made him lose control of bladder and bowel. Something huge and warlike gave pause – something huge and warlike and moving with the speed of a striking snake, that was when you knew that gods moved amongst men, and that there existed a scale of strength and speed beyond anything mortal, and that you were about to die. And, if you were really lucky, there might be just enough time to piss yourself first.

Aximand saw that dumbfounded look on the faces of the Dwellers he was about to gut and section. He heard the men of Fifth Company following behind him. He felt the joy of being Horus’ son.

Noctua was right. They had been wasting time and effort with guns and bolters. The shields were good enough to make the percentages of a firefight poor. The shields were good enough to stop blades too. Bayonets, that was. Pole arms. A sabre. Maybe even a powered blade.

But not, not for a moment, a powered blade driven by a transhuman arm.

The shields shattered. They cracked and broke with the sounds of smashing glass. Sharp chips of shield segment flew into the air for a microsecond after each blow before evaporating, the shield first, and then the body inside: the energy shell, then the meat. Blood exploded from the yawning wounds under pressure, jetting into the morning air, hosing Aximand and the great columns of the colonnade with arterial spray. Each sword stroke made an explosion of viscera, a puff of red in the air as if a bag of blood had been detonated and its contents particulated.

Whatever edge the Tyjunate Compulsories had owned, they lost it the moment the most advanced warriors in the Imperium remembered they were adaptable enough to fight the old-fashioned way: blade and trade, strength of arm, sword-school close combat.

The Fifth made the entrance to the Precinct less than five minutes after Aximand’s inspiring charge.

Aximand went into the thick of it with three sons at his side: Zenonius of Bale, Ger Geraddon, and Mir Amindaza, both of Tithonus Assault. They went in at the end of the grand colonnade, under a gateway called the Arch of Answers. Dweller Compulsories were packed in beneath the shadow of the vast archway, ready to defend the sunward entrances of the East Mausolytic Hall.

The air was full of shots, like neon rain, horizontal. Energy bolts and tracer rounds shone especially brightly in the shade of the vast archway. The Sons struck the line with their heads down and their shields up, sucking up the lancing gunfire, barrelling Compulsories over in a crush, like a surging mass of rioters. Dwellers fell, their shields still lit, rolling and bouncing inside the hard-light shells. There was a crush, a sense of crowd momentum, of thousands of bodies rippling as one mass. There were bodies underfoot. Hands clawed. Weapons fired point-blank.

The Sons bit deeper. Their shields were ploughs and rams. Their swords were scythes and pikes. Compulsories dropped, spilling from their shredding, fizzling shields in tattered states, blood sobbing and squirting out of the compromised fields. Blades hooked other men, hurled them into the air, their bodies spinning, tumbling, flailing overhead, above the crowd, crashing back down on the necks and shoulders of their kin. Some men were dead, upright, their bodies kept from falling by the press of the mass. The mirrored pavements were running with blood. The huge pool, draining out from under the fighting mass, spread its racing edges out across the etched steel, wider, broader, crimson in the sunlight, scarlet in the shadows, flooding around the bases of the columns, making islands out of plinths and pillars.

The screaming voices of the Compulsories were either muffled by their cocooning shields or rendered tinny and raw by the vox-intercept feeding into the comm systems of the Legiones Astartes. Most of the sounds Aximand registered were the concussive impacts as he chopped and barged and hacked. Mourn-it-all was running red on its hilt and grip, blood-smoke cooking off the powered blade. Blood had painted Aximand’s sword arm to the elbow and was dripping off the edges of his vambrace. His shield boss was bruised, and splattered with gore and brain matter.

Behind everything, he could hear breathing.

Zenonius moved past him, shield up, ripping through waists and hips and ribcages with broad, horizontal slashes, bisecting bodies, rupturing shields. It was a devastating, mechanical action, almost agricultural rather than martial. He was reaping his way through the enemy to reach the Mausolytic Halls. Like a worker in a field of crops, he was cutting his row, back and forth, swinging his long blade from the shoulders.

To Aximand’s left, Amindaza was treating it more as sport. His blade was shorter, and he toyed with the Compulsories he was rushing, as if trying to engage them in combat and test their skill. He looked for blades to lock with, to deflect. No one met his challenge. They were too busy trying to fall back out of the path of his butcher assault. Amindaza favoured hacking downstrokes, deep, crushing blows coming from over the shoulder that demolished his foes and smashed them onto the ground at his feet. Aximand could hear him calling out his enemies, daring them to fight him. He railed contempt at their attempts to retreat. He killed men whether they were facing him or not.

For his part, Aximand, like Geraddon, preferred a more textbook mass assault form: shield at eye level, used as ram; sword tip forward at chest level, punching and stabbing like a piston from under the shield rim. It was relentless. It was like rolling a heavy piece of fruit into rows of toy soldiers and watching them knocked down and scattered.

The assault was so fierce that a brown smoke of aerosolised blood was fuming off the fighting line into the sunlight.

Zenonius reached the East Hall entrance, and slaughtered a dozen Compulsories around the ornamental fountain and pool in the deep, sunlit antehall. Larger cohorts of Aximand’s company were on their heels on the colonnade. The lake of blood was so deep and swollen, there was some pressure in it as it grew and spread. Bodies on the smooth, polished floor rotated in its current, end to end, like sticks of driftwood caught by an overspilling river.

Aximand followed Zenonius into the antehall. The walls were sheer, the height of the hall impressive, though the floor plan was a small, square area with a central fountain. The top was open to the sky, so that sunlight could lance down and illuminate the quiet space, the polished floor, the clear water, the calyx and tulip carvings of the fountain’s main figure.

Blood spattered the floor, and pooled around crumpled figures and broken weapons. Bloody handprints marked the edges of the fountain bowl where men had struggled to prop themselves up as their last breaths escaped. On the intricately carved walls, jets of blood had left long, pressure-pattern arcs, huge horsetail fans or fern-frond spatters. Some stretched five or six metres up the sheer walls.

Aximand prowled forward. The place was almost tranquil. The din of fighting outside, muffled by the walls, sounded more like the grumble of a distant storm. Zenonius moved ahead, pausing to finish a wounded Compulsory. Amindaza stepped into the light on the far side of the antehall, blade sizzling with frying blood. He had entered via one of the other doorways. Two Compulsories and a Precinct docent rushed him, and he turned to greet them with his sword.

Aximand could hear breathing again. It was close now, closer than ever before, closer than a pulse beat in a man’s brow. The breathing, the sense of presence, had followed him out of his dreams and into his daily life. It had got closer and closer, until it was hovering at his shoulder. Now it sounded as though it were sharing his helmet, as though there were two heads in the one helm. Aximand stopped breathing for a moment to see if it was just some acoustic trick, an echo of his respiration.

Silence.

He was about to breathe again when it started, quiet but close, slow and calm, like the hushing of a gentle sea.

‘Where are you?’ he asked.

‘Say again!’ Amindaza crackled over the vox.

‘Specify, sir?’ Geraddon linked.

‘Nothing, nothing!’ Aximand answered. ‘Continue.’

Foolish, so foolish, to let it better him like that. To make him speak of it, to speak out loud. He was only talking to himself, to a trick of his mind. He was only talking to his fear.

And fear, like dreams, was something a legionary was not supposed to have.

He knew fear, and he knew the fear would go the moment he could identify the stranger, the moment the intruder’s face became plain to him. Little Horus Aximand wasn’t afraid of anything except the unknown.

A Compulsory charged him from the brown shadows, a lance in his hands. The blade-tip twinkled with blue light, a photonic edge.

Aximand sidestepped, swung his shield, and put the man on the floor. The blow cracked the Compulsory’s bodyshield and broke his arm. He yelped. Aximand was about to put his foot on him and finish the job when two more came at him. Faster now, more urgent, he rotated, scooping Mourn-it-all around in a backwards stroke that snipped the blade-heads off the lances stabbing at him. The blunt hafts cracked and bent against his ceramite armour. His sword ripped one man apart, opening his shield and eviscerating the body inside. He kicked the other backwards, crunching man and energy cocoon into the antehall wall. The impact grazed the stone, and caused chips to fly out. Stepping in, Aximand put his blade through the man’s chest. Mourn-it-all punched through the shield shell, the man, and the wall behind him. The Compulsory was pinned there for a second, like an insect specimen on a felt pad, his bodyshield flickering and blinking as it shorted out.

Aximand yanked the blade out, and the man collapsed at his feet.

The breathing had drawn so very close.

Aximand stepped forward, through a tall archway, into one of the main Mausolytic Halls. The space was vast, and the air was radiant with yellow light. It was like stepping into heaven. The thin, quiet, shrouded dead of Dwell were suspended all around him in clear glass tubes, supported horizontally in columns of light. A million bodies, framed in light and glass and gravimetric energy, united in cybernation.

Zeb Zenonius of Bale Tactical squad lay dead on the floor. He had been split open like a piece of shellfish.

The sight should have put Aximand on guard, on the highest pitch of readiness and alertness. But the breathing was louder than ever and, despite his transhuman instincts, he tried to see where it was coming from.

So the first blow took him by surprise. His attacker struck from the side. Only by fluke did Aximand’s shield take the brunt of it. The attacker’s sword split the shield, and cut into Aximand’s forearm beneath. Aximand staggered backwards, outraged and surprised.

Outraged by his distracted error.

Surprised by the vast strength of the being assaulting him.

Aximand rallied, blocking with his sword. He was face to face with one of the Legiones Astartes, a flesh-spare brute whose glossy black armour was laced with augmetic systems and stark white insignia: a senior captain of the X Legion, the Iron Hands of Medusa. For a moment, Aximand thought it was Shadrak Meduson himself. The warrior had the stature of a warleader, and bore the sigils of the Sorrgol Clan. But visual tagging via visor display identified his foe as Bion Henricos, Meduson’s favoured lieutenant. Henricos’ sword was a long blade of augmented-function Medusan steel.

They whirled down the cybernation hall like dancers, trading blows. Henricos represented a greater challenge than all the Compulsories Aximand had doomed that day, combined. The Medusan’s skill was formidable. His augmetic strength far exceeded Aximand’s. His speed was breathtaking.

For a thrilling instant, Aximand wondered if he was, at last, experiencing transhuman dread for himself.

They fought their way towards the centre of the hall, where a great bio-stasis generator stack rose like a temple altar, gilded and covered with angelic figures. The glass-packed bodies radiated out from it, stack upon suspended stack. Huge white statues, demigods shrouded in long capes, bright as snow, knelt in obeisance before the central block.

The silvered-black armour of the Iron Hands warrior gleamed like slicked oil in the Precinct’s weird light. His blade moved like a ribbon of light. Aximand got around the expert guard, and delivered a glancing blow with his hilt that cracked the chest plating of Henricos’ wargear. Henricos responded by planting his feet, locking their blades in a rigid cruciform, and shoulder-barging Aximand.

Little Horus lurched backwards and crashed into the nearest row of cybernators. Glass sleeves shattered, and showers of fragments flew up and caught the light like spring petals. Cybernation tubes cannoned into one another, cracking and disintegrating. Some were pushed clear of the gravimetric support fields and fell, smashing on the polished metal floor. Power relays shorted out. Desiccated bodies tumbled out into the air like bundles of roots and twigs.

Bion Henricos crunched over broken glass and dry bones to get at Aximand. He shoved suspended glass sleeves out of his way. There was a bitter stink of resins and preserving spices. Aximand struggled to get up. Flickers of energy, dark and unhealthy, were flaring like troubled synapses out from the disrupted area of the Mausolytic array. The coloured bursts writhed and fired out into the serene, golden layers of the undamaged structure. Odd harmonics, like the low moaning of a thousand voices relayed by a low quality vox signal, filled the hall.

Henricos reached Aximand. Mourn-it-all cut him across the eyes, shattering one lens unit, and raked a gouge down his stomach and hip. Henricos struck with a swing that would have severed Aximand’s head if he had been a hand-span closer. He drove the Medusan back across the carpet of ancient, pulverised glass and mummified scraps. His next blow wounded Henricos in the thigh. Something silvery, like liquid mercury, sobbed out.

Henricos put him on the ground. Aximand wasn’t quite sure how he’d been hit, but the impact rattled his brain inside his skull and filled his mouth and nostrils with blood. He was face down, groping for his fallen sword, concussed and dazed and vulnerable.

He looked up, wondering why Henricos hadn’t finished him. Amindaza of Tithonus was locking swords with his opponent. Amindaza had fought his way into the hall, and Geraddon wasn’t far behind. The loud and repeated discharge of weapons from outside the entry space suggested that the assault had washed into the main area of the Precinct, and that the Compulsories were in retreat.

Amindaza had been wounded on his way into the hall, and his arm was slow. His arrival and interception had saved Aximand, but it had also doomed Amindaza. Henricos was a far superior swordsman. Before Aximand, dazed and spitting blood, could get back up, Henricos had delivered a blow that split Amindaza from his left shoulder to his right hip. He was simply bisected, diagonally, in one stroke. The sections of him fell hard, messily, in an apocalyptic release of blood.

Geraddon flew at him, and Henricos knocked him aside. Geraddon smashed into another row of caskets.

Aximand put Mourn-it-all through Henricos’ spine so that the tip shattered the aquila on the Medusan’s breastplate.

Henricos fell to one knee, and then onto his face. Aximand knelt on his back and cut his helmet off. Henricos’ pale face was turned to the side, cheek to the floor, the white skin flecked with beads of dark red blood.

‘Pray this death takes you, traitor,’ said Aximand. ‘Other deaths would be less forgiving.’

Henricos gurgled something.

‘What?’ asked Aximand, pressing his blade against the neck of the Iron Hands warleader.

‘You are not the trophy we hoped for,’ Henricos whispered.

‘Trophy?’

‘Knew we couldn’t beat you, wanted to hurt you instead. Thought... thought he would value the Mausolytic Precinct above all, and lead this segment attack personally.’

‘This was supposed to be a trap for Lupercal?’

‘May he burn forever.’

Aximand laughed.

‘But your master is a coward and a traitor,’ murmured Henricos, ‘and all he sends is you.’

‘It would appear I’m quite enough,’ replied Aximand. ‘What did you hope to do?’

Henricos gurgled.

‘I said, what kind of trap is one flesh-spare warrior?’

Henricos did not reply. All the life had drained out of him.

Aximand rose, and kicked the corpse.

Geraddon had got back up.

‘What was he saying?’ he asked.

‘Nonsense,’ Aximand replied. ‘Simply nonsense. He was desperate.’

‘It was supposed to be a trap,’ said Geraddon, ‘so why was he alone?’

The sound of breathing had come back. Aximand turned slowly and realised that it was simply the background noise of the Mausolytic Hall, the slow, throbbing murmur of the cybernation system. It was the pulse of the sleeping dead.

He felt like a fool. When the operation was over, he would meditate. He would clean his mind of the fears and dreams that had accumulated. He would purify his thoughts and expel his weaknesses. To serve the Warmaster, he needed to be an even-tempered weapon.

He had let himself slacken. It was time he recommitted his mind and made himself truer to the image of Lupercal.

Aximand opened the vox, and took stock. Large portions of the Precinct were in XVI Legion hands. Grael Noctua reported the West Hall and the approaches secure. Aximand ordered squads forward into the East Hall, to his position. He ordered all access ways closed.

He looked at the cybernation array around them. A little damage had been done, but not too much. The facility was essentially intact, and a little pressure applied to Dweller tech-adepts would soon have repairs completed.

The huge white statues of shrouded demigods, bright as snow, that had been kneeling in obeisance around the central great bio-stasis generator stack were gone.

‘Wait–’ Aximand began.

The White Scars kill team rushed them. The five killers of the V Legion had thrown off the white cloaks they had used for concealment. They had used chalk dust or some funereal powder to mask the crimson edges of their armour. Their helms were crowskull, the Corvus pattern.

It seemed Lev Goshen had been badly mistaken. The White Scars did have the patience to wait. What on the open field was fast hit and run became, in city fighting, stealth and swift ambush.

Grael Noctua’s warning had been shrewd.

The first one was upon him. It was Hibou Khan. Aximand identified him from his rank and company pins. This was the practice of berkutchi, to ‘cut the head’. The term came from the Chogorian art of hunting with eagles, the great akwilluh, using the birds to draw out and isolate the bull leader of a herd. Once the bull was dead, the herd was broken.

It had been their intention to decapitate the XVI. Thwarted, they were going to make do with other prey: other bulls, junior bulls, company captains.

Aximand smashed Hibou away, and broke the White Scar’s blade on Mourn-it-all’s edge. Another Scar lunged in. Aximand parried and heard Geraddon cry out as two blades punched through him. Aximand drove his sword down through the cap of the next snow-white crowskull helm that came at him. Suddenly, not all the red decorating the White Scar’s wargear was scarlet lacquer. He reached for his bolter.

Gunfire ripped through the Mausolytic Precinct. More White Scars and renegade Iron Hands had sprung their trap. Squads of Aximand’s company were meeting both, bolter to bolter. Fighting on, outnumbered, Aximand slew another White Scar, blasting his bolter point-blank through an eye slit. He yelled over the link to Noctua and his lieutenant captains to close the fight down.

To be on alert that their enemy was hunting captains as trophies.

To be aware that they weren’t facing Tyjunate Compulsories or Chainveil any more.

They were facing Legiones Astartes transhumans.

Hibou Khan had got back on his feet. To replace his own, broken sword, the White Scar had snatched up the long blade of Medusan steel that Henricos had wielded. His first blow notched Mourn-it-all, his second beat Aximand’s guard.

His third blow caught Little Horus vertically at the cheek, in a line that began just over the right eyepiece where his Mournival mark was displayed. The bonded ceramite of his helm didn’t even seem to stop the Medusan weapon.

Aximand fell. There was a great deal of blood suddenly, and he couldn’t properly account for its source. He saw something on the etched steel floor in front of him.

It was the visor and snout section of his own helmet, the entire faceplate. It had been sheared off, peeled cleanly away, as though shaved by an industrial slicer.

And it was not empty.

The reattachment left a scar. It set the character of the face differently, altered the seating of the muscles. Somehow, the wrongness, the imperfection, made him more like Horus, not less.

Noctua brought his squads into the East Hall in a rapid counterstrike, and broke the berkutchi. Hibou Khan was denied the opportunity to finish the job. Most of the loyalist Space Marines were driven back out into the lap of Lev Goshen and his Terminator squads.

Hibou Khan fled, leaving twelve men of Aximand’s company dead by his own hand, and earning himself a place on Aximand’s death list.

A new helm was forged for him, with the half-moon above the right eye. The armourers were already busy graving Mournival marks to the helms of Grael Noctua and Falkus Kibre. When Aximand was shown the pieces of his old headgear, he saw that the blade had sliced his half-moon mark in half.

Had he been a man prone to superstition and belief in omens, he might have read bad things into this.

But he was not afraid of change. He was not really even a man.

Under the surgeon’s knife, in stasis sleep, he had dreamt one final dream. The identity of the faceless intruder had ultimately been revealed. Aximand had been slightly apprehensive that the intruder’s face would turn out to be his own, or one just like it, and that lengthy psychological work would be required as a consequence.

It was not. As they restored his face, he dreamt the face of the other.

It was the face of Garviel Loken.

When Aximand woke, he felt a measure of happiness and relief. A man could not be afraid of the dead, and Loken was dead, and that fact would not change.

Not that he was afraid of change. Change was, he always insisted, part of his ruling character.

‘The melancholic humour is protean,’ he said. ‘It possesses the quality of autumn. It is transformative. It makes me the accelerator of death, the enabler of ends and beginnings. I was made to clear away this world ready for renewal. To change the order of things. To cast out the false and enthrone the true. This is my purpose. I am not afraid.’

Then again, once they reattached his face, all he ever really looked was invincible.

HORUS RISING

After thousands of years of expansion and conquest, the human Imperium is at its height. His dream for humanity accomplished, the Emperor hands over the reins of power to his Warmaster, Horus, and heads back to Terra.

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FALSE GODS

The Great Crusade that has taken humanity into the stars continues. The Emperor of Mankind has handed the reins of command to his favoured son, the Warmaster Horus. Yet all is not well in the armies of the Imperium...

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GALAXY IN FLAMES

Having recovered from his grievous injuries, Warmaster Horus leads the triumphant Imperial forces against the rebel world of Isstvan III, where Horus’s treachery is finally revealed...

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VENGEFUL SPIRIT

Warmaster Horus leads his Legion to attack the Knight world of Molech – home of House Devine and stronghold of the Imperial Army. What will he sacrifice in pursuit of his destiny?

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WOLFSBANE

The time has come. Leman Russ, primarch of the Space Wolves, withdraws his Legion from Terra and makes all haste for Horus’s position, to try and end the traitor once and for all.

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SLAVES TO DARKNESS

As the traitor fleet closes on Terra, turmoil grips its heart. Horus lies wounded, and as the greatest battle of all time looms, it falls to Maloghurst the Twisted to hold the force together and save the Warmaster.

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WORD BEARERS

XVII LEGION

CHILD OF CHAOS

Chris Wraight

So, what do you want from me?

Perhaps some kind of explanation? Some kind of great redemptive story, to explain the way events transpired? Perhaps there was a reason, a causal mote that made everything explicable, and in turn, when you understand that, you might loathe me a little less than you do at present.

But there isn’t one. I never had time for redemption. I am, as you might say, elemental. Axiomatic. Somebody within this whole skein of false turns had to be.

As it turns out, I am compassed. I am what I am – that is my blessing, and it is, for symmetry’s sake, my curse.

Now wait. I get ahead of myself. An explanation was desired, and so I should start on Colchis. You could make a case that everything – everything – started there. What a desperate, awful place to start.

Then the beginnings always are, I suppose.

Gods, I hated Colchis. I hated the heat. I hated the dust and the thick sweat of it. Even before I knew that other worlds existed, I cursed the gods for making my home so unbearable. There’s a reason why religions prosper in deserts – there’s nothing else to do but ponder the misery.

I used to sit in the shadow of my father’s house, squatting as the air shimmered, and wait for scorpions to scuttle out of the glare. I’d catch them in my bare fingers and hold them up, watching them wriggle. I’d pluck their limbs off, one by one. Sometimes I’d get stung, sometimes I wouldn’t. It was a kind of game, though not a very good one. Once, a sting made me feverish for a month, leaving me boiling on my mat inside with visions and shaking. I might have died. I didn’t care much, either way. Once I’d recovered, I was sitting right back out in the porch, waiting for the next one to scamper into range. Ever since then, I’ve played the same game: get close to the danger, see how long you can last before it bites you.

It doesn’t matter which town that was. I can barely remember it myself. They were all the same – thick with filth and haze and the stink of perspiration and refuse. My parents were exasperated with me. They wanted me to learn a trade, get ahead, find something useful to do. I didn’t want any of that. I wanted to be rich without trying. I wanted to have slaves and concubines. I wanted to play my scorpion game with people. For a long time, it wasn’t clear how I would be able to achieve that, but fate had a way of leading me into opportunity.

I had noticed, being an observant sort, that the Covenant had become the kind of organisation I might do well in. It is fashionable now, among those who still pretend to keep records and tell histories, to think of the Covenant as some wellspring of piety – the precursor to the fundamental religion that came later. Perhaps it was, in some places. Maybe in Vharadesh they did things properly. Out in the provinces, though, the priests had begun to develop a reputation. They drank. They gambled. They were violent, and they used that violence to gather up riches. Even the devout knew that the tithes they paid didn’t all end up embellishing temples. The whole edifice was like a spoiled aquifer, with a cold and oily heart locked away from the searching light of the sun.

So you can understand the attraction. I could see myself in those robes, with a palace of my own where a fountain would tinkle in the courtyard and a chamber full of young things would lounge around in silks and count my coins. Getting there was not straightforward, though – for all their decadence, the clerics held on to power with the rictus grip of a fresh corpse. Only the well connected were sent to the seminaries and taught the rites and shown how to read the old texts. For street-trash like me, there was just penury to look forward to.

I didn’t give up, though. The idea had entered my head, and it stuck there. I hung around the oratories and watched the aspirants come and go, waddling like fat dogs. I listened at the window when they chanted their songs, and began to learn the patterns of the words. As I got older, I got bolder. I crept into the old scriptoria when the doddering masters had dozed off, and I stole books. Bit by bit, I started to piece together the catechisms and the litanies. It didn’t make any sense, of course – they were just words – but I memorised a lot of it. It all came naturally. Of course it did. These were the words I was born to preach, whether or not I believed them. I did believe, later, but back then they were just symbols, like codes on a lock.

There was a young man in my settlement, a pious one, who had inked some words of the holy books onto his face and shaven head. Every day before dawn he would apply more henna, re-writing the sacred glyphs with only the aid of a polished silver bowl for reflection. For this, he was considered something of an inspiration in our flyblown township. Even my own mother, a fat and lazy slattern if ever there was one, noticed his diligence.

‘Why can’t you be more like him?’ she would complain, picking at her fingernails and watching me sitting idly in the porch. ‘Why can’t you be more like Erebus?’

Now, you see, thoughts like this have a terrible power. I took her words to heart. I pondered them. And I thought to myself: why can’t I be more like Erebus?

I was thinking the same thing as I garrotted that young man. I might even have said the words out loud as I twisted the string and watched his eyes bulge and pop. That was the first time I killed a living soul, and gods, was it sweet. My heart was pumping and my face was glowing. The more his life ebbed away, the more I felt my own burgeoning. By the time I let his body drop into the alleyway, I was positively singing inside.

The sensation didn’t last long. There was all the tedious business of disposing of the body, then rooting through his belongings to get what I needed, then turning my back on my birthplace and setting off into the great dust – I couldn’t stay in a place where he and I were both known. I never once regretted it. I walked out under the southern gate with the stars rising and the heat of the day ebbing, wearing a dead man’s robes and with a dead man’s script inked neatly on my own shaven head.

Ah, there you go. There is the irony. The marks on my flesh, the ones that mark me out as me, were never really mine. I wore them after that to ensure my stolen name and persona were never questioned. In time, I half forgot their origins, and I began to care more about what I was writing. By the time I reached for the tattooist’s needle, the words had changed and the act was more than one of disguise. Originally, though, it was all just lies.

So what was my original name? Just like the name of the place where I was born, that genuinely doesn’t matter. I have become like a daemon, nurturing a secret moniker that only the empyrean echoes. I certainly will not tell you. Some things even the gods don’t know.

I was lucky, or fated maybe, to be learning my craft at such a time. I was just a boy, as all the seminary acolytes were. My stolen papers and my lies soon found me ensconced at another institution. I studied as little of the genuine theology as I could, but was assiduous in observing the more worldly paths of power. I saw how the priests maintained discipline within the great cathedrals. I saw how fear and ecstasy could cow an entire population. I saw how a whispered word was more powerful than a shouted oration, at least a lot of the time.

These were the last days of the old faith. Already there were panicked rumours of an army sweeping across the desert, one commanded by a golden prophet who would upturn everything and bustle the Powers out of their assumed heaven. The hierarchs of the Covenant began to get scared. The sacrifices became more frequent, protestations of faith and penance for sins were made more heartily. I knew it wouldn’t save them. The well was running dry, and in any case, they had already drawn too much water. I began to speculate on who this prophet was, and wondered if I could somehow align my cause to his. I was growing tired of my withered instructors, and wished to be in the shadow of something with a proper sting.

And then the strangest thing of all happened. I’d spent so much time with all those books, and all that chanting, and all those homilies on the old patterns of pain and redemption, that I somehow neglected to be cynical about them. I found myself saying things, and meaning them. I found myself studying, not to evade the instructor’s scourge, but out of fascination. It was as if I’d been dipped into one of the inscribers’ inkwells and come out stained. There was never an epiphany. I never moved from being an unbeliever to a believer, but I began to appreciate, gradually, how much I was aligned to a certain way of being. I was, you might say, a natural. I had been made for this.

I remember being in the vaults of that old mud-brick temple, tending to the tapers and tasting the aroma of hot blood on my lips. I remember looking into the tarnished glass of the altar-mirrors, and seeing not one reflection, but a fractured four. I felt a shiver run through me, despite the ever-present heat. I was a petty thief, a minor speck within the iris of eternity, but I knew I could do things for these presences. I felt they had always been there, hanging in my shadow, lingering over my minor cruelties. The Covenant was their plaything. Perhaps other institutions could be used in a similar way.

So when the prophet eventually made it to our city, and I saw his impeccable profile shine out across a weeping and grateful nation of newly enlightened slaves, I was neither elated nor despondent. All I had to do was wait.

I was still a child, then. I would not be one forever.

And of course I met my prophet in the end, up close. I saw him pass through the gates with his army of swivel-eyed faithful and recognised what it meant for me at once. He was a bigger scorpion, and I needed to get closer.

He was with Kor Phaeron. That raddled old sack of skin and esoteric drugs, he hung around like the stench of cut meat rotting in the sun. I remember that our eyes met, briefly, as the two of them made their triumphal procession through the taken city, although I suppose he won’t recall it now. Back then, I was nothing, and he was everything. I was the grub in the dirt and he was the master of a world’s zealous armies, standing at the side of the anointed and sucking up his sloughed-off incense.

It is commonly supposed that I must hate Kor Phaeron. We have become rivals, that’s true, and within this grand coalition of blackguards and renegades that generally engenders bad blood, but he really doesn’t make me angry. I find him amusing. He’s worked so hard to keep up, to become one of us, and all he’s done is made himself ridiculous. His flesh hangs within his armour like a strung-up corpse. He’s kept around out of a maudlin kind of pity. I’d miss him, if he were somehow taken away from us now, for our Legion is not blessed with many jesters, and we can’t afford to lose the few we have.

Once the prophet had come, though, that was the end for the Covenant, at least in the open. We went underground, those of us who understood what things were really about. We gathered what we needed, and stored it away, out of sight. And, such is the way of things, it all became stronger through secrecy. Old words were hissed through locked doors, and we would mouth the ossified canticles under the ostensibly ardent singing of the new ones. They were the best days, if I’m honest, full of promise and guile and silent murders in the dark.

We knew, of course, that He would come soon after that. The prophet kept telling us, and every augur and flesh-sacrifice screamed it out. I wanted to see this Master of Mankind so very much, since I knew more than most what it would mean for the universe. I wanted to witness the creature I was destined to bring low. I wanted to see Him dragged before me like a lowing ox before the sickle knife. I was never, ever taken in by Him, not like so many who afterwards claimed they had somehow been wronged or misled.

I knew, right from the start.

I knew, before He even set foot on my dry-as-bones home world.

I knew all this because I’ve never aspired to be anything other than what I am – an eavesdropper, a sneak, a fertile soakaway for lies and poison. Judge me if you will, and plenty do, but we all have our places within this far-from-ideal creation.

Here I stand. I can do no other.

First, we had to change. We had to become His warriors. We had to cast our old bodies aside and take on new ones, like caterpillars wriggling out of chrysalises. We went into all this knowing that we were donning blasphemous forms, and that our sacred human shapes would be mangled and pummelled by unbelievers. This was a real sacrifice, despite the gifts we knew we would inherit, and I remember the bitterness of it.

And we were all too old, in truth. Even though our mortal bodies were still on the cusp of hardening into adulthood, we were beyond the optimal age for the transition. As a result, it hurt. It hurt like nothing I have felt before or since. Imagine someone plucking your organs out, twisting them inside out, stuffing them back in, filling your veins with acid and cracking your bones. Many of us died. Some of those who perished badly had been steeped in the ways of the Covenant, and that was enough to give the rest of us pause – were we really being looked after?

But I made it. Like an unlucky talisman that keeps popping up, I pulled through and found myself, blinking hard and bleeding softly, on the other side. For the first time in my life, once fully recovered, I was strong. Horrifically so. Where I had previously slunk and slithered, now I could strut. I would stand before my collection of mirrors and marvel at this muscle-wrapped god-form. We learned to fight in new ways, and with new weapons. We learned to drill ourselves into that heavy armour and use it to make us faster than malice. There was a seduction there, one that could have been dangerous. I briefly saw the attraction of the entire Imperial project – a universe of purely material extravagance, bound by ancient science and divorced from the messy realm of the spiritual.

Only briefly, of course. For the most part, the spectacle appalled me. I began to take the scripts on my flesh more seriously, and the marks became longer-lasting. I selected passages from our various books that could be read in a number of different ways, pleasing all the various masters that, in those days, we had to please. Only later, when my primarch had taken up his own authorial career and things were becoming straightforward, did I make my facial etchings irreversible, and that was long after the need for ambiguity had dissipated.

There were a thousand subtleties to negotiate. Terrans made up the bulk of the Legion, and they were all drearily atheistic. Even the many Colchisians could not be relied upon, split as they were between the old faith and the new one as well as the jostling creeds of materialism. We were a body of mongrels, desert hermits flung out into a void populated by more variety than we could ever have imagined possible. Those of us who cleaved to the single truth – the deep truth – had to tread with care, taking our time, working slowly into positions of authority and influence.

I was in my element. I was not the most powerful warrior in this Legion, nor the most gifted commander, but I was never assailed by any kind of uncertainty. I knew the destination before we had even begun the journey. In a sense, I was the destination. I was my treachery, and my treachery was me. There were no choices to make, just time to wait out and traps to avoid.

Out in the emptiness of the abyss, all the truths I had encountered in abstract on Colchis were met in concrete. The first time I set foot on a starship, I could smell the empyrean evaporating from its decks. The first time we made for the warp, I almost laughed at the absurdity of the exercise – we were briefly, insubstantially, hurling ourselves through the realm of the Powers themselves, and no one batted an eyelid. The level of self-deception was colossal, and I couldn’t see how it would be sustained for any length of time at all.

In this, as in other things, I was guilty of underestimating our opponents. The genius of the Crusade was its very audaciousness. The speed it was prosecuted at was mind-bending. Millions – no, trillions – of souls were being directed towards a single goal. While the entire galaxy was at war, it felt like we were all distracted, kept looking up into the glare of a noonday sun, our eyes watering so hard we never noticed the carrion vultures flying low under its glare. If we were not careful, these contradictions might survive examination long enough for His greater task to be completed – the final banishment of the old gods from the realm of the senses.

As I began to understand the implications of this, I reflected on my extraordinary luck on being gradually elevated into a position to do something about it. And, as I pondered that, I reflected that there was no such thing as luck in the universe, properly understood, and that in fact I had always been destined to be in this place, at this time, with my faculties elevated to this point. I was destiny itself. I was its servant. I was its hand.

But until the moment of crisis came, we were all dancing around one another in geometrical figures, like some great brass orrery – agents of two divergent futures, with all our pawns and our capital pieces on the board. I could feel that the underlying currents were accelerating, melding into one another and becoming stronger by association. The Pantheon was uncommonly united, putting aside its essential antagonism in favour of one new and vital objective. I could not divine much more than that, for at that time, almost all my efforts were bent on understanding and prospering in this new and unsettling world of system conquest, but I did understand that we were all teetering on a narrow fulcrum, apt to collapse one way or the other soon.

Another thing did become steadily apparent. The violence we were unleashing was a danger to our enemies even as it brought the known galaxy under the heel of Terra. The deaths were mounting, the pain increasing. Across such vast distances, that had an effect. I began to feel that the old Powers were closer to me than they had ever been, and that if I could simply reach out, extend an armoured finger ahead of me, I might somehow touch them.

I have never lost that feeling. The Pantheon has remained close to me ever since, whatever lies you may have heard from my many enemies. I have never been their stated champion, not like Horus, but I have always been their servant, their counsellor to the mighty, their assassin, their adviser, their deliverer of souls.

Consistency. That is what they value. Perhaps because they are ever-changing, they will reward the mind that never wavers in its commitment.

Or maybe that is a lie, too. Most things are, when traced back to their beginning.

They defy understanding. They defy categorisation.

And for that, for that one indefinable truth, as I have often said, blessed be their many and malleable names.

So we come to Davin, and I was so sick with anticipation before the final warp-stage that I did not sleep for four nights.

It was, of course, another desert world. There must be something about them. Why do the gods not make themselves more obviously manifest in forests or factories or cities? When we came into orbit, all I could see was a second Colchis, parched and sharp, its ochre plains wrapped around a swollen equatorial zone and squeezing out all other terrain.

Once we’d made planetfall, it soon became apparent what the key difference was. The inhabitants were human, but only just. They were too strong, too strange, as if something had been working on them for a long time. I thought they were all terrifically ugly. My battle-brothers merely saw them as apt disciples for the faith.

This was, to be clear, faith in the Emperor. Let the irony of that sink in, for a moment. Our Legions landed on Davin, for the first time, with the honest and thorough-going intent to turn its population into diligent atheists.

But I did not. I knew what we would find there, as surely as I knew what I would see in the mirrors that now lined my private chamber each time I glanced at them. All worlds have a harmonic – a resonance in the ether – and Davin was no exception. It was a thrum, a press of half-heard sound, like an endless mumbling that lingered on the very edge of intelligibility.

As I skidded across its heat-distorted landscape in my flyer, I could feel the hot pressure against my temples, a hubbub of murmurs guiding me to where I needed to be. Elsewhere, there was fighting. The savages of this world had yet to bow to the inevitable and were taking war to the Sons of Horus and Word Bearers. This resistance had shocked some of the mortal hangers-on within the fleet, who thought it suicidal and pointless, but they were blind to its true purpose. The fighting would be over soon, but it would keep all eyes away from the deep desert, where tombs lay deep and dormant under the baking sands.

I reached my destination, touched down and de-powered the engines. I emerged from my lander and breathed Davinite air for the first time. It tasted vaguely sweet, like overripe fruit. The dust clotted and stuck to everything – soon my armour’s filters were working hard just to keep its airways clear.

Ahead of me rose a temple of some kind, though it had seen better days. Its mud brick and masonry walls were ruined, its towers collapsed. Old stains from old fires still marred the crumbling stonework, and its many doorways were open and gasping in the heat.

I glanced down and saw a ribbon serpent slithering around my ankle. Its black forked tongue flickered briefly, then it slipped away, making for the hard-edged lines of shadow ahead.

I walked up a long causeway, bounded on either side by broken human-sized statues. The further I went, the more I could see how the place must once have been magnificent, an octagonal city-temple of extraordinary size and complexity. We had larger cathedrals on Colchis, but nothing, perhaps, made with such a raw understanding of the relationships between the real and the unreal. I could see immediately that these long-dead architects had known what they were doing. They had known the sacred ratios and proportions. They had known where to site their watchtowers and campaniles so as to catch the red passage of Davin’s ancient sun, casting shadows that looked, out of the corner of an eye, like teeth, or horns, or curved talons.

By then it was late in the day, and the air was seamy with tired heat. My surroundings were almost completely quiet; only my breaths and my footfalls broke the stillness.

I found the priest squatting in the centre of a tumbledown courtyard. A fountain lay choked and gasping amid a heap of rubble, its water long gone. Gargoyles and stone dragons looked down on us from crumbling terraces, their gnarled expressions grotesque against the reddening sky.

The priest was as ugly as every Davinite was – a snaggle-toothed, greasy-haired wretch with dirty robes. He blinked as I approached him, then smiled broadly and obsequiously.

‘You came,’ he said, as if I were some delivery boy on an errand. I was comfortably twice his size, and could have broken his neck with a flick of my finger. He was clearly a fool, near the end of his strength and wits.

‘I saw this place in my dreams,’ I said. ‘But not like this.’

‘It’s not what it used to be,’ he agreed.

He got up and limped across the courtyard. I followed him, having to check my stride to match his pace. We passed under the shade of the gargoyles and into chambers within, all adorned with cracked plaster and gap-tiled mosaics. As we went, I saw faded frescoes on the walls – angels fighting daemons, monsters writhing in combat with knights. I saw depictions of high walls crumbling, and flames leaping over falling towers. Repeated images of a gold-armoured warrior had been scratched out, his face replaced with crude images of a single eye.

Eventually we reached a larger chamber, one buried down in the heart of the city-temple. Its high domed roof was cracked like an eggshell, allowing red light to lance down onto the floor around us. A low stone altar stood in the centre of the space, surrounded by four ritual pillars. The surviving stonework was etched with lines of fine carving – tight-curled glyphs, repeated over and over, just like the screeds on my own flesh.

My skin tingled. I could feel the charge running through these foundations, apt to snap, like static charge, with my every movement. I was breathing faster, my primary heart pumping a little too hard.

‘So this is where it will happen,’ I breathed.

‘It might,’ said the priest. ‘If you are indeed a true messenger.’

I was feeling heady at that point, intoxicated. It is one thing to witness visions, it is another to see the actual site, the actual stone, the actual bricks. I turned on him, catching him by his throat. He gagged, and I almost laughed out loud.

‘Does this feel true, priest?’ I asked, squeezing just a fraction harder.

He couldn’t answer. It would take only the slightest movement to crush his windpipe. I very nearly did it. The nexus of death and power in this place was so complete and all-consuming.

But I halted, suddenly aware of someone watching me. I turned to see a little girl, barely more than a babe in arms, staring at me with dark, wide eyes. I couldn’t interpret her expression. It wasn’t fear. It might have been a kind of exhilaration, just like mine.

I let the priest go. ‘Who is that?’ I asked.

‘Only Akshub,’ he gasped, rubbing the weals on his neck ruefully. ‘Do not hurt her, I beg you.’

I studied her, vaguely amused, and she stared back at me fearlessly. ‘Why would I do that?’ I asked. ‘Is she dangerous?’

Then my gaze wandered off, roving across the faded frescoes. They were badly eroded, hard to make out even with my enhanced eyesight. In all of them, though, I saw the same image, over and over again, picked out in the desert colours of terracotta, ochre and sallow.

A knife. A blade. A flint shard, crudely fashioned, the length of a mortal man’s spine. I knew without needing to ask that no such weapon had ever been fashioned on this world. These ancient artisans had been working from visions, casting their minds out on the ether’s tides, knowing what had to come here to fulfil their lives’ purpose.

‘Where will I find it?’ I asked.

The priest looked up at me, fear and resentment marring his old face. ‘I think that is your task to discover, messenger,’ he said.

I smiled dryly under my helm, feeling my new tattoos flex across my skin. It was a good irony, to leave this dried-out old husk to meet me here, the desperate last cough of a half-dead people. If I had waited another decade, there might have been no one left at all, just the stones and the dust and the serpents in the sand.

‘Rebuild it,’ I said coldly, looking up at the state of the walls and the roof. ‘A governor will be appointed when the fighting is over – he’ll ensure you have what you need. Rebuild it all, just as it was.’

The priest grinned pathetically. ‘There are so few of us left. Can you not send us… help?’

I knew what he wanted. Slaves culled from our many conquests, the kind he had dreamed of owning ever since he had learned the words of the old curses.

I didn’t bother giving him an answer. He glanced back over at the girl, who hadn’t moved. She squatted in the darkness, watching, saying nothing.

‘I’ll see you again,’ I said, sealing the deal.

And for all of this, I am hated.

For being there at the outset, for laying the foundations that others would willingly build on. I think they wish to find something in this story that explains things – some moment of decision, some choice that could later be regretted or accounted for. But it’s just as I said – none exists. I have always been on this road, never turning, never deviating.

A long time ago, aware of my limitations, I formulated an expression to capture my condition: Blessed is the mind too small to doubt. I am very attached to this maxim, and propagate it wherever I can. I hope it will be taken up with enthusiasm once our task is completed and the False Emperor is expunged from eternity.

For now, though, I am content. I am loathed by those I betrayed, and loathed by those I guided into betrayal. I have brought a Warmaster to the Truth, and cracked the galaxy’s vaults to speed his armies. I have burned worlds, and been burned by them, and who thanks me for this? This rebellion does not even bear my name – it bears the title of the scorpion I stayed closest to, the most dangerous of the breed who will ever live.

Now I observe my disgrace. I consider the wounds I have suffered, and the pain that will dog me forever. I consider those that inflicted such ignominy upon me, and how they started their stories so nobly and will end them in the gutter.

They hate me, not because of what I am, but because of what they were. They hate me because they turned, and I did not. The records of our enemies call us all turncoats, but I changed no allegiance. I was always here, just as I am now, aware of myself and the universe that made me. I lied with every breath I ever took, except to myself. That is purity, of a kind, and something that no other soul in this grand armada of renegades can boast.

I look on Terra now from my void-cold vantage, and see its huddled lights glimmer in the fragile dark. Soon the order to attack will come, and the final act will be entered. The monsters I created will burst from their fetters, giving no thought to what long labours brought them here.

Horus mutilated me, my own primarch discarded me. That could be a cause for self-doubt, here on the edge of Terra’s fall. That could make a lesser soul slink away, gnawing on his failure even as humanity’s bastion collapses at last. But that’s never been my way. I’ve been stung before, and I always come back for more poison. I’m still the boy in the shadows of Colchis, pulling on the garrotte-string and feeling my blood pump.

The old games never really ceased, in truth. Only the players changed.

Nothing remains to be explained. I can whisper these truths to my own screed-inscribed face, if I wish, that I can now hold up in front of my own eyes as my only audience. The ragged flesh is dry and cracking now, and will fall apart soon, but I keep it, just as I used to keep my mirrors for the same purpose.

I took this face from another man, once, to become what I wanted to be. Now it is my reminder, that all despots are fragile, and that the hand of destiny will always be despised.

Such is my power, now, I could fashion a new skin in moments. I choose not to. My face still weeps blood under my helm, glistening on flayed muscles. It hurts, and that too is a reminder.

I was there at the start. I was there before we even had names for all the things we’re doing now. I have no congregation any more, but I will again. The faithful will come back, thirsty for accounts of how this feat was achieved, and I will have stories waiting for them. Such stories. Stories that will make their ears bleed and their hearts burst.

So it’s not done yet, Erebus. Not yet. Just watch.

Just watch.

THE FIRST HERETIC

Chastised by the Emperor, the Word Bearers set out on their own path – one that will eventually lead them to damnation and heresy and plunge the galaxy into war.

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EYE OF TERRA

The galaxy burns at Horus’s command, and the Imperium will never be the same again. This anthology gathers together tales of the primarchs and their sons, and the lengths to which their bitterness may yet drive them…

In this volume, read the story ‘Aurelian’.

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KNOW NO FEAR

Mustering for war against the orks, the Ultramarines Legion is attacked by the Word Bearers on the planet of Calth, and the forces of Chaos openly reveal their part in the Heresy.

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MARK OF CALTH

The Heresy came to Calth without warning. In just a few hours of betrayal and bloodshed, the proud warriors of the XIII Legion – Guilliman’s own Ultramarines – were laid low by the treachery of their erstwhile brothers of the XVII.

In this volume, read the stories ‘Shards of Erebus’, ‘Dark Heart’ and ‘The Underworld War’.

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BETRAYER

As Calth burns, the Word Bearers and World Eaters begin a bloody crusade across Ultramar. Worlds will burn, Legions will clash... and a primarch will fall.

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SLAVES TO DARKNESS

As the traitor fleet closes on Terra, turmoil grips its heart. Horus lies wounded, and as the greatest battle of all time looms, it falls to Maloghurst the Twisted to hold the force together and save the Warmaster.

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SALAMANDERS

XVIII LEGION

ARTEFACTS

Nick Kyme

‘At the edge of the Ghoul Stars, at the very fringe of Segmentum Ultima, my brother and I united on a mission of mercy. We emerged from warp transit wreathed in tendrils of psychic corposant that clung to the scarred hulls of our ships – but we arrived too late. We had come to rein in a madman, yet could only bear witness to an atrocity.’

Fire crackled beneath the primarch’s words, though T’kell found it hard to discern if the sound came from his lord’s voice or the flaming torches on the walls. Whatever the cause, the air was filled with the reek of hot ash and cinder, carried along by Vulkan’s deep and rumbling baritone.

‘It wasn’t much to see, though I’m not sure if I expected it to be. So different from our home world, one to the other as night is to day… Nocturne is a terrible place to behold and, though I felt no fear as I emerged from my own capsule into the burning dawn, I could appreciate its feral majesty. Tall peaks of fire mountains, long plains of ash and sun-baked deserts, the stink of sulphur from the oceans – it was bracing, deadly. From the void, Nocturne is a deep red orb, a blazing iris of fire. His was a dark, unremarkable world. It looked like a black marble, flawed by the grey smog of its polluted atmosphere.’ Vulkan scowled at the memory, as if he could taste those noxious fumes on his tongue. ‘To be able to see it from orbit, those clouds must have been dense, but I am told they hid a plethora of sins. Even so, it doesn’t justify what he did. What we saw him do.’

A shadow passed across the primarch, the incumbent silence that followed this declaration filled by the sound of his heavy breathing. T’kell realised the heinous act that Vulkan was describing had left a mark deeper than any brand – though whether the perpetrator or the act itself was the cause, he did not know.

‘Darkness veiled it, a curse met out by an ugly moon called Tenebor. Its name meant “shadow”, an apt appellation. Here it was literal, for the moon cast a shroud of night over a world desperately in need of illumination. Before that moment, I hadn’t ever seen his home. Now I never will, and I cannot say I’m sorry. By every account I’ve heard, it was a wretched place, without possibility of transformation.

‘It began as a starburst, noiseless flashes in the vastness of space. They came from a dark, dagger-like vessel – his own flagship. At first, I could not quite reconcile what I was seeing with the deed. Great beams of stabbing light and swarms of torpedoes hurtled down onto his dark world. All attempts to hail his ship failed, of course. Our brother was in the mood for vengeance, not reason. He wanted to smite it, he would declare later, and expunge it of all sin in a single, purifying and insane action. The surface erupted in a chain of stark, flaring blooms and for the first time in its long, benighted history the world saw light. But it was the light of ending.’

Vulkan paused, as if wanting to choose his words carefully and recount what he remembered as clearly as he could.

‘You have to understand, my son, because this is where the real horror of it all lay – there was precision in that orbital bombardment. He wasn’t just venting his wrath. He knew. Some flaw in the tectonic structure, it doesn’t matter how or where, was targeted directly. I had thought we were witnessing petulance, the immature act of an immature soul with tragic consequences. But it wasn’t. What we saw was premeditated.’

And so it was the perpetrator and the deed that had left the primarch so disquieted. T’kell could not imagine having to accept the reality of that. Vulkan went on.

‘Cracks split the outer crust along fault lines, then spread, webbing in all directions. Fire colonised the landscape, virulent as a plague, until the entire surface of the world was burning. Then it was no more. In one cataclysmic explosion, its moon and every minor celestial body in sight of this destruction were gone.’

Lowering his head, Vulkan took a moment to regain his composure. When he looked up again his eyes blazed like the fires he had just described, the physical expression of anger he felt towards his brother for unleashing planetary genocide.

‘Debris rained against us, stripping shields and battering the armour of our vessels. We rode the shockwaves that emanated from the detonation but emerged scathed in ways that went beyond the dents and scrapes clawed into the ship’s hull. An immense expulsion of heat faded and in its wake was dust and floating rock.

‘Silence reigned for a while, until Horus conquered our collective sense of disbelief and gave us purpose. He was incensed at what our brother had done. He was also determined to run him down. I gave chase alongside, not knowing that Horus had tasked another primarch to slip around undetected. Between the three of us, we bracketed the world-murderer with our ships. There could be no escape. I thought Horus might open fire and kill him for what he had done, but in fact he was determined to redeem him. I wonder had there been one of us to do that later for Horus, would events have taken a different course now?’

Again, Vulkan paused in his iteration, as if imagining a reality where that was true – Horus the loyal son, instead of the rebel.

‘It doesn’t matter now. Nostramo died in those moments and though none of us could have realised it at the time, so did any chance for Curze’s redemption. It all began with him. I think it will probably end that way too.’

T’kell watched his primarch closely, being sure not to speak until Vulkan had finished. Around them, the atmosphere of the forge was soothing, the heat and the penumbral darkness adding solemnity to the primarch’s words. Ash and the smell of warm metal were redolent on a shallow breeze, but the sound of hammer strikes against the anvil was quiet for now; the forge’s blacksmith had paused in his crafting.

‘I can’t fathom what must have been going through his mind, my lord. I have seen destruction on such a scale before, but to turn your guns on your own world with the express purpose of destroying it… We are generationally set apart from our sires, but at least I can understand your motivations.’

‘But not in this?’ asked Vulkan. ‘Not in the task I have asked of you?’

‘I’ll do my duty, primarch,’ T’kell answered, somewhat defensively, as though not wanting Vulkan to think he was a poor son.

‘But you don’t understand the reason.’

T’kell confessed, ‘I do not. Not for this.’

Vulkan leaned back in his seat. It was a simple block of stone, carved from the face of the mountain, worn to the primarch’s shape by the many hours he had spent sitting and toiling over the artefacts he wrought with his Emperor-given craft. One particularly magnificent specimen was lying on his workbench, now finished. The hammer was a true work of art, and T’kell found his own crafts humbled by the weapon’s beauty.

Vulkan saw him admiring it.

‘Do you know why my father made all His sons different?’ he asked.

T’kell shook his head. His war plate whirred and groaned in sympathy. He had forged the armour himself, and it was as finely artificed as any suit of ceramite and adamantium in the XVIII Legion. Usually, it was crowned with a drake’s head helmet, but T’kell would not dream of wearing that when in conference with his lord. The primarch always insisted on meeting the gaze of his warriors and expected the same in return. He would have reprimanded the forge master if he had hidden his eyes behind retinal lenses.

‘I cannot even pretend to understand the depths of the Emperor’s design or colossal intellect,’ T’kell said humbly.

‘Of course not,’ Vulkan replied without condescension. ‘I believe He did it as part of His vision for the galaxy. Though I know my brother Ferrus would disagree, each of us has an important role to play. Guilliman is the politician, the statesman. Dorn, the keeper of my father’s house, and Russ is the dutiful watchman that keeps us all honest.’

‘Honest?’

Vulkan smiled coldly. ‘A joke that is no longer funny.’

‘And Curze?’ asked T’kell, his desire for knowledge a symptom of his Martian training. ‘What is he?’

Vulkan’s faced darkened.

‘Necessary. Or so we all believed once.’

Mars was the reason for Vulkan’s return to Nocturne and his brief reunion with his forge master. Resupply from the Mechanicum had been sparse and the primarch had been forced to deviate part of his fleet’s course to the one munitions store he could rely on – his own home world. The fact that T’kell was stationed there on the fortress-moon of Prometheus only made it more timely.

‘And Horus, and you?’ T’kell pressed, his eagerness to understand interfering with his sense of propriety.

Vulkan indulged him. ‘Horus was the best of us. Although, in our father’s eyes, we were equals. I always felt like a child in his presence. Unless you’ve met him, it is hard to describe but my brother had this… way about him, an undeniable charisma that made you listen to his every word and then believe it without question. Back then, none of us thought anything but absolute loyalty lay in his heart, otherwise we might have realised just how dangerous his persuasive aura could be.

‘His role was leader and once, I would have followed him to whatever end and for any purpose. But that pedestal has fallen, and there will be no righting it. As for me…’ Vulkan laughed humourlessly, spreading his arms to encompass the forge and the vault beyond. ‘I am my father’s weapon-maker, but unlike Ferrus or Perturabo, I specialise in the unique.’

T’kell’s gaze strayed to the immense vault door that dominated the back wall of the chamber as he recalled the many names and forms of the artefacts within.

‘Like the hammer?’ T’kell said, gesturing to the workbench.

Vulkan turned to regard it, lost for a moment as he ran his hand across Dawnbringer’s head, the haft bound in firedrake hide, the gemstones and the esoteric device he had fashioned into its pommel.

‘It is the single finest thing I have ever wrought,’ he told the forge master, ‘but it was never meant for me. I forged it for my brother, for Horus, and that is another reason for the task I must set for you.’

Vulkan left it alone, but did not avert his gaze from the hammer.

‘It was after Nostramo, after Ullanor. My gift to him to commemorate his achievement. With Jaghatai’s help we had captured Curze and brought him to heel. You have to understand, my son, nothing like this had ever happened before. For a primarch to act in the way Curze had, to do what he had done…’

The primarch shook his head.

‘It was unconscionable. Yet, my brother had a solution.’

‘Remake him,’ Horus said proudly, and with enough enthusiasm and vigour to make the Lord of Drakes look up from his brooding.

Horus looked resplendent in his armour, a muscular sheath of pale ivory and jet black. It was a suit so fine that even the great blacksmiter had to admit his envy of it.

He and Vulkan were alone in Horus’ quarters on board the Vengeful Spirit, sitting in companionable silence when the primarch of the Luna Wolves spoke. They shared a drink together, a heady broth native to Cthonia – Vulkan did not know its name, but appreciated it for its heat and potency.

He swilled the mixture around the cup, looking into the tiny maelstrom he had made, as if the answer he sought might be waiting for him somewhere within its depths.

Vulkan looked up, his eyes glowing as they always did in the dark confines of Horus’ private chambers. ‘Tell me how, brother, for no one more than I wishes that to be.’

‘We can rehabilitate our brother.’

At first, even Horus’ rhetoric could not sway him, and Vulkan looked more aloof than ever, concealed by the shadows. The first primarch’s quarters were functional but well appointed, even opulent. A fire raged in an ouslite hearth, a concession Vulkan felt sure Horus had made to make his guest more comfortable. Instead, the Lord of Drakes eschewed the light and heat of the fire, wondering why he hadn’t disabused himself of this conference as Jaghatai had, though his gaze occasionally strayed to the flames.

‘After this,’ said Vulkan, angrily jabbing a finger towards the empty darkness and imagining the swathe of atmospheric dust that used to be Nostramo. ‘How?’

Horus smiled in a way that suggested he already knew this would work, and had but to convince Vulkan of it.

‘Each of us shall take him under our wing, nurture him.’ He gestured with his hands, miming the next part. ‘Mould him into the weapon he needs to be, not the jagged implement he is right now.’

Vulkan frowned, thinking of the midnight-clad prisoner they held, doubting the sagacity of his brother’s suggestion.

‘Think of it like this,’ said Horus, his optimism unwavering. ‘You are a weapon maker, the weapon maker. Curze is but an untempered blade that requires its edge honing. Remake him, as you would remake a broken sword, Vulkan.’

There was a vibrancy to his eyes as Horus made his pitch, his certainty for his wayward brother’s resurgence becoming infectious.

‘I believed him,’ said Vulkan, leaving the past behind. ‘Curze was to be separated from the bulk of his Legion, in the hope that – free of Nostramo’s malign influence – he could change. I would take him first, then Dorn… once he was healed.’

‘Healed?’

Vulkan’s expression turned rueful. His eyes met the forge master’s. ‘Curze had tried to kill Rogal.’

T’kell cursed under his breath at this admission.

‘The Praetorian of Terra?’

‘I know of no other,’ said Vulkan. ‘For Horus’ plan to work, it was vital that the relationship between Dorn and Curze be repaired. But after Kharaatan I knew we had erred. I don’t know whom Horus had planned to put Curze with next, but we didn’t get that far. The demands of the Great Crusade and his new position as Warmaster kept Horus in a distant orbit. I couldn’t attend the Triumph at Ullanor, so I had not seen him in person since Nostramo. Years had passed without word between us, but I knew I must disturb him for this. I had seen what was within Curze’s heart. It was nightmarish and broken. I pitied my brother, hated his deeds but not him, and feared what he would do or become if allowed to continue.

‘Horus and I met across a lithocast projection. I had already spoken to Dorn, who had returned to Terra by that point, and we were of the same mind. Foolishly, I thought Horus would be too. His initial greeting was warm enough, if a little more prickly than I had once known.’

‘Brother Vulkan, what matter of great import do you come to me with that warrants my time and the disruption of our father’s Crusade?’

The Warmaster stood amongst warriors on the bridge of his flagship, an array of sensorium and auguries suggested along the edges of the hololith. He wore different battleplate to their last meeting aboard the Vengeful Spirit, repainted in the deep sea green of his newly renamed Legion.

The Sons of Horus.

‘The undertone of condescension was hard to miss,’ Vulkan said to T’kell. ‘I have no doubt it was deliberate.’

‘I apologise, brother, for taking you away from your duties, but I believe this matter is dire enough that it must come to your attention.’

Horus’ eyes widened, and Vulkan could not deny the sense that his brother was mocking him.

‘It must? Well, then you had best speak of it, Vulkan, so I can gauge for myself just how dire the matter is.’

It was more than just the Warmaster’s tone that worried Vulkan – something deeper, implied rather than overtly expressed. Though little of the ship was discernible behind Horus in the hololith, there was enough to suggest that it had been changed. Markings that had not been there before, strange symbols Vulkan did not know the meaning or significance of, were partly visible. At first, he considered they might be lodge sigils, as it was Horus who had instigated these traditions within the Legions. Vulkan had eschewed them, despite his brother’s overtures, such bonding rituals redundant in the face of the Drake’s own Promethean Creed.

But what he saw did not seem entirely related to lodge culture. There was something else, something inscrutable…

‘It was as if another being were wearing my brother’s skin,’ Vulkan explained. ‘Yet even that skin, with all its usual trappings, was a darker version of what I knew.’

‘You believed him changed?’ asked T’kell.

‘It was more than that. I recounted what had happened on Kharaatan – Curze’s mania, his suicidal, nihilistic tendencies. Despite the strange mood I had found him in, I expected Horus to be appalled.’

Vulkan paused, his jaw hardening at the memory.

‘But he laughed,’ he said, frowning incredulously. ‘I was angry and confused.’

‘I see nothing amusing in this, brother,’ Vulkan said, wondering what had happened to the noble warrior he had once so admired. ‘We have failed.’

Horus’ mirth turned to serious intensity. ‘On the contrary. You have succeeded.’

‘I do not see how.’

‘Curze cannot be tamed. His is a necessary evil, a monster to help us win this long war and keep our hands clean.’

‘How are they clean? They are tainted just as his, perhaps not with murder, but with complacency in the full knowledge of Curze’s homicidal pathology.’

Horus leaned in, his face filling the grainy hololith.

‘Every general needs a weapon of terror, an instrument to threaten the hardiest of his enemies with. You have sharpened ours well, Vulkan. From what you’ve told me, Curze has turned fear into a blade that I can wield.’

‘This is no weapon we should harness. His mind is broken, Horus. He needs help.’

‘He’s had help. Yours. And I am grateful for it.’ Horus leaned back again. ‘If there is nothing further?’

‘I saw something in Horus,’ Vulkan said to T’kell. ‘Something that stopped me from replying. It made me withhold the gift I had made for him. It made me realise that my pleas would forever fall on deaf ears. It has also driven me to my decision about the vault. Some weapons are simply too dangerous, in the wrong hands.’

Despite everything he had heard, T’kell still pleaded.

‘You are not the leader of a rebellion against the Emperor. It is not your army that we go to censure on Isstvan. You are not Horus.’

Vulkan’s eyes strayed to the vault. ‘Why is it so important to you that we do not destroy them?’

‘Because they are your work and legacy. Destroy them and the galaxy will never see their like again.’

‘And would that be such a terrible thing, my son? As weapon maker, I have forged an arsenal that could cause unimaginable death and suffering. That is not a legacy I want.’

‘Then why fashion them in the first place?’

Vulkan leaned forward so he could place his hand on T’kell’s shoulder. The gesture dwarfed the forge master, but was paternal and reassuring.

‘Because it was my purpose, the one my father made me perform, and back then I did not believe any of us were the wrong hands. Through Curze and Horus, I now sadly know different. One maniac in our midst, a tragic error of nurture over nature that I can understand and accept. Horus is rational. Not only that, he is the very best of us. I would freely admit that it terrifies me to think of him wilfully inciting rebellion. He is an enemy I would not wish to fight on any level, not least of which because he is my brother. And should my craft, what lies beyond those vault doors, be taken by Horus… I cannot be responsible for that, T’kell.’

Vulkan rose to his feet to declare the matter closed, taking up the hammer Dawnbringer as he did so.

‘Come. I’ll show you what must be done.’

Together they crossed the smoke-thronged forge, their armour reflecting the lambent firelight, until they reached the door of the vault.

It was immense, as was the vault itself, and Vulkan used an icon he had fashioned as part of his armour to unlock it. The small fuller slipped into a recess wrought into the door’s ornate surface. It was difficult to see, and T’kell realised he would not have found it without the primarch to show him.

One twist and the cavernous space was filled with the dull clunk of gears, pulleys and chains – the sound of an old mechanism churning to life. After a few seconds the door began to open, slowly but inexorably. It split down the middle, each half opening outwards and into the forge.

When the gap was wide enough, Vulkan stepped through and led T’kell into the vault after him.

As he passed through this slender portal, T’kell marvelled at how thick the doors were, at the sheer incredible artifice of their construction. Despite their ostensible function, they were as beauteous as any of Vulkan’s creations. Had Ferrus Manus made these doors they would be cold, ugly things. Impervious, secure, but ultimately bland.

Where the Lord of Iron was a smith, Vulkan was an artisan, or so T’kell believed.

‘You are the first and only one of my sons to see this vault,’ said Vulkan. ‘Held safe within its walls is every artefact I have ever forged.’

Muttering a word of command, Vulkan ignited the braziers around the room. Flickering torchlight cast the contents of the vault in tones of umber and crimson, filling every recess with shadow. Only hints of the wonders that the primarch had fashioned were revealed.

T’kell recognised some, and knew their names.

Obsidian Chariot.

Vermilion Sphere.

Light of Unmaking.

Some were constructed as simple blades; others were larger, more complex mechanisms. All were named.

Names had power, as Vulkan often said. To name a thing was to give it identity, resonance. An enemy does not fear a man who wields a sword, but would give pause to one who held the Fangblade of Ignarak. Such things mattered to the Lord of Drakes and were a part of his teachings.

‘Such wonders…’ breathed T’kell, scarcely able to comprehend his primarch’s magnificent labours.

Vulkan had set the hammer Dawnbringer down amongst the other treasures and was about to reach for his spear when he stopped, fingers poised to wrap around the haft. Sword and spear were his preferred weapons, Thunderhead having been destroyed earlier during the Great Crusade.

‘I hope your indecision represents a change of heart, primarch,’ ventured T’kell when he had recovered his composure enough to speak.

‘It does not. The artefacts must be destroyed. I am bound for Isstvan so cannot do it myself, which is why you must, T’kell.’

‘Then what is wrong, primarch?’

Leaving the spear where it stood shackled to the rack, Vulkan took up Dawnbringer.

‘I believed I had chosen poorly, although this feels right,’ he said. ‘Fitting. Perhaps its epithet will see my brother illuminated after all.’

T’kell looked on despairingly at the artefacts, desperate to preserve them and his lord’s legacy.

‘Primarch, I beseech you,’ he uttered, bowing to one knee. ‘Please do not ask me to do this. At least save something.’

Vulkan looked down at his forge master, then to the inside of the vault.

‘There are weapons here that can destroy worlds, my son…’

‘Or save them from destruction,’ T’kell replied, looking up at his lord, ‘in the right hands.’

‘Mine?’ asked Vulkan, meeting the forge master’s pleading gaze.

‘Yes! Or Lord Dorn, or Guilliman. Even Russ!’

Vulkan held T’kell’s gaze a moment longer before turning away.

‘Rise, forge master. I would not have one of my sons beg me on his knees.’ There was a snarl in Vulkan’s voice and for an instant, T’kell thought he might have overstepped.

‘I am driven to it, primarch.’

‘Very well.’

‘My lord?’

Vulkan faced him.

‘I said, very well. Something should remain. If I destroy everything, then I have given up on hope and seeing loyalty and honour endure in my brothers. I won’t do that.’

T’kell visibly relaxed, the relief at his primarch’s words evident on his face.

‘You are to remain here, T’kell. You won’t come to the Isstvan System – your place is now on Nocturne and Prometheus.’

‘But, primarch–’

‘Do not defy me a second time,’ Vulkan warned. ‘I am not that tolerant.’

T’kell bowed his head in contrition.

‘You shall become Forgefather, and keeper of the artefacts in this vault.’

‘Forgefather?’ asked T’kell, frowning. ‘Am I not your forge master, my lord?’

‘Of course. A legionary can be more than one thing, T’kell. I am entrusting you with this duty, just as I entrusted you with the vault.’

‘What duty, primarch? Name it, and it shall be done.’

‘To act as custodian. To swear you will protect these artefacts and should anything happen to me, ensure they are well hidden, far from those who would seek to use them poorly.’

T’kell saluted vehemently. ‘I swear it, Lord Vulkan.’

‘Good. Choose seven to remain, and only seven. One for each of our realms on Nocturne.’

‘There are thousands in here, primarch. How can I possibly–’

‘Indeed there are,’ said Vulkan, tying the hammer off around his belt and reaching for his gauntlet. Kesare’s drake scale mantle was already hanging around his broad shoulders. ‘Seven, Forgefather, that is what your primarch decrees.’ Vulkan was leaving, his mind now firmly on a reckoning with Horus.

‘I go to join with Ferrus’ fleet,’ he called back to T’kell. ‘See it is done before I return.’

He walked away bound for the space port, leaving T’kell behind.

The Forgefather regarded the contents of the vault, trying to contemplate the impossible task before him.

‘Seven…’

VULKAN LIVES

In the wake of the Dropsite Massacre at Isstvan V, the survivors of the Salamanders Legion searched long and hard for their fallen primarch, but to no avail. Little did they know that while Vulkan might have wished himself dead, he lives still…

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THE DAMNATION OF PYTHOS

A group of battered legionaries regroups after the Dropsite Massacre, on a seemingly insignificant death world. But a darkness gathers that threatens to consume Pythos forever…

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DEATHFIRE

Artellus Numeon urges the Salamanders on Macragge to return their primarch’s body to Nocturne – there to be reborn in the flames of Mount Deathfire.

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OLD EARTH

Reborn in the fires of Nocturne, Vulkan prepares for his final journey. With the choice between vengeance and duty, what will the primarch’s destiny be?

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BORN OF FLAME

The Salamanders battle through the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy in this collection of novellas and short stories that showcase the selfless heroism of the Fireborn.

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RAVEN GUARD

XIX LEGION

THE GREY RAVEN

Gav Thorpe

There was a moment during translation when everything hung between the realms of the material and the immaterial, when Balsar Kurthuri knew silence. At the threshold of existence, for an infinitesimally short instant, he was neither real nor imagined, alive nor dead, legionary nor psyker. The mesmerising, taunting, crashing background noise of the warp did not intrude upon his mind; the constant nagging whisper of his companions’ thoughts and the ever-present hiss of humanity’s psychic static was gone.

He remembered the first time he had left with the Raven Guard, the first time he had been upon a ship as it delved into the gap between realities. Every occasion since, on each of the countless jumps from star system to star system, he looked forward to that singular experience, hoping that perhaps this time the silence would remain.

It was not to be.

The cold clamour of his fellow Space Marines welled up around him, no matter how much he suppressed his potential, how high and thick he built his mental barriers. Even the servitors at the consoles, more machines than men, gave off a dim glimmer of life like slowly leaking reactors tripping a rad-counter over and over – the very reason for their existence being that they had souls, which true machines did not, such were the strange ways of the Mechanicum.

The Geller field dropped as the warp breach closed behind them, taking with it the nerve-tingling sensation of psychic suppression. Like a fog lifting outside a sealed door, Balsar was aware of its dissipation even though his thoughts extended no further than the limits of his own skull.

He had always been more of a receiver than a broadcaster. It was that ability that had seen him inducted into the XIX Legion and sent out with the fleet.

Layer by layer he shut away the impeding inputs, like narrowing the frequency band on a vox-caster until he had only a single channel.

Last to go were the bleeding thoughts of his companions on the bridge of the Wrathful Vanguard, and strongest were the mixed emotions of its commander, Captain Noriz. His emanating thoughts at returning to the Throneworld fluctuated between relief, trepidation and anticipation. Not that one needed psychic powers to discern such truth – it was obvious from the Imperial Fist’s pensive expression and relentless pacing – and the bright polish and full regalia of his war plate – that the occasion of his return to his Legion was at the fore of his mind.

More closed but still discernible were the thought patterns of Arcatus Vindix Centurio, warrior of the Legio Custodes, who had left with the Raven Guard after their fateful acquisition of the primarch gene-code during their last journey to Terra. His face was passive, his stance relaxed, but seeping through the iron gates of his mind came pulses of something like happiness at his homecoming. Not relief, but pleasure at being returned to the place of his birth and his duty.

Even as a semblance of quiet fell upon Balsar, the placid deepness of a pool from which one hears and sees only the faintest glimmers from the surface, a physical clamour rose to fill his senses.

Sensor-servitors jabbered warnings and klaxons wailed as the augur banks came online after their deactivation for warp transit. Multiple targeting beams and intrusive hails assaulted the Wrathful Vanguard, threatening all kinds of trauma before even a word was uttered.

‘Warning signals off,’ snapped Noriz, his golden-yellow livery dappled by the glow from a dozen red and amber lamps. The clamour seemed to settle more than agitate him, and he spoke calmly to his officers. ‘Gun crews remain on standby, targeting systems on passive.’

A chorus of affirmatives replied.

‘Vox-channels open for contact,’ reported the legionary sergeant at the communications console. ‘Which hail do you wish to receive?’

‘How many are there?’ asked Balsar.

The sergeant checked his display.

‘Eighteen.’ He read a little more. ‘Two outer defence stations, three full line warships and the rest are escort-class monitors and patrol boats.’

‘Give me whichever has highest rank priority,’ Noriz told his deck officer. ‘Return the others with our standard identifiers.’

Balsar realised that Noriz was in his element. This was his whole world. After years fighting the war alongside the Raven Guard, he was now returning to the Imperial Fists, on far more familiar ground.

The former Librarian had another revelation. ‘You were hoping for this, weren’t you?’

Noriz glanced at him with a guilty smile.

‘I’ll admit, I was far more worried about arriving and not being challenged.’ He nodded to the waiting sergeant. ‘Full contact, prepare for visual feed.’

The connection crackled into life with one of the defence stations. On a sub-screen, wavering lines illustrated the several banks of weapons batteries currently locked on to their position from the fortress. Armoured figures moved in the background, mostly legionaries and several gold-armoured Custodians – to Balsar’s surprise, the figure that appeared on the main display was not dressed in the war plate of the VII Legion, but the starched uniform of an Imperial Army officer. By the frogging and epaulets he was of some senior rank, not entirely the sort expected to find manning a comm-station. Such a secondment spoke of recent upheaval. His broad face was scarred down one side – a las-burn fresh enough that healing unguent still gave it a glossy sheen and stained the stiff collar of his dress jacket. He spoke through one side of his mouth, the other paralysed by the wound.

‘The Wrathful Vanguard? Your identifier is years out of date,’ said the officer. He turned his head to someone that could not be seen, nodded and looked back at the lens. ‘Is Captain Noriz still in command?’

‘I am Captain Noriz of the Imperial Fists. Please provide your rank and name.’

‘Commandant-Colonel Flecht, of the Jovian Corpus.’ Flecht looked tired, heavy bags under his eyes, his speech slurred even when accounting for the injury. ‘Hold station and await further instruction.’

‘I must rejoin the Seventh Legion as soon as possible, commandant-colonel. I have with me Arcatus of the Custodian Guard. He will vouch for all aboard this vessel.’

‘The Legio Custodes?’ Flecht roused a little more interest. ‘I’ll note that on the application. Stand-to and await escort. If you attempt to power up your weapons, you will be destroyed. If you raise your void shields, you will be destroyed. If you attempt to establish communication other than through...’

His voice tailed off as he turned again, this time to face the figures across the communications hall. A gold-plated warrior approached, their exchange too quiet for the feed pickups to detect. Flecht moved aside and was replaced by the blank-masked figure of a Custodian.

‘Arcatus, make yourself known,’ he barked.

‘I am Arcatus,’ said the warrior, moving to stand beside Noriz. ‘The entire ship’s company has been assessed for loyalty. Few have fought harder in the Emperor’s name than those aboard this ship.’

‘You will understand, honoured companion, that verbal assurance is no assurance at all. There have been significant developments since your departure. No ship is permitted into the inner system without authentication and verification in person. A boarding party is being assembled to conduct the search.’

Noriz glanced at Balsar, sharing the moment of irony. Several years earlier it had been the Imperial Fist enforcing the security of the Solar System and the Raven Guard under suspicion. To his credit, Noriz suffered the indignity of doubt without question.

Arcatus’ mood was not so easily tempered. ‘You would delay my return to the Emperor’s side? This is no Blood Game.’

‘I am Ludivicus, personally appointed to this role by the First Lord of Terra. You will defer to the judgement of this station as if it were the judgement of Malcador himself.’

‘Does the Sigillite now sit upon the Throne?’ Arcatus demanded. ‘We answer only to the Emperor.’

‘And the Emperor has named Malcador His regent in all things. The Sigillite’s word is the Emperor’s will, Arcatus. You know this.’

‘What of my Lord Dorn?’ Noriz asked, his haste betraying a sudden anxiety. ‘Our scanners detect the debris of much fighting in the system. How fares the Praetorian of Terra?’

‘He lives,’ was the only reply that Ludivicus would give.

Balsar made his presence known. ‘You speak of judgement, and claim to speak in the name of Malcador, but I am afraid I must set my case before the Sigillite in person. Corvus Corax of the Nineteenth Legion dispatched me to the Throneworld to stand before the Sigillite and seek his adjudication on matters pertaining to the Edict of Nikaea, and the Librarius.’

‘And who are you to demand the personal attention of the Sigillite in these critical times?’

‘Balsar Kurthuri of the Raven Guard. Formerly of the Librarius, under personal oath to Lord Corax.’

The Custodian’s mask made it impossible to detect any change in his expression, but his demeanour shifted. He stood a little straighter, his shoulders tensing. Even if Balsar allowed his other-sense free flow, the distance to the defence station was too great for a scan, but Ludivicus’ curt manner confirmed his sudden antipathy.

‘Arcatus, threat protocols are in full effect. I expect you and your followers to do your duty immediately.’

Balsar looked to the Imperial Fists captain for any explanation, but Noriz’s confused look spoke volumes.

‘Is this a test of my loyalty?’ Arcatus replied. ‘You expect a Custodian to accept the issue of such a command from another of the lowest rank, is that it? Confirm your authorisation, Ludivicus.’

‘It is not test, Arcatus. Do your duty. The authorisation is “Othrys”.’

A subconscious swell of intent from the Custodian warned Balsar a second before Arcatus swung his guardian spear. It was just enough for him to duck beneath the crackling blade. He leapt back as Arcatus swung again, his thoughts flooded with single-minded determination.

Noriz threw himself at the Custodian, wrapping his arm around Arcatus’ neck. ‘Hold! What madness is this?’

Receiving nothing more than a backhanded blow in response, he bellowed to his crew for assistance.

‘And you, get out of here!’ the Imperial Fist yelled at Balsar. ‘Go!’

Not understanding what had happened but certain that his continued survival depended upon his immediate absence, Balsar turned and ran. He heard the curses of Arcatus and the crash of ceramite colliding while the bridge doors growled open before him, and a flurry of bolters being cocked as he pounded out into the corridor.

Balsar felt the closest sensation to panic that it was possible for a Space Marine to experience – a mystifying blend of confusion and urgency that propelled him without thought along the corridors of the Wrathful Vanguard. His instinct took him aft and down, towards the area of the ship that had been set aside as a temporary sanctum for him. If he could reach the safety of that hall, with the ward-sigils and psychic locks that he had created himself, he could at least take a moment to assess the situation.

Thus went his reasoned justification, but he also knew that he was simply allowing instinct to drive his decision making. His conditioning, training and experience had prepared him for nearly any eventuality on the battlefield. The only time he had felt like this before had been on Isstvan, at the dropsite, the moment that the Iron Warriors’ cannons had opened fire.

Helpless. Bemused. Almost infantile in his inability to comprehend the magnitude of what was happening.

Balsar had not the slightest clue what new threat protocols had been activated, nor why Arcatus had attacked him. What was special about ‘Othrys’? He tried to tell himself that it was a misunderstanding, but the singular, instantaneous purpose with which the Custodian had turned against him proved otherwise.

The boarding alarm sounded across the ship, three short groans of the klaxon followed by three longer tones, repeating endlessly. Serf crew and legionaries would be roused from their stations – they had already been at alert, as was right for any ship dropping in-system. Yellow-armoured warriors pounded down the corridors to their squad muster points, almost oblivious to the sable-plated Raven Guard in their midst.

A flash of gold warned him of the arrival of a Custodian at a junction ahead. Not Arcatus, but one of his subordinates. The guardian paused and, fortunately for Balsar, looked down the corridor the other way first, giving him a split second to throw himself out of sight down a side passage.

He longed to break open the barriers holding his powers in check. If he could scour the passageways and corridors for the minds of his hunters, he could plot a course to his sanctum. The temptation was great, but he held back, mindful of the promise he had made to Lord Corax. With his gene-sire’s permission, he had used his talents in spite of the edict laid down by the Emperor at Nikaea – a simple trick to trigger the psychic lock of the labyrinth that had held the primarch gene-codes on Earth. They had shared a wry understanding at the time, denying his part in the act by attributing it to the will of the Emperor.

But had the subterfuge sat poorly with Corax since then? Had that act fed into some inherent distrust of psykers and the warp, leading to his later change of heart?

These thoughts were out of place, unneeded at this desperate time, but Balsar couldn’t entirely banish them as he spied another Custodian ahead. This warrior saw him and opened fire with the bolter of his guardian spear, shells snapping down the corridor.

The Space Marine replied in kind, lifting his pistol – when had he drawn it? – to fire off a burst without conscious thought. Dodging the Custodian’s return fire, he careened off a bulkhead and pushed on down another corridor, heading towards the starboard gun batteries.

Twice now, the Custodians had been ahead of him. Clearly Arcatus was guiding them, guessing at his destination.

He needed a better plan.

Checking that he was unobserved, Balsar pulled open the hatch to the empty magazine and stepped inside. A few empty shell crates and feed belts littered the floor – Noriz would be disappointed that they had not been tidied away properly when the stores had run out and the chamber fell into disuse.

Given a moment to think, the Raven Guard considered his situation. Along with Arcatus there were six more Custodians on board. Seven warriors could not possibly scour the entire ship.

But that was not the problem.

Even if the Custodians could not track him down, there would be others on their way. The boarding party that Ludivicus had mentioned could number in the dozens, even the hundreds. What chance did he have then of hiding?

And to what purpose? They would not give up the search if Balsar were such an important target. The unease at his mention of Nikaea meant that it had to be connected to his psychic powers, though whether the threat protocols were to apprehend or execute he was not sure. Balsar figured that it seemed likely the latter, and in any case was not prepared to risk the consequences of finding out.

If he could not stay here, there had to be some other solution…

He had to leave. He had to get off the Wrathful Vanguard. Perhaps even make his own way to Terra somehow, to plead his case to Malcador himself. Surely the assertion of his primarch had to count for something?

The one boon in his favour was that the Imperial Fists had not tried to hinder or apprehend him. It seemed purely a protocol of the Legio Custodes for the time being. That could change, of course, if a higher authority was brought to bear. What if Noriz received orders from his Legion command? From Rogal Dorn himself?

Balsar shook his head, dismissing these thoughts. The primarch of the VII had no knowledge of these events. The fate of a single Librarian was of no concern to him. Nor to Malcador, he suspected. This had to be a blanket authority, a standby invoked in extremis.

If Noriz wasn’t against Balsar, then the Raven Guard needed him firmly on his side. If he was going to get off the ship then he would need help. Having secured Balsar’s quarters it would occur to Arcatus to lock down all of the ship’s flight assets – with only seven pairs of hands, that would be difficult but not impossible. There were four launch bays, and two banks of saviour pods. That would give Arcatus one warrior for the sanctum and one for each route off the ship.

When the Raven Guard survivors of Isstvan had come to Terra in the wake of the Dropsite Massacre, they had been interred pending the primarch’s audience with the Emperor. During their incarceration at the hands of the Legio Custodes it had been a matter of some debate and contention whether an individual Space Marine was a match for a Custodian. The consensus arrived at by the legionaries of the XIX was that it would be a close-run fight, but ultimately they had to concede, reluctantly, that a Custodian was superior in personal combat.

Again, Balsar’s thoughts returned to the next step. He needed assistance and only Noriz could provide the sort that he required. What he would do once he was free of the Wrathful Vanguard was another matter.

There was a communications panel in the wall of the magazine. Balsar keyed it to the command channel of the bridge.

‘I need to speak to Captain Noriz immediately.’

‘Kurthuri? This channel is not secure! I have your position, await contact.’

The connection was cut and Balsar took his thumb from the activation stud, at a loss. Had he just given himself away? He moved to the back of the chamber, pistol aimed at the hatchway, and waited.

Minutes later, movement outside brought his finger to the trigger. Only when Noriz stepped into view did he lower the weapon.

‘External address only,’ the captain said, waving for Balsar to join him. A squad of Imperial Fists stood in the corridor of the gun deck outside, bolters at the ready. Several of them showed battle damage to their armour. ‘Arcatus has our cipher codes. Vox-traffic is being monitored.’

‘What is happening? What does Arcatus want?’

‘He and his Custodians opened fire on my men. I believe he means to kill you.’

‘What, they were shooting to kill you as well?’

‘Warning shots, really. We’ve exchanged a few volleys to discourage the Custodians from getting in our way, and it seems to be working. So far. But this could escalate quickly.’

‘I have to get off the ship, then.’

‘That was my thinking, also. Not being able to rely on the vox has hampered my efforts, but we have a secure route through to the port aft bay. We did when I last checked, at least. But there is an incoming Stormbird from the defence station. I don’t know who is on board – more Custodians, I would think. We’ve managed to avoid casualties so far, and I won’t resort to lethal action against the appointed Hands of the Emperor. Not on this ship, not in the light of Sol. This has to be some misunderstanding. Once you are clear, I’ll signal Seventh Legion command to intervene on your behalf.’

‘Arcatus seemed entirely certain what was expected of him,’ said Balsar. ‘This was prearranged. You heard what I heard.’

Noriz said nothing more. At a nod from their captain, the squad formed up and started moving aft.

When they reached the corridor that led across to the main dorsal transit they met up with a handful more Imperial Fists moving forward. Their sergeant approached with a salute.

‘What is it, Vindar?’ asked Noriz.

‘The Custodians have opened the main weapons store and have taken almost all of the melta-charges, my lord. They’ve already broken open Legionary Kurthuri’s sanctum. I think they mean to disable all of the launch doors.’

‘Then we have to–’ Noriz stopped as two figures in gold appeared on a walkway above. Without warning they turned their guardian spears towards the group and opened fire, their bolts cracking into the armour of the Imperial Fists as they turned.

Noriz and the sergeant grabbed hold of Balsar by silent consent and hauled him away. The moment he was out of sight, the fusillade stopped.

‘They’re not shooting at us, then,’ Vindar muttered. ‘Only you.’

‘My apologies for the inconvenience…’ the Raven Guard replied.

They broke into a run, the clatter of armoured boots behind them as the other legionaries followed.

‘We’ll head for the closest bay and break through however we can,’ announced Noriz. ‘No more delays.’

‘How did they get ahead of us?’ Sergeant Vindar’s question was punctuated by the whine of bolts from the hallway junction ahead. Three Custodians had taken up position around the entrance to the flight deck, using the stanchions of the muster point as cover. ‘Do they have their own secure channel?’

‘They defend the Emperor’s domains from all threats,’ replied Balsar. ‘Don’t you think they might have studied the layout of this ship down to the smallest detail before they ever set foot on it?’

Noriz tried to push him aside but he resisted, thrusting away the captain’s hand. He snapped off a shot with his pistol towards the Custodians and drew his chainsword.

‘I am a Space Marine, captain. Not a bystander.’

The two sides fought to a stalemate in the next few seconds, with neither the Custodians willing to give ground nor the Imperial Fists wishing to bring to bear the full force of their attack for fear of maiming or killing the Emperor’s guardians. When another of Arcatus’ warriors joined the defence, Noriz signalled for his warriors to withdraw into the surrounding galleries.

‘This is not going to work,’ Balsar said.

‘Perhaps we should just throw you out of the voidlock,’ suggested Vindar. He sounded sincere. ‘You’ll be fine, Librarian, I’m sure.’

Balsar frowned, thoughtfully. ‘That’s not such a–’

Noriz silenced him. ‘We are not throwing you out of a voidlock. Vindar, slow advance. I want it to seem that you are trying to take the launch bay. We’ll send more squads your way when we see them.’

‘You’re leaving?’ said the sergeant.

‘A lesson from our companions from Deliverance.’ Noriz cocked a look at Balsar, the smile apparent in his voice. ‘Be other than where the enemy believes you to be.’

‘The First Axiom of Stealth,’ he replied. ‘Indeed, I think I’ve been cooped up with you Imperial Fists for too long. You’ve dulled my Raven Guard wits.’

Vindar moved to the corner of the junction. ‘We’ll drag every Custodian into the fight, captain. Surround them.’

‘No.’ Balsar shook his head. ‘Give them a route to leave by. If you cut off all retreat then they’ll fight to the death – you’ll leave them no choice. Leave a chink in your armour, and let them exploit the mistake.’

‘You Ravens are certainly sneaky,’ said the sergeant. He received a nod from Noriz, confirming the plan.

With a shout, Vindar and a handful of his battle-brothers rounded the corner, firing on the move. They were met immediately by return fire from the Custodians.

Balsar turned to Noriz. ‘So. Where do we head?’

‘Where are they?’ Noriz hissed. The pair crossed one of the upper galleries, taking a circuitous route to the launch bays on the opposite side of the vessel, as far from the Imperial Fists’ attack as possible.

Again Balsar felt the temptation to extend his preternatural senses, to search the ship for his adversaries. As he and Noriz dashed along the corridor and pounded up a stairwell – they avoided the conveyors out of concern that the Custodians had some means of monitoring their activation – the former Librarian had an almost physical desire to unleash his power. He was like an adult human competing against a child, holding back their true strength in order to present an even contest. He gritted his teeth.

‘I swore to the primarch that I would abide by the Edict of Nikaea,’ he said. ‘Only Malcador can release me from that.’

‘A shame. We could use a psychic augur. It would make this a lot easier.’

‘And it would be nothing at all if you would simply order your men to gun down these Custodians!’

‘I take your point. We each must live by our code and honour, then.’

‘A code that this war has stretched to breaking, captain. Now more than ever, we must hold dear the values that separate us from the traitors. Fraternity, loyalty, obedience.’

‘Obedience?’ Noriz almost laughed. ‘If that is true, why resist the will of the Custodians?’

‘When I have a little more time, I’ll be sure to paraphrase one of Lord Corax’s lectures for you, on the difference between obedience and subservience.’

They rounded a corner onto a landing and, after a brief survey in both directions, headed into the corridor adjoining it. They had gone no more than twenty metres when a blast door wheezed down ahead of them, shutting off the route before them.

Noriz cursed. ‘Arcatus turns my own ship against me!’

‘He must have overridden the servitor protocols…’

They turned and headed back to the stair, but a golden-armoured figure stepped into view ahead of them, about fifty metres distant. It was Arcatus himself, resplendent in his hand-forged battleplate. His impassive mask regarded the pair for just a split second before his spear spat bolt-shells down the corridor towards them.

Noriz threw himself into Balsar and the two of them tumbled out of the line of fire, clattering across the deck. In the quiet that followed, the clang of armoured boots on metal approached, swift but steady. Arcatus was not so rash as to run headlong after his prey. Doubtless he was already summoning his warriors to close the net once more.

‘Enough,’ whispered Balsar, shrugging off Noriz’s weight. He rose to a crouch, pistol and chainsword at the ready.

‘No killing,’ insisted Noriz, holding out a warning hand. ‘Our code, remember?’

‘We’ll overpower him,’ promised Balsar. ‘We can thin their numbers, and then I can get away. How long until the boarding party–’

He never finished his question. Arcatus appeared, guardian spear raised for the attack.

His first burst of fire sparked from Noriz’s armour as the captain hurled himself forwards, bolt pistol raised, his power sword still in its scabbard. He crashed a gauntleted fist across the faceplate of Arcatus’ helm, and in return the Custodian struck the haft of his spear into the captain’s arm, jarring the pistol from his grip.

Balsar joined his kinsman, his chainsword snarling into life as he swung for Arcatus’ leg. Only a wounding blow, he told himself. Unlikely to be fatal for a Custodian.

Arcatus stepped quickly, pulling his leg back even as he jabbed the butt of his guardian spear towards Balsar’s throat. The Raven Guard dodged the attack at the expense of his balance, and in the heartbeat it took to right himself, Arcatus had reversed his grip and swung his blade in retort.

Noriz drove the blow aside, smashing his shoulder under the arm of the Custodian. He tried to lift him, to turn the embrace into a throw, but Arcatus turned his weight to his advantage, flipping Noriz away. With a crack of armour, the Imperial Fist slammed into the wall and fell to the floor.

Arcatus focused on Balsar, thrusting the guardian spear at his prey, feinting first to the left before slashing from the right. Balsar’s hastily raised chainsword caught the gleaming blade and, for a moment, sparks erupted like a fountain of fire. The chainsword lost, cleaved into pieces of whirling metal and ceramite, its chain-linked teeth scattering across the deck in a shower of white-hot, molten droplets.

Balsar fired. Point-blank, he emptied his bolt pistol into Arcatus’ face.

At least, he attempted to. The first two shots rang from the Custodian’s helm with blossoms of detonation, but Arcatus veered and swayed with incredibly agility, one moment in front of the Raven Guard, the next alongside him, smashing an elbow into the side of his head.

He stumbled, turned the fall into a roll and dived aside as the cracking head of the guardian spear seared into the deck grille where he had been a second before. Without time to catch his thoughts, he threw himself under the next blow and aimed a kick at the Custodian’s knee, cracking the shining auramite there.

The Custodian staggered back, slowed for the first time.

In the space this allowed him, Balsar jumped to his feet and drew his combat knife.

Behind the Custodian, Noriz rose up and thundered a double-handed blow into the back of Arcatus’ head. The Custodian turned at the next punch, catching it on his vambrace, thrusting one-handed with his guardian spear. The point crashed through Noriz’s plastron, splintering the armour and disrupting flesh as it drove through fused ribs and vital organs.

The Imperial Fist twitched on the halberd, fingers spasming and head jerking as he fell away, dull blood already clotting from the wound.

Seeing Noriz’s body fall, the trail of ruptured viscera that trailed from his broken plate, set Balsar into motion before he fully understood what he had just witnessed.

He seized Arcatus with a roar, wrapping an arm about his neck and driving his knife towards the grille of his helm. But the Custodian was too quick, turning his head so that the blade shrieked from the armoured visor, leaving a finger-width welt in the metal. Balsar drove a foot into the back of Arcatus’ wounded knee, forcing him down with all his weight, his opponent unable to bring the spear to bear in time.

Pulling harder, Balsar grunted and snarled as he constricted his arm tighter and tighter, twisting Arcatus’ head sideways and back. Gauntleted fingers scrabbled at the Raven Guard’s faceplate. A thumb jabbed backwards like a dagger, breaking his left lens, missing his eye by a fraction to bruise against the reinforced bone of his brow. Even so, the momentary weakening of Balsar’s grip was enough for the Custodian to free himself from the grapple, abandoning his weapon to get two hands on the Raven Guard’s arm to throw him over a shoulder.

Enraged, Balsar slammed his knife backhanded, slashing the point across the other warrior’s gorget. As the momentum spun him around, the Raven Guard propelled himself headlong into his foe, smashing his forehead into the weakened visor. The Custodian’s helmet split open, falling between them as he staggered back, bloody drool bubbling from his nose and mouth.

Lashing the knife towards his opponent’s exposed face, Balsar struck again and again, opening up a wound across the Custodian’s cheek, cutting the top off his right ear. Arcatus backed away, raised hands fending off the next flurry of attacks as he regained his senses.

And it was at that moment that Balsar knew he could not win.

He had taken his best shot and it had not been enough. He could only be victorious now if he tapped into his true abilities.

Psychic energy coursed into the Librarian. Eyes burning with golden light, he held up his fists, black flames wreathing his gloves. A nimbus of power shone from his psychic hood, bathing the walls and floor with cerulean light.

Arcatus stared at him, snatching up his guardian spear from the floor. Balsar would have expected anger, hatred, perhaps even resignation, but he was not prepared for the look he saw in the Custodian’s eyes.

It was disappointment. Maybe even pity.

And in that gaze he saw again the black eyes of Corax as he had dismissed Balsar, convinced that the psyker was tainted in some way. The words the Librarian and his primarch had uttered came back to him in that moment.

‘Very well. You will go to the Sigillite and receive his judgement in person. Your brothers are under ban of their powers again. Any use of them without specific order will be a capital offence. Am I clear?’

‘Absolutely, my lord.’

A code. His honour. His oath.

Balsar reined in his rage. The flames guttered and died as he sank to his knees, the gleam of psychic power fading from his gaze.

Arcatus loomed over him, bloodied but unbowed. He took up the spear in both hands and swung.

The blade of the spear crashed against the bulkhead just above Balsar’s head, showering him with hot sparks but otherwise leaving him unharmed. The Custodian let the weapon drop from his grip. He lifted his hand and spoke into the vox-link built into the vambrace of his right arm.

‘This is Arcatus. Code word “Disciple”. Cease operations immediately and return to quarters.’ He looked down at the Librarian. ‘Balsar Kurthuri of the Nineteenth Legion, will you submit to me, to face the judgement of Malcador?’

Confused, Balsar looked back and nodded.

‘I will.’

The Sigillite waited for them in an austere chamber somewhere in the depths of the Imperial Palace. Balsar had no idea where they were. He had been sedated for much of the journey.

With Malcador were two of the Sisters of Silence, clad in ceremonial armour, their faces veiled. Balsar’s skin and mind itched in the presence of the anti-psykers, but Malcador seemed unaffected. If anything the null maidens seemed to be keeping their distance from him. Despite their warp-dampening presence, Balsar could feel the power emanating from the First Lord of Terra, so powerful that the warding of the Silent Sisterhood was not enough to contain it. It lapped against the edges of his consciousness, laid bare before them.

The Sigillite regarded him impassively for several minutes.

‘Balsar Kurthuri – you must forgive me for the severity of the test you have endured. The death of Captain Noriz is most regrettable. Lessons will be learned from this.’

Balsar said nothing. His jaw worked silently.

Malcador nodded in understanding.

‘Again, you have my apologies. But the strength of will you have shown under extreme duress, not to mention considerable physical prowess, is one of the qualities I seek. The Librarius of the Legions were full of powerful psykers, many of them more capable than you in that regard. But it is temperament, loyalty and a good degree of stubbornness that make the finest warriors. Rest assured I will send word, if I can, to Lord Corax. You will not be returning to the Raven Guard, but I have no doubt you will continue to serve with distinction, nonetheless.’

‘Serve who?’ Balsar asked.

There came a brief surge of psychic power that caused the Sisters of Silence to stiffen, and a door in the far wall slid open to reveal a warrior in Mark VI battleplate. The armour was the unadorned grey of bare ceramite, free of all sigils and livery, and crowned with a finely wrought psychic hood. Wincing at the presence of the null maidens, the Space Marine stepped into the room.

‘This is Brother Umojen, Balsar,’ said the Sigillite, turning away. ‘He will explain everything.’

DELIVERANCE LOST

After their near-destruction at the hands of Horus’ Traitor Legions, the Raven Guard seek to escape and rebuild, but the forces of Chaos are insidious, and the Legion may yet face its doom.

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CORAX

The Lord of Ravens, Master of Deliverance, Primarch Corvus Corax of the Raven Guard takes centre stage in a collection of works by Gav Thorpe that explore his campaign of vengeance against Horus’ allies and his desperate attempts to hold his Legion together.

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SHATTERED LEGIONS

After the massacre at Isstvan V, the broken remnants of three Legions formed a guerrilla force dedicated to slowing Horus’s advance on Terra. The ten tales in this volume relate exceptional stories of heroism by these Shattered Legions.

In this volume, read the story ‘The Seventh Serpent’.

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ALPHA LEGION

XX LEGION

LIAR’S DUE

James Swallow

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

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

The recording reached its conclusion and began again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘...how long would that take?’

‘...already on their way...‘

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

‘...could he be killed?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He had felt that way until today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What was that, boy?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Cuts the dust, that’s truth.’

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

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

He nodded. ‘I dabble.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘About what?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I’m sorry.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It does to Horus Lupercal.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did it actually matter?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Well enough.’ He nodded at the handheld screen. ‘What is it that you’re doing there?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leon gave a glum nod. ‘Aye.’

‘Your mother did, though.’

‘How did you know that?’

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

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

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

‘My Da doesn’t seem to think so.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Tell me,’ she said, glowering.

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

Leon wasn’t certain what would happen next.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘But Horus–’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I did. And I will again, and again…’

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

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

‘Why?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was what he was best at.

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

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

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

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

LEGION

The Space Marines of the Alpha Legion, the last and most secretive of all the Legiones Astartes brotherhoods, arrive on a heathen world in a pacification campaign against uncanny forces...

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THE PRIMARCHS

Four tales of the primarchs, the Emperor’s own sons and liege-lords of the Space Marines. From the Great Crusade to the end of the Heresy itself, what roles have they yet to play?

In this volume, read the story ‘The Serpent Beneath’.

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SHATTERED LEGIONS

After the massacre at Isstvan V, the broken remnants of three Legions formed a guerrilla force dedicated to slowing Horus’s advance on Terra. The ten tales in this volume relate exceptional stories of heroism by these Shattered Legions.

In this volume, read the story ‘The Seventh Serpent’.

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PRAETORIAN OF DORN

As the first assault on the Solar System begins, the strength of the Imperial Fists and the seemingly impregnable fastness they have built is tested at last…

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Dan Abnett has written over fifty novels, including Anarch, the latest instalment in the acclaimed Gaunt’s Ghosts series. He has also written the Ravenor, Eisenhorn and Bequin books, the most recent of which is Penitent. For the Horus Heresy, he is the author of the Siege of Terra novel Saturnine, as well as Horus Rising, Legion, The Unremembered Empire, Know No Fear and Prospero Burns, the last two of which were both New York Times bestsellers. He also scripted Macragge’s Honour, the first Horus Heresy graphic novel, as well as numerous Black Library audio dramas. Many of his short stories have been collected into the volume Lord of the Dark Millennium. He lives and works in Maidstone, Kent.

Aaron Dembski-Bowden is the New York Times bestselling author of the Horus Heresy novels Echoes of Eternity, The Master of Mankind, Betrayer and The First Heretic, as well as the novellas Aurelian and Prince of Crows and the audio drama Butcher’s Nails, for the same series. He has also written the Warhammer 40,000 novels Spear of the Emperor and Ragnar Blackmane, the popular Night Lords series, the Space Marine Battles book Armageddon, the novels The Talon of Horus and Black Legion, the Grey Knights novel The Emperor’s Gift and numerous short stories. He lives and works in Northern Ireland.

Matthew Farrer is the author of the acclaimed Warhammer 40,000 novels Crossfire, Legacy and Blind. He has also penned many tales set in the Sabbat Worlds, including the Urdesh duology The Serpent and the Saint and The Magister and the Martyr, the novella ‘The Inheritor King’ in the Sabbat Crusade anthology, ‘The Headstone and the Hammerstone Kings’ in Sabbat Worlds and ‘Nineteen-Three Coreward, Resolved’ in Sabbat War. For the Horus Heresy he has written the short stories ‘After Desh’ea’ and ‘Vorax’. He lives and works in Australia.

Chris Forrester lives and works in his home town of Wolverhampton. A lifelong science fiction fanatic, he has been an ardent fan of Warhammer 40,000 for over half that time. His work for Black Library includes the short story ‘Postulant’, featured in the Cthonia’s Reckoning anthology.

John French is the author of several Horus Heresy stories including the novels The Solar War, Mortis, Praetorian of Dorn, Tallarn and Slaves to Darkness, the novella The Crimson Fist, and the audio dramas Dark Compliance, Templar and Warmaster. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written Resurrection, Incarnation and Divination for The Horusian Wars and three tie-in audio dramas – the Scribe Award-winning Agent of the Throne: Blood and Lies, as well as Agent of the Throne: Truth and Dreams and Agent of the Throne: Ashes and Oaths. John has also written the Ahriman series and many short stories.

Guy Haley is the author of the Siege of Terra novel The Lost and the Damned, as well as the Horus Heresy novels Titandeath, Wolfsbane and Pharos, and the Primarchs novels Konrad Curze: The Night Haunter, Corax: Lord of Shadows and Perturabo: The Hammer of Olympia. He has also written many Warhammer 40,000 novels, including the first book in the Dawn of Fire series, Avenging Son, as well as Belisarius Cawl: The Great Work, the Dark Imperium trilogy, The Devastation of Baal, Dante, Darkness in the Blood and Astorath: Angel of Mercy. He has also written stories set in the Age of Sigmar, included in War Storm, Ghal Maraz and Call of Archaon. He lives in Yorkshire with his wife and son.

Nick Kyme is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Old Earth, Deathfire, Vulkan Lives and Sons of the Forge, the novellas Promethean Sun and Scorched Earth, and the audio dramas Red-Marked, Censure and Nightfane. His novella Feat of Iron was a New York Times bestseller in the Horus Heresy collection, The Primarchs. For Warhammer 40,000, Nick wrote the novel Volpone Glory and is well known for his popular Salamanders novels and the Cato Sicarius novels Damnos and Knights of Macragge. His work for Age of Sigmar includes the short story ‘Borne by the Storm’, included in the novel War Storm, and the audio drama The Imprecations of Daemons. He has also written the Warhammer Horror novel Sepulturum. He lives and works in Nottingham.

Rob Sanders is the author of the Horus Heresy novellas Cybernetica and The Serpent Beneath, the latter of which appeared in the New York Times bestselling anthology The Primarchs. His other Black Library credits include the The Beast Arises novels Predator, Prey and Shadow of Ullanor, the Warhammer 40,000 titles Sons of the Hydra, Skitarius, Tech-Priest, Legion of the Damned, Atlas Infernal and Redemption Corps and the audio drama The Path Forsaken. He has also written the Warhammer Archaon duology, Everchosen and Lord of Chaos, along with many short stories for the Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000. He lives in the city of Lincoln, UK.

Graham McNeill has written many titles for The Horus Heresy, including the Siege of Terra novellas Sons of the Selenar and Fury of Magnus, the novels The Crimson King and Vengeful Spirit, and the New York Times bestselling A Thousand Sons and The Reflection Crack’d, the latter of which featured in The Primarchs anthology. Graham’s Ultramarines series, featuring Captain Uriel Ventris, is now seven 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, and the Warhammer Horror novella The Colonel’s Monograph. 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.

James Swallow is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Fear to Tread and Nemesis, which both reached the New York Times bestseller lists. Also for the Horus Heresy, he has written The Flight of the Eisenstein, The Buried Dagger and a series of audio dramas featuring the character Nathaniel Garro, the prose versions of which have now been collected into the anthology Garro. For Warhammer 40,000, he is best known for his four Blood Angels novels, the audio drama Heart of Rage, and his two Sisters of Battle novels. His short fiction has appeared in Legends of the Space Marines and Tales of Heresy.

Gav Thorpe is the author of the Horus Heresy novels The First Wall, Deliverance Lost, Angels of Caliban and Corax, as well as the novella The Lion, which formed part of the New York Times bestselling collection The Primarchs, and several audio dramas. He has written many novels for Warhammer 40,000, including Indomitus, Ashes of Prospero, Imperator: Wrath of the Omnissiah and the Last Chancers series, including the most recent title, Armageddon Saint. He also wrote the Rise of the Ynnari novels, the Path of the Eldar and Legacy of Caliban trilogies, and two volumes in The Beast Arises series. For Warhammer, Gav has penned the End Times novel The Curse of Khaine, the Warhammer Chronicles omnibus The Sundering, and, for Age of Sigmar, The Red Feast. In 2017, Gav won the David Gemmell Legend Award for his novel Warbeast. He lives and works in Nottingham.

Chris Wraight is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Warhawk, Scars and The Path of Heaven, the Primarchs novels Leman Russ: The Great Wolf and Jaghatai Khan: Warhawk of Chogoris, the novellas Brotherhood of the Storm, Wolf King and Valdor: Birth of the Imperium, and the audio drama The Sigillite. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written The Helwinter Gate, The Lords of Silence, Vaults of Terra: The Carrion Throne, Vaults of Terra: The Hollow Mountain, Watchers of the Throne: The Emperor’s Legion, Watchers of the Throne: The Regent’s Shadow and many more. Additionally, he has many Warhammer novels to his name, and the Warhammer Crime novel Bloodlines. Chris lives and works in Bradford-on-Avon, in south-west England.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

‘The Last Church’, ‘After Desh’ea’ first published in Tales of Heresy in 2009.
‘Savage Weapons’, ‘The Iron Within,’ ‘Rebirth,’ ‘Little Horus,’ ‘Liar’s Due’ first published in Age of Darkness in 2011.
‘Lost Sons’ first published in Black Library Weekender Anthology in 2012.
‘Bjorn: Lone Wolf’ first published digitally in 2013.
‘Brotherhood of the Moon’, ‘Daemonology’ and ‘Child of Night’ first published digitally in 2014.
‘The Laurel of Defiance’ and ‘Artefacts’ first published in Sedition’s Gate in 2014.
‘Imperfect’ first published in Death and Defiance in 2014.
‘Immortal Duty’ first published in Meduson in 2015.
‘Black Oculus’ first published digitally in 2015.
‘The Grey Raven’ first published digitally in 2016.
‘Champion of Oaths’, ‘Child of Chaos’ first published in Black Library Events Anthology 2018/19 in 2018.
This eBook edition published in 2022 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Represented by: Games Workshop Limited – Irish branch, Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1, D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Maria Zolotukhina.

Lupercal’s War © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2022. Lupercal’s War, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-80026-776-3

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