More Warhammer 40,000 stories from Black Library

THE BLOODIED ROSE
A novella by Danie Ware

MERCY
A short story by Danie Ware

CELESTINE: THE LIVING SAINT
A novel by Andy Clark

SISTERS OF BATTLE
An omnibus by James Swallow
featuring the novels Faith & Fire and Hammer & Anvil plus many short stories

SHROUD OF NIGHT
A novel by Andy Clark

CULT OF THE WARMASON
A novel by C L Werner

CULT OF THE SPIRAL DAWN
A novel by Peter Fehervari

IMPERIAL CREED
A novel by David Annandale

REBIRTH
A novel by Nick Kyme

THE DEATH OF ANTAGONIS
A novel by David Annandale

BLOOD OF ASAHEIM
A novel by Chris Wraight

REDEMPTION CORPS
A novel by Rob Sanders

OUR MARTYRED LADY
An audio drama by Gav Thorpe

Contents

Cover

Backlist

Title Page

Warhammer 40,000

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Celestine: The Living Saint’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of His inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that He may never truly die.

Yet even in His deathless state, the Emperor continues His eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in His name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

Chapter one

The broken steel gantry swayed and screeched.

Backed to its outermost end, the wounded man had stumbled to his knees. Alone, unarmed, he held one hand to the smoking hole in his belly. The other supported him as he crashed forwards, coughing blood.

He did not have long.

‘Aim!’ The sergeant’s bark was curt. It rang hollow, echoing loudly in the empty systems of pipes and conduits that towered around them, resonant in rust and decay.

Nine lasguns tucked into nine shoulders.

Nine tiny, red insects clustered on the man’s skull.

The man made no move; he didn’t protest, or try to defend himself. He’d led them a long chase, but it was over.

‘Hold your fire.’ A woman’s voice, cool and controlled.

The sergeant raised one hand from his weapon, and the squad paused.

A small, grey-robed figure stepped through them, her black boots ringing on the metal walkway. Even in her ceramite armour, she was barely as high as the heavy sergeant’s shoulder, but her poise and bearing spoke of complete authority. Her head was bare and her white-threaded dark hair was braided tightly down her back.

At her feet, an empty vat-tank stretched downwards into darkness. It had a mark stamped in its side – the cog-and-skull of Triplex Phall, and a line of Mechanicus numerals, noting its denomination. Somewhere at its base, there hissed the wash and seethe of liquid.

But the woman did not look down.

She said, ‘It’s over, Zale.’

The man did not respond. He was still coughing; his breath was harsh and ragged. Like the metal-stinking wind, it rose into the umber sky, and was gone.

‘Ma’am?’ The sergeant stood poised, his battered green armour-plates filthy with blown rust, his head still tilted into the rifle sight. She could feel his tension, his need to end this, once and for all. The squad’s lieutenant had already died on his knees – from the beginning, this entire mission had been littered with corpses – but such things were of little interest to her.

She took a further step forwards, her gauntleted fist closing. The band of her signet ring bit into her flesh.

She would take whatever action she deemed necessary.

Curtly, she repeated the order. ‘I said, hold your fire.’

‘Ma’am.’

The sergeant was a good man, solid. She felt his pressure on the trigger ease.

Satisfied, she raised her voice, let her accusation sound like a paean from the crumbling pipework. ‘Scafidis Zale, you are a heretic and a traitor, and there is nowhere left for you to run. You will surrender, or you will fall to the waters below, and there you will dissolve. You will beg me for pity as they eat your living flesh, but there will be no pity, Zale, not for you. Repent here, and I may yet grant you your future, and your continued service to the God-Emperor.’

From somewhere, far out in the mess of refineries, machines and galleries, there came the sounds of shouting, and running boots. There was the hiss and boom of lasgun fire, a rise of laughter, the noise of fists on flesh.

But she and the fallen man were intent only on each other.

Slowly, the injured Zale sank backwards until he was sitting on his heels. His hand was still on his belly, his head bowed.

The woman felt the sergeant tense. Rage and suspicion rose from his burly shoulders.

Still, she did not give the order.

She said, ‘Surrender, Zale.’

Feet sounded again, closer this time. Several of the soldiers twitched, but the noises soon clanged past them, and faded to echoes.

And then, at the far end of the gantry, Scafidis Zale began to unfold. Slowly, he came to his feet. He moved like a performer, taking command of his stage.

Nine points of light followed the motion.

He didn’t care.

Instead, he said one word, like a hiss of pure scorn…

‘Inquisitor.’

And he started to laugh.

Lycheate.

Once a forge world, a world of industry. Lycheate was a planet of refineries and manufactoria, of ferrous incinerators, of furnaces and vents, of the pulse and vein of living machinery. Once, Lycheate had thundered and rumbled with the fusion reactor deep at its core. It had been governed by its fabricator, and teeming with tech-priests, transmechanics, lexmechanics and enginseers.

Once, Lycheate had been orbited by dozens of small moons, each one rich with promethium and rare ores, drilled with mines and worked by helots. Shuttles and cargo scows had ferried those ores to the planet’s surface, where they’d been assayed and smelted and forged, and then shipped out across the Imperium, the lifeblood of all mankind.

Once.

But Lycheate’s moons had long since been stripped bare. Its steelworks were empty, its forge-temples abandoned to the seething swarms of human and xenos scum that had moved in there. The planet had become a vacuum – a sucking, steel-walled cesspit that pulled in the lost, the heretic, the mutant, the cultist…

All those who wanted to vanish, or who had nowhere else to go.

Inquisitor Istrix, however, had no interest in the denizens of this place. She had walked fearless through their filth, untouched and uncaring – this world was a sewer, worthy only of Exterminatus. And that would come. For now, Istrix had a greater purpose.

The inquisitor was focused purely on her quarry. She had hunted him, relentless, all the way from Terra itself, all through Scintilla and the mines on Sophano Prime, and finally out here, to the very edges of the Ultima Segmentum and the Calixis Sector.

Now, she had him.

And, as the wounded man came to his feet, his laughter ringing like the sounding of ancient hammers, Istrix gave thanks to the Emperor Himself that her long chase was over at last.

‘Inquisitor,’ he said.

‘Zale.’ Tiny, framed by the lost wealth of rust and decay, Istrix faced her foe. ‘There’s nowhere left to hide.’

But his laughter only grew.

Ever the entertainer, he flicked his fingers.

Screaming, the sergeant went over backwards, his lasrifle firing bursts of superheat at the pipework over their heads. Metal creaked and screamed and tore; debris plummeted past them, clattering and banging against the sides of the tank, splashing into the waters below. The sergeant had both hands clutched to his helmet; as he hit the walkway, he started to thrash, his feet hammering.

The noise was incredible.

Beside him, the lance-corporal turned on her fellows. Stepping back to use the lasrifle, too fast for anyone to react, she carved red light through three of her comrades, then turned the weapon on herself. Her last, mad laugh was cut off as the front of her helmet vanished in a hiss of steaming gore.

She toppled over the edge, and was gone.

No fool, the corporal barked an order. Five streaks of scarlet whooshed out at the figure on the gantry.

But Zale was up, now. He was uninjured, and moving.

Moving fast.

Still laughing, he gave another, extravagant gesture. With a roar, forge fires boomed to sudden life; the rise of heat was staggering, blistering. Swearing, the corporal threw up his arms and fell back.

The air shimmered and stank – fuel and fear and fumes.

In the blur of it, Zale wavered and was gone.

But Inquisitor Istrix did not move. She watched, impassive, as her grey robes ignited, as the scarred and grubby armour of the Astra Militarum began to char and smoke. Several of them were swearing, emptying water bottles or trying to smother the flames with their gloved hands. She could hear the corporal barking further orders, his nerve remarkably steady.

Again, lasgun fire streaked across the air.

She barked, ‘Hold your fire!’

The corporal echoed her order. The lasguns stilled.

She heard one of them mutter, her voice confused, ‘Corp?’

The words were across the squad’s private channel, but Istrix could hear them quite clearly in her vox-bead.

The man responded, his deep voice low, ‘You heard the inquisitor. Hold your fire.’

With a faint, cold smile, she took another step out onto the gantry, now swinging wildly from its overhead wires. The metal squealed in protest; it was already reddening to a dull, magma glow.

Her burning robes billowed in the rising heat.

+Issy.+

Zale’s laughter crawled into her ears, echoed through her skull. It took her brain apart, piece by piece; it touched old memories, the days of his training, now long-gone…

She could hear him in her head.

+You don’t have to do this.+

But he could not touch her; she belonged to the Emperor alone. He was a traitor, a failure – her failure. And he would surrender himself to Penitence.

That, or lose his soul.

She commanded the corporal to hold his position; walked three more steps out along the gantry. The roasting, searing heat clawed up at her from far below; the fall was hungry for her life. Her flapping robes burned higher; there was smoke in her eyes, her face. She felt her braid crisp and shrivel, burning like fuse wire; felt her skin start to soften.

Felt the holes opening in her flesh.

But she tightened her fist, feeling the signet ring.

There was no heat, no flame.

No forge.

The pain was nothing.

She said, ‘Your trickeries do not touch me, witch. The Emperor is with me.’

At the end of the walkway, his gold eyes now blazing with the lava-light of the glowing metal, his whole form rippling with power and illusion, Zale offered her a bow. Still laughing, he raised his hands, gestured again, tore a huge rent across the pipework to one side. Steam flooded out at her, hissing, then rose towards the brown and distant sky.

Somewhere up there, debris shone like the stars.

‘I can tear out your heart,’ he told her softly, ‘and you know it.’

‘This is nothing,’ she said. ‘Witchery. Illusion. The machine-spirits of this world are long dead.’

But Zale laughed like a daemon, his eyes still burning. Behind her, she heard a sudden, physical struggle, heard the corporal curse. Boots rang on the walkway, there was shouting, then a long, wailing cry as a second figure went over the edge.

She did not bother to turn.

‘Mistress.’ The word was a caress. ‘You never learn. How many lives will you throw away? How many more will you send to the Emperor’s glory, before you see the truth? I will not surrender to the torture you call Penitence.’

‘No more,’ Istrix said. ‘This is over.’ The awful heat yammered at her, searing her now-hairless scalp, hurting her lungs as she breathed it in. But she was stronger than this, better than this.

‘Then shoot me,’ he said to her softly. ‘If you can.’

She raised the bolter.

And, with an ear-splitting screech, the gantry fell away beneath both of them.

From its orbit of the jungle-planet Lautis, the Imperial frigate Kyrus had turned back to the vacuum of space. Called home by the astropaths, by the tides of the empyrean, it was returning to Ophelia VII, and to the Hallowed Spire of the Convent Sanctorum.

Behind the heaviness of the Kyrus’ reinforced bulkheads, securely defended by its void shields and gunnery decks, there lay an empty, decorous hollow, like a hole in its heart. Floored with rockcrete flags, walled with glassaic windows, each one lit by a cunning strip of exterior biolume, this was the ship’s chapel, silent and chill. Neat lines of pews could seat almost a tenth of the Kyrus’ full crew; rows of faces, each man and woman looking up at the altar, and at the broad banner of the aquila that hung above.

To one side of that central image hung the winged skull of the Imperial Navy, to the other, the twisting-fish symbol of the Kyrus herself.

Flanked by the imagery, lit by the ever-shining glow of the electro-candles, stood the golden stone statue of the God-Emperor. Thirty feet at His Imperial shoulder and framed by the aquila’s wings, He stared out over the nave, His gaze clear, His expression stern.

He demanded service. He accepted no compromise. He reminded every one of them of their faith, their courage, their sworn duty. And, from those rows of pews, the crew of the Kyrus could look upon Him, and leave this place uplifted, ready to carry His name out through the warp and to all corners of the Imperium.

They would fight and die for Him, to the last man and woman.

And they would do so gladly.

Now, however, the pews were empty. Under the false vault of the rockcrete roof, the cherubim circled silently, their cold, augmetic gazes eyeing the space below.

As the heavy hatchway clunked open, they blinked metal eyelids, recording every movement.

A lone figure stepped through.

It paused, silent. Bright in the chapel’s lume, its scarlet armour glittered, all ceramite and plasteel. Over this, it bore a black-and-white cloak, decorated with the symbol of the rose; the fabric billowed as it turned to close the hatch. A line of adamantine beads decorated its chaplet and, at its hips, there were slung a Godwyn De’az pattern bolter and a brutal, heavy-duty chainsword.

Its – her – head was bare, revealing a stern bob of steel-grey hair and a distinctive tattoo.

She said, though there were only the cherubim to hear, ‘In the name of Mina and the Golden Throne, I am the willing daughter of the God-Emperor. I come to listen, and to do His bidding.’

Sister Superior Augusta Santorus touched the fleur-de-lys on the front of her armour, and bowed her head.

The cherubim blinked again, their eyelids clicking.

As if by their signal, servitors whirred from their resting places. Augusta lifted the bolter from her belt, unclipped the sword, and laid both in the offered brass trays.

The soldiers of the Imperial Navy had no requirement to lay down their sidearms, but she, as outlined in the Accords of Deacis VI, entered His presence with humility – bare of weapons, and with her head bared to His Light.

Slowly, she walked up the aisle.

But she did not look up.

Since their departure from Lautis, Augusta had visited the chapel often. Not just offering the daily prayers of herself and her squad – and those soldiers of the Navy who’d wished to attend – but at other times, when the hollow was quiet, and she could focus her concentration.

Augusta was the commander of her squad, a veteran warrior of twenty years’ experience. She had fought battles against xenos, daemon and heretic; she had pursued the foes of mankind to the very edges of space, and she had slain them all.

But there was a darkness upon her heart that would not leave her, and that had brought her, once again, into His presence.

It defied her comprehension – their previous mission had been a success. Upon Lautis, they had faced a greater daemon, and had banished it back to the warp. They had freed the jungle-planet from the daemon’s cultist followers, and had secured the ruined cathedral for their Order, the Order of the Bloody Rose. The Adeptus Mechanicus tech-priests and servitors arriving aboard the Tukril now held the building safely, and were beginning its reconstruction.

The Kyrus had accompanied them, and had waited to assure their security. And now, the old frigate was taking the Sisters back home.

Her boots loud in the chapel’s silence, Augusta reached the altar rail. The cherubim followed her movements, sharply watchful.

She knelt, her grey bob of hair falling forwards over her face.

Though they had defeated it, the Lautis daemon had left her with nightmares. It had infected her thoughts, plagued her dreams with Chaos and Ruin, with images both fearful and bloody. For long Solar weeks after its expulsion, she and the other members of her squad had awoken sweating, and had knelt in midnight prayer…

Fortitudo est certa clara meo.

My strength must be unfailing, my sight clear.

Augusta did not fear the spewed-forth creatures of the warp. Yet Lautis had seen the deaths of two members of her squad – Sister Kimura, in the battle against the orks, and Sister Jatoya, her second and right arm, smashed by the daemon’s axe.

Her lips moved in prayer: the Litany of Divine Guidance.

Domine deduc me mi Imperatoris.

Guide me, my Emperor.

In twenty long years of battle, Augusta had lost troops before. Her Sisters had been slain, but they had died with courage and honour and they stood now at His feet…

Levis est mihi.

Show me to the Light.

…but her darkness did not diminish. She recalled the words of the cultist’s leader, Subul, the man who had summoned the daemon.

‘I can feel it in you, Sister! I can feel your anger. Let it go. Revel in it! Like your saint before you, like your whole blood-armoured Order, you revel in rage, in the pure fury of the battlefield. You belong here! Lose your foolish faith, and join the darkness!’

For a moment, she dared raise her eyes to Him, framed by the light of the electro-candles…

But it was too much. His expression was too austere, His judgement too stern. She was His daughter, her faith and weapons unquestioned, unquestionable; war was her craft and her study. Anger, grief – these were permitted, within proper confines. The loss of her discipline was not.

Shamed, she lowered her gaze, back to the gleam of her armour, blood-red against the rockcrete floor.

Whatever mission called them, it was His will, and they would praise His name, with hymn and blade and bolter, just as they had always done.

We are strong, she told herself. We will not fail.

Yet, as she completed her litany and came back to her feet, she wondered at the shadow that still lurked so deep, and at what it may mean for the future.

Chapter two

The dull throb of the Kyrus’ engines rumbled like a vast heartbeat.

It resounded through the metalwork, through the twisting guts and veins of the old ship; as the Sisters prowled forwards, suit-lights glimmering, they could feel it in their boots and their blood. They moved cautiously through the empty corridors, alert for any motion or threat.

It was dark, down here, and the air was bitterly cold.

Over the vox, Sister Melia Kaliyan growled orders. ‘We will progress as far as the junction. Akemi, with me. Viola, Caia, standard skirmishing advance. Maintain your vigilance, Sisters, we do not know what lurks here.’

Bolter in hand, the smallest of the red-armoured figures fell back to Melia’s position, bilgewater sloshing at her ankles. Melia paused to check the squad’s spacing, then used the preysight in her retinal lenses to search for signs of heat, for enemies hiding silently in conduit or crawlspace.

But there was nothing.

‘Caia?’

‘Auspex is clear, Sister,’ Caia said. ‘No motion, no life signs. Even the rats have cleared out.’

Viola muttered, ‘There’ll be something.’

Melia commented softly, ‘Quiet, Sisters. Focus. We have until Compline to complete this mission and return to the Sister Superior.’

‘Aye.’

The ship’s lumens flickered and fizzed; in front of them, one light sputtered and then died completely, leaving a pool of darkness upon the rippling water. Two of the red-armoured figures moved forwards through it, their skirmish tactics flawless – each one ran ten paces and then splashed down to one knee, covering her comrade as she ran forwards in her turn.

Melia watched them, assessing their movements. At the request of the Sister Superior, the captain had cleared his helots and servitors away from this lower deck, but Melia knew, just as Viola did, that there was something waiting for them.

Something…

She said, ‘Situation report.’

‘Clear both ways, Sister.’ Viola, her thrice-blessed heavy bolter in both hands, had taken cover at the right-hand corner of the wall. ‘No motion, no hostiles.’

‘Caia?’

Covering the junction in the other direction, her auspex bathing her visor in a garish, green light, Caia said, ‘Not as much as a blip. We’re the only things down here.’

‘Take a full five-second awareness check.’ Melia’s hand tightened on her flamer. ‘There are spaces behind these walls, Sisters, they could be concealing any number of threats – xenos, stowaways, saboteurs.’ Sub-vocal, she counted it down: three, two, one… ‘Very well, we’ll head onwards. Akemi, move up. I’ll take the rear.’

In the vox, Akemi replied, ‘Aye.’

Smoothly, the foremost Sisters moved out to secure the junction. Akemi splashed after them, then ducked back to a kneel as they continued to move. Melia walked at the rear, the filth-strewn water tugging at her feet, her flamer guarding the corridor behind them. She checked over their heads for ladders and walkways, for lurking creatures, for hatches left unsealed…

Nothing.

Her skin crawled – it couldn’t be this simple. She had to be missing something.

But what?

‘Objective sighted,’ Caia’s voice sounded in the vox. ‘Two hundred yards.’

Melia barked, ‘Hold.’

Glancing back over her shoulder, Sister Melia could see it clearly: the glimmer of the pict-screen at the corridor’s far end.

But she did not give the order to advance. She said, ‘Eyes open, Sisters.’

More wary than ever, expecting the ambush at any moment, she checked the flickering lights, the overhang of the servitors’ walkway, the line of small, round airlocks that led out to the saviour pods…

Still: nothing.

What was she missing?

The weight of Melia’s new responsibilities sat as unfamiliar to her as the flamer in her hand… Jatoya’s were big boots to fill.

The Emperor has called you, she told herself firmly, for the hundredth time. You will offer only thanks for this opportunity to serve Him.

Her tone in the vox was firm. ‘Full scan.’

‘Nothing, Sister,’ Caia said, again. ‘The corridor’s clear.’

Viola echoed her, ‘Nothing.’

‘Very well,’ Melia said. ‘We proceed, but slowly. Follow the left-hand wall, Sisters, under line of sight from the walkway. I want every pod-hatch checked.’

‘Aye.’

Their movements polished, Caia and Viola took the left-hand turn. They headed onwards, and stopped by the first hatch. But Sister Akemi, the youngest of the squad and newly blooded upon Lautis, paused.

‘Akemi?’ Melia’s voice was soft in the vox.

Akemi said, ‘There’s something here.’

Instantly Melia barked, ‘Hold!’

Caia and Viola stopped dead. The auspex gleamed green, but its screen remained still.

‘Still nothing,’ Caia said. ‘Not as much as a bilge-rat.’

Viola, both hands on the heavy bolter, twitched a frost-edged pauldron in a shrug.

Slowly, Melia turned around, her feet sloshing, her skin crawling with tension. She searched the walls, the hatches, the walkway, the corridors both ahead and behind – the living, twisting guts of the frigate…

What was it?

What had she not seen?

Then Akemi pointed, ‘There!’

‘Throne!’ The exclamation was out before Melia could stop it. ‘Again?’

And there it was, like a slap to an untrained novice: opposite the nearest hatch, hidden behind a conduit-cover, there was the empty case of a melta bomb. It was almost invisible, painted black, and mag-fastened to the wall.

Upon it was inscribed, in Augusta’s stern, cursive hand…

‘BOOM’.

‘Dominica’s eyes!’ Melia cursed again, lost her combat stance and slammed the flamer back onto her hip. ‘How did we miss it that time?’

‘We’re well within the blast radius,’ Akemi commented, ruefully. ‘Motion sensor, triggered as Viola passed – that would have killed all of us.’

‘Scenario failed.’ Caia’s tone was annoyed, though her ire seemed aimed at herself. She shook the auspex, glaring.

Melia let out her breath, frustrated. ‘All right, Sisters, exercise over. Regroup at my location. We’ll put together the report, and join the Sister Superior in the chapel.’

Her armour creaking, Viola came back to her feet, turned around. ‘I went straight past it,’ she said, coming to look at the black metal case. ‘I didn’t even see the thing.’ She glanced at Akemi. ‘How did you know?’

Akemi had plucked the case from the wall mounting and was turning it over. On the bottom, in the same hand, it carried the number four.

It was the second one they’d missed.

‘The Sister Superior,’ she said, ‘has a pattern. I don’t know if it’s deliberate, but she ambushes us in very similar locations, every time. It’s always at a tension-point, a place where we’re thinking about something else – concentrating on a junction, maybe, on an objective, or on hatches in the wall…’ She tailed off. ‘I think it’s deliberate, and I think it’s a part of her lesson – we’re not down here just to identify a threat.’

‘Everything has a pattern,’ Caia agreed. ‘Every type of xenos and heretic adheres to its own rules – we just need to know them so we can anticipate. They taught it to us at the schola,’ she turned to Melia. ‘Do you remember? Old Garvia used to say–’

‘“All things have an Operandus”,’ Melia finished. She took off her helmet, revealing dusky skin and a dark bob of hair, both now glittering with sweat. Her warm breath steamed. ‘“Know it, and your foe’s defeat is assured”.’ She held out her hand for the hollow bomb casing, then crushed it in her armoured fingers. ‘All right, Sisters, we’ll put together the analysis. What we got wrong, and how we can – yes, lieutenant?’

Her tone was startled; the others turned around.

Behind them, standing framed by the junction’s jittering lights, a young naval officer stood waiting for their attention. He looked out of place, all the way down here – his uniform was immaculate, and the sludge from the floor was starting to creep up his trouser legs. As Melia turned, however, he gave a perfect fist-to-chest salute.

‘Sisters. I apologise for interrupting your training, but the captain has requested your presence with the utmost urgency, and he does not wish to put this over the vox.’

Surprise flickered through the squad. The others, too, had started to remove their helmets and gazes flashed from Sister to Sister, though they said nothing.

‘For what purpose?’ Melia asked, her tone careful.

Looking pained, the young man said, ‘The captain… is in receipt of new orders, Sisters. He needs to relay them personally.’

Viola’s eyebrows shot upwards; Akemi frowned.

Melia said, ‘Lieutenant, the captain’s orders came direct from the canoness of our Order, from Elvorix Ianthe herself. We’re to return to the Convent Sanctorum.’

‘Yes, Sister, the captain is aware of this.’ The officer stood bolt-upright, but sounded increasingly apologetic. ‘But those orders have changed.’ He met Melia’s dark gaze, his eyes slightly wide.

‘You’re… wanted by the Inquisition.’

‘We’re what?’

Pulled from the chapel by a pale-faced aide, Sister Superior Augusta filled the captain’s office with scarlet shoulders and tightly controlled rage. Her expression a thundercloud, she said, ‘Captain Mulier, I trust you’re not accusing my squad…?’

‘No, Sister, of course not.’ The captain was an older man, with a truly spectacular set of whiskers. Defended by his gold epaulettes and by the heavy weight of his desk, he leaned back, refusing to be intimidated. Beside him, his servo-skull hovered silently, its red gaze glittering. ‘A poor choice of words, perhaps.’ He held Augusta’s iron-grey gaze for a moment, then said, ‘Sister Superior. At seventeen hundred hours, Solar time, the Kyrus was in receipt of a communication. And that communication was a demand – for our mission parameters, our cargo, and for the full roster of the forces that we carry.’

Augusta continued to glower. ‘That information is surely classified.’

‘Of course,’ the captain said. ‘But the demand came with an Inquisition signature. And when your name was mentioned, the inquisitor immediately commandeered your presence. She has a mission that… necessitates your assistance.’

‘Captain.’ Augusta’s voice held the faintest edge. ‘I am under orders from my canoness.’

But the captain was not backing down. ‘Sister,’ he said. ‘We are – you are – under orders from the Inquisition.’

Caught, she said nothing – an inquisitor had the rank to command any force or cooperation they required, including the obedience of a planetary governor, or of the Adeptus Astartes. And, captain or no, it would not be proper to show an emotional reaction to a member of the Imperial Navy. She allowed herself the luxury of rattling her gauntleted fingers on the butt of her bolter.

‘Did she detail the mission, captain?’

‘She did not.’ The man was still looking up at her, his whiskers bristling. ‘She merely issued the command. We’ve been given new coordinates, Sister – we’re adjusting our plasma drives now.’

His words made her notice the change in the ship’s engines, the ever-present throb intensifying as the million-ton weight of the Kyrus turned with slow dignity, like some vast creature.

Augusta said, ‘Our new destination?’

‘Sister–’

A sharp, metallic knock interrupted his answer.

He raised his voice. ‘Enter!’

A young officer pushed the hatch open, and immediately stepped back to allow four more armoured figures into the room – Augusta’s squad, helmets off and weapons slung.

Melia caught her gaze, and gave her a brief nod – their training had been completed – then came to stand at her side, feet apart, hands behind her back, helmet mag-locked to her hip. The other three stopped a pace back, their stances identical.

Their frost-rimed armour still radiated the chill of the lower decks; the small room was suddenly filled with the glitter of ceramite. Each purity seal caught the lumens and gleamed like a statement of faith, each merit-bead like one of accomplishment. And each face was perfectly schooled, both stern and proficient.

Sister Melia Kaliyan, now second-in-command. Augusta had been unsure about Melia’s confidence in her new role, but Melia had faced the challenge with no visible doubt in either herself or her abilities.

Sister Caia de Musa, Melia’s closest friend through the schola. Tall and bronze-haired, her auspex always to hand, her gaze was razor-sharp, and she missed little.

Sister Viola Taenaris, freckled and red-haired, with a noted streak of wilfulness. Her insubordination upon Lautis had cost Viola her single merit-bead – only the extremity of the situation had prevented her from making the trip back in the Kyrus’ brig.

And Sister Akemi Hirari, the squad’s newest and youngest, her skin pale and her hair shining black. Akemi had almost taken her vows to the Order of the Quill, and her lore surpassed that of all her Sisters combined. Upon their previous mission, it had been Akemi’s insight that had enabled them to banish the daemon.

Looking at them, Augusta felt her heart lift, felt it flush with faith and light. She gave them an approving nod and turned back to the desk, offering silent thanks to the Emperor Himself for her squad’s solidity.

Her darkness was nothing, and it shamed her.

Shamed them.

‘Sisters, thank you for attending.’ Respectfully, the captain came to his feet, his gaze travelling from one face to the next. ‘I understand that your training was not to be interrupted, but the situation is critical. Dismissed, lieutenant.’ The young officer saluted, then stepped back through the door and pulled it closed.

There was the metal rattle of the hatch seal.

Augusta said, ‘We are close to Compline, captain. Please, proceed.’

‘Sister Superior, Sisters Militant.’ He picked up his data-slate, waited as its glassy surface flowed with text. Then, with a sigh as though he were bracing himself, he said, ‘The orders I have received read as follows. “Effective immediately, Sister Superior Augusta Santorus of the Order of the Bloody Rose is to relinquish all prior mission instructions. She is to muster her squad, and to report to the following coordinates. A full deployment of weapons and battlegear will be expected. A full brief will be issued upon landing. Ave Imperator.”’ He turned the slate to show them. ‘It’s signed with Inquisitor Istrix’s personal seal.’

Viola muttered; Augusta silenced her with a sharp look.

Melia asked, her velvet voice cool, ‘What are these coordinates, captain? We should at least know where we’re bound.’

The captain sat down and laid the slate back on the desk, giving himself time.

After a moment, he said, ‘This is a quiet corner of the void, Sister – something of a rarity. And the Kyrus is an older ship, her armaments unsuitable for heavy combat. When the Tukril was deployed to Lautis, we were deemed… enough… to accompany her.’

Augusta studied him, wondering where this was going.

He said, ‘I would guess that we’re the only Imperial ship within reach.’

Melia said, voice soft with danger, ‘Reach of what?’

The captain turned to the pict-screen behind him, let its surface flow with an image – a single, reddening star, a single, ringed planet. He said, ‘There is a Class Four star three Solar days from here, Sister, that has a solitary, satellite world.’ The screen moved, closing its focus upon the planet itself. ‘It’s known to the ships of the region as a place to avoid. Some even call it notorious.’

Melia frowned at the word; the other three shifted, their armour scraping. The captain continued, ‘My orders, however, do not include the luxury of either speculation or avoidance. These coordinates will take you to Imperial Munitorum depot eight-nine-zero-point-four-five, upon the surface of the planet Lycheate.’

Augusta blinked – the name meant nothing to her.

‘Permission to speak, Sister.’ The voice was Akemi’s.

‘Granted.’

She said, ‘Captain. “Lycheate” meaning… industrial waste?’

‘That’s as good a description as any,’ the captain said. ‘Lycheate is local slang, a nickname – your map would name the world Vastum.’ The pict-screen shifted, closing focus upon the planet. ‘It was a forge world, founded during the Age of Redemption by the Adeptus Mechanicus. Its considerable output helped fuel the Macharian Conquest, among other things.’

‘But no longer?’ Augusta said.

She’d felt the others tense – they’d already had one experience with long-dead machinery, though it had come from a very different time. Melia indicated the planet’s encircling ellipsis.

‘What is the ring, captain? Debris? Or defence?’

‘Three hundred years ago,’ the captain said, ‘Lycheate had more than twenty moons, the largest of them barely two thousand miles across. They were finally stripped of all their resources when the Iron Duke Glevan stormed Bastoom.’ His smile was grim. ‘But you know the Mechanicus, they never waste anything. The moons were detonated at their cores to ensure that every last scrap of ore could be stripped for the war effort. The more valuable fragments were towed–’

‘And the rest now orbit the planet,’ Melia said. ‘A ring of wreckage.’

‘Just so, Sister.’ The screen closed in further, focusing on the fragments. Augusta could feel Akemi shifting, committing the images to memory.

‘There’s something you’re omitting, captain,’ Augusta said. ‘Why is this world to be avoided, if it’s so long dead?’

‘The world is far from dead, sadly,’ the captain said. ‘Only the spirits of the machines themselves.’ His smile was mirthless. ‘I regret to inform you, Sisters, that Lycheate is very much alive.

‘And our first problem will be getting you to the surface.’

Chapter three

In the back of the Aquila-class shuttle, the vox-grille crackled into life.

‘…ist… zzz… assist… urg…’

The five members of Augusta’s squad were seated in the old landing craft, each one fully armoured, and strapped into her chair. The shuttle was battered, its hangings and its dignitaries’ throne long since removed. It had tiny, double-layered glassaic windowpanes, and, above their heads, the observation dome was long since welded shut. Wherever this craft had been, it’d had more adventures than simply delivering persons of importance to critical locations.

Melia, sitting beside Augusta in the front row, leaned forwards.

‘Pilot? Can we investigate that signal?’

The pilot’s voice came back over the vox-grille, her tone politely firm. ‘We’re about to enter the planet’s debris field, Sister,’ she said, ‘and our course is very tightly plotted. If we’re to make planetfall in time for your briefing, we can’t be making side trips.’

Melia sat back, her expression closed. The squad’s new second was Hospitaller trained, had spent time with the Order of Serenity, and she had a unique streak of compassion that was both a blessing and a nuisance.

Augusta understood her concerns, but the squad was under orders.

‘Sister,’ she said. ‘You have never encountered the Inquisition, but believe me, we will need to arrive promptly.’

Melia glanced at her, her expression a question. Augusta said, raising her voice a little so the others could hear, ‘Only once, and only briefly – Inquisitor Tuccius and his storm troopers came to the planet Lyca, investigating the High Deacon. They wield fear like a weapon, authority like a banner – they answer to the Emperor alone. I know nothing of Istrix herself, but she is the holy servant of the Emperor, His will made manifest, and our service to her is an honour.’

Melia said, ‘Aye, Sister,’ and sat back, murmuring a prayer.

The vox-grille crackled again. ‘Approaching the debris field now. Be warned, Sisters, this could get rough.’

The engines fired and slowed.

Augusta touched a hand to the front of her armour, breathing the words of the Litany.

‘By the Light!’ The awed whisper was Akemi.

They all turned.

Below them, the planet Lycheate lay waiting, the haze-blur of its atmosphere a dirty, reddish-brown. To their left, its star was sullen, red and swollen with vast age.

But it was not the star, nor its satellite, that had caught the squad’s attention.

Outside the shuttle, the first of the moon-pieces was now coming past them, a slow and silent tumble of shattered rock. It was oddly serene; a turning of glitter and angle, of dark, crystalline colours all frosted with cold. And soon, there were hundreds of them.

Thousands.

The Sisters sat staring, their breaths taken away.

As they passed, many of the fragments offered hints of their previous life – of the frozen edges of mine workings, of scaffold and steel, of vox-antennae and torn-open habitat. There was industry wreckage, like the shattered splinters of the great machine-spirit, all snapped and broken, its pieces still reaching out to the vacuum.

Augusta could almost imagine the moons’ endings, that silent boom of slow motion detonations, one after another, the spiralling of the pieces forming the ring that now orbited this lost Mechanicus world.

It was a reminder of the Emperor’s power, of His grace and strength, of His great might that spanned the vastness of space.

The shuttle slowed. Its engines fired as it curved carefully from side to side. Still watching, Augusta offered her voice in a Requiem. Around her, the others lent their song to hers – Melia’s velvet contralto, Akemi’s pure, clear harmony.

‘Dies Irae, Dies Illa! Solvet saeclum in favilla!’

The Day of Wrath! That day will dissolve the world in ashes!

The Sister Superior shivered. Under her vambraces, the hair on her forearms was standing on end.

The grille crackled again, shattering the moment.

‘Pleazzz… assist… oxy… deplet… hours…’

‘In the Emperor’s name,’ Melia said softly. ‘There can’t still be workers out there!’

‘Ignore it, Sister.’ The voice was the pilot, her tone still firm.

Melia sat upright, her expression hardening. ‘Pilot–’

‘Sister,’ Augusta said. A larger piece of moon loomed close to the window, a gleam of tram-lines clearly visible. ‘Let the pilot focus. We must attain the surface safely, and without delay.’

The words were a warning, and Melia fell silent.

But the vox-grille still crackled, the voice now tightening with panic. It was offering coordinates, the numbers broken by the spit and fizzle of the star’s radiation, and by the spin of the passing rock.

‘That’s close,’ Caia said, checking her auspex. ‘Those coordinates are–’

‘It’s not a distress call.’ The pilot’s interruption was curt.

Melia stared at the vox-grille. ‘What?’

Augusta was studying the silent dance outside, watching the edges of the rocks as they slowly sailed past. The one at the window had gone, revealing a longer view – and a silhouette of familiar shapes.

A line of titanic gun-muzzles, now covering the debris field.

They turned, tracking the Aquila as it passed.

‘Hold on!’ The voice was the pilot’s, suddenly sharp.

The old shuttle banked hard, into a turn; Augusta’s belly lurched. The engines whined and strained; their noise burrowed in her ears like a bloodworm. Outside the window, the moon-pieces pitched abruptly sideways and were gone.

Gripping the arms of the chair, she leaned back, exhaling more of the hymn.

‘Imperator majistatis,

Qui salvandos salvas gratis,

Salva nos, fons pietatis!’

Emperor of majesty,

Who saves those who are to be saved,

Save us, O fount of mercy!

‘Keep holding!’ The pilot spoke again, her tone tight. With a rush, the vehicle banked further, turning right over; the fragments outside were suddenly way too close for comfort.

The Sister Superior tightened her grip, still praying. She had no fear of dying in battle – weapons in hands and praising Him – but this, this sudden threat of a cold and unmarked doom…

This was not something she could control, and she disliked it intensely.

The vox-grille spoke again. ‘The signal is an automation, Sisters, calculated to lure unwary transports. If the defences don’t kill us, then the collision probably will. And the pieces can be picked up by the pirates.’ The pilot’s voice spat and sputtered with electricity and tension. ‘With the Emperor’s blessing, we should clear the debris field in about four– And again.’

The Aquila banked the other way, throwing Augusta sideways in the seat. She could feel the shuttle’s engines as the vehicle twisted and shuddered, hear them straining, higher and lighter than those of the frigate. They hummed in protest as it turned past another huge fragment of rock. Drawing in her breath, she murmured further lines of the Requiem, the sound blending harmoniously with the engines’ song.

‘Confutatis maledictis,

Fammis acribus addictis

Voca me com benedictis!’

Once the accursed have been silenced,

Sentenced to acrid flames,

Call me thus with the blessed!

‘Four minutes,’ Viola said, her tone biting. ‘I thought Captain Mulier said the emplacements were abandoned?’

‘Not all of them,’ Akemi answered her. ‘When the Mechanicus withdrew from Lycheate, they must have armed the debris ring to keep the planet secure. It seems their emplacements have been repurposed.’

‘But there’s no gravity, no reactors, no nothing,’ Caia said, looking out at the pieces. ‘How can anything live out here?’

‘They’re probably controlled from the surface,’ Akemi said. ‘They…’

She stopped as one of the visible emplacements suddenly blossomed with globular flame. A red streak came hard across the darkness; the whole vessel shook as it banked for a fourth turn. The Sisters could almost feel the missile as it streaked beneath the agile lander’s belly, then detonated on the rock beyond.

More fragments tumbled, tiny pieces newly broken.

‘That one wasn’t automated,’ Caia said. ‘That targeted the engines.’ She raised her voice to speak into the grille, ‘Can we return fire, pilot?’

‘I’d rather not, Sister,’ the pilot said, her tone sharp. ‘We’re not armed for a fight. Better we just get out of here, and into the atmosphere proper. Once we’re through the debris-ring, this should get easier.’

‘Let them concentrate, Sister,’ Augusta said, again. Her tone was sharper than she’d meant it, and she made an effort to speak with proper control. ‘This is not our task. We will place our trust in the God-Emperor, in the spirit of this landing craft, and in its pilot, who does His work.’ She ended the Requiem and began to murmur the more familiar words of the Litany, and felt the others join her.

Felt them steady.

From the lightning and the tempest…

As if it had heard them, the vehicle returned again to a level flight path, and Augusta felt her belly-tension ease. Beside her, Melia blew out her breath; the others sat back, began to relax. The last of the pieces of rock sailed slowly past the windows, and were gone.

Beneath them now, the planet gleamed like rust.

Engines firing, the Aquila picked up speed.

Soon, they felt the bounce and judder as the shuttle penetrated the outer atmosphere.

And slowly, a glittering arc of light to the eyes of the planet below, it began its descent.

‘Sister. Superior. Augusta. Santorus.’ Inquisitor Istrix pronounced each word like a passing of her judgement, chill and merciless. ‘Your closeness to my location must be the Will of the Emperor Himself.’ Her faintly acerbic tone echoed in the empty metal shelving that surrounded them, in the corrosion of centuries that stretched upwards to an unseen ceiling.

With its loading bay doors now closed, the old Munitorum depot was large enough to have accommodated the Aquila’s landing, small enough to be secure, and secure enough to be guarded by whatever force Istrix had brought with her.

Privately, Augusta complimented the inquisitor on her choice of briefing location – there was little that could reach them in here.

Aloud, however, the Sister Superior said nothing. She and her squad stood at parade ground attention: feet together, hands at their sides, their gazes clear and straight ahead. In her black armour and grey robes, Istrix barely came up to Augusta’s nose, yet the mantle of her authority was tangible.

She eyed them critically, one after another. Her odd, pale green gaze took in the scars on their armour left by the Lautis daemons, the purity seals, the merit-beads, the elaborate filigree work on Viola’s thrice-blessed heavy bolter.

She looked like she was ticking them off a list.

‘The Order of the Bloody Rose,’ she continued, her words still heavily weighted. ‘Followers of Saint Mina. One of the younger militant orders, and founded by Deacis IV. Your Order have quite the martial reputation, Sister Superior, ferocious with both faith and blade. Is this true?’

‘Emperor willing, inquisitor,’ Augusta said, still staring straight ahead.

Istrix nodded. ‘Good. Your courage becomes you.’

At the inquisitor’s shoulder, there stood a tall young man, his gear Militarum issue, all green and beige, his skin rich and dark. His brassard bore two stripes, but scars and dirt had obscured his regimental insignia. From the state of his kit, he looked like he’d been here for some time.

‘I know your canoness,’ Istrix said. She made no attempt to explain the comment, but went on, ‘Captain Mulier will convey to her my orders. Down here, securing off-planet communication can be… challenging.’ She gave a small, cold smile. ‘It is possible, but it requires either force, or coin. And until recently, my presence has been… necessarily discreet.’

The corporal kept his eyes on his boots.

‘Very well, Sisters,’ Istrix said. ‘At ease. And listen up.’

The inquisitor’s briefing was curt.

Lycheate, she told them, was a sewer; a filthy, seething sump-hive of a world. The planet’s surface was ninety-five per cent water, now heavily polluted with the effluvium of centuries. Over it had been built vast ferrocrete and flexsteel platforms, supporting the endless, methodical grids of Mechanicus machines – furnaces, regulators, incinerators. They stretched for thousands of miles, a planet-wide city of industry and labour, once teeming with servitors and tech-priests alike.

But, the Mechanicus had gone. With the moons destroyed, they’d taken everything else of value, spoken the last rites of the Omnissiah, and they’d left Lycheate to die.

And yet, Istrix had said, no corner of the Imperium was ever free from the ingenuity of the determined heretic.

Some two hundred years before, the cargo scow Egestes had proven itself too curious, and had skimmed just too close. Damaged by the debris field, it had crash-landed upon the planet’s surface.

And so, Lycheate’s new life had begun.

The scow had been carrying the Questor Heretek Vius, and his multiple servitors and helots. And Vius had been curious about what he’d discovered – he had determined to scour every last inch of this world for its lost machinery and data-ghosts. Under Vius’ relentless, methodical direction, his minions had spread out across the planet, exploring, seeking, repurposing. They’d breathed just enough new life into the last sparks of the fusion reactor; they’d found habitats still intact, infrastructure still usable. And the vox-antennae could be repaired, and repurposed.

‘Come to me,’ Vius had said, his datastream reaching out across the void. ‘Come to me, and I will offer you a new beginning.’

The Sisters had listened to Istrix’s clipped, meticulous tones, watched the shadows as they passed across the face of the corporal – he seemed barely more than a boy.

Augusta eyed his youth, and his battered kit, and wondered what he was doing here.

Istrix said, ‘Have you ever encountered a renegade world, Sisters? A world where the Light of the Emperor has been not only lost, but wantonly abandoned?’ The question was rhetorical; she continued to speak. ‘You wonder why this world has not been purged, and I tell you – its day of reckoning will come. For now, however, its existence will be tolerated, as it conceals a greater prize.’

The corporal’s expression flickered, though his stance did not falter.

Glancing at him, Istrix said, ‘Corporal Mors is a young man of very great courage. He has seen his squad slain around him, screaming with fear, and he has stood fast. He has earned your respect, Sisters. And this world must do likewise. You will not walk out of here and open fire – you will run out of ammunition long before you run out of targets. Do I make myself clear? Any cleansing will come only when I speak the word.’

The chill in her voice was cracking at the edges, though Augusta could not tell why. In the Sister Superior’s ear, her vox-bead fizzled as a channel opened, but whichever Sister had been going to speak thought better of it, and said nothing.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ Augusta said. ‘Perfectly clear.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Istrix told her. Again, that touch of acerbity, of bleak, cold humour. ‘For now, we are secure – my shuttle is secured here, and this compound and its immediate surround are safe. But once we leave this location, my resources are few. Lycheate is a lawless world, Sisters – a world of pirate and trader and ganger, of human and xenos, of cultist and witch and psyker. There is no Ecclesiarchy here, no governor. No neat chimes to mark the hours.’ Her face was sharp, narrow as a hatchet. ‘Here, the order is one of power, of wit and money, of force and reputation. And much as I have tried to remain unremarkable, my life has already been attempted several times.’ Her eyes glittered. ‘Needless to say, those attempts have been thwarted. With you at my back, however, I can employ a somewhat more… forceful… approach.’

She fell silent, almost as if she was thinking.

Augusta said, ‘A question, inquisitor.’ Istrix nodded, and the Sister Superior said, ‘What is it that you pursue?’

What is so important that you spare this world to find it?

The inquisitor paused, her oddly pale eyes narrowing.

‘You ask me why I permit this world its miserable life?’ Again, the same, cold smile. ‘Your reputation is not unearned, Sister Superior.’

From somewhere, there came the whoosh of hydraulics, the sound of shouts and lasgun fire. Screaming. Viola twitched, put a hand to the heavy bolter, but the noises soon faded again.

The inquisitor said, ‘How would you feel, Sister, if you were betrayed by one of your squad?’

Augusta blinked – the question had caught her out. It was shocking, unthinkable, verging almost on blasphemous. And there was no answer that she could make that was not an outright refusal to accept the inquisitor’s words – and the breach of her orders would be severe.

She said, ‘Ma’am?’

Istrix tapped the bolter at her hip. ‘My target,’ she said, ‘is a man called Scafidis Zale. He is a witch, a heretic, and a reminder of my ultimate failure.’ Her skin flushed faintly, showing a latticework of recent scars – the marks both regular and deliberate. ‘He was my interrogator until his… ability… became manifest. And he refused the path that the Emperor had chosen for him.’ Something in her gaze glittered like the ice of the debris-field. ‘And in the name of Terra itself, I will end him personally.’

The final word made an odd chill go down Augusta’s back.

But this was the Inquisition – and it was not her place to disobey.

Chapter four

In all the years of her service to the Emperor, Augusta had never seen a planet quite like Lycheate.

This was not a place for her martial expertise, nor a place for skirmish tactics or strategic advances. This was a vast and creaking sprawl of corrosion and splotched rust, its polluted waters hissing as they tugged at the crumbling uprights.

Looking down, she didn’t need an auspex to tell her if she fell from the platform, she’d be kneeling before the Golden Throne.

The inquisitor, however, paid the filthy water no attention. She showed no fear – the only emotion that crossed her small, tight face was disdain. She’d given her troops a curt set of orders, and had requisitioned Sister Caia to be her personal lookout and bodyguard. And then, she’d walked out as if she owned the entire planet.

Augusta had followed, watching the woman’s upright, grey-robed back. The Sister Superior’s thoughts were oddly uneasy – though she could not identify why.

Perhaps it was just the air of the planet itself.

Out in the open, Lycheate’s atmosphere was thick, brown and cold. As they moved away from the base and out onto the layers of walkways, the wind made the scaffolding creak and sing. Metallic dust clogged her visor, and she kept wiping it away.

Istrix at their head, they walked silent and double file. The platforms groaned and scraped beneath their feet. Over the vox, Akemi warned them not to march in rhythm, as they would increase the stress on the already rotting metal, and tumble helpless into the waters below.

At times, half-decomposed bodies floated under them like warnings.

Augusta walked warily, bolter in hand. In her scarlet armour, she felt conspicuous, exposed to threats from every angle. A thousand ambush points surrounded them – layers of steps and catwalks, of pipes and gantries, of lifts and tracks and carts and rusting cargo-haulers. And, if she looked all the way up, she could see the narrow strip of the brown and twilight sky, and the sparkle of the debris field in the light of the dying sun.

The whole place stank of rot, as if He had turned His face from the last of its corroding, fading life.

A spiritu dominatus…

Softly and over the vox, she sang the words of the Litany. The others joined her, their close harmonies rising like the wind in the pipework.

He was here, as He always would be.

Behind the Sisters, their big boots loud, walked Corporal Mors and the surviving three members of his squad – Rufus the medicae, a scar through his brown eyebrow, Lucio, small and blond and bright-eyed, and a rangy, dark woman, Adriene. They were all equally grubby and startlingly young, but they walked alert, weapons in hands.

The inquisitor, however, did not bother to look back – she marched at their forefront with no flicker of doubt or compromise, marched like the demand of the Emperor Himself. At the briefing, she had offered them only a minimal set of orders; she had not as much as detailed an outline of her mission. They were here to locate the witch, and they were not to open fire without her direct command.

That was all.

The lack of information was both unusual and unsettling, but Istrix was the will of the Emperor, and she worked in His name – it was not Augusta’s place to question her.

Domine, libra nos.

The words of the Litany flowed like faith, pure across the umber air.

‘Be wary,’ Augusta told her Sisters, over the vox. ‘We track a psyker. Trickery may abound. Keep vigilant, and guard your souls and your minds.’

‘Ave Imperator.’ The words of the others were steady, their Litany strong. Their voices continued to sing, soft and intricate.

As they moved further, however, the Sisters began to hear different noises.

Clanking. Shouting. Gunfire. Detonations. Running feet.

The unmistakeable sounds of heavy, desperate splashing.

Caia said, ‘To our left, next platform over. They’re not bothered with us. They’re moving away.’

The surrounding violence was rapidly becoming common-place.

From the lightning and the tempest…

Amid the song of the Litany, Augusta commented, ‘We are very visible – we will be a target, and soon.’

Our Emperor, deliver us.

‘Aye,’ Caia returned. ‘Scan continues.’

They went onwards, the sounds around them becoming more frequent. They had seen no one close, not yet, but it was surely only a matter of time before the denizens of this place made themselves known.

Renegades, cultists and witches; the lost and the godless.

Augusta’s hand tightened on her weapon, her skin prickled with tension. Somewhere in her memory, she heard Subul’s laughter, the boom and rumble of the Lautis daemon…

From plague, temptation and war…

‘Sisters,’ Caia said. ‘We’ve got company.’

‘Location?’ Augusta said.

‘To the left. Half a dozen contacts running parallel. Whatever’s here, we’ve got its attention.’

‘I hear you. Eyes open.’

‘Aye.’

Our Emperor, deliver us.

‘You will remain on your guard, Sisters.’ Cutting across the vox’s open channel, Istrix’s tones were severe. ‘But I repeat – you will open fire only if I give you a direct order. Is that understood?’

Augusta said, ‘Yes, inquisitor.’

‘For now, we will veer right, and remain out of range.’

Pulled by the inquisitor’s relentless forward march, they continued. Slowly, the platforms spread wider, became flat, open spaces that stretched between vat and tank and workshop, all of them engraved with the cog-and-skull of the absent Mechanicus. The brown sky slowly darkened, and the age-old lumens coughed into life. The centuries-old numerical denominations became cast in shadows; they, too, were caked in dust.

The contacts continued to run parallel.

‘We’ve got more,’ Caia said. ‘Now both sides. They’re starting to close.’

From the scourge of the Kraken…

‘They’re herding us,’ Augusta commented. ‘We must halt, and take a defensible position–’

‘Throne!’ Caia’s curse was vehement. ‘We’ve walked right into the middle of them!’

Our Emperor, deliver us!

Augusta’s heart thumped with sudden adrenaline. She blinked in her retinal lenses, scanned with her preysight for the blurs of warmth. Her mind was working – she needed to assess, to give commands, to formulate both offence and defence…

Somewhere ahead of her, a voice said, ‘Nice to see you, ladies.’

Istrix held up a hand. ‘Halt.’

Immediately, Augusta said, ‘Defence pattern beta. Mors, pull your troops back behind our cover.’

All four Sisters deployed to a compass defence, watching every direction. The Militarum soldiers pulled back into their centre, their lasrifles defended by the Sisters’ heavier armour.

Scanning for enemies, Augusta said, ‘Caia?’

Caia said, ‘Ahead and to both sides, close range. Multiple targets. Estimate more than forty individuals, though it’s hard to tell their armament.’

‘Mechanicus?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Caia said. ‘Mostly human. They’re confident, though. And they definitely knew we were coming.’

Istrix, however, didn’t care. ‘Show yourself.’

A snort answered her. Angled from somewhere below the platform, a single red light appeared on her chest. She looked at it as one might look at an insect.

Bolter in hand, awaiting the order to fire, Augusta scanned further, assembling information.

The platform they stood upon was open, and almost alone – the planet’s waters stretched around it, black and deadly and filled with garbage. Ahead of them, the area narrowed to a single walkway, a narrow steel alley caught between a rust-splotched tank at one side and a tall wall of storage crates on the other. At their top perched a huge servo-hauler crane. It was too obvious an ambush point – and if that crane came down, it would smash the entire platform into the filth below…

From the blasphemy of the Fallen…

The Sister Superior drew in her breath, still singing the Litany, the words as strong as the bolter in her hand. She held herself firmly in check, looking for the escape routes, the clear lines of fire, the tell-tale glimmers of warmth that were there, there and there.

She could feel the eagerness that came from them; feel the seething corruption of this whole place.

It crawled in her skin like an infection.

Our Emperor, deliver us.

Her anger, her need to fire, was strong. Her purpose was pure, clear, unquestioned; the thump of the blood in her veins was steady, insistent. She needed to draw her blade, to bring His wrath down upon every suffering, sneering occupant of this machine-dead pit…

But she could not.

Despite her need to loose both hymnal and bolter, however, she stayed in control. Twenty years’ experience had given the Sister Superior a solid core of practicality that enabled her to hold her position, and wait.

She said, softly and over the vox, ‘Corporal, when the order is given to open fire, your squad will take the upper levels. Your primary targets will be atop the tank, and anything upon the crane. Everything close belongs to us.’

Mors said, ‘Yes, Sister.’

The voice came again, mocking. ‘Quite the army you’ve got there. Little thing like you.’

‘I said, show yourself.’ Istrix’s tone was ice.

‘Listen to you.’ The voice sniggered. ‘Thinking you can walk round here like you own the place.’

Istrix snorted, the sound utterly scathing.

‘What’s she doing?’ Viola said, over their private channel. ‘Can’t she just give him orders or some–?’

‘Silence,’ Augusta told her shortly.

Viola subsided, but the muzzle of the heavy bolter twitched as it covered the walkway ahead. Augusta heard the corporal growl softly, ‘Hold steady, eyes open. Keep pressure on the – shit!’

Ahead of them, something big and metallic had rumbled into motion. The walkway creaked under its weight.

‘Kataphron,’ Caia said shortly, her tone a curse. ‘Breacher, I think. It’s blocking the exit. Heavy rifle in its left arm. Looks like it’s been scratch-repaired.’

‘Keep vigilant, Sisters,’ Augusta said. ‘There may be more.’

The Sister Superior’s line of sight was blocked by Istrix’s armoured figure, but she could still make out the thing’s brutal, half-metal skull, its blank and open eyes, one of them gleaming red with an augmetic targeter. She heard the metal grumble of tracks as the thing rolled forwards.

‘So, why don’t we give you a proper Lycheate welcome, ladies?’ The owner of the voice was somewhere below them, and Augusta couldn’t see him. ‘Weapons on the floor, hands in the sky. Unless you want my friend here to get tetchy.’

Istrix gave a short, impatient sigh. ‘Sister Superior, rid us of this obstacle.’

And then everything happened at once.

They had little cover, and less time.

As Istrix gave her order, the inquisitor vaulted clean over the railing and dropped from Augusta’s line of sight, her movements surprisingly lithe.

Caia followed her.

Dropping to a kneel, Augusta barked, ‘Viola! Take it down!’

From the begetting of daemons!

She heard the Litany hit a crescendo, heard a heavy bolter as it thundered into a full, directed burst. In the open channel of the vox, there was a faint, awed whistle from one of the Militarum soldiers.

‘Shut it.’ The corporal growled the warning.

‘Corp.’ The voice sounded like Lucio, the youngest of the four.

Viola, her hymn fully as furious as the bolter itself, loosed her full rage at the tracked servitor.

But the thing was just too big. It was slow, clunky, poorly repaired – yet its chest armour was heavy, all clumsily re-welded pieces of flexsteel. Rounds struck and spanged, leaving dents.

Snarling, Viola aimed at its head, but a heavy, spot-welded helmet defeated the directed burst. The thing’s torso rocked; detonations filled the air. Its shoulder grinding audibly, it raised the rifle.

And the servitor was not alone.

From behind Augusta came the cough and roar of Melia’s flamer. Sheltered from the Breacher by the curve of the tank, the rest of the gang were jumping down to the platform, a scruffy assortment of pirates and roughnecks, their armour scavenged, their weapons poor.

Our Emperor, deliver us!

The flamer spat death.

Attackers ignited, weapons exploding as magazines overheated. Melia, too, called the words of the Litany, her anger seeming almost a blessing as she freed the nonbelievers from their cursed existence.

‘By the Emperor,’ Lucio was still muttering, his tones awed. ‘I’ve never seen fighting like it!’

Mors snapped, ‘I said, shut it.’

Knowing they couldn’t see, Augusta let herself grin, tight and lethal.

‘Go down, you cursed machine!’ Viola swore; the Breacher guttered and rocked, but the grinding continued. Any moment, it would hose the platform with rounds.

‘Back!’ The Sister Superior barked orders. ‘Use the tank as cover! Viola, take out the tracks!’

Shoving the soldiers behind her, she and the other two Sisters retreated back across the main platform. High-speed explosions chewed lines of holes in the metal of tank and walkway both, making them creak and screech. Viola followed the Sisters’ retreat, her bolter still battering the thing as it tried to roll forwards.

From the curse of the mutant!

With a sudden, livid cry that was more snarl than hymn, she aimed her full rate of fire at the joint where the walkway met the platform. A volley of rounds hit and detonated.

The walkway juddered and cracked.

As the monster servitor rolled onwards, its tracks found the weak point. There was a scrape and a jolt, and the whole thing pitched nose-down, the heavy rifle now aimed at the waters below.

This time, even the corporal loosed a curse.

But, even as metal creaking grew more urgent, the heavy bolter thumped and clattered as it ran out of ammunition.

‘Above you!’ Caia’s voice said. ‘Heads up!’

A head and forearm were poking from the top of the tank, a long barrel just coming into view. The corporal hit the sniper cleanly, his single shot sizzling across the half-light. Augusta watched the figure’s head explode, the body teeter and plummet.

Melia’s flamer whooshed again – a great spitting curve as she brought the weapon round in an arc. Screams followed, bodies tumbled, splashing as they hit the water.

In an instant, fire roared across the water’s oily surface, lighting the entire platform to a ruddy-hued hellscape.

The metal creaked again.

Still at Augusta’s shoulder, the corporal barked, ‘There’s more of them! On top of the crane!’

Lasguns sizzled at another layer of snipers. The air cracked with lines of heat. The attackers swore and fell back, holes seared in their vulnerable flesh. Another one tumbled loose, and hit the catwalk with a crash.

The metal shook again.

‘It’s going to collapse!’ Akemi said. Her bolter barked as she kept firing.

‘Motion slowing.’ Caia’s voice came through the vox. ‘I’ve got fleeing contacts on all sides.’ Augusta heard the grin, heard the sharp crack of her weapon as she made sure. ‘Mercenaries!’ The word was a snort.

‘Caia,’ Augusta said. ‘What’s your location?’

‘Look down,’ Caia replied. ‘I’m still with the inquisitor. And she’s requesting… demanding… your presence.’

Leaving the other three Sisters and the four Militarum soldiers under Melia’s command, Augusta saw immediately where Istrix had gone – the inquisitor had followed the angle of the earlier targeter, and had jumped from the walkway. She’d landed on a small lift platform, some four feet below.

Sister Caia was still with her – and she had shoved her bolter, hard, under the chin of a small and grubby figure. Over the Sisters’ vox, she said, ‘Look, we’ve caught ourselves a rat.’

As Augusta jumped down, the man’s dirty, lined face paled even further. ‘Hey, I’m just trying to make a living!’

‘You’re a thief and a bully,’ Caia said curtly. ‘And your “living” is over.’

‘Please, Sister, I was only–’ he stopped as the bolter pressed harder.

The inquisitor said, her tone like steel, ‘You have made a very unwise mistake.’

‘Please!’ The man was almost gibbering. ‘We just collect the tithes, that’s all. Y’know, try to survive, make a little profit–’

‘Tithes?’ Istrix grabbed his shirt and shook him like a captured gretchin. ‘Are you some local baron, to make such demands?’

‘I’m no one, not really.’ He was stammering, scared. ‘I just work here. But I do know things. I can help you.’ He gave a sickly, ingratiating grin. ‘If you’re heading to the city, I can get you in. I know the routes. The people. I can tell you who you need to find.’

Augusta still flanking her like a bodyguard, Istrix stepped back and pulled a long votive chain from the neck of her grey robe. On its end, it bore the symbol of the Inquisition, glittering in the light from flame and lumens both.

The man swallowed, going green.

‘You know who I am?’ Her cold tones were layered with both authority and scorn.

‘The…’ The man’s face changed. Glancing down, the Sister Superior could see the dark patch now flooding the front of his trousers. He gibbered, ‘I can tell you anything, everything you need to know. Please…’

‘Maybe you can.’ Istrix gave a small, amused smile. ‘You listen to me, little man, and you listen well. I am the word of the Emperor and I am His law. I have the Sisters of Battle at my back, carrying His faith and His torch. And there is no force on this miserable planet, nothing Zale can array against me, nothing he can muster, that is enough to stop me, or to get in my way. Do you understand? Now – tell me where he’s gone.’

‘Where who’s gone? I don’t know who you mean!’ The man was almost sobbing with fear. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know…’

‘Whether he’s lying or not,’ Caia commented, over the vox, ‘he’ll betray us the moment we’ve gone.’

‘Of course he will.’ Augusta stepped forwards, and bent the man back over the lift’s metal railing. The water sloshed and hissed. The last of the flames had flickered to nothing and the garbage on its surface was ash.

‘Enough,’ Istrix said. ‘He lives. On one condition.’

‘Anything.’ The man was snivelling, snot running down his face. ‘Anything. Just – please – don’t build me into a machine!’

‘I would not bestow such a blessing upon you,’ she said, scathing. ‘Besides, I doubt you would have the stamina for it. I need you to do something for me.’

He sniffled. ‘Whatever you want. Whoever you want.’

Istrix said, ‘Do you know a woman called Rayos?’

Augusta and Caia exchanged a glance, but said nothing.

The inquisitor continued. ‘She’s a local, a seeker of knowledge, and she’s very… distinctive.’ Her tone seemed oddly amused. ‘She’s one of my few known contacts on this cesspit of a world. Do you know who she is?’

Sniffling, the man nodded.

‘You will take her a message.’

He said, ‘Rayos doesn’t–’

‘You were given an order, worm,’ Caia said, her bolter pressing harder.

Istrix shot the Sister a sharp look for speaking out of line; let the look continue to Augusta, a raised eyebrow at her discipline of her troops.

‘All right, all right!’ The man was sobbing now. ‘I’ll do anything!’

On the platform above them, pairs of armoured legs were moving in methodical patterns as the squad despatched the last of their opponents, and threw the bodies over the side. The black boots of the corporal had appeared beside the heavy metal tracks of the doomed Breacher, and a single sizzle of light finally shut the thing down.

‘If you lie to me…’ Istrix leaned in close, and spoke softly, ‘I won’t only kill you, little man. I will tear your soul into screaming pieces. And I’ll do it slowly.’

The man had sunk to the floor. He was curling in on himself, almost numb with terror. Istrix planted her boot against his shoulder and made him look up.

‘Well?’

Slowly, still sniffing, he began to nod. ‘I know the woman you mean. She’s been here a long time. Gets a lot of work. Knows a lot of people. I’ll take her your message.’

‘I thought so.’ The inquisitor was smiling, her scars creasing with the expression. ‘Tell her… tell her I’m here. Tell her to be in the Archeotech, this evening. Tell her… I have a deal to make. And that I can make it worth her while.’

The man was still nodding, relief flooding the movement. ‘I promise, I promise. In the Emperor’s name.’

‘Very well,’ Istrix said, moving her foot. ‘You can go.’

‘With all due respect, inquisitor,’ Augusta said, ‘this creature surely cannot be trusted…’

‘I gave you an order, Sister Superior.’ Istrix’s tone was cold. ‘Release him. He may betray us, but that also works to my advantage.’ She turned, her pale green eyes alight with an odd intensity. ‘I want Zale to know I’m coming. I want him to know that I have the Sisters of Battle at my back. And I want him afraid.’ Her tone was firm.

Over the vox, Caia said, ‘Sister Superior–’

‘Do not voice the thought, Sister,’ Augusta warned her. ‘To question the inquisitor is heresy.’ Both Sisters stepped back.

Fast as a rat, the man was over the railing and gone.

Istrix lifted her chin, her expression stony. Her fine latticework of scars glowed like inlaid wires. She said, ‘We are the chosen of the Emperor, Sisters, His children, and we fear nothing. What is there ahead of us that can defeat the will of the Inquisition, and the faith of the Sisters of Battle? This city holds no fears for such as we.’

Augusta saluted, said, ‘Mea fides est, et ferrum armis.’

My faith is my shield and my blade.

‘Sister…’ Again, Caia’s voice over the Sisters’ private channel.

‘Be silent.’ Augusta answered the unspoken doubt with no compromise in her tone. ‘She is the voice of the God-Emperor, and we will not discuss this again.’

Chapter five

The Lycheate city was designated ‘City-05’, and the crush and the stench were incredible.

The place was a cacophony of noise – metallic music, harsh and jangling; voices, raised in shouts and anger. Everywhere, there was the push and shove of filthy, reeking humanity, with orks and beastmen in the seething crowd. There was the flit of the thief, the bulge of the mutant, the bellow of the roustabout thug.

Sister Melia had seen such things before – she and Caia had both been with Augusta on Hadria, on their mission to recapture the renegade rogue trader Samual – but still, the stink and the corruption of this place crawled under her skin like an infection. She hated it; she needed to offer it the cleansing it so richly craved. She could feel the Sister Superior’s rising impatience, and her restraint; could feel the sharp sense of wariness that came from Akemi and Viola both, neither of them long from the schola.

Yet Melia, her Hospitaller training rising in her heart, contorted with something else. These people had lost their way, lost the Light. They should be purged; they should be granted the Emperor’s final peace…

She walked with her hand on her flamer, itching to pull it free.

Around them, much of the machinery had been prayed to new life. It rattled and clanked. New devotions had been embossed into its surfaces; its old Mechanicus symbols had been cleaned and polished, or defaced and carved over. Liquid rumbled through endless pipes; bursts of steam hissed free from louvered vents, and rose, ghost-pale, into the almost-dark sky. The hauler engines were running here, clattering loudly in their tracks. Screen linked to screen and silent information flowed almost palpably across the air. In places, there were figures tending to them, praying. Melia caught flashes of additional limbs, of extended augmetics and hood-covered faces…

Of the twists of warp and ruin that crept from the Mechanicus’ remaining skin.

She shuddered.

This whole place was a hive, a living, breathing melting-pot of machinery, and every type of depravity clamoured in its suspended steel streets.

Before her, Sister Akemi walked slowly, a prayer on her lips. Melia was about to intercede when Augusta stopped beside the youngest Sister and gripped her shoulder in one gauntleted hand.

‘Have faith, Sister,’ she said. ‘He is with us, even here. Keep your thoughts on His light, and the despair of this place cannot touch you.’

Akemi nodded, continuing to pray. Melia echoed her, the words both strength and comfort.

Yet her hand remained on her flamer.

They walked on, their red boots clanging loudly. Desperate figures huddled away from them, crippled or mutated or both. Others turned as they passed, gaping in awe or astonishment. Still more narrowed their gazes, as if weighing the opportunity – then thought better of it and turned away. There were even those who tried to trade, bundles over their shoulders that they spread out, laden with scavenged treasures – machine parts, pict-slates, ancient fragments of forgotten weaponry.

More than once, they saw a figure overwhelmed in a corner, and beaten casually to death.

Nowhere were there soldiers, or any icons of either faith or authority.

‘By the Throne,’ Akemi said, her voice soft. ‘This place is a hell. It should be ended.’

‘Why do they even come here?’ Viola asked.

Istrix replied, her voice flat. ‘A place with no authority can be seen as an inviting prospect – somewhere that one can live without the restriction of rules. Outlaws and renegades, the lost, the unlucky, the mutant, the witch – all have rid themselves of the Emperor.’ Her voice curdled, sour with anger. ‘Here, they consider themselves free.’

‘This is not freedom,’ Viola muttered, her tone edged with ferocity. She gestured with the bolter-muzzle, indicating their surroundings. ‘This is sacrilege.’

But Istrix turned sharply on her heel and faced them, making them stop.

‘I suggest you control yourself, Sister,’ she said, her voice flat. ‘I remind you again – you will take action only by my command.’

She held Viola’s gaze, stared her down. She turned to Augusta, making sure, then to Mors, one eyebrow raised.

‘Ave Imperator.’ The young man offered a salute, but he let his fist drop as soon as she’d turned away. The expressions of his squad, Melia noted, were less than properly schooled.

They glanced at each other, silent stress shifting between them. Augusta was watching the inquisitor’s back. The Sister Superior’s expression was concealed by her helm, but her armoured shoulders seemed increasingly tense.

It appeared, Melia thought, that there was more to Inquisitor Istrix than they’d realised.

Staying close together, the group pushed onwards over the endless, groaning metal. It was fully dark, now, but the lumens were brighter and their light gleamed from the soldiers’ steaming breaths. The platforms were larger, better maintained, and many of the tanks and reactors had been repurposed as habitats or saloons. Smoke curled in the air – tabac sticks and kyxa weed. Coloured signs gleamed in darkened corners, making offers that made Lucio nudge his fellows and snicker.

But Istrix did not care. She ignored the graffiti, scratched in mockery over the cogs and skulls of the original forge world; she ignored the sharp gazes of the curious opportunists, ignored the surrounding bodies, looted and rotting. She walked through all of it with her conviction blazing fearlessly, like an aura. The Sisters, in their scarlet armour, followed her, pushing through the grubby people like a wash of blood through rust.

And the four soldiers walked with them, their eyes everywhere.

At last, the inquisitor stopped. She indicated a large, cylindrical tank, standing alone at the platform’s outer edge – a smeltorium, perhaps, from the corroding pipes beneath. A sequence of binary code was carved into its outside.

And below it, scratched into the metal, was the word, ‘Archeotech’.

‘Sssss.’ The noise might have been laughter, but it was mechanical, and oddly flat.

In the dim illumination of the tank’s interior, a hooded figure sat in a defended seat, its back to the curve of the wall. Before it, the place was packed, all shouting and fighting and the pounding of scratch-built metal tables; the air stank of piss and spirits. The figure, however, did not raise its hood to look.

On the other side of the table, Istrix stood solid, arms folded. The five Sisters flanked her like icons.

Ranged with them, the Militarum soldiers seemed somewhat distracted. Lucio was looking around, and casting a wistful gaze at the battered metal mugs.

Melia left him to it. Her attention was on the figure itself, and its mantled, augmetic limbs.

A tech-priest.

A renegade.

Its cloak was black, shimmering with an oily glisten, and it bore a cog-symbol unfamiliar to the Sisters. Its limbs clicked and twitched; one claw pulled back its hood just enough to reveal a semi-human, female face, a single bright blue eye. Her other eye was an extending metal lens, glinting with a red, augmetic glare, and her mechadendrites rippled this way and that, scanning Istrix, the Sisters and the soldiers, and the bar in every direction.

Satisfied with the data she had assembled, she sat back and hissed again, the noise like releasing steam.

‘Rayos.’ The inquisitor picked up a mug, eyed the contents, and clanked it back down on the table.

‘Inquisitor.’ The word was emotionless, emerging in ticks and whirs. ‘There has been an eighty-six point seven per cent chance that you would come, seeking my input.’

‘Your information is excellent,’ Istrix said. It was statement, rather than question. ‘And I know about you, also – the heretek Vius was not alone in his desire to plunder the mysteries of Lycheate.’

The hood cocked to one side, the movement precise. ‘Vius is gone, his data held only in memory.’

The bar heaved and roared. From somewhere, there came singing, coarse and ragged like a shanty; the tables clattered in rhythm.

Istrix said, ‘I wish to trade.’

Rayos let out another hiss. ‘My trade is forty-two point two per cent information, twenty-one point three per cent machine parts, and eleven point four per cent ores and minerals. The remainder can be defined as “unusual”, where that definition is taken from–’

‘I’m looking for a man called Scafidis Zale,’ Istrix said, with a thin smile. ‘You either know where he is, or you can tell me where he may be found.’

The tech-priest sat back, her augmetic eye twisting as she focused upon Istrix’s face.

‘I can access this data,’ she said, at last. ‘But its release requires a very specific exchange.’

Istrix glanced pointedly at the Sisters that surrounded her, and leaned her knuckles on the table. The seemingly casual movement dropped her symbol from the front of her robes. It swayed there, glinting. ‘It’s not a request.’

The priest hissed again, the noise thoughtful. All of her mechadendrites had swivelled upwards to focus on the leaning figure. ‘You have…’ she paused, ‘…no authority here. And you do not have sufficient force of arms. Releasing this information may place my life at risk, and I will not offer you this data without a suitable reciprocal exchange.’

She turned away, as if the interview was closed. Melia found herself wondering if she’d try to throw them out.

What binary messages were stealing out, even now, across the air?

The Sister looked around for enforcers, but could see nothing obvious.

‘Inquisitor, with your permission?’ Augusta took a half-step forwards.

Istrix nodded and stood upright, her arms folded.

Augusta said, ‘Answer me, Rayos, yes or no – do you know the location of the witch?’

The priest turned back, raised her chin as if curious. ‘I can offer a ninety-seven point six per cent probability on where he may be found. These parameters are usually enough to assure accuracy.’

The Sister Superior paused, then said, ‘But you will not offer the information. Why can you not just tell us, Rayos? Does the heretic have some hold on you?’

‘Sssss.’ The priest’s limbs were moving now, closing about her body as if to defend herself against assault. ‘My programming is uncorrupted. The Adepta Sororitas have no cause to assail me.’

Augusta paused, eyeing Rayos’ hood-shadowed, half-steel face. ‘We seek the witch,’ she said, ‘and we intend to find him.’ The Sister Superior’s hand was resting on her chainsword – whatever enforcers Rayos may have, she looked prepared to fight through all of them.

Lucio had stopped looking around now, and the four Militarum soldiers were paying tight attention.

‘The Sister Superior is correct,’ the inquisitor said. ‘We will see this mission completed.’

The roar of the bar clamoured round them; Melia laid her hand on her flamer, a prayer rising on her lips.

But Rayos clicked and whirred, considering the pair of them. She leaned backwards in her chair, her limbs mantling higher. Then one claw pulled her black hood right off, revealing all of her once-human face, and the nest of augmetics that swarmed over it like a contagion.

They stared.

Rayos looked unclean, her flesh twisted and her metal corroding. As Melia suspected, she did not resemble any Mechanicus adept the Sisters had ever seen. In her remaining human cheek, her original cog-and-skull symbol had been obliterated by a long, red scar.

‘Incaladion,’ Akemi commented, over the vox. ‘Must have been her home forge world.’

‘What do you want?’ Istrix asked her. ‘In exchange for Zale’s location?’

Rayos’ mechadendrites flicked from the inquisitor to the Sister Superior and back, considering their unity and determination. Melia could almost imagine her assessing the information, calculating the threat. She said, ‘One of the Sororitas will remain with me until you have secured Scafidis Zale.’

‘What?’ Augusta stepped forwards, her hands tightening on her weapons. ‘To what purpose?’

‘As bodyguard,’ Rayos said. ‘If I reveal Zale’s location, there is a ninety-nine point six per cent chance that he will seek retribution. The Adepta Sororitas are known for faith that can defy witchery. This is my trade. If you wish to locate the heretic, you will grant me security.’

‘We will make the deal.’ Istrix made a decisive gesture. ‘Sister Superior, one of your squad will volunteer.’

The words were an order.

Augusta inhaled sharply, her armour creaking with the movement; Viola and Akemi exchanged a look.

The priest wheezed again, a sound like straining bellows – she sounded almost like she was laughing. A clear space had spread out around the table and Melia could feel shadows lurking at its edges, bristling dark with threat.

The Sister had no doubt that, if they turned on Rayos or tried to betray her, the resulting confrontation would be excessive.

She heard herself say it: ‘I will stay.’

‘Sister?’ Augusta turned, her face concerned.

‘I will stay,’ Melia said, again. ‘Sister Caia must remain with the inquisitor, and you will need Viola’s strength and Akemi’s knowledge. The success of this mission is the will of the Emperor,’ she kept her tone neutral, ‘and if I can serve Him best by remaining here, then I will do so.’

‘You have great courage, Sister Melia,’ Istrix said, her smile thin and cold.

‘You have great courage,’ Augusta repeated. ‘To face this test alone is an act of both honour and bravery.’ She offered the sign of the aquila and a blessing. ‘Imperatoris vobiscum.’

Emperor be with you.

The blue eye of the priest had observed the exchange with interest; the red one swivelled to focus on Melia, scanning her from head to foot.

‘The chances of successful retribution have lessened by a factor of three point three recurring – these parameters are acceptable. I must clarify accurate data. Inquisitor, Sister Superior, you will return here at 20:03:57, Solar time, when I will possess the information you require.’

‘What guarantees do I have,’ Istrix said, ‘that you will not betray us?’

The priest placed her hood over her face and sat back, hissing.

‘You must calculate those odds,’ she said, ‘for yourself.’

Outside the repurposed tank, Augusta was finding herself increasingly disconcerted. They had been given no clear orders. They had walked blindly into an ambush. They were forbidden to open fire.

And now this.

Leaving a member of her squad behind was unthinkable – her Sisters fought, moved, as a unit.

They had no Kimura, no Jatoya…

And without Melia, they had no medicae, and no second.

Augusta wondered why her Sister had volunteered, but the thought was too much. The Sister Superior was becoming more unsettled with every passing moment, with every order given and decision made…

But, erratic behaviour or not, Istrix was the Emperor’s chosen, and her word was law.

Levis est mihi.

A prayer in her heart, Augusta walked like an automaton, her boots clanging with every step. Viola and Akemi flanked her like guards. The three of them stayed in tight formation as they followed Istrix back out onto the platform, and over towards the city.

Ahead, Caia still walked with the inquisitor, but the set of the Sister’s red shoulders was tense. Melia was her closest friend, and it was easy to see that Caia was angry.

At the back, the four Militarum soldiers stayed silent, as if they dared not make a sound.

At the city limits, however, and demarked by a chain-link metal fence, a crowd had gathered to watch.

Eyes hungry and gleeful were observing their every movement.

As if they were waiting for something.

They didn’t wait long.

Caia’s warning and the single shot came almost simultaneously; Augusta saw Istrix jolt, then slump sideways like a broken thing.

Caia shouted, ‘Up there!’

The corporal’s lasrifle streaked fire across the darkness. But, on the high walkway, the cloaked figure was already vanishing from sight.

Viola’s weapon was drawn, covering the city; Augusta and Akemi both aimed their bolters at the tank’s entranceway. The Militarum bristled lasrifles at the higher gantries.

Nothing moved.

Stuck out in the open, the group was coverless, and alone. Gazes still watched them from the town, avid and curious. Augusta could almost feel them, mustering their courage, their hatred and their fear – they bulged with resentment like some mutated growth.

But would they dare attack?

Bolter still in hand, she drew the chainsword with the other.

Daring them.

Caia had dropped to one knee beside the inquisitor. ‘She’s alive,’ she said, bio-scanner in hand. ‘By the grace of the Emperor, she’s alive. We need Melia…’ She stopped, twisting her words to a halt.

Rufus, one of the Militarum group, called, ‘Sister! I can help!’

Augusta gave a curt nod.

‘Go,’ the corporal told him, and the man ran forwards, pulling a medi-pack as he did so.

Viola hadn’t moved; the muzzle of the heavy bolter still covered the crowd. Augusta could feel her fury; she was burning to pull the trigger.

‘Rayos must have betrayed us.’ Her tone was vicious. ‘This whole place stinks of corruption. We should go back in there and–’

‘That is not our priority.’ Augusta cut her off. ‘Akemi, speak to Melia and secure her report. Corporal Mors, we need a defensible location. If the inquisitor dies while under our guard…’ Purposely, she let the implication hang.

‘Sister!’ Viola’s protest was angry. ‘Rayos–’

‘Sister Viola!’ Augusta’s tone was a bark. ‘The inquisitor is alive. She is the word of the Emperor, and she must take precedence.’ She looked at her squad. ‘We will not abandon Sister Melia. But we need security – and now. Akemi, what’s the report from the Archeotech?’

‘Nothing, Sister,’ Akemi said. ‘I can’t reach Melia on the vox – I’m getting static.’

Throne! Augusta stopped herself cursing aloud. She was caught, thinking, praying, her whole body was alert with adrenaline – she could not abandon a member of her squad, but nor could she leave the injured inquisitor out in the open.

A prayer curled in her heart; she needed guidance, under-standing…

Levis est mihi…

Show me to the Light!

She had to make the decision.

She said, ‘Keep trying. Mors – how well do you know the area? Can you find us a safe location?’

‘I believe so, Sister,’ the corporal said. He had his rifle in hand, still scanning the upper catwalks. ‘The Mechanicus construct these platforms in repeating and regular patterns, and I know where one may be found.’

‘Good man,’ Augusta said to him. ‘We will follow your lead. Can the inquisitor be moved?’

‘The Emperor is with her, Sister Superior.’ Rufus was on his knees and holding a dressing to Istrix’s shoulder. ‘The wound is serious, but treatable. The hydrostatic shock has robbed her of consciousness. I can revive her–’

‘Not here.’

‘Yes, Sister.’

The city’s crowd was getting larger now; they were starting to shift and seethe. Viola made a deliberate show of re-cocking the heavy bolter, the noise echoing from the tank like a challenge. Akemi kept her weapon trained on the tank’s hatch, though the bar had remained silent. Her voice in the vox continued, but there was no response to the call.

Augusta checked her annoyance, and gave her orders.

‘Corporal, take point. Sister Caia, with the corporal. I will carry the inquisitor myself. Viola, guard our backs – and if anything tries to attack us, shoot it.’

Viola said, ‘Aye,’ and the word was like a promise of violence.

They moved, low to the ground and at the double. Caia’s scanning enhanced the corporal’s local instincts and they made good speed, skirting the outer edges of the city and climbing down towards the lower platforms.

It was darker down here, the lumens faltering, but it offered at least basic concealment.

Suspended walkways creaked over the reeking water; the group moved as fast as it dared, all suit-lights turned off.

The unconscious inquisitor hung in Augusta’s arms like a sacrifice, her scars glinting. She was heavy, but the Sister Superior’s power armour was enough to bear her easily.

In the vox, Augusta offered a prayer – for Melia, for Istrix’s health and recovery. And for herself, for insight, for His wisdom to show her the way…

Domine deduc me mi Imperatoris…

This mission was not turning out how they had expected.

Soon, they left the noise of the town behind them. They could clearly hear their own boots and breathing, the hiss and seethe of the hungry, polluted waters. And, as they walked, Augusta’s prayers focused her thoughts, and she began to understand something.

The Sister Superior did not doubt Istrix’s authenticity, nor her dedication to her target, yet still, her choices of action seemed odd. She came across as arrogant, though perhaps that was not so unusual. And she had willingly walked them out from the Munitorum depot, and straight into the nearest ambush…

For what?

So she could locate Rayos?

Rayos herself had seemed genuine enough – a local boss, manipulating the people and powers around her to her own best advantage. Augusta had encountered such creatures before. She–

‘Here!’

The corporal’s deep voice sounded in the vox.

‘No movement,’ Caia confirmed, auspex back in her hand.

‘That doesn’t mean it’s empty,’ Augusta commented. ‘Secure the area.’

‘Aye.’

Caia nodded at the corporal, and his heavy boot hammered the metal door. It spanked back against the side of the lift shaft, and Caia brought up her bolter to cover the space. Within was a cargo-lift, more than big enough to accommodate all of them, and with the added advantage of a second exit on the opposite side.

Caia counted five and said, ‘Clear!’

‘Very well, then,’ Augusta said. ‘We will regroup, and reload.’

As they moved in, and laid the inquisitor down, Rufus moved forward with his kit, but Augusta held up a hand. ‘She’s stable, yes?’

‘Yes, Sister.’

‘Then why don’t we let her sleep for a moment?’ Her tone was grim. ‘Keep an eye on her. Corporal Mors, I’ll need your full report.’

If this mission was to succeed, then the Sister Superior wanted to know everything.

Chapter six

Sister Melia sat with her back to the old smeltorium’s wall, the rigid metal scraping against the edges of her armour. Beside her, Rayos paid her no further attention, hissing and clicking over the pile of trade-pieces and data-slates that had been left on her table. Some she passed to the little brass analyser beside her; others were carefully measured with callipers and claws. Her cogitator clicked away to itself, presumably keeping some sort of running tally.

Melia watched, oddly fascinated, and wondered what information flowed between the two of them.

In her heart, however, she offered the Litany of Divine Guidance; she prayed for strength, and for clarity.

Domine deduc me mi Imperatoris.

Guide me, my Emperor.

And then, the bar went quiet.

Melia looked up.

A lone figure had pushed through the crowd, stilling fights and rowdy singing both. He was strong and tanned, gold-eyed and brown-haired. He wore no armour, no symbols; he carried no weapons. Yet he commanded his audience with a flourish like pure confidence.

As he came closer, Melia could feel a pressure swelling in her mind, like creepers growing through her ears.

She continued to pray.

As if he could hear her, the man met her gaze. He had a smile that gave him tan-lines, crinkles round his eyes that offered humour, warmth and mischief.

‘Sister,’ he said, as he stopped at the table. ‘How charming.’

She lifted her chin; the pressure in her mind was growing worse. Her skull spasmed with agony, aching like it would split.

Somewhere, she could hear the hissing of the Lautis daemons, feel their flame and fear–

The priest raised a claw. ‘Desist.’

The man laughed, and the pressure was gone.

Witch!

Shuddering with revulsion, Melia was on her feet. She knew what had happened, knew exactly what – who – this man was. And she understood, in the very next instant, that Rayos had betrayed them, that she’d never had any intention of going through with the deal. Melia’s hand went for her flamer; she opened a channel in the vox but the signal was blocked. The bead in her ear crackled static.

Weapon out, she pointed it at the newcomer. ‘Heretic!’

‘Really, Sister.’ The man laughed. His tone was like his clothing, rich and warm. ‘The word is so crass, don’t you think? Please, call me Zale. And you will stand when I say, sit when I say, kneel when I say. Now put that away, and be quiet.’

With each word, Melia’s body jerked in response; she obeyed him like a marionette, her strings in his hands. As he gave the final order, however, she spat a prayer and surged forwards. One hand turned the table clean over, mugs and data-slates clattering to the floor; the other shoved the flamer right in his face.

At the noise, there was an instant of silence, then whoops and cheers erupted around the bar.

The man’s eyes narrowed, as if she’d surprised him.

But he made no attempt to defend himself, or back away.

‘I wouldn’t,’ he told her softly, ‘if I were you.’

His eyes glittered; she could see whole worlds held in them, the sparkle of stars, the vast streams of the empyrean. The screaming, bloody heave of the warp that she’d seen through the mirror in the Lautis cathedral…

Worlds, dying at the touch of Chaos.

Softly, he said, ‘I know you have no fear of death, Sister. I know you would lay down your life to slay me, and everything else in this establishment. But I also know how this ends.’ Moons exploded in her vision; his words stroked her, their truth enthralling. ‘Istrix is a lunatic, you must have realised that by now.’

‘She is a child of the Emperor.’ Melia snarled the words; her flamer hadn’t moved. ‘You spin treachery and illusion to gain your own ends. I will not suffer your life–’

‘Sister, please,’ he said. Smiling, he raised a hand and pushed the weapon down and out of the way. ‘That’s quite enough. If I told you to, you would strip off your armour and bathe in the waters of Lycheate like they were a font.’

Melia reeled, staggering and silent. The words were a lance of pain in her forebrain, a white-hot flare going off behind her eyes. She fell back onto the bench.

Beside her, Rayos had stood up, and a delicate, unfolding claw was picking up her fallen goods. Secreting some of the higher-value pieces in places under her cloak, she said to Zale, ‘Our trade is concluded. You have the item you require. I will depart. I will not return to this location, the percentage chance of retaliation is unacceptable. I will join you at the requested appointment. We will conclude our business.’

‘Of course.’ Zale offered her a bow like a flourish, then turned back to Melia. He extended his arm as if he expected her to take it.

And Melia found herself obeying the gesture, her body moving like a servitor’s, clumsy and painful. She fought to clear her thoughts. She wanted to demand: what appointment, what business? She wanted to pull her flamer, execute this smirking heretic, this betraying tech-priest. She wanted to howl the hymnal aloud, to purge this world of its faithless and its unbelievers…

But she could not; her head hurt and her limbs ground like rust. She tried to pray, struggled to recall the words.

‘Domine… libra…’

They came forth in pieces, in shards of pain through her hard-clenched teeth.

‘I feel your battle,’ Zale told her, smiling. Explosions were still going off in her head – the moons detonating, over and over again, their pieces spinning, spinning in the void. ‘But you’re weak, Melia, unsure of your own strength and position. You know this.’ He chuckled, the sound lush. ‘Please understand, Istrix and I go back a very long way, and I can usually… shall we say predict… her moves.’ His words were sharply amused, as if at some private joke. ‘But the Adepta Sororitas? Now, that’s a ploy I hadn’t expected. And one that’s interesting, a genuine challenge.’ He picked up one of the metal mugs, drained its contents, put it down again. ‘And so, I had to have you – my security, my coin, my Imperial scrip. The card up my sleeve, if you like.’ His smile grew. ‘And, close-up, I can learn how your mind, your foolish faith, really works, Sister – and understand how to better the rest of your squad.’

Melia’s mind was fraying like old cloth. Her prayers were fading, her vision was full of detonations, and wonder, and beauty, and Ruin, and pain…

She made herself speak, each word like a splinter of agony. ‘My life… will not save you. The Sisters of Battle… will not… be defeated. My squad… will shoot you.’

‘Really?’ he said, and his brown eyes glittered like rusted manacles. ‘I think you’ll find… it’s just not that simple.’

‘Sister Superior, I am under orders…’

Inside the lift, the corporal tailed into an uneasy silence, eyeing the fallen inquisitor. ‘To disobey those orders would be heresy. I would be shot. Or confined to the life of a gun-servitor–’

‘The question is not difficult,’ Augusta said. They were short of time, and she needed Mors’ full story, needed to try to understand why the inquisitor’s behaviour was so peculiar. ‘I asked for your report. Where do you come from, Mors? How do you come to be on Lycheate? And how long have you been with Istrix?’

Leaving Caia and Viola on watch, Augusta and Akemi stood with their backs to the lift wall. Opposite them, on a long metal bench, the four members of the Militarum had stood down, and broken out their rations. They were sharing a canteen of water, and even Lucio had run out of banter.

Rufus, the medicae and the oldest of the four, sat the closest to Istrix. He said, ‘Sister Superior, with all due respect…’

‘Corporal,’ Augusta said, cutting straight across his words. ‘You will answer the question.’

The corporal had removed his helmet; despite the cold air, his dark skin glittered with sweat. He muttered something that might have been a prayer, then let out his breath in a plume like surrender. Swiftly, he explained how they had met Istrix when she had been scouting the planet for her quarry. She had been unaccompanied, working alone, and assaulted at the outskirts of the city. They had gone to help her, and she had immediately commanded their assistance in locating Zale. Several days later, after a short battle during which their lieutenant had lost his life, they’d cornered, and successfully wounded, the psyker.

But Zale’s wound had been an illusion, the corporal told them. The witch had lured them in, and the battle had cost the life of the sergeant and of the other members of the squad.

‘Zale is extremely powerful,’ Mors said. ‘The illusions he creates are truly horrifying. Our squad… barely stood a chance.’ He trailed off into silence, frowning.

‘She didn’t fire.’ Adriene, her legs stretched out across the lift floor, looked up from her ration pack. ‘She had him, at gunpoint, out on the gantry, and she didn’t shoot him. She–’

‘Private!’ the corporal snapped at her, cutting her dead.

Augusta turned back to Mors. ‘Corporal, you will give me your full report, everything you’ve seen while you’ve been with the inquisitor.’ Her gaze did not let him go. ‘The success of this mission may depend upon your information.’

Mors paused for a moment, then he inhaled and straightened his shoulders. ‘Our squad died screaming,’ he said. ‘The inquisitor…’ His voice shook, he swiftly controlled himself. ‘Istrix hesitated, and the gantry collapsed. We lowered a line and pulled her free, but by then, Zale had already gone. Emperor forgive me, Sister, Adriene is correct – she had him at gunpoint, and she did not fire.’

Augusta nodded, but said nothing more aloud. Over their private channel, she continued, ‘Sisters. What do you make of this?’

‘He seems terrified,’ Akemi said. ‘They all do.’

‘He’s not telling us everything,’ Caia commented.

Viola suggested, ‘We can force it out of him.’

Augusta replied, ‘We will do no such thing–’

She stopped as feet raced past outside; they all turned, hands on weapons. The rasp of an engine sounded at the waterline.

‘Very well,’ Augusta said. ‘We have not secured Sister Melia, and I fear we are out of time.’ She eyed Mors for a moment, then looked down at the unconscious inquisitor, her gaze exploring the careful latticework of scars. ‘One last question. You say she did not shoot Zale. So, why did Zale not end her life? He must have had the opportunity.’

Adriene frowned at her rations, Lucio counted his ammo.

‘He used to be her pupil,’ Mors said, and Augusta nodded. ‘And there still seems to be some… strange connection between them, Sister, some compulsion or madness that drives them both–’

‘Corporal.’ Augusta’s voice was steel. ‘Has she fallen?’

At the question, Mors drew in his breath, and the others stopped to stare, their gazes wide. Carefully, the corporal said, ‘I have seen nothing to prove so, Sister. Only her… singular devotion to securing her target.’

Augusta exhaled, her prayer tangling round her exasperation. If the inquisitor had fallen to Ruin, then the Sisters’ path would have been clear, but still they had no explanation for Istrix’s peculiar behaviour.

The Sister Superior had a need for guidance, for His light that had shown her Subul, and the way to the daemon…

Domine deduc…

But there was no clarity, here, no definite answer. Frustrated, she let her hand rest on her chainsword, solid and strong. More than anything, she wanted to hear the song of its rasp, to solve these endless questions with the glory of the Litany and the roar of pure combat…

By the Throne!

All her life, Augusta had trusted to two things – her faith, and her weapons. And, all her life, they had been the same – she raised her voice to the God-Emperor, and she slew His foes.

But this!

She was beginning to believe that Istrix did not intend the witch’s death – and everything in the Sister Superior’s training baulked at that knowledge. The witch should be purged. He needed to die. Yet Mors was right, there seemed to be some deeper game here, some twisted, emotional connection that she did not understand.

It made Istrix dangerous, unpredictable – and it brought the entire success of the mission into doubt.

Had Istrix fallen to the darkness? She would not be the first inquisitor to have been consumed by the powers she pursued.

But if Istrix was the presence of the God-Emperor, then her word was law, and to open fire upon her would be pure heresy. Augusta and her entire squad would offer their lives in Repentance.

Somewhere, the Sister Superior could still feel the jagged edges of her darkness – see the stikk-bomb that had slain Kimura, the clang of the axe that had broken Jatoya like a doll.

Melia, volunteering to stay with Rayos.

Upon Ordination, the Sisters of her Order offered a prayer…

‘Imperator illam possedit me precor. In omnibus meis actionibus et officiorum. Omnium cogitationes et opera. Et ego armis exceptus…’

Emperor, I pray that you will utterly possess me. In all of my duties and actions. In all of my thoughts and deeds. I am your weapon and your vessel…

Guide me, my Emperor, she prayed. I cannot get this wrong.

With the words, she lifted her chin, and made her decision.

Yes, she must follow the inquisitor’s orders…

But she did not intend to do so blindly.

‘Corporal,’ she said. ‘You withstood Zale’s mental assault, correct?’

‘Yes, Sister.’

‘You will run reconnaissance on the smeltorium, and locate Sister Melia. Your squad will stay with me. If you are right about this connection, then Zale will be closer than we think.’

The corporal saluted. ‘Aye.’

‘Remember, corporal, this is recon, not a combat mission. Do not call attention to yourself, and do not engage. Stick to the upper levels. Return to the smeltorium, and watch.’

‘Aye.’

She nodded, approving of this young man, his choices and his discipline. ‘Go with His grace, corporal. And return with His wisdom.’

‘Ave Imperator.’ He offered her a salute.

As he slipped out of the far door of the cargo lift, however, he turned back.

‘Sister Superior,’ he said. ‘I do have… one last suspicion.’

‘Go on.’

‘It is my belief,’ he said, ‘that Zale is up to something. I think he’s here for a reason.’

‘Then we will prevent that reason,’ Augusta told him flatly. ‘One way or another, the witch must die.’

He was in her head.

Like a burrower, like the stain of Chaos. Like the fear wielded by the Lautis daemons. Like a necron scarab, its claws scratch-scratching with the taint of steel and death.

Stubbornly, Melia held to her chant, the Litany – like her novitiate childhood – both comfort and reflex. She had been taught this as a girl, kneeling beside her dormitorium bunk and praying to that tiny, carved effigy… she knew how to face fear, how to surpass witchery. And yet it still lingered, like an ache in the back of her skull.

Images tumbled like the edges of rocks.

She was in the belly of the Kyrus, in command of the squad. Kimura was there, and Jatoya; they described a perfect skirmish manoeuvre along the flickering-dark corridor.

Domine, libra nos…

Words lingered like hope, but she could not quite grasp them.

The Sisters moved onwards, the font-waters of Lycheate sloshing at their feet. Bodies bobbed past them – Sister Felicity Albani, the missionary Tanichus, the tech-priest Jencir, his flayed skull all covered in blood. Phantoms rose from her past, and they laughed like Scafidis Zale, lush and rich and warm.

You are to blame, Melia.

Jatoya was twice the warrior you are.

Look at your errors!

Look at them!

In the Kyrus’ corridor, she saw the bomb. She went to cry out, but it was too late – the detonation was colossal, and the flame was livid and hungry for life. The impact of it threw her backwards. Debris creaked and screamed; her visor was smudged with smoke. There was a hole ripped in the side of the ship – it was injured and in pain, crying out. She tried to pray for it, but she was not the priest it needed, and Rayos laughed at her ignorance. The wind shrieked past her, wreckage and bodies all sucked out into the void. She caught a last look at Jatoya’s face as the Sister scrabbled madly at the wounded metal, and was gone.

The woman’s still-armoured body spun outwards into nothing, and her voice cried the Requiem.

Dies Irae, Dies Illa!

+You did this,+ Zale told her. +You failed. You’re weak, inadequate. The Emperor does not want you, Melia. You do not deserve Him. And you know it!+

She held to her hymn, angry, stubborn, refusing to give up. She filled her mind with the chapel on Ophelia VII, with His image, His Light. She cried denial, her defiance loud:

‘Thou shalt not suffer the witch to live!’

With a crack like the split in a window, the image splintered, and was gone.

Startled, she blinked.

Her head was pounding. She was still in the bar. Scafidis Zale was before her with his arms folded, and one elegant eyebrow raised.

‘Impressive,’ he said, the word almost a compliment. ‘You’re going to take more of my concentration than I’d realised.’

She faced him, continuing to recite the Litany. She repeated the words like a lifeline, over and over, wreathed in anger and defiance.

‘Domine, libra nos.

‘Domine, libra nos…’

‘Makes a change to name, rank, and serial number, I suppose.’ He laughed at his own humour, then chewed the inside of his lip, thinking.

‘Domine, libra nos…’

‘You listen to me, Sister Melia.’ He stepped forwards, cupping her cheek in his hand with a gesture that seemed almost affectionate. He bore several rings and his gold eyes shone like Sol itself. ‘We are going to take a little walk, and explore some of the glories that this planet has to offer. Not its people – you’ve already seen too many of those – but its secrets. Some of the things that the Mechanicus believed broken, and that the heretek Vius, in his cleverness and his determination, managed to discover. The things that Rayos has been… moving… for me.’ He stroked his thumb over her cheek. ‘You may fight me if you wish, Sister, but the outcome will be the same. Your Emperor cannot save you.’ His smile was pure charm. ‘Not from me.’

‘Domine, libra nos.’

Melia kept praying as the images broke over her again.

Chapter seven

The stimm brought Istrix upright in a rush, her face pale, her green eyes briefly wild. She took in her surroundings with a single, blazing-cold glance, and came straight to her feet.

She swayed, her hand going to her field-dressing, and her missing pauldron. Instinctively, Rufus offered her assistance but she refused. Outrage flared from her shoulders as she turned around.

She snapped, ‘Where is Corporal Mors?’

Augusta replied, ‘I sent him on reconnaissance.’

‘What?’ The inquisitor spun back to her. ‘Are you deficient, Sister? I did not give you leave to take the initiative. To make my decisions for me. You disobey an order of mine again, and you will find yourself wielding a very different selection of weaponry.’ A flicker of spittle flew from her lips as she thundered, ‘Do I make myself clear?’

‘Ma’am.’ Startled by her vehemence, Augusta offered her a curt salute, but Istrix had already turned away, scornfully dismissive, to retrieve her shoulder-armour. Her voice in the vox demanded the corporal’s immediate return, and on the double.

The Sister Superior held herself still. Mors had given her new questions to consider, but as yet, she did not know the answers.

Beside her, Akemi shifted uncomfortably, her armour creaking; the soldiers were exchanging uneasy glances, though they said nothing.

But Istrix paid none of them the slightest attention. Instead, as she fastened her pauldron back into place, her gaze fell on the ration-crumbs, and narrowed.

‘How long,’ she asked them, the words like cracking ice, ‘did you leave me unconscious?’

‘Moments only.’ Augusta offered a penitent prayer to accompany the lie. ‘We roused you as soon–’

‘But long enough to pause for a rest?’ Istrix’s tone was savage.

‘Ma’am–’

‘Enough!’ The inquisitor silenced the Sister Superior with a bark that was almost a bellow. Her face was flushed, now, showing the neat lines of scars. She looked like she would split along those lines, detonating into flying fragments of furious flesh.

Augusta inhaled. She prayed for calm, and for clarity.

For truth.

‘We will hold this location until Mors returns,’ the inquisitor said, her sarcasm as bitter and lethal as a lake of acid. ‘And then we will move out for our meeting with Rayos.’

‘Inquisitor, we do not know that Rayos can be trusted.’ Privately, Augusta thanked the Emperor Himself for her years of training, for the canoness’ strict discipline that enabled her to keep her voice controlled. ‘We cannot reach Sister Melia. And, dependent upon Mors’ intelligence, I suggest that an assault upon the tech-priest’s location would be the best option.’

‘I have already told you, Sister.’ Istrix ground crumbs under her boot. ‘You will not open fire without my orders.’

Viola tensed; Augusta could see the young woman’s gauntleted hands tighten on the heavy bolter, though she did not turn around.

‘When this mission is over,’ Istrix continued, ‘I will be accompanying you back to Ophelia VII. I will be commanding an audience with your canoness, and I will be delivering my report on your performance and behaviour… in person.’

Augusta was beginning to feel the same sharp, furious sense of helplessness that she’d felt in the shuttle, the same sense of being tumbled by forces outside her control.

And, down here, she liked it even less.

‘Corporal Mors, incoming.’ The man’s voice was accompanied by the impact of boots on the top of the lift. Weapons twitched; Istrix gave one of the soldiers a curt nod. Smoothly, Adriene stood on the bench to open the hatch, while Rufus and Lucio raised their rifles for cover.

‘Clear,’ she said.

Mors’ long figure dropped into the lift, his rifle over his shoulder.

Istrix waited for him, arms folded. ‘Well?’

‘Ma’am.’ He glanced from inquisitor to Sister, and offered a salute. ‘Your hunch was correct, Sister. Rayos has betrayed us, and Zale was at the smeltorium.’

Istrix bridled, pulling herself up to her full height.

‘Go on, corporal,’ Augusta said.

‘We saw Zale speak to Rayos and leave, heading towards the other side of the city. He had back-up, two armed city thugs, and he had Sister Melia with him. She was unhurt, though she seemed to be dazed.’

In the vox, Viola commented darkly, ‘Told you so.’

‘Viola.’ Augusta’s disciplinary bark was sharp. ‘That’s enough.’

The younger Sister shifted again, but said nothing.

Another issue: Viola had a strong will, and stronger opinions. She’d disobeyed her orders once before. And with the increasing pressure that Istrix was placing upon the squad…

This was all going to detonate, and soon.

The Sister Superior said, ‘We should target them now, inquisitor. The heretic must die.’

Mors glanced from face to face, as if trying to understand the tension. His expression was pained. Her orders had already killed his squadmates – presumably he was wondering if she would end up killing all of them.

‘We’ve got another problem,’ Caia’s voice said. ‘Incoming cityside.’

Outside the cargo-lift, the city’s shifting, curious crowd was closing on the Sisters’ location. A glut of filthy figures – many of them deformed or subhuman – were weapons-in-hands and loitering, their grins eager. Their leader looked orkish, big and green and tusked; its face was half metal and it wore a freebooter’s distinctive hat. There were soldiers, worn ragged, gangers in various muddy colours, knots of mutants with robes and appendages, and at least one of the shadowy Mechanicus renegades, all cloaked and clawed. Its visible flesh was stained and rotting, and it was flanked by the scuttle and rumble of clumsy servitors.

The group looked ramshackle, but determined.

‘They must have followed the corporal,’ Istrix said. The words were cutting, and pointedly aimed at Augusta.

‘I fear, ma’am,’ Augusta returned, ‘that our force has been all too visible. They’re scavengers, they must be after our wargear.’

Viola added, ‘And the reputation to go with it.’

‘We should attack,’ Augusta said, again. ‘We must eliminate Zale before we lose him.’

‘We will move out,’ Istrix told her shortly, ‘and we will follow Zale’s route. But we will not engage him – not yet. I want to know where he’s going.’

When they moved, the crowd from the city followed them.

Not close, but close enough.

The people – if that’s what they were – carried anger and fear, a rising need to obliterate or control these icons of Imperial faith that had landed in their midst. The swell of them came on like a slow ripple of hunger, the freebooter ork at the centre.

Augusta knew that they were no match for four fully-armed Sisters, backed by the lasrifles of the Militarum soldiers, but they seemed content to hang back, and they made good use of the local cover.

It seemed like they were waiting for something – some signal to attack.

Yet Istrix still didn’t care; still, she was focused only forwards. She kept moving, and she left the fully armed horde, loitering, at their backs.

With every junction they passed, Augusta’s frustration grew stronger. Powerful priorities pulled the Sister Superior in opposite directions – to doubt the inquisitor was heresy, and yet those doubts grew with every moment. Augusta needed to stop and think and pray; to follow her faith, and her honour.

To follow His Guidance.

Yet it seemed even more lost here than it had been in the catacombs of the Lautis cathedral.

Is she Your vessel?

Or is she corrupt?

Istrix’s forward motion remained utterly, obsessively relent-less.

Behind Augusta, Sister Viola walked at the rear, her heavy bolter daring the crowd to come closer. Caia stayed in the lead, auspex and weapon both in hand; Akemi still flanked the Sister Superior. The youngest Sister’s fingers twitched, as though she missed her little silver fetish.

To Augusta, this was looking more and more crazed – perhaps Mors had been right, and this was all some elaborate game…

Everything has an Operandus.

The lesson she had been teaching her Sisters – but if there was a pattern here, then she still could not see it.

Behind them, the horde hung back, mocking. They loosed the occasional shout, pieces of chants like the edges of some violent promise. They still kept their distance, but Augusta knew: if they saw the right opportunity, they would surge forwards and tear the inquisitor’s entire retinue to screaming, bloody pieces…

Or – and the Sister Superior laid her hand on her chainsword – they’d make the attempt.

The group moved on.

Soon, they passed a familiar bottleneck – walkway, tank and crane, all identical to the previous layout. It bore an embossed numerical sequence in exactly the same place, and the scored-out cog-symbol of Triplex Phall.

Augusta said, her tone short, ‘We should hold this location, inquisitor. If we take a stand here–’

‘We will keep moving.’ Istrix did not even bother to pause. ‘I have already said – I need to know where they’re going.’

Under her breath, Augusta let herself curse.

But the inquisitor’s boots did not stop. They clanged onwards, continuing with her inexorable, headlong march. It seemed as though some fierce, white flame pulled her, some need she would not stoop to explain.

The Sister Superior was becoming more and more convinced that the inquisitor’s mission was not just the will of the Emperor. Like Viola, she felt rising frustration; she wanted to loose her rage at the dirty brown sky, to open fire at last, to sing until this entire ruined world knew the wrath of the Emperor Himself, and of His Adepta Sororitas…

‘Inquisitor,’ she said. ‘A question.’

Istrix answered her with a short laugh, a snort as cold as the frozen air. She said, her tone almost patronising, ‘You wish to know about Zale?’ She glanced back, her odd smile making her scars crease and wrinkle. ‘I have been chasing him a very long time. He knows he cannot overpower me, either physically or psychically. He is not strong enough to face me himself. So, I think he’s found himself another force.’

Another force.

By the Throne!

With an effort, the Sister Superior stopped herself swearing aloud.

‘Something must be left here…’ The words were Akemi’s, though Istrix did not react to her outspokenness. ‘Something like the Breacher. Something that the Mechanicus forgot, or overlooked.’

The inquisitor said nothing; she seemed too intent upon the realisation of her goal.

‘Which explains,’ Augusta commented, ‘why he was dealing with Rayos. She must have found something, uncovered something…’

The remainder of her sentence remained unspoken: And we have walked straight into this… you are walking us straight into this…

‘So, we’re expecting an ambush?’ Viola echoed her thought, her voice edged with fervour.

Augusta felt an urge to grin – the release of pure combat would be welcome – but she had to keep her head. This was insane. They were surrounded. They had enemies both ahead and behind. And if there was a force ahead of them, then they had no idea of its armament or capability.

And yet, they would just walk straight into its centre?

Was Istrix that fixated with Scafidis Zale?

Augusta noticed the corporal frowning. He caught her looking and turned away, lifting his chin and flattening his expression.

Her suspicion and annoyance peaked. In the Emperor’s name, this was idiocy.

‘Inquisitor,’ she said, trying again. ‘We must remove the threat at our backs. If we are expecting battle–’

‘Sister. Superior.’ The words were a nasty hiss and Istrix stopped dead, turning sharply on her heel and coming back to face Augusta, her expression incensed. ‘Your continued insubordination is intolerable. If you question my decisions one more time, I will execute you for heresy, right here and right now.’ Specks of froth flew from the corners of her mouth as she thundered, ‘Do you understand?’

‘Ma’am.’ Augusta controlled her shock; she stayed still, held her ground. She felt her squad shift, tense and startled. She could see Akemi’s wide-eyed expression; feel Viola’s silent surge of outrage.

See the corporal’s frown returning.

‘Hold strong.’ Her voice in the vox was soft, but still an order. ‘Sisters, with me… It Imperator, docere patientia mea. Docete me observationis. Docete me de hostibus meis scientia.’

Emperor, teach me patience. Teach me observation. Teach me the knowledge of my enemies.

It was the Litany of Learning – one from the schola, and not usually something sung in the field. But, her mind aflare with the sudden idea, she continued to the correct stanza…

‘Ut plene intelligere, quod de ratione tuum hostes Tuos, et adducere ut ut iustitia Tua.’

That I may understand fully the nature of Your foes, and that I may bring them to Your justice.

Under the visor, she saw Akemi’s face relax, saw the faintest flicker as the youngest Sister caught her meaning. Viola’s rage began to ease.

They joined her in the hymn, Caia too.

Their voices were soft, their harmonies perfect and pure.

And it was enough.

August felt herself relax – He was with them. And her suspicions had been conveyed, properly and discreetly; her squad would be wary, and would be alert for her orders.

Much as her every military nerve told her to disobey the fanatical inquisitor, she still – absolutely – could not. Their suspicion and their unity would have to be enough.

Until the Emperor chose to make His wishes clear.

Melia clung to herself with the very edges of her strength and her faith, resisting the yawning chasm.

In her mind, a single image: the great, stained glassaic window in the chapel of her Order.

In her throat, a single Litany: From the blasphemy of the fallen…

Zale had rounded up a couple of gangers and had taken her from the smeltorium, out past the back of the city and up, always up, along the higher levels and the platforms of the city’s outskirts. She’d stumbled after him, all her focus and energy going into keeping him from controlling her mind; nothing left to stop herself being propelled forwards by a rust-smelling oaf on either side.

She could only repeat the thing that held her sanity, her lifeline, over and over again.

Domine, libra nos.

He had her in his mental grip like she were a bolt, gripped by a tech-priest, like she were a round, caught in the chamber of her own weapon. She held on, but only just.

Around her, the landscape of Lycheate slowly changed. She was only dimly aware of it – an ongoing blur of dust and oxidation at the outsides of her vision – but the platforms were opening out now, becoming much larger and offering landing pads, turning tables, and huge, mecha-scaffolds. There were colossal lifts, rusted into their shafts, titanic cranes that stretched skywards, creaking in the cold night wind.

Wherever they were going, it was going to be vast.

+Curious, are you?+ His voice sounded in her head. It was the warmth of it that was the hardest thing – the soft coax that said trust me, I am here for you.

She did not respond.

Only the Litany.

Only the lifeline.

In among Lycheate’s steelworks, she could see flickers of phantom-images. The death-green glow of the necrons on Psamitek; the clicking seethe of the tyranids that she and Caia had faced on their very first mission out of the schola. She saw Caia die, over and over, yet she knew that it had never happened. She saw the Lautis orks tear her Sister to pieces, saw the daemon’s flesh hounds bite into her limbs and worry at them, ripping them free from their sockets and gnawing on the bones. She saw that Caia was still alive as they did so, watching her own arms and legs being dragged, bloody, out through the nave of the ruined cathedral.

Only the Litany.

Only the lifeline.

She saw the Convent Sanctorum on Ophelia VII; saw the canoness hit the floor as the first detonations rocked the building. She was running though the cloisters, her robes, red and black and white, flapping behind her. She was calling for her Sisters to do battle – but they refused her authority. They did not recognise her, and even as the dark blurs of warships robbed the light from the windows, she knew that the failure was her own.

Only the Litany.

Only the lifeline.

‘Here.’

It took her a moment to realise that Zale had spoken aloud. Her head was so full of the destruction of the convent that she had to blink to realise that she stood in bright, magnesium-white lumens, and that the space around her was colossal, draughty and absolutely ice-cold.

Wherever they were, it was taking enough of Zale’s attention that she could grind her gaze into focus and look round.

By His Holy Light!

She barely had the wit to keep the exclamation to herself, to remain reciting the Litany so he had no suspicion. She was not a good dissembler – it was lying, dishonourable – but a pure mote of sense told her to keep her awareness concealed.

If she could.

Only the Litany.

Only the lifeline.

They stood at the upper balcony of a huge, half-collapsed factorum.

Below them, the floor stretched out into darkness. Its machines were silent, rows and rows of production lines, all dead and rusted into place. There were shrines and pict-screens at their ends, data towers that stretched towards the crumbling roof, fallen grav-pallets where products could be stacked and – presumably – taken to the hauler stations outside. This was where the life of the planet’s doomed moons had once been manifest upon its surface, the place where the tech-priests had rolled out their forces…

And those forces were still here.

Once lost.

Now rediscovered.

She could see them, lurking at the factorum’s edges, silent and rust-splotched, but looming huge in the shadows… the forgotten fighting machines of the departed Adeptus Mechanicus.

Kataphrons – Destroyers and Breachers.

Lines of kastelans.

Waiting.

This, she realised, was the place where Rayos would be meeting him. To offer her prayers to the Omnissiah – however a heretek would see Him…

And to bring this force to life.

A breath escaped her, a plume of white with which she gave herself away.

‘Awake, are we?’ Zale turned like some now-benign conqueror, opening his hands to let her witness his triumph. ‘And for just long enough to see what I have found here, and what I can muster. When Istrix comes for me – because she will, she has no choice – when she comes for me, this will be the very last thing she sees.’

+Finally!+

She heard his words in her head.

+And I want her to witness this, Sister. I want her to know just how badly she’s failed. I need her to see this force, and to understand what I will do with it…

+I need her last thought to be despair.+

His mental tones were gleeful, full of exultant celebration. And the images closed over her again with the rush of Lycheate’s filthy waters – and, this time, they came with the call of the moons’ distress signal, and the grind and batter that was pure, machine war.

‘You want…’ drowning, she struggled to find the words, ‘…revenge on your mistress…’

+Not just my mistress, Sister.+ His tone was deep, liquid-soft, and utterly lethal. +Like the heretek Vius before me, my call will reach out across the void.+ He smiled like the sun coming up. +I want all of them.+

She didn’t understand him, not clearly; the confusion was too great. Even the Litany was fading now, as if he had rent it clean from her mind, thrown it down like some damaged convent tapestry, all torn to shreds.

+Here we are,+ he said. +At last!+

Chapter eight

The heights of the planet Lycheate were bitterly cold, and Augusta’s visor kept clogging with the icy dust.

Up here, the great steelworks creaked and graunched; the walkways were thinner, and much more precarious. In places, they rounded the edges of the huge pipes like some poorly fenced steel precipice, and the wind made them shudder like they were still living, like the great strength of the Omnissiah had never forgotten His world.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, Augusta was trying to picture the full industrial capability that this planet must once have offered – the noise, the motion, the heat, the stench, the steam and oil and fuel. The electric-lightning charges of the temples. The datastreams, alive in the air. The priests and the adepts, the helots, the bustling servitors, everywhere, praying to their God and to the spirits of this vast production-world…

All gone.

Now there was just the cold, and the rust, and, high above, the shattered moon-fragments, reflecting the last red light of the unseen sun.

‘There,’ Istrix said, pointing with one ceramite arm. ‘That is our objective.’

Ahead of them: the largest open space that Augusta had yet seen. It appeared to be some huge hauler station – long lines of parallel rails stretched away from it, glinting in the debris-light, and there was a turntable at the centre, rusted into place.

And, across on the far side, there rose the metal walls and blackly silhouetted chimneys of a crumbling factorum.

She heard the corporal let out his breath; he must know, as she did, that if Zale had come here to muster an ambush force, it could be considerable…

And there was still a seething, leering crowd of locals at their backs. Even now, the ork’s big boots were thumping up the final set of stairs.

If that beast and its minions made it out onto the platform, there would be absolutely no cover.

‘Caia,’ Augusta said softly. ‘Estimation of numbers, ahead and behind.’

‘Ahead, almost nothing,’ Caia said. ‘Five contacts, all located within the factorum itself. Behind us, maybe thirty, forty.’ The Sister paused, as if thinking, then said, ‘Sister Superior, there is a very good chance that the force within the factorum may not yet be in motion–’

‘Aye,’ Augusta agreed. ‘I hear you.’

They were rapidly reaching the crisis point, the event horizon. Everything in Augusta’s military training told her to take the tactical decision and to remove the known threat, the one at their backs…

…but to disobey the inquisitor was heresy.

Domine deduc me mi Imperatoris!

The ork reached the top of the steps.

It wore a skull-and-bones hat and a long coat with gold frogging down the front. Seeing them, it grinned, its fangs broken and yellow – fully smart enough to realise its own advantage.

Her voice tense, her tone dangerous, Augusta said, ‘Inquisitor…’

The word came out sharper than she’d intended.

Istrix almost snarled, ‘We will not demean ourselves, fighting this rabble. Now, move!’

They broke into a run. Behind them, the ork roared and stamped; the whole platform shook. Leaving the thing made Augusta’s blood rage even higher – she’d never fled an enemy in her entire life. And an ork! It went against everything she believed, everything she’d learned, against thirty years of her novitiate training and battle-experience–

In her heart, her prayer rose higher – she needed His guidance, His forgiveness. She needed to turn and shoot that cursed beast before it reached them.

She recalled her own darkness and doubts, recalled the stern severity of His statue upon the Kyrus…

He does not forgive.

The ork bellowed again – outrage or laughter, she couldn’t tell, and she almost stopped. This was madness – the inquisitor was surely demented; she would kill them all.

Yet they would die in His service, and was it not their greatest honour to do so?

The ork stopped.

At the sudden cessation of its banging feet, Augusta glanced back. It was holding up one huge mitt, pausing its accompanying rabble.

As the Sisters reached the double doors of the factorum, it raised its weapon…

…a flash-memory, the rocket that hit the front of the cathedral, Augusta pushing Tanichus to the floor…

Caia was at the doors; she was shouting, shoving them open. Augusta did not pause to think; she was through the doorway, almost pushing Akemi and the four soldiers in front of her, turning to make sure that Viola was safe…

The ork pulled the trigger.

Viola flung herself through the doors.

And Augusta slammed them, hard, right in the missile’s painted face.

The doors were heavy, good steel. The rocket smashed into them, detonating. The heat and impact were enough to send Augusta over, a heavy clang of metal on top of her.

Something cracked; sickening pain shot though her shoulder.

Throne!

It felt broken; she needed Melia to look at it…

It would have to wait.

Shoving the fallen doors sideways with her good hand, she got back to her feet.

They were in.

They lived, they survived.

Despite the pain, she offered a breath of prayer, a thanks for their lives, but that was all she had the time for.

Because, in the hard, white light of the factorum, something was waiting for them.

‘And here you all are,’ said a voice. ‘You’ve caused quite the sensation.’

It was deep and rich and warm. It spoke of welcome, of forgiveness, of wealth and luxury, and it came from the factorum floor.

From their vantage on the high, metal balcony, Augusta could see…

Down there, in among the long, hulking corpses of the production machines, a single, strong-shouldered figure. He had a rogue trader look about him, long boots and decorous jacket, its fringed epaulettes glinting. And though he was both unarmed and unarmoured, she registered his physical beauty as if it were a bolter, strapped to his hip.

It was a weapon, and one he knew how to use.

Her mind said the words:

Thou shalt not suffer…

But, flicking on her preysight, she was also looking for something else – Caia had said five contacts. There should be others here: Sister Melia, two thugs, and the last one must surely be Rayos. She could not see them, though there were many pitch-black shadows at the outer limits of the room – corners concealed by great, empty hoppers or by the collapsed sections of wall.

Her roll call in the vox did not secure a response.

Scafidis Zale, however, had given the Sisters only a cursory glance.

Istrix had stalked to the balcony’s edge, Caia still with her. The tall Sister towered over the inquisitor, yet Istrix’s passion gave her an intensity of focus that was almost tangible. She radiated…

What?

Rage? Zeal?

‘Interesting bodyguards, Issy,’ Zale said, his tone amused. ‘These ones have even survived. Smart game move, to secure the service of the Adepta Sororitas.’ He smiled, the expression wicked. ‘I confess – I hadn’t anticipated that one. You must have thought you’d beaten me.’

Augusta felt herself react to the compliment, strangled the feeling like some irksome gretchin.

Don’t you play me, witch…

In the vox, Viola said, ‘Sisters, we’ve got another problem.’

The Sister Superior glanced back. The bulging frame of the ork had appeared at the shattered doorway, though it had stopped, its weapon still in hand. A throng of smaller figures had clustered up to it, but none of them seemed to want to come closer.

‘Oh, don’t worry about them,’ Zale said, with an offhand wave. ‘They’re all part of the game. They were just making sure you got here safely.’

The words were out before Augusta could stop them: ‘You’re controlling them.’

Istrix rounded on her. ‘Be silent, Sister.’ The inquisitor’s response was immediate, her usually cold tones thrumming with something deeper. It felt like eagerness, like some sense of need. ‘Do not interfere.’

Interfere? The witch must die!

Her fury rising like bile, Augusta closed her teeth on the retort. Her hand was on her bolter, craving to pull it free, to loose her rage at last.

But Zale laughed aloud, the noise ringing in the emptiness like some perfect, chapel bell. ‘Still determined to end this yourself, my mistress. I should be flattered.’

Istrix cursed him, leaning further over the balcony as if she would spit fire. ‘You! Witch! Traitor! You could have served the Emperor in the greatest of capacities, you could have seen the streams of the empyrean, been one with the vastness of space! You could have had ships at your call, raised your voice and mind to the stars! You could have had everything! We could have had…’

‘We.’ Zale cut her dead, his tone icing over. ‘You, Istrix. You. You, and your ambition, and your selfishness, and your greed. When my talents manifested, you didn’t want me to serve the Emperor. You wanted to present me to Him, gain favour and status. It was never about my future. It was always about you.’

‘Liar!’ Istrix was raging, leaning over the balcony. ‘I cared for you, trained you! I would have given you everything–’

‘Warpshit!’ Zale was losing his elegant calm; his rage, too, was rising. ‘You offered me nothing! Slavery! What choice did I have? To be captive, to be Penitent, or to be fodder? Fed to the Emperor to keep His soul alight? You gave me my ambition, Istrix – you taught it to me! And you know me better than to think I would ever surrender.’ His anger peaked, and subsided; he mustered a laugh. ‘And when I surpass you on every level.’

‘How dare you!’ Istrix was thundering vehemence. ‘You accursed, filthy heretic!’

‘Ah, Issy. You’ve followed me all the way here. And now you’ve lost, and you don’t even know it.’

Below them, somewhere in the black and hard-edged shadows, machines were grinding into motion.

Augusta raised a prayer and it echoed from the metal roof like the call of a vox-coder trumpet.

She thought she saw the flickering of an oil-black cloak, thought she heard the almost soundless tick-ticking of Rayos’ data-prayer.

And then, in the outermost shadows of the factorum, joints and servos were moving, whining and scraping as they struggled through long years of rust.

Akemi said, with a sudden of rush of intensity, ‘Kastelans.’

A second later, Caia added, ‘Two, nothing else is in motion.’

‘Two is enough,’ Augusta commented, her tone flat.

‘You will not fire, Sisters,’ Istrix said. ‘This is pure intimidation, nothing more.’

‘Intimidation!’ Viola snorted the word, cocking the heavy bolter. ‘We’re surrounded!’

Somewhere behind them, the big ork loosed a belch.

Caught in a split-second of pure stillness, in the centre of the tornado of questions, between enemies before and behind, Augusta offered a final questioning prayer.

Guide me! Is this woman Your vessel?

It is Your work that she does?

Or is she tainted? Touched by Ruin?

Her darkness loomed at her, Subul’s mockery, her own doubts.

And then she remembered, again, the Kyrus’ chapel…

I am His daughter, my faith and weapons unquestioned, unquestionable; war is my craft and my study.

I am strong.

I am enough.

And, as the kastelans ground slowly up to full speed, as Zale raised his hands, laughing at the success of his crafted drama, as the ork scratched its belly and kicked its way over the fallen doors, Augusta did the unthinkable.

She offered her prayer.

She made her choice.

And she defied her orders.

‘Viola – fire!’

The thrice-blessed heavy bolter snarled into life with a sound like pure relief. Even as Istrix howled over the vox, the ork went backwards in a spray of gore, its hat flying free.

The fallen doors clattered as it fell down on top of them.

Viola shouted the words of the Litany, less a hymn than a celebration of pure, focused violence – it had been building in the younger Sister ever since they’d landed on this cesspit of a planet.

And Augusta could feel the same thing, that rising need to let it go.

But not yet.

‘Cease fire!’ Istrix had turned on the Sisters, livid with incomprehension. ‘I gave you an order! Cease fire!’

Something in the Sister Superior wondered why the inquisitor was still so maniacally intent upon stopping them shooting – but there was no time for that now.

She had defied her superior. What happened next – victory or Repentance – was the will of the Emperor.

Bolter in her good hand, her shoulder still spiking with pain, Augusta continued to bark commands. ‘Caia, Akemi, take down the kastelans. Corporal, target the heretek – stop her activating anything else. And don’t let her out of your sight!’

She added her voice to Viola’s, felt the hearts of her squad rise – no more indecision, no more questions.

Just the pure, clean rage of battle.

From the fury…

This was what she had been called for!

Istrix was shrieking, spitting outraged fragments of words. She was hammering the heel of her free hand against the side of her skull – with a sudden, intuitive flash, Augusta understood something else, though she didn’t have time to realise it clearly.

The roar of combat was already raging round her. With the big ork down, nothing else was tough enough to get past the bottleneck of the doorway. Yet they still came, shoving towards their own deaths as if they could not help it. Viola kept firing, and kept firing, short staccato bursts. She must know the truth as well as Augusta did – when she ran out of ammunition, they would be on her.

And she had no Sister to cover her back.

At the balcony’s edge, Caia and Akemi were shooting at the lumbering, grinding kastelans. The things were still slow, and they had no ranged weapons – thank the Emperor! – but they had fists the size of tanks and one thump would be enough to crush a slow-moving Sister to the floor.

Beside the Sisters, the Militarum soldiers had switched targets. Under the corporal’s commands, they were firing at the kastelans’ joints and visors, though they were making little impact.

Augusta could not see Rayos – the shadowy tech-priest had vanished.

And she still could not see Melia.

The Sister Superior aimed her bolter at the closest of the machines; saw its visor crack under the impact. She shot it again, and again. It jolted under the repeated rounds, but both machines were still moving, and faster with every step.

They stood fourteen feet at their armoured shoulders and, if they reached the wall, Augusta realised, they could just pull the whole balcony clean onto the floor…

Shards of pain still stabbed through her shoulder; she kept her injured arm to her chest and switched to shooting at the kastelans’ knee and elbow joints. Beside her, the corporal directed his squad to shoot at their fingers.

He must have reached the same conclusion.

Behind them, the heavy bolter clattered to a halt.

Viola raised the hymnal with a rush of defiance – she was trying to reload, but the city’s thugs had been smart enough to use the bodies as cover. Now they were up and through the doorway; they were piling past the fallen ork, knowing that they had to stop her before she raised the weapon again.

Augusta spun and bellowed, ‘Down!’

Viola dropped to a kneel, still reloading the bolter. The Sister Superior turned her fire on the crowd. She levelled short, controlled bursts as more and more of them tried to shove through the doorway.

She couldn’t stop them all – the doorway was too wide and the piles of bodies too high. And Viola was just too close. The crowd closed around the red-armoured Sister, and she fought them back with her fists and feet, and the butt of her weapon.

The Sister Superior stopped; she couldn’t shoot without the risk of hitting Viola.

But they had another problem.

The first of the kastelans had reached the balcony.

Its joints still grinding in protest, it gripped the edge and started to pull. Creaking and groaning, the ancient metalwork began to split, and to come away from the wall.

In her head, the Sister Superior could hear laughter, ringing and joyous – it tangled round her recitation of the hymnal. She sang louder, defiant, shutting it out.

The second kastelan reached the balcony’s edge, took hold.

With a protesting, metallic screech, the entire platform started to come loose.

Unaware of her danger, Viola was moving like a dancer, fluid despite her armour, punching and kicking with a relentlessness that was pure, loosed savagery. Augusta had another flicker of memory: Jatoya’s physical strength, and the training she had given to all of them.

She offered a fragment of thanks in a prayer.

Akemi and Caia were still shooting at the kastelans. They could hardly miss; the machines were right on top of them, their blank armour-eyes staring out of their helmets like dead things. The Sisters were doing damage – sparks flew as rounds hit, the Militarum troopers were still firing – but it was not enough, never enough.

The platform shrieked and screamed and juddered.

Augusta felt it lurch as it came away from the wall.

And then crashed to the floor with a noise like the end of the world, dumping all of them at the crisply booted feet of Scafidis Zale.

Chapter nine

In thick, slow motion, Sister Melia watched everything.

She was concealed beneath the shadow of a vast and silent hopper – she couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. She was not restrained, but a heavy fog of lassitude had soaked into her limbs and her thoughts. It had robbed her of any energy, and left her listless and dull.

And there was something she’d forgotten, something…

Something like a light, maybe, but just beyond her field of vision.

She watched the balcony as it fell, watched the creaking, groaning metal as it collapsed to the floor. She saw the four scarlet-armoured figures as they fell with it. One rolled straight back to its feet, two others got up more slowly. The last one landed with a huge, metal door smashing down on top of it, edge-first.

It did not move again.

A flicker of concern went through Melia’s soul, but it soon faded, lost to the grey. Her distress was too nebulous, like trying to grip smoke – she understood that the red figures were important, but she couldn’t remember why.

Domine, libra nos…?

The words lingered, like some echo of her past.

To either side of her, the two gangers were grinning, watching the fight like it was some sort of gang battle. Whenever Zale spoke, they snickered obediently; he’d had no need to give them orders. As the kastelans moved towards the tumble of fallen figures, each ganger smacked his fist into his opposite palm, eager for more violence.

They moved like servitors, mindless – but she could no more have drawn her flamer on them than she could have reached for her hidden fleur-de-lys blade…

Her gauntleted hand twitched in her lap, as if it were missing something.

Yet there was only the fog, only the grey. She was safe in the grey, it was like a blanket. Like strong, stone walls, the big machines couldn’t touch her, wouldn’t notice her. Here, she could rest.

Yet still, Sister Melia was sure that she’d forgotten something…

On the factorum floor, Augusta rolled back to her feet, bolter still in hand. The nasty stab of pain in her shoulder kept her head clear and sharp; she took in the scenario with a glance. Akemi and Caia were both getting up, but the falling doors had smashed Viola to the ground, and she wasn’t moving.

A roll call in the vox did not get a response from the younger sister.

Around Viola’s still form were the city’s tumbled thugs. Some were getting up, dazed, others groaned in pain or did not move at all. Several more were still in the doorway, hiding in cover, their weapons aimed at the scene below.

They did not fire.

Corporal Mors was upright, Rufus with him; their lasrifles were aimed at the thugs, making them keep their heads down. Adriene was moving, but more slowly; Lucio stared sightless at the roof, his helmet tumbled off and his young face etched with a final expression of shock.

By the angle, his neck was broken.

The Sister Superior had a split-second to take all this in – then her line of light was blocked by something small, armoured, and lividly angry.

Istrix stood in front of her, her face etched in bright scarlet and white, cross-hatched scars. A nimbus of hair had stood up from its braid – it had given her a halo, gleaming shock-white in the lumens.

‘I told you, I told you!’ Istrix’s words were a spittle-filled snarl. ‘I told you not to fire!’

Augusta inhaled, closing her teeth on a flare of livid and absolute fury.

She recited her Oath of Ordination, striving for calm.

Fides est armis meus mihi telum erudiens.

My faith is my armour, my training my weapon.

Smirking as if at some glorious, private joke, Zale lifted a hand to halt his various minions.

The looming kastelans ground to a halt.

Between them, the witch stood back with his arms folded, his attitude curious, and his confidence tangible – whoever won, this was still his game, and he was still in control.

But the Sister Superior spared all of this barely a glance. There was a bolter-muzzle right in her face, a small, round void of death.

Istrix’s words were vicious. ‘You are a traitor, Sister, just as much as he is. You have undermined my authority at every turn. You have refused my orders, taken initiatives to which you were not entitled. I am His word, His blade, and His law.’ She thundered the last sentence. ‘And I expect to be obeyed!’

Around them, the tableau had halted. Caia and Akemi flanked Augusta, weapons out, one to either shoulder; Viola, still, had not moved. Mors and Rufus were each dropped to one knee, covering the thugs, the kastelans and Zale himself. Adriene had joined them, though there was a trickle of scarlet down one side of her face.

Nothing moved, nothing seemed to breathe. Everything held still, mesmerised by the confrontation between the tiny, furious Inquisitor and the calm, steel-cold solidity of the veteran Sister.

Augusta said, her tone pure steel, ‘I follow my mandate, guided by His wisdom.’ She pointed her bolter at Zale. ‘This witch must die.’

But Istrix was beyond hearing, beyond understanding. ‘Do you doubt my authority, Sister? My orders? Do you doubt His power? It is His voice I hear, His instructions I follow! He has brought us here! And He will tell me when to open fire!’ She trembled with intensity. ‘Heretics and betrayers, all of you! You are the denizens of Ruin! There is no faith! No loyalty! No trust! You are all fallen! All damned! I will kill you all! I will bring this whole planet to destruction with you still on it! You will blow to pieces like the moons–!’

‘Then why don’t you?’ Zale spread his arms. His voice soft, he said, ‘Come on, my lovely. My Issy. My mistress. Do as He bids you. After all,’ and his smile was glorious, ‘you always have.’

Her eyes wild, Istrix was gripping the bolter in both hands now, her shaking increasing. There was a nerve-spasm ticking under her eye; her teeth were gritted. She looked like she was fighting something.

Augusta said, ‘Shoot him, inquisitor. Or I will.’

The corporal’s voice interjected: ‘She won’t shoot him, Sister. She can’t.’

Augusta said, ‘What?’

‘It’s the thing I couldn’t tell you,’ he said. He wasn’t looking at her; he still had his lasrifle trained on the thugs. ‘Why she shot the lieutenant.’ Realisation broke over Augusta like an ice-cold tide. In that second, even as the corporal spoke, the final question was answered, and she understood the thing she’d missed, right from the beginning…

‘He put it together,’ Mors said, ‘when he saw her cutting the scars into her own face. Zale’s been in her head all along – playing with her, torturing and tormenting her. She thinks she’s hearing the Emperor, doing His bidding. The lieutenant confronted her. And she shot him. Commanded the rest of us to say nothing, on our oath to Him.’

Oh, of course…

It explained why Istrix had walked them straight into the initial ambush, why she’d specifically sought out Rayos, why she had persistently refused to let them open fire…

Explained what – and why – the Militarum soldiers could not tell them.

Zale had been playing with them all, all along – he’d probably let Mors see him at the smeltorium.

So that he could lead them all here.

Just like he’d lured Mors’ squad into a confrontation, and then murdered them…

Just like the signal from the broken moons…

Wrecker.

Playing them, reeling them in.

Too late, Augusta realised the wisdom of her own teachings:

Everything has its Operandus.

Zale had played his game expertly…

And, if the Sisters were not strong enough to withstand him, he might even have won.

The Sister Superior found that she, too, was shaking. Not from fear, but from the sheer brutality of the realisation, and from the rise of anger it brought with it…

They had failed.

Istrix had been weak, and she had faltered in her faith…

And Augusta had not challenged her, despite knowing full well that she should have done.

Perhaps the Penitence should be hers…

But not until the witch was dead.

‘You betrayed us.’ Ice-calm, Augusta spoke to Istrix. ‘Led us into a trap. You have surrendered your soul, Istrix, your faith and your honour.’ Her squad continued to cover the witch; she turned her own bolter on the inquisitor. ‘You are a tool of Ruin, nothing more. You have turned your back upon Him, and opened your soul to the darkness.’

Istrix had bitten her lip. She was spitting, blood and froth and outrage. ‘I have not failed! I will slay you all! You will feel His wrath! His strength! His Light!’

‘She’s mad,’ said Akemi softly, her tone awed.

Augusta stepped forwards, placed her bolter beneath the woman’s chin, forcing her head back. ‘You are fallen, Istrix. Your life is forfeit. You–’

A weapon barked.

The inquisitor collapsed.

Augusta rocked on her heels, startled, but the shot had not been hers. It had not even been a bolter – it had been a single streak of heat, a sizzling hole bored clean through the side of the woman’s skull.

Istrix lay on the floor, her mouth open, her scars pale. Smoke rose from her eye sockets. Blood pooled round her head like a corona.

Carefully, the corporal raised his hands, but he did not release his rifle.

Rufus and Adriene glanced at each other, then at the Sister Superior. They, too, raised their arms.

But the group had a more immediate problem.

Zale was swearing, savage and vicious and livid; his kastelans were moving again.

‘No! What have you done? What have you done?!’

And Augusta’s mind exploded.

As the battle began, Sister Melia watched.

She watched the kastelans as they lumbered into motion once more, felt the heavy stamping of their great feet. She heard the gangers chuckling, heard the continuous, monotone tick-ticking of Rayos’ heretek prayer. She was aware of the three red-armoured figures that stood against the remains of the city horde, and against the huge might of the looming machines.

She watched it all as if through a mist, through a repeated blur of words that filled her head.

You are nothing. You are abandoned. His Light has left you. You cannot fulfil your role. You have made too many errors, Melia…

In the fog in her head, there were thin lines of light – the lasrifles of the Militarum. There were shouts and orders; they spoke to something deep in her soul, some reflexive reaction. She found her hand in her lap twitching with more insistence, looking for something – an answer that the fog did not give her. And she could still see the glow – not its source, but the illumination that came from it, like something she’d lost.

Something important.

More words came through the grey – words like a blessing.

A spiritu dominatus…

Her twitching increased, her hand seemed to move towards her hip.

There was more fighting, now. The great machines were moving more swiftly, feet stamping, fists slamming and grabbing. The three remaining soldiers were keeping the rabble back – shooting at the doorway above and battering those closest with the butts of their weapons. Two of the red figures stood against the kastelans; one still lay motionless, crushed beneath the doors…

The other one stood still, swaying slightly as if it had lost the will to move.

Even as Melia watched, it went over with a crash, face down. It made no attempt to put out its arms or to save itself.

Its black and white cloak fluttered and was still.

Augusta.

The name came through the fog like the strike of a tutor’s ruler – it was the first thing that had made sense.

The Sister Superior had fallen.

Chapter ten

With no warning, the factorum was gone.

Augusta was young, and wide-eyed, and in the grey robes of a novitiate. She was walking into the font-waters of her Ordination, but they were black and filthy, and the bodies of lost Sisters bobbed past her. On the far side, there waited a brand new set of armour, glistening like blood – her first. She’d trained for it, worked for it, and it was finally, really hers – yet she couldn’t reach it. The waters about her were covered in oil, and even as she struggled through their viscosity, her Sisters’ hymns about her congealed into a sour, minor key.

The font burst into flame.

The water burned, hot and raw, biting at her robed flesh. It was the flame of Lycheate’s pollution, of the Lautis daemon; it was the exultation of her combat-rage, and the darkness in her heart.

It was glorious, and brutal.

But, amidst the whirl and the heat and the pain, the Sister Superior clung on. In her head, the image from the chapel on the Kyrus – His face, stern and unforgiving. She could not perish, not like this – He would not permit her failure.

Her anger – the thing with which Subul had tormented her, the thing she’d seen reflected in the daemon – that anger was her ally.

And it was not darkness. It was good.

Augusta’s hand was burned through to the bone, but still, she closed it on the grip of her bolter. She raised her voice, trying to sing the Litany, coughing and tuneless in the midst of the smoking, suffocating heat:

‘A spiritu dominatus…’

As the Sister Superior fell, Melia’s thoughts spasmed with genuine fear.

Around Augusta’s downed figure, the battle raged on. The kastelans were protecting Zale; one ground to a halt as a bolter took out its knee. It tried to take a further step and fell like a colossus, crushing friend and foe alike.

One of the Militarum soldiers gave a final, awful scream.

From somewhere beside her, Melia heard the strange tick-ticking intensify…

Rayos.

But the Sister’s head was clearing and the memories were coming back fast now, flooding the fog with new light – the shattered moons, the rust-brown planet, the crazed inquisitor.

A spiritu dominatus

Domine, libra nos.

Only the Litany…

Only the lifeline…

In her head, the fog was dissipating – stretching, thinning, fading. She shook herself, trying to clear her thoughts. The hand in her lap moved with more urgency. It was looking for a weapon.

Jatoya’s flamer.

Her flamer.

Her flamer that she had earned, by virtue of her experience and wisdom; her flamer that she knew.

Then she heard the ticking cease, heard Rayos say, ‘Sister Melia Kaliyan is seventy-eight point one per cent recovered. She will commence motion in two point two seconds.’

Startled, the gangers moved.

But they were too late.

‘Domine, libra nos!’

From somewhere, the Sisters’ hymn was answering Augusta’s half-croaked words with the twinned sounds of prayer and gunfire. She heard the crash as the second kastelan went over, shaking the floor.

And then, another voice – weak, but singing with them.

Contralto.

Familiar.

Sister Viola, too damned stubborn to lose her life to anything as foolish as a fallen door.

The surprise of it was like an influx of strength, like the music of a waterfall, putting out the flames.

‘I see you, Zale.’

She couldn’t see him – her eyes had melted in her skull. But she knew he was there, wrecker and manipulator, traitor and betrayer. Player of games.

He had lured Istrix here, lured all of them here…

For what?

The thought was sharp, like a sudden hook of faith and clarity. Caught, her mind began to focus.

All of this, was it just some impassioned connection between mistress and pupil?

Or was it something more?

Somewhere above her, the corporal slammed a final thug in the face with the butt of his rifle. He was shouting, and he was standing at an angle that was somehow all wrong.

‘Sister! Sister! Can you hear me? Sister!’

She was on the floor.

‘Sister!’

How…?

Domine, libra nos.

The flames had gone. She was herself, and unhurt – except for her broken shoulder. If Zale had been trying to control her, as he had controlled Istrix, he had failed.

Her bolter was still in her grip.

Slowly, Sister Superior Augusta Santorus got back to her feet.

The two gangers were local toughs – heavy and filthy.

They were decent enough as Lycheate enforcers, but they were no match for a fully-armoured member of the Adepta Sororitas.

Melia downed one with a gauntlet to the face, brought the elbow sharply back to break the nose of the other. He stumbled, cursing and spitting, then tried for a grapple.

But her other hand had drawn her flamer and she cracked him sharply on the head with the butt.

He went down like a sack of rocks.

‘Ssss.’ Rayos had backed up, all her limbs mantling over her head. Her eyes – one red and one blue – were both fixed on Melia. Her mechadendrites rippled, tasting air and opportunity.

There was a one hundred per cent chance that Melia was going to end her heretek existence.

But there was data in the air, both prayer and plea; there were a hundred streams of information coming from somewhere beneath that oil-black cloak…

What was down here? What was she trying to reach?

Melia didn’t care.

She pulled the trigger.

Screaming in both human tongue and machine-code, the tech-priest became a torch.

The city’s thugs were beaten, the kastelans ruined.

Around Augusta, her Sisters were moving. Caia and Akemi were methodically executing the injured; Viola was shoving the door sideways with an angry curse – the red-haired Sister had not appreciated missing half the battle. Rufus had gone to help her. The corporal, the only other member of the squad surviving, had his lasrifle trained on the doorway above, though the last of the figures had gone.

In the midst of destruction, Zale stood like an icon. He was losing his composure, now; he looked rattled and angry.

Caia pulled the trigger on the final, protesting thug. It jerked, and was still. She turned to him, and said, ‘Where’s Melia?’

He replied, almost petulant, ‘You spoiled my game. All that work, everything I’ve planned and plotted – and she died!’ Suddenly, he was shouting, his fists clenched at his sides. ‘I needed her to see this! To see what I have done!’

‘And what have you done, Zale?’ Augusta’s adrenaline was fading, now, and the pain in her shoulder was making her nauseous. ‘What is this wonder that you brought us all here to behold?’

‘No.’ He stepped forwards, still the performer; despite his tight and twisted rage, he had an air of a man wanting to deliver a masterstroke. ‘I am still winning. I know how you think. I can tear you open, all of you. Do you know what a powerful psyker can do to a human mind? I can hollow you out like an egg. I can play upon your fears. I can conjure xenos, terrors from the warp, a hundred tortures to deliver pain to the cores of your souls. I can make you die, over and over again. I can make you fail. I can take your faith. I can give you despair, disaster and depression–’

‘You’re as mad as your mistress,’ Augusta told him.

‘We are the servants of the God-Emperor,’ Caia said. ‘We can stand against your tricks, witch.’

‘Can you?’ He rounded on the taller Sister. ‘I have already broken Sister Melia. She was weak, plagued by doubts. I know what you fear.’

Caia gave a single, piercing scream, a sharp, high sound that split the air like a siren. She crashed over sideways, her body wracked by spasms. Viola swore. The red-haired Sister was not yet on her feet, but she brought the heavy bolter up anyway.

‘I wouldn’t.’ Zale was trying to smile, but his expression had lost its elegance, and it was edged like a blade. ‘You want to know why I’m here?’ He laughed, brittle and crazed. ‘You think I just lured you, Sister Superior? I have Lycheate completely under my control. And I can lure all of them – every last member of the Inquisition can be called here, to their death! You think I just wanted revenge on Istrix?’ His laughter scaled upwards. ‘I will kill every one of them – every last one! – until they muster enough force to stop me.’

‘That was what you wanted her to know,’ Augusta said. ‘That she had brought death upon her fellows. So that she would die, knowing exactly what she’d done.’

‘She would have died in horror.’ Zale’s eyes shone like pyrite, the gold of a fool. ‘Knowing she was damned. Don’t try to stop me, Sister Augusta. Or I will torture your entire squad, rip out their minds. Rayos will tear Melia to pieces.’ His grin spread. ‘And then we will rebuild her.’

‘Try it,’ Augusta said, ‘and I will shoot every one of them myself.’

She raised her bolter.

‘Hold!’

The word came from a familiar, red-armoured figure, stepping from the shadows with her flamer in her hand.

Augusta almost laughed; she raised her voice in a prayer like a celebration.

But Sister Melia wasn’t finished.

‘Rayos is dead.’ Walking forwards, her helmet off, her flamer in hand, she had every bit as much presence as the witch.

‘Tear us open, will you? Hollow us out like eggs? Conjure monsters, xenos, a hundred tortures? You cannot make me die, witch, or lose my faith, or fail. And the only doubts are yours.’

‘No!’ Zale was screaming now, rage and denial. ‘This can’t happen! You can’t–!’

There was a whoosh, and a flare.

And the witch burned, just like Rayos had done.

The factorum floor was covered in bodies.

Sickened by the rich, thick smell of charred flesh, Augusta made sure that neither Melia nor Caia had been harmed, then she sent them to retrieve Rayos’ corpse. She wanted the heretek’s data – wanted to know what Rayos had been doing.

What she’d found.

What this ‘force’ really was that she had been assembling for Scafidis Zale.

She put a round through the witch’s skull herself – just to make sure – and then turned to consider the fallen form of the inquisitor.

Because, now that the mission was over, they had a very serious problem.

‘Corporal Mors.’

The corporal and Rufus had been paying what respects they could to their fallen comrades. At the order, Mors came to his feet and offered Augusta a salute.

‘Sister Superior.’

‘I asked you in the lift, corporal,’ Augusta said, ‘how you came to be upon Lycheate.’ Her words were considered, thoughtful. Melia had set her shoulder and offered her a painkilling injection, and the Sister Superior had removed her helm. The young man watched her expression, his face tense. ‘But you did not have time to answer.’

It wasn’t a question, and Mors’ lifted his chin.

She went on, ‘You have no insignia, corporal, none of you. No platoon, no company, no regiment. It has been scrubbed from your armour.’

‘Sister, we–’

‘You’re a good man, Mors.’ She turned from Istrix’s fallen form to look the young man in the face. ‘Your courage and swift thinking have been exceptional. But.’

Mors straightened his shoulders, held Augusta’s gaze.

‘You know the penalty for desertion.’

Rufus, crouched by the fallen Lucio, looked up sharply.

‘Yes, Sister. But…’ The corporal swallowed. ‘I request your permission to say one thing.’

‘Granted.’

He looked at the body at their feet. Its eyes were glassy, and it was already starting to bloat. ‘I’m Astra Militarum, Sister – my individual life is worth nothing. And I’m a deserter, a coward and a traitor. But you… all of you… you’re Sororitas. I’ve heard stories about the Sisters of Battle – about how you halt entire wars with just your presence. About how the God-Emperor Himself gifted you the arts of combat.’ He offered a flicker of a smile. ‘About how you bite men’s heads from their shoulders–’

‘Only when I’m really hungry,’ Augusta told him, straight-faced.

The corporal blinked, almost laughed. Then he sobered, and said, ‘I pulled the trigger, Sister, so that you wouldn’t have to.’

Augusta eyed him thoughtfully. From anyone else, the words might have sounded like a lie, calculated to flatter, but she found that she believed him. ‘Sadly,’ she said, ‘I must still make answer for Istrix’s death. The responsibility is mine, whether I pulled the trigger or not.’ She watched him until he looked back up, met her gaze. ‘I believe you made the right choice, corporal. But the repercussions of this are out of my hands.’

Rufus had stood up, and had come to stand at Mors’ shoulder.

Akemi said to him, ‘You still haven’t told us where you came from.’

‘Tallus VII,’ Mors said. ‘We were left behind when our regiment pulled out. They didn’t come back for us, left us for the tyranids. But the Emperor blessed us – we escaped with the planet’s refugees, and that’s how we came here. I’d kind of hoped that, if we worked for Istrix, she would take us home.’ He shrugged, philosophical. ‘But now, I guess you’re going to execute us after all.’

Augusta tapped her boot.

‘I cannot take that decision,’ she said. ‘I must speak with my canoness, and upload a full and detailed report. And we must – all – face whatever comes in its wake.’ The thought was not a comfortable one. ‘Mors, is there somewhere we can secure an off-planet signal?’

Trying to hide his relief, the corporal said, ‘Back at the depot, Sister. Istrix’s shuttle is still there.’

‘Good.’ She nodded. ‘We will return to the Kyrus, all of us, and await the canoness’ orders – and her punishment.’ The word was bitterly dark. ‘You will both be confined to quarters, and held under guard.’

‘Yes, Sister,’ Mors said. ‘Thank you.’

Augusta nodded, and turned as Caia and Melia came back to the factorum floor. They had weapons in their hands, and their expressions were concerned.

‘Tell me you found Rayos,’ Augusta said.

‘No, Sister,’ Caia told her. ‘We did not. We tracked her by the trail of blood and oil, but she must self-repair – it led only as far as the next hangar.’ Her tone was worried. ‘Sister, that hangar was full.’

‘What?’

Melia said, ‘You know the old saying – the Mechanicus never delete anything?’

Augusta said, a statement of realisation, ‘There’s an army in there.’

‘Aye.’ Melia said. ‘They all bear the mark of Incaladion, but they’re hundreds of years old. How the Mechanicus missed them, I cannot guess – but Rayos must have found them. Maybe the heretek Vius found them, on his original quest.’

‘And they’re what Zale wanted,’ Augusta said. ‘An army of his own.’ Augusta shook her head, some part of her baffled by his and Istrix’s obsessive connection. ‘How strange, to be that consumed with another human.’ She dwelled on the oddity of it for a moment, then dismissed the whimsy. ‘We must assess this army.’

‘We should destroy it,’ Viola muttered.

‘That is not our call to make,’ Augusta said. ‘While I have had enough of Lycheate’s filth, the presence of this force must be reported. We will speak to the canoness. This situation has become larger than we can face alone.’

‘Sister?’ Melia asked her.

‘I suspect,’ Augusta said, ‘that the Mechanicus will request the data. They may come here themselves, and retrieve their forces.’

‘And if they don’t?’ Akemi asked.

‘Then,’ the Sister Superior told her, ‘our situation may escalate. I suspect… if Rayos lives, our Order will call for war.’

About the Author

Danie Ware is the author of the novellas The Bloodied Rose, Wreck and Ruin and the short story ‘Mercy’, featuring the Sisters of Battle. She lives in Carshalton, south London, with her son and two cats, and has long-held interests in role-playing, re-enactment, vinyl art toys and personal fitness.

An extract from Celestine: The Living Saint.

Consciousness, sudden and violent.

Her eyes snapped open and hellish light poured in. She sucked a breath down her red-raw throat, then coughed hard, doubled up, curling foetal on her side. Her eyelids flickered, and darkness threatened to swallow her again. Her mind kicked against it, fought back, surfaced. Another painful series of coughs wracked her, then subsided. She took a slow, shuddering breath, blinking quickly as her eyes adjusted to the glare.

Her surroundings resolved; her senses cleared, sight, sound, smell and touch coming slowly. She registered that she was lying on something hard and lumpy, an irregular surface that shifted beneath her as she moved. To her bleary gaze, it looked like a mound of pale stones and jagged debris, but no matter how much she blinked and frowned, she couldn’t quite focus.

She could hear a low moan. The wind, she realised. It was warm, but not pleasantly so. Its touch was like the first bloom of fever-sweats that warned of illness to come. It bore a sharp tang. It took her long moments to place the stench. Sulphur, and something worse, some underlying stink of corruption that triggered primal revulsion within her. She pushed herself into a sitting position and redoubled her efforts to see straight.

What began as a fiery haze became a sky, though a more forbidding and ominous sight she could not have imagined. Blood-hued clouds roiled through a bruised void of purples and rotted greys. Vortices of black fumes whirled across the vista, ripping the bloody clouds to tatters and trailing crackling storms of lurid green lightning in their wake. Her gaze lowered, taking in the distant horizon with its jagged line of half-seen mountains. Fume-wreathed plains marched away from their feet.

She shifted again, fighting down feelings of dislocation. Her heart thumped as she realised that she had no idea where she was, or worse, even who she was. The questions almost escaped her lips aloud, before she realised there was no one there to answer. Something crunched beneath her palm, hard and splintering. She looked down with dawning horror.

Not stones.

Bone.

She snatched her hand back through the broken, brittle brow of an ancient skull. Bones ground beneath her as she moved, and this time she did let out an involuntary moan. She scrabbled backwards on hands and heels, as though to escape the carrion mound. Osseous matter cracked beneath her weight. Shards jabbed through the grey shift she wore, scraping her bare legs and arms. The macabre clatter of bone on bone grew, skulls and femurs and finger-bones grinding with her every movement.

She felt something cold and hard beneath her palms. She dragged herself backwards with a gasp of gratitude, until she sat on a slab of black-painted metal several feet across. It was part of something larger, she realised, buried in layers of bone, rusting and studded with rivets and old bullet-holes. Dimly, she perceived the faded remnants of an insignia still clinging to the metal, but she had no more attention to spare. The slopes of bone stretched away on all sides, spilling down and down, broken by jutting metal wreckage, tatters of coloured cloth and other, more organic looking remnants that she didn’t care to identify. She couldn’t tear her eyes away.

‘Not a mound…’ she said, her voice a dry croak. ‘This is a mountain.’

Questions chased one another through her mind. She shut them into cages forged from her iron will, there to languish until she could address them rationally. Panic spread like hoarfrost in her gut, surged up through her chest. It met the fire of her determination and melted back as quickly as it had come. She took a deep, slow breath and closed her eyes, centring herself.

‘Emperor, protect me and light my way,’ she said, the words coming unbidden to her lips. They felt right there, natural, reassuring. She could not say for sure who the Emperor was, but she drew strength from His name. Feeling calmer, she opened her eyes and took mental inventory.

She could see no signs of movement beyond the occasional stirring of wind-tugged cloth. Whatever macabre carrion peak she found herself atop, wherever this wasteland was, she was alone here. She realised she had clenched her fists in readiness to defend herself.

‘A fighter, then, perhaps,’ she murmured, finding comfort in the sound of her own voice. It was deep and strong, a voice made for firm statements, stern prayers and binding oaths. But prayers to whom? Oaths of what? Seeing no immediate danger, she resolved to begin by answering as many questions as she could about herself.

She would open her mental cages one at a time and interrogate the thoughts within.

She took personal inventory. Her grey shift was unadorned, its material coarse against her skin. The body it clad was a powerful one; she could feel graceful strength in her every movement, and see wiry, chorded muscle shift beneath the skin of her arms and legs.

Her hair was shoulder length, and she could see from holding it out before her eyes that it was raven-dark. Beyond that, without a reflective surface she could tell little more about her age or appearance. What she had gathered for now would have to be enough.

She let her fingertips explore her facial features, moving down over her chin to her throat. She gasped and pulled her hands away as she felt a ragged ring of scar tissue there, bespeaking a catastrophic wound. Feeling nauseated, but needing to know, she gingerly felt around the circumference of her neck. Sure enough, the scar ran all the way around, and for a moment she felt an echo of something within her mind.

Screaming.

Flames reflected in churning waters.

Something towering and monstrous.

A light.

The strange sense was gone as suddenly as it appeared, moonlight glimpsed through tattered cloud. She frowned in puzzlement as she realised that the scar was gone too. She felt at the flesh of her neck with increasing agitation as she tried to find the horrible mark.

‘How is that possible?’ she asked the empty mountaintop. ‘How is any of this possible?’

She had no possessions, that much was clear. No weapons or armour with which to protect herself, no food, drink, any other items of clothing or gear. Nothing to suggest who she was, or to help her survive.

‘And no idea how I came here,’ she said. ‘But I have myself. That is enough.’

She knew she could not simply sit atop a mountain of bones forever. There was no telling what kinds of ferocious storms the brooding sky might disgorge, and she felt no desire to be plucked from this peak by a screaming gale or caught amidst ferocious lightning blasts. Though she felt neither hunger nor thirst, she doubted that would remain the case forever. Starving to death and adding her bones to the mountain held even less appeal.

Yet the thing that drove her to her feet was the desire for answers. Who was she? What was she doing in such a ghastly place? How had she come to be here? Who was the Emperor? She needed to know, and she would find no insights here.

She stood atop the mountain, shift and hair blowing in the hot winds. She stared down the steep slopes. They vanished ever downward on all sides into a thick crimson mist.

‘Nothing to suggest a route,’ she said. ‘No hint as to where I must go.’ Strangely, the notion held no terror for her. Instinctive as breathing, she closed her eyes and offered up a wordless prayer to the Emperor for guidance. To her surprise, she felt a faint warmth upon her cheek, as though a candle flame had been brought close to it for the briefest of moments. The sensation was there and gone, yet it was enough, its touch somehow pure, distinct from the clammy caress of the winds.

‘Are you a god, then? My protector, perhaps?’ Her questions fell dead and unanswered. Whatever the truth, she knew it would not be as easy as simply demanding answers.

She opened her eyes and turned in the direction from which she had felt the warmth. Steeling herself, she stepped carefully out, barefoot, onto the jagged carpet of bones. She began to make her slow and slithering way down the mountainside.

The going was treacherous. An ache built in her muscles until it became dull fire, and her chest tightened reflexively whenever she took in the nightmarish steepness of the slope. In places there was little more than a compacted cliff, and she was forced to spend long minutes scrambling crabwise across the slopes in search of a more forgiving descent. Splinters tore at her. Rusted jags of metal scraped her shins. When she was forced to put her hands down in a hurry, her forearms and palms were scratched and pierced until she left a trail of bright red blood drops behind her to mark her path.

Bone shifted underfoot with every movement, small avalanches of ghoulish matter clattering away down the steep incline to vanish into the mists below. She had to be constantly careful lest she twist an ankle or slip and fall; if she lost her footing, she might fall to an agonising death upon the jutting bone shards below.

Within minutes of beginning her descent, she found her heart thumping and her nerves singing from the constant exertion and peril. Briefly, as she clung by tenuous handholds to a protruding ribcage and felt for a foothold in the shattered arch of some ancient shrine, she contemplated turning back. Perhaps she could try another angle of descent? A glance upwards showed no obvious route of return, and she realised that – now that she had begun this perilous climb – her only option was to press on.

She gathered quickly that the mountain was not just made from the bones of the dead, but more specifically from those that had fallen in battle. It was apparent not only from the ways their limbs and skulls had been smashed, hewn and blasted, but also in the increasing quantities of rusted weaponry, armour and even vehicle hulls that peppered the mountainside.

Here, she picked her way carefully through a thicket of swords whose blades had been shattered and turned to rust. When there, she was forced to traverse the jutting prow of some manner of combat aircraft, its nose cone hanging downwards, its cockpit glass crazed with bullet-holes. Banners and pennants flapped in the wind, bearing myriad insignia that stirred feelings within her she could not identify. A portcullis gate flanked by eagles and lightning bolts here, a dark blood drop fringed by spreading wings there. Some seemed so familiar that she could almost taste their names on the tip of her tongue, yet she was left frustrated by each attempt to place them.

She had been scrambling downwards for perhaps an hour when a tangle of bones she was gripping cracked and gave way. She fell, her stomach lurching at the momentary weightlessness before she hit the slope feet first and spilled awkwardly sideways. Bones cascaded around her, clattering in a hollow storm of remains. She fell with them. She rolled and skidded.

Chest tight, she grunted with effort as she tried and failed to arrest her fall. Something gouged her arm. Something else crunched under her hip. A flare of pain shot up her leg and she cried out. She scrabbled for purchase as her speed increased, knowing with sick certainty that at any moment she would feel the slope vanish from beneath her as she sailed out into the void.

Her fingers found purchase at last, a solid chunk of metal that took her weight and arrested her plunge with a jolt. Her shoulder screamed in protest, but she hung on, heart thumping fast in her chest. She managed to get a grip on a femur with her other hand. She braced her feet against a jutting slab of stone and breathed out slowly. Fragments of bone continued to slither and roll past her, but the avalanche became a trickle, then stopped altogether. She realised that she had stopped just yards above a sheer drop.

‘Thank you, Emperor,’ she breathed.

As her pulse slowed, she looked to see what miraculous object had saved her life. Her eyes widened as she realised that it was a breastplate, moulded, lacquered black and edged with fine gilt filigree. Compelled by a feeling she could not name, she dug the fingers of one hand in around the segment of armour to work it loose, while clinging tightly to a rusty spar with the other. More bones scattered. For a moment she was gripped by vertigo as she wobbled on her perch, but at last she tugged the breastplate free and held it out before herself.

‘It is not just the breastplate…’ It was, in fact, torso armour both front and back, its clasps half-fastened, its plates dented and edged with verdigris. It was clearly meant to be powered in some fashion, for its interior boasted a webwork of fine circuitry, and she saw servo-actuator sockets ready to accept connecting components. A rent had been torn clean through both front and back. She let out a gasp as another sensory echo struck her. It was stronger this time, the sound of a blade rasping through metal, flesh and bone, accompanied by the acrid stink of smoke and burning flesh. She gritted her teeth as a tearing pain flared in her chest, there and gone in an instant.

She knew, then. This breastplate had been hers. It was hers. How that could be, she had not the faintest idea, but she knew it as surely as she still drew breath. As she turned the armour over in her hands, she saw a scrollwork plate set along its gorget. She ran her fingers over it, dusting away a patina of ancient grime.

‘Celestine,’ she read. The name was powerfully familiar. ‘Is that… me? Am I Celestine?’ The notion felt right, and she resolved that, until it was proved otherwise, she would claim this name for herself. It centred her somehow, made her feel less a wraith of this wasteland and more a being that ventured through it.

She considered throwing the armour aside, for it was battered and worn to the point of uselessness. Yet it was the first familiar thing she had seen in all this forsaken realm. She could not bear to part with it. She glanced down at her shift, ragged and torn where it had snagged bone and metal during her fall. She had been lucky not to suffer worse.

The armour would at least provide her some protection against another fall, and although she had no power pack for its systems, it didn’t seem so heavy that it would encumber her overly. Awkwardly, mindful of the drop beneath her, Celestine manoeuvred the armour into place. She slid her arms through the holes, then sealed its clasps with an instinctive, practised ease.

‘O divine machine-spirits, demideus Omnissiah espiritum, I beseech thee to shield my fragile flesh from harm.’

As the last clasp clicked into place, she blinked in bewilderment. Not only had the prayer of benediction sprung from her lips by some instinct, but the rent in her breastplate had vanished. The dents and grime faded as though they had never been. The armour she had donned had been a battered relic, but this was brand new, its lacquer shining in the bloody light, its scrollwork glinting. It took Celestine a moment to place the sudden hum that invaded her thoughts. She realised that an internal power source had activated within her backplate.

‘Emperor, whatever miracle this is, I thank you for it,’ said Celestine. The armour’s restoration was inexplicable, but then, so was everything else about her situation. She chose to take it on faith that this development, at least, was in her favour.

Her spirits buoyed, she forged onwards.

Click here to buy Celestine: The Living Saint.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2019.
This eBook edition published in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Nemanja Stankovic.

Wreck and Ruin © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2019. Wreck and Ruin, 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: 978-1-78999-487-2

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For Brenda.

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