Table of Contents

Luna Mendax - Graham McNeill

The Wreckage - David Annandale

The Lords of Borsis - L J Goulding

The Last Man - C L Werner

Death's Shepherd - Andy Smilie

Flayed - Cavan Scott

LUNA MENDAX

Graham McNeill

PEACE. THE WORD was meaningless to him. As far back as Loken could remember, he had never known any state of being that could equate to the concept as it was now explained to him. The word had served as a talisman once, back when the universe made sense, an ideal for which to strive towards. An end of war and the fulfilment of the task for which he and his brothers had been created. He was of the Legiones Astartes, a warrior born and bred, wrought in the Emperor's gene-labs with forgotten alchemy and unknown science.

What could a being who knew only how to kill understand of peace?

Yet here in the garden, Loken felt something close to it.

Warm sunlight shone in a flickering blue sky, entoptically rendered on the curved inner face of the dome, yet no less pleasing for its artifice. Pictographic clouds drifted in a non-existent breeze, and birdsong chirped from artfully concealed vox-grilles worked into the garden's structure.

The garden was composed of rough ouslite slabs laid like giant flagstones, arranged around a series of square, shallow basins of crystal-clear water. Lilies and bright flowers flourished in rock pools fed by a branch system hived from the brass tower's reservoirs. Ferns and weeping trees caressed the water's edge, and something in their placement stirred a long-buried memory, though one Loken found himself unwilling to examine too closely.

He made his way through the garden, enjoying the quiet and the warm scents of living things. Water gurgled over an ornamented arrangement of smooth rocks, and fell in a spuming waterfall that tumbled into a miniature lake of glitter-gold koi. Curved steps led down to neat rows of planting beds, where the seeds Loken had planted were already beginning to grow.

Clad in a long chiton of unadorned grey over a tan bodyglove with plastek-seals over his armour interface sockets, he was armed only with a few gardening tools hanging from a leather work belt. Loken walked with the heavy steps of a mourner at a memorial, his shoulders broad, but hunched, as though they carried the weight of the world upon them. His features were broad and flat, made blunt by war and drained of joy by betrayal.

Yet as he surveyed the green shoots pushing their way out of the dark soil to the light above, the thinnest trace of a smile came to his lips. Bred to kill, not to care, it gave Loken a sense of the wonder of creation. By his hand was this universe in miniature flourishing.

His eyes narrowed as he saw one corner of the planting beds green with an altogether unwelcome growth of weeds and enveloped with a spun sugar gleam of gossamer-fine spider webs. Loken unhooked a trowel from his belt, one that was entirely too small for his grip, but which he handled with surprising delicacy. He could have asked for tools better suited to his post-human scale, but the forges of the brass tower were tasked with the production of more important things than mere gardening implements.

Like any warrior, he learned to make do with what he had.

Loken knelt on the corner slab and swept away the spider webs with his hands. Arachnids emerged from hiding at the disturbance, and he flinched at the sight of them. The multi-limbed creatures sparked a memory fragment in Loken: a war of gruelling attrition, hard-fought victories and a glorious time when gods did not make war on one another.

He couldn't place the memory, but that was nothing unusual. The madness that almost consumed him on Isstvan III had left scars that were slow to heal and quick to flare in jagged pain. The spiders contented themselves with baring their fangs then retreating into their subterranean lairs, and Loken felt an irrational hatred of the creatures swell in his heart.

He dug into the soil with vicious jabs, laying the weed-roots on the slab beside him and seeking to drive the spiders out. This section was particularly overgrown with parasitic plant matter, which was in the process of draining the goodness from the soil and choking the life out of the crop growing here. The seeds had been sown before he had found the garden, and had withered once already, but with his patient attention, the garden had bloomed once again, brighter and more vital than ever.

The previous custodian of this biodome had allowed it to grow wild, neglecting the task of prudent weeding and maintenance. He had since learned that Sister Elliana was long dead on Prospero, and no one had taken up her duties in the biodome. An understandable lapse. The maintenance of a space that existed for purely aesthetic reasons would be seen as wasteful.

And in times of war, nothing wasteful could be tolerated.

LOKEN HAD FOUND the biodome by chance, staring vacantly through the armourglass window of the orbital shuttle bringing him back to Luna. He had spent the journey back from the Caliban fiasco in contemplative silence, isolating himself from the crew of the nameless vessel that crept into the Dark Angels domain before slinking away like a thwarted thief.

The abject failure of the mission weighed heavily on Loken, and he had struggled with his part in it through the long, cold nights in the dark heart of the vessel. He was a warrior who had turned his back on war, a man without colours or a Legion to call his own. In the depths of his despair, he had believed himself to be a Legion of one.

Nathaniel Garro had shown him that was no longer the case.

He no longer fought alone, but he cared nothing for the warriors who stood with him. The brotherhood of his former life was no more than a ghost memory now. None of the easy banter he'd shared with Vipus and Torgaddon leavened the times between engagements, only cold hard mission briefings and grim talk of their shadow war.

A shadow war in which he no longer wished any part.

Seated in the back of the shuttle with Iacton Qruze, Loken had felt cramped and claustrophobic, deeply uncomfortable at sharing so confined a space with another refugee from his Legion. Qruze had sensed his discomfort and known enough not to intrude on Loken's solitude. Only as the shuttle banked during its crossing of the Sinus Honoris did Loken notice the glinting diamond of the biodome on the edge of the Mare Tranquillitatis. No sooner had he blink-clicked the selenographic coordinates than the dome was lost to sight as the shuttle spiralled in on its final approach to the Somnus Citadel.

Built on the haunches of the Palus Somni, the fortress of the Silent Sisterhood rose from the uneven, rocky terrain on the north-eastern edge of the great basin. A soaring tower of brass and crystal, its myriad docking bays were arranged one atop the other like the lairs of undersea creatures in a spire of coral. Their scale was impossible to judge, but Loken knew each was large enough to accommodate the sisterhood's nigh-invisible black ships. Unlike the rest of Luna's surface, the surface of the Palus Somni was the shade of bleached tan, its hue different from any of the moon's other plains or mountain regions.

Dorn had been waiting for them.

Already appraised of the mission's outcome by astropathic means, the primarch of the Imperial Fists had, nevertheless, taken time from the dismantling of his father's bejewelled palace to hear the ill-news from Caliban first-hand. Loken had seen Lord Dorn's hope that the imperfect medium of astropathic communication had missed some subtle nuance to Qruze's report, some sign that the Lion's warriors of Caliban could be counted on to rally to the Emperor's banner.

Dorn would return to Terra none the wiser, and Loken's heart had broken at disappointing him.

Loken remembered the first time he had seen Rogal Dorn, deep in conversation with the Warmaster. He had seemed titanic then, a demi-god built to match the strength and prowess of Horus himself; no small admission for a warrior of the Luna Wolves to make. Clad in golden plate and seemingly carved from the solid core of a mountain, the primarch had made Loken feel like a specimen pinned to an examination table, scrutinised by a being who understood everything about him in a heartbeat.

Dorn was still that demi-god, but Loken saw he was somehow... diminished, as though the burden he took upon on his shoulders was growing heavier by infinitesimal fractions every second. Like the trickle of water that over millions of years splits the mountain, Dorn's role as Terra's Praetorian was one that would already have crushed a lesser being.

How long might it take to crush a warrior like Dorn?

That debriefing had been kinder than the first to which he had been subjected. He had been brought to the Somnus Citadel as a broken, wretched thing; a madman Nathaniel Garro had dug out of the ruins of Isstvan III. Loken now understood that he had been closer to death during that interrogation than any other time in his life, though those who wished him gone did not come with blades, bolts or orbital bombardments; they came with doubts and fear and suspicion.

Was he to be trusted? Could anyone - even a Space Marine - have survived what he survived? Had he been left in the ruins by their enemies for Garro to find? Was Garviel Loken a ticking time bomb left by Horus, primed to inveigle himself into the Imperial ranks only to wreak untold havoc in the days to come?

No one knew for certain, but powerful men had spoken for him: Garro and Malcador for certain, and - Loken suspected - Lord Dorn himself. But others - he never knew their identities - declared him a danger, a potential spy or worse. What followed was an indeterminate period of pain and misery, inflicted on his body and the depths of his mind to seek answers to those questions.

That he still lived was not seen as definitive; merely that his interlocutors hadn't found anything damning enough to go against the wishes of the Regent of Terra and the Emperor's golden-armoured Praetorian.

The Caliban mission had been authorised by Lord Dorn and was... what? Penance? A test of his loyalty? At every stage of that mission, Loken had the sense of a pistol being aimed at his head. He had understood in the way that only men of violence know, that Qruze was to be his executioner had his fealty been proven false.

With statements delivered to Dorn and numerous faceless functionaries, Loken had followed his snapshot coordinates to the biodome, taking the rusting hulk of a Cargo-5 onto the Lunar surface, past ancient ruins of the first colonies to spring up on Terra's moon and a site marked with an eagle banner that commemorated some great achievement of a distant age.

That the dome was still functional was Loken's first surprise. That life still flourished within was his second. Overgrown to the point of needing a slash and burn campaign to return it to any form of order, Loken had felt a measure of calm in the flickering light of the glitching entoptics. Blue skies shimmered above, broken by portions of starlight and tantalising hints of the iron-clad world above. The riotous foliage grown to gigantic size reminded him of a world he had once trod, a place of blistered skies and thick bladed stalks of fibrous material. It was a world that bore a name of violent death, but he found he could no longer remember it.

Loken had taken it upon himself to restore the garden to its former grandeur.

Kill for the living and kill for the dead...

Those had once been the words by which he had lived.

He thought he might even have sworn an oath to that effect once. He'd seen that moment as if from the point of view of an observer, though he didn't know how that could be possible. Had he experienced that moment at all or was it a phantom pseudo-memory?

A name sighed upwards into his consciousness at the thought of that moment - Keeler - but it held no meaning for him anymore. Was it a person or a place?

Loken no longer knew and, in truth, no longer cared.

Once a killer, now he would be a custodian of living things.

SPIDERS CRAWLED FROM the dark earth, and Loken crushed them where he saw them. Some, the smarter ones, kept out of the light and dug down deeper, but Loken's trowel scooped them from their hiding places and killed them anyway. There would be nests beneath the soil, and he needed to kill the offspring of the spiders too. Anything less than total extermination would simply allow the canker beneath the surface to grow unseen until it was too late to stop.

'You know that if you kill all the spiders, you'll just inherit their work, yes?' said a voice drifting across the koi lake.

Loken looked up, instantly alert. The speaker stood thirty metres away in the shadow of the weeping trees at the lakeside, but his powerful voice had not diminished in the intervening distance.

'Why do you say that?' he asked.

The figure stepped from the shadows to kneel at the water's edge, and Loken saw he had the bulk of a legionary, though not one he recognised. These days, most faces were a blur to him, an assemblage of features that held no meaning, bereft of the visual cues that could differentiate them. He had taught himself mnemonics to recall the people that now mattered in his limited sphere of existence, but this warrior conformed to none of his self-imprinted memes.

And yet there was something maddeningly familiar to this figure.

The entoptics woven into the dome's structure flickered and a perfectly circular reflection of Terra glimmered in the black mirror of the water. Loken felt his hostility at this intrusion into his domain lessen at the sight of the planetary bauble, as though it reminded him of a once perfect moment never to come again.

'Spiders kill the aphids and other pests that devour the plants,' said the man, skipping a flat stone across the lake and grinning broadly as it smacked on a rock on the other side. The reflected image in the water broke into splinters of pale light. 'You might not like the look of them - they're not too pretty after all - but they're waging a war for you even if you can't see it.'

The man's tone was laconic, but Loken saw past it to the dangerous core beneath, though, oddly, he felt no threat from him.

'Do I know you?' asked Loken, rising from his labours and wiping his knees of dirt.

'You don't recognise me?'

Loken hesitated before answering. 'I might if you came closer.'

'I think I'm fine as close as we are for now,' said the man, circling around the pool. He bent to choose another flattened stone from the lakeside and turned it over in his hands. Satisfied with its heft, he skimmed it across the water towards Loken. The stone bounced and skipped across the surface of the lake before striking an angled rock and arcing into the air.

Loken reached up to catch the stone, but it smacked into his palm and bounced away before he could close his fingers over it. The pain was momentary, but it galled him that he'd failed such an easy feat of dexterity. A dirty purple bruise formed on his skin.

'You used to be quicker,' said the man.

'I used to be a lot of things,' replied Loken.

'Very true,' agreed the stranger.

'You know me, but you still haven't told me who you are,' said Loken. 'If you're another of Malcador's "counsellors" then you should turn around and leave. I owed it to Lord Dorn to go to Caliban, but I've no time for the Sigillite's half-truths and subterfuge. I no longer want a part in his schemes within schemes, so he should stop sending his lackeys for me. Though I should be grateful that at least he's sent a legionary this time.'

'He sends mortals to try and understand the mind of a legionary?' said the man, with a shake of the head that conveyed his amusement at such an idea. 'They really don't understand us at all, do they? But to set your mind at ease, I'm not here to summon you and I'm no counsellor, though I've dispensed my share of battlefield wisdom. Bolter bon-mots, you might call them.'

The quip seemed to amuse the man and he laughed aloud, though Loken was beginning to tire of the stranger's obtuse answers. He hooked the trowel to his belt and followed the path that led to the steps cut into the rocks by the waterfall.

'Leaving already?' asked the man, moving along a parallel path.

'If you won't even tell me your name then I have no interest in continuing this discussion.'

'Is my name really that important?'

Loken paused at the bottom of the steps. He felt that he should know this man's name, and that, yes, it was important he know it. It felt as though much depended upon that revelation.

'How can I trust you if I don't know your name?'

'You already know it. Why should I tell you it again?'

'I don't know it,' spat Loken, his hands curling into fists. He was unarmed, but a warrior of the Legions had no need of weapons when it came to killing.

'You do,' said the man. 'You've just forgotten it.'

'Then I've forgotten it for a good reason.'

'No,' said the man. 'For all the wrong reasons. It was the only way to survive on Isstvan III, but you're not on Isstvan III anymore. The Warmaster tried to kill us there, but he failed. Well, for one of us at least.'

The entoptics flickered again, and something on the underside of the dome's cupola blew out in a shower of sparks. They rained down onto the water, fading as they fell, and once again the reflected image of Terra appeared on the lake's surface as the skin of the dome became transparent.

'You were on Isstvan III?' said Loken as the figure emerged into the glow from the lake's surface.

A cold hand clenched his heart as the man's previously unknowable features resolved into those of a brother from a previous life.

'I still am,' said Tarik Torgaddon.

THEY SAT ON the ridge overlooking the lake, two brothers separated by a yawning gulf of regret and mortality, yet Loken felt as if no time at all had passed since last they had spoken. Torgaddon reclined upon an upright flat stone topped with a crescent arch and toyed with a loose thread on his robes that frayed the more he pulled at it.

'How are you here?' asked Loken.

Torgaddon shrugged. 'You tell me.'

'I saw you... I saw you die,' said Loken. 'Little Horus killed you.'

'Aye, I think he did,' said Torgaddon, pulling down the collar of his robes and probing his neck with his other hand. The fingertips came away red, and Torgaddon licked the blood away. 'Still, could be worse.'

Loken wanted to laugh at such a ridiculous statement.

'How,' he said, 'could it be worse?'

'Well, I'm here, aren't I?' said Torgaddon. 'Talking to you.'

'And how exactly is that possible? The dead don't rise from their graves.'

'I seem to recall something of that on Davin's moon,' pointed out Torgaddon.

'I suppose,' agreed Loken. 'In fact I seem to remember hauling your sorry arse out of a swamp as a bunch of dead men were dragging you down.'

'You see? These days, death isn't the handicap it used to be.'

'Don't be glib,' said Loken. 'I don't know what caused the dead of the plague moon to fight. A pathogen, or some cerebral parasite maybe.'

'Come on, you don't really believe that,' said Torgaddon. 'You've been reading too many of Sindermann's old books again, haven't you?'

'Maybe I don't believe that, but I know people who had their heads cut off don't get up and start walking around and talking to old friends.'

'I'll admit it's a puzzler,' agreed Torgaddon.

Loken reached out to touch Torgaddon's arm, and the limb he grasped felt as real and as solid as his own. He felt the rough fabric of his brother's sackcloth robes and the steel-trap strength in the musculature beneath. His hands came away black with ash, and he rubbed it clean on the grass.

'Am I still on Isstvan III?' asked Loken. 'Did I die there too? Did Garro kill me, or am I still alone, still Cerberus?'

'Cerberus?'

Loken shook his head, embarrassed. 'A war name I think I took for myself.'

'Guardian of the underworld,' said Torgaddon. 'Appropriate enough, I suppose.'

'I thought you'd know that.'

'I know just what you know,' said Torgaddon. 'And what you know is... patchy, shall we say?'

Understanding dawned on Loken. 'Ah, so you're a figment of my imagination? Some memory my damaged mind has conjured up.'

'Maybe,' agreed Torgaddon. 'You straight up and down types do like to punish yourselves.'

'Punish?'

Torgaddon nodded and leaned forward. Loken caught the pungent reek of his brother's blood and the choking dust of smashed building parts mixed with the chemical stink of explosives and the burnt metal smell of war. He gasped as he relived the moment of his awakening, trapped beneath thousands of tonnes of debris and wondering how he was still alive.

'Why else would you think of me except to punish yourself?' asked Torgaddon, staring right into the heart of him. 'You let me die. You watched Aximand take my head, and you didn't stop him. He killed your closest battle-brother and you didn't hunt him down and kill him for what he did. How can you call yourself my friend while that treacherous bastard still breathes?'

Loken pushed himself to his feet and walked away from Torgaddon, standing at the edge of the waterfall and staring down into the water forty metres below. The fall might not kill him, but the rocks at the bottom were like the sharpened teeth of a half-submerged leviathan and would certainly break a good many of his bones. How long would it be before anyone came to find him here? Long enough for the water to turn red with his blood? Long enough for him to die?

'I wanted to hunt them all down. I wanted to kill every last one of them,' he said at last. 'But... there was no way off Isstvan. Everyone was dead. I was trapped on a world of death.'

'The dead who rose up, I might point out,' said Torgaddon.

'I... I lost my way for a time,' continued Loken as if he hadn't heard Torgaddon. 'I was so consumed by the need to kill that I lost sight of what it was I needed to kill.'

'Then Garro came and brought you back.'

Loken nodded. 'He convinced me I still had a duty, a debt to pay, but this isn't the fight I was made for. I can't fight in the shadows, Tarik. If we're going to beat the Warmaster, then it has to be out in the open. He has to be seen to be defeated, so that everyone knows it.'

Torgaddon got up and smoothed down his robes, the fraying thread still hanging from his sleeve.

'You said "if" you beat the Warmaster,' said Torgaddon. 'You don't think it can be done?'

'You were a Luna Wolf, Tarik,' said Loken, rubbing a hand across his face as a tremendous wave of weariness swept through him. 'You know as well as I do that he's the most dangerous man in the galaxy. There's a reason Horus was made Warmaster and not any of the others. He's the best at what he does, and what he does is make corpses of his enemies.'

'So that means you shouldn't fight him?'

Loken shook his head. 'No, of course he has to be fought.'

'Just not by you?'

'What do you mean?'

Torgaddon ignored Loken's question and spread his arms, turning on the spot to encompass the entirety of the garden.

'What is?'

Torgaddon cocked his head to one side and stared quizzically at him. 'You really don't see it?'

'See what?' said Loken, growing tired of Torgaddon's constant evasion.

'This place? You don't recognise what you've built here?'

'No.'

'Sixty-Three Nineteen?' said Torgaddon as though teasing the memory out, like a timorous animal coaxed from its burrow by soft words and the promise of food. Loken looked down at the garden, now seeing it for what it was: the square shallow basins surrounded by flagstone pathways, the weeping trees and the bright flowers gathered at the water's edge. Memory surged, and he gasped as the full force of it tore into the fractured synapses of his mind.

When he'd first come here, none of this had existed. The enclosed biodome had been a tangled, overgrown mess that looked like it needed a flamer team or a destroyer cadre to tame it. But Loken had rebuilt it, hacking away the fibrous masses of dying flora and dumping it outside the dome. Working in his battle armour for days at a time, he'd fought the unwinnable fight against the rampant overgrowth of weeds and uncontrolled expansion of climbing plants. And he had brought the garden back to life, using a wellborer drill to cut giant flagstones from the Mare Tranquillitatis and hauling them inside to lay the paths around the pools he'd dug.

Everything that now existed within this dome had been wrought by his hand, and now he saw that, he understood why every little thing was freighted with familiarity.

'The water garden,' said Loken, tears misting his eyes. 'This is where I took the Mournival Oath.'

'And do you remember what you swore?' said Torgaddon, putting a hand on Loken's shoulder. 'You pledged to serve the Emperor above all primarchs. To uphold the truth of the Imperium of Mankind, no matter what evil might assail it. To stand firm against all enemies, alien and domestic.'

'I remember,' said Loken.

'You swore to be true to the Mournival to the end of your life,' said Torgaddon.

'The Mournival is broken,' said Loken. 'Ezekyle and Aximand saw to that.'

'Very well, to the ideals of the Mournival then.'

Loken nodded. 'This was the last moment I felt we were on the verge of something incredible.'

'Aye, it was. And now you know that, you know you can't stay here.'

Loken's mind was afire with all that came after that moment: the war on Murder; the blood spilled from misunderstanding upon the homeworld of the Interex; the horror of Davin; the slaughter of the Auretian Technocracy; and the final, monstrous betrayal on Isstvan III. He'd known all this, he'd always known it, but had found a way to keep it locked away in the depths of his mind.

Loken dropped to one knee, overwhelmed by the surge of suppressed memory.

'I remember it all,' he whispered. 'I didn't want to. I tried to forget, but it looks like I can't.'

'It's like the dead things at the bottom of the sea,' said Torgaddon. 'Maybe they were tied to anchors or boulders, but somehow things got rotted up and those dead things are floating up to the surface. We never knew they were there all along, but we're seeing them now.'

Loken looked up at Torgaddon, who held out a hand to him.

'You've hidden here and lied to yourself for too long, Garvi. It's time you got back in this war, whether you fight in the shadows or the light of day. Right now, the Imperium has foes in both. You're going to have to go down the hole and see how dark it gets, and I warn you it's going to get very dark indeed before this is over.'

Loken took Torgaddon's hand and let the big man pull him to his feet.

'I told you, I'm not built for this kind of fight,' he said.

'You're built for every kind of fight,' said Torgaddon. 'You know this and you need to stop thinking as if the Imperium is on the back foot. You're a Luna Wolf, and nothing is more dangerous than a cornered wolf.'

'So you think we're cornered?'

'Alright, maybe that wasn't the best expression,' admitted Torgaddon. 'But you know what I mean. Strong enemies know when you're weak. That makes them hungry, and that's when they come for you. So what do you do?'

'Don't let them know you're weak.'

'Or better yet, don't be weak,' said Torgaddon. 'Be strong: I remember something the Warmaster said back in the day, you know, back before everything went to shit. He said that man has control of action alone, never the fruits of the action. Take control of your actions, Garvi. Remember that when things look their worst, you can only do what you think is right at the time.'

'Loken heard the clatter of the airlocks on the far side of the dome.

'I have to go now,' said Torgaddon, holding out his hand again.

Loken looked at the proffered hand, but didn't yet take it.

'Are you really here or is this just my mind's way of convincing me to do something I know I have to do?'

'I don't know,' confessed Torgaddon. 'Either explanation sounds unbelievable, but what do I know? I had my head cut off.'

'Don't joke, Tarik,' said Loken. 'Not now.'

'I don't know what to tell you, Garvi,' said Torgaddon, suddenly serious, and the transformation was as unsettling as anything else Loken had experienced recently. 'I don't have a neat explanation all tied up with a bow. I feel real, but I think something terrible happened to me after I died.'

'After you died?' said Loken. 'What could be worse than dying?'

'I don't know yet,' said Torgaddon. 'But I think you're the only one who can undo it.'

Loken heard footsteps drawing near, the harsh ring of armoured boots telling him that another legionary was approaching. He looked back along the path, seeing a long, broad-shouldered shadow thrown out over the flagstones, and closed his eyes. He wanted this all to be a dream, but knew it was all too real and all too hideous to be so easily dismissed.

When he opened his eyes, Torgaddon was gone, if he had ever really existed.

Loken let out a breath that felt as if it had been caught in his chest for an eternity, as a warrior armoured in steeldust war-plate without Legion markings rounded the corner. Iacton Qruze, once known as the half-heard of the Luna Wolves, now one of Malcador's Knights Errant, nodded in respect to Loken and held up a hand in greeting.

Loken returned the gesture and said, 'Qruze, what brings you to the garden?'

'You are summoned,' said Qruze. 'And this time you need to answer.'

'Who summons me?'

'Malcador,' said Qruze, as though there could be no other summoner.

'Then I will come,' said Loken.

'You will?' said Qruze, as though surprised by Loken's answer.

'Yes,' said Loken, bending to lift a flattened stone from the waterfall's edge. 'Give me a moment.'

He hurled the stone out over the lake, smiling in satisfaction as it skipped and bounced over the water, before ricocheting back into the centre of the pool to land in the reflected image of the Solar System's precious third planet.

Qruze watched the stone's trajectory with a curious expression.

'What was that all about?' he asked at last.

'Something Torgaddon and I did on the shores of a water garden's lake one time,' said Loken. 'He could never master it, but I always managed to get stones further than anyone else.'

Qruze nodded, though Loken's answer was plainly meaningless to him.

'What's that on your hand?' asked the half-heard.

Loken looked down and smiled as he saw a bruise turning to yellow in the shape of a gibbous moon on the palm of his hand.

'A reminder,' said Loken.

'A reminder of what?'

'Something I still have to do,' said Loken.

THE WRECKAGE

David Annandale

THEIR FIRE DROVE us to shelter. The enemy was at the top of the ridge, dug in, behind cover, invisible. We were exposed. We had nothing to target. The las hit us hard. The night screamed with lethal energy. We lost three more squads before we made it inside the shell. Just ahead of me, a shot struck a pocket of gas. I ducked back, shielding my face from the heat of the explosion. Flames washed over troopers, melting rebreathers into flesh. The barrage drove us on, and I ran through smoke thick with the stench of burning corpses.

Sixth Company of the Armageddon Steel Legion's 252nd Regiment went to ground. Our shelter had been a freighter once. Its provenance, its identity, even its shape, were long gone. I guessed what it had been by the size of the ruin, and by the eroding remains of its former self: the length and curve of the hull. The ship had been destroyed by its crash onto the surface of the moon. The wreck had been stripped of anything worth having, then had been mined for scrap metal. Now it rusted, its bones gnawed by the corrosive rains of Aionos. It had been reduced to a cyclopean, arthritic talon.

'Lures,' Sergeant Otto Hanoszek said to me as I caught my breath behind a wall of pitted iron. 'Those damned ships were lures.' He pulled off his rebreather and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his trenchcoat. He was a thin man, much younger than he looked, with a face in perpetual flush. He was greying, looked like a veteran, and commanded his squad like one, but was only a few years older than I was, and the mantle of commissar still felt new on my shoulders.

'They were lures,' I agreed. 'And they worked.'

Hanoszek waved an arm, encompassing all of Aionos. 'Not for the first time, either.'

He was right about that, too. I ducked my head around the tear in the hull and looked uphill. I hadn't given up hope of gauging the location and size of the enemy forces. We needed better intelligence than ''high ground'' and ''many''. At least a thousand, I guessed.

Night had fallen on Aionos. Its planet, the gas giant Kylasma, took up a third of the sky, and was still only half risen. A green smear through the drizzling clouds, it silhouetted the spires of the moon. They were twisted, broken shapes. They were the accumulated wrecks of thousands of ships, the centuries-old graveyard of the victims of the heretics we had come to purge.

'Lures,' I repeated. 'So the attack on Statheros was one too. Lures to catch what?'

'Us?' asked Hanoszek.

'I think so. But why?'

The incursion into the nearby Statheros System had been an atrocity. Three planetoid mining colonies devastated, their resources plundered, and everywhere the eight-pointed star of Chaos daubed with the blood of slaughtered civilians. Sixth Company's frigate, the Castellan Belasco, was dispatched. We had pursued what we had thought to be a force no larger than a squadron of lighters to Aionos. We had made moonfall and descended upon what we had thought was an encampment. It had been just another decoy.

The rain worked its way down behind my cap and down my collar. Its slight acidity burned. The troopers were used to this and worse on Armageddon, but as the precipitation broke down the metal, it released combustible pockets of gas from the wrecks.

'I hear you were on Mistral, commissar,' Hanoszek said.

'That's right.'

'Was it as bad as they say?'

I shrugged. 'We had wind there instead of rain. Take your pick.'

He didn't need to know any more. The wounds were still fresh. Some were still bleeding.

Las-fire streaked past my face as I pulled back. The sergeant grunted in surprise. 'Some good shots up there.'

'In that position, I should hope so,' I said. 'There is nothing impressive about their having the upper hand in these circumstances.'

Hanoszek laughed. 'As you say, commissar. Of course, they also created these circumstances.'

He was right, of course. I liked Hanoszek. He had a clear eye for the battlefield and the lunacies of war. What might have sounded like misplaced admiration for the enemy coming from someone else was, with him, a simple acknowledgement of how things stood. 'Then let's see if the captain has something to say about changing them,' I said. I had seen him move on towards the uphill end of the wreck.

'Yes, commissar.' His tone was noncommittal.

WE CLAMBERED OVER heaps of broken metal and through the ghosts of the ship. Here and there, a bulkhead still projected sideways from the hull. Doorways without walls or rooms stood like skeletal sentinels. Along the way, we passed small groups of soldiers. Clad in their iron helmets and light-tan trenchcoats, they rested. Many were wounded. I was young, still feeling my way as a commissar, but I was no novice at war. I knew the challenges of this interlude. The relative safety after the punishing, unsuccessful fight was its own form of curse. During combat, there was no time to think of anything except the act itself. Now, in the limbo of inaction, when wounds were felt and when reflection was possible, was when thoughts of what might come next surfaced, and became apparent, and morale suffered. I stopped briefly to speak to a few troopers. I let them speak to me first.

I have known commissars who declare that there is no need to understand the soldiers who are in their charge. They say that it is enough to demand obedience to creed and mission. Perhaps it should be. But to understand the troops is to be better able to direct them. I sometimes think that the coldest commissars are fearful, though they would never admit this. They are afraid that if they get to know the soldiers as human beings, they will find it more difficult to carry out the more merciless aspects of their duty.

If this is so, they are cowards and a disgrace to our uniform.

So I listened to the troopers, and I spoke to them, trying to temper my response to the needs I heard. Where there was firmness of purpose, I gave encouragement. There were only two instances where I heard faltering that required discipline. Both cases, I noticed with some concern, were soldiers who appeared to be close to the captain. I had seen them drinking with him in the Castellan Belasco's dining hall.

Context matters. So I had been taught, and so I had already learned, through hard lessons in the field. Context was why I tried, in those early days, to memorise the names of every soldier who fell within my remit. The day would come when that was no longer possible. I am pained by the thought of the anonymous thousands who, in later years, would die because of my decisions. I am pained, but not haunted. I know that if I had not made those decisions, the numbers would be infinitely worse. Context matters.

And on that day, on Aionos, I could still know all the names. I noted the problem cases, and a doubt festered.

We found Captain Jeren Marsec near the uphill end of the hull. He stood between two pieces of bulkhead that rose twenty metres above our heads. He was well under cover, but ahead of him was a large gap in the shell, wide enough for ten men to pass through. The other sergeants were there too, and a large number of troopers had gathered to listen. Marsec stood on a heap of refuse so all could see him. He was grinning. He could grin well. Though he had the flash, pride and handsome profile, he was no aristocrat. Before conscription, he had been a foreman in a Helsreach manufactorum. His natural charisma had carried him far. He was as popular with his superiors as he was with his subordinates.

'So, Yarrick,' he said when he spotted me, 'ready to spoil the enemy's little game?'

'What does he think he's playing at?' Hanoszek muttered under his breath. I almost didn't hear him.

I frowned. I didn't mind the sergeant's borderline insubordination. What I disliked was Marsec's flippancy. He should show confidence in our ultimate triumph. But the confidence he radiated seemed to be based solely on his own self-admitted brilliance. It was perhaps true that, on the tactical level, we were engaged in a game with the cultists. But it was a serious one, and the enemy was winning. There was something in Marsec's tone of voice that suggested he did not respect our foe's skills. We had already been given ample evidence that we should.

Cheers greeted the captain's question. Perhaps I was wrong. Hanoszek wasn't happy, and some of the other sergeants were looking grim, but most of the soldiers around us hooted their approval of Marsec. He had, it was true, led many successful missions. So I swallowed my doubts for the moment and said, 'I am always ready to ruin the day of a renegade, captain.'

'Good.' He pointed at the gap. 'What do you see there?'

'A way into the field of fire.'

He wagged a finger at me. That summoned a somewhat more nervous laugh from the troops. The commissar's uniform is not well-loved. Nor should it be. It is meant to be respected and feared. Marsec's little show at my office's expense was expertly calculated to endear him even more to his company, but it was a brave soul who openly enjoyed mockery of that sort. 'You lack imagination, Yarrick. I expected better of you. Where you see a death trap, I see opportunity.'

'Oh?' I grew uneasy.

'The entire company is going to charge through that opening.'

My doubts about Marsec were twofold. In the first place, his very popularity was, I thought, a problem. He loved his troops, that was clear, and they loved him back. That was all very well, but I worried that the affection he felt would get in the way of making the hard choices that befell every command sooner or later. Would he be able to issue the orders that would lead to the sacrifice of some squads for the preservation of the rest of the company?

Secondly, and paradoxically, he was reckless. I believe this was because he was aware of his popularity. He wanted to be worthy of it. He wanted to give his troops glory. It is one thing to send soldiers to their death with the full knowledge that one is doing so, and of the necessity of this action. It is another to make a grand gesture with no thought of the consequences. And because his troops loved him, they would throw themselves after his dream no matter how unsound. There was a cult of personality growing around Marsec. That was dangerous. They always are. I still believe that today as I wrestle with my own.

'He's mad,' said Hanoszek.

I silenced him with a look. I approached Marsec. At the base of his makeshift podium I said, 'I wonder if you might explain a few details to me, captain.' I kept my voice low, hoping he would take the hint. I had no desire to undermine his authority without sufficient cause.

He understood perfectly well. He remained where he was, and announced, 'Commissar Yarrick is worried. He thinks I'm about to order a suicidal charge. Let me reassure you, comrades, I am doing no such thing. There is a risk. Of course there is. This is war! And without risk, there is no glory!'

Shouts of affirmation from the company. A bit muted, though. Hanoszek and I weren't the only ones to see the obvious drawback of running straight into enemy fire.

'I am in constant touch with the Castellan Belasco,' Marsec continued. 'We have the means to destroy this nest of rats in one swift move. We will present such a target, and such a threat, to our foes that they will be forced to respond in kind. They will mount a counter-charge, or they will have to concentrate their fire massively. Either way, they will be giving away their precise position. At that moment, the Belasco will strike with an orbital barrage. Comrades, are you with me?'

The roar was unequivocal. They were.

Marsec stepped down with the cheers still deafening. 'So?' he asked me. He had to speak into my ear and raise his voice so I could hear him. 'What do you think, Yarrick?'

'It's a big gamble.'

'Worth taking, though. We have to try something to break out of this box they've put us in'

'And if you're wrong? If it doesn't work? We could lose this war in this single action.'

'We won't,' Marsec assured me. He clapped my back. 'The rockets are ready to fly. The ship's augurs almost have the enemy's position. The problem is that those vermin are a bit too spread out, and under cover. We need to draw them out.'

'We're likely to do that,' I conceded. I still didn't like the plan. It felt wrong. Wars were rarely won by glamorous schemes.

'So we shall!' he said, delighted. He thought he'd won me over.

I WAS NOT convinced. Even so, I took my place at the front of the line as the company prepared to charge out of the hull. I would be coming out of the left-hand side of the gap. Marsec was in the centre. Hanoszek's squad was a few rows back and on the right. The sergeant made a point of walking past me before joining his troopers. 'What do you think, commissar?' he asked. 'Is this going to be a good death?'

His question was honestly meant. He wasn't joking. 'If this tactic achieves what the captain expects, then yes, to fall in this effort would be a good death.'

Hanoszek gave me a lopsided grin. 'I already knew that. Do you think it will work?'

That was his true question: were the deaths going to be worth it? Was he about to die for a good cause, or in the service of another man's ego? And I had answered him like a politician. I was a political officer. That wasn't the same thing at all. Not if I could help it. So I gave a direct answer to his direct question. 'I don't know.'

His grin became broader. 'Fair enough.' He moved on.

'The Castellan Belasco stands ready for our signal,' Marsec announced a few moments later. 'Warriors of Armageddon, forward!'

We charged out of the shelter and emerged halfway up the slope towards the ridge. On all sides, the corpses of the renegades' victims loomed over us. We were storming up a valley of wrecked ships. Few bore any resemblance to what they had once been. They had become massive tombstones, designed by lunatics. Metal reached for the sky with twisted desire. There were jagged angles the size of habs. Rotting husks, broken cylinders, fragments of towers and tumbled superstructures stretched away forever. We were in the land of industry's death.

I yelled my challenge at our enemies, daring them to cut me down. I raced with pistol drawn and sword upheld. I fired blindly into the night. And though I threw myself completely into the task of killing and survival, a part of my mind looked at the wider picture of two forces clashing in an ocean of wreckage and was dismayed.

The enemy did not return fire. There was no response at all to our attack. I stopped firing. Was anyone still there? We kept up the advance. In less than a minute, those of us at the front were almost at the ridge. I looked back. The totality of Sixth Company was now on the slope.

We reached the top. Before us was a landscape of exposed corridors and gigantic heaps of slag. There was no sign of the renegades. We stopped. If we advanced further, the footing would be treacherous and slow.

'Captain?' I asked. I knew we had fallen into another trap, but I couldn't see what it was. Seconds were ticking by. With each one that passed, I cursed myself for failing to see what had to be done.

Marsec was just as confused. 'Get me the vox!' he yelled.

Trooper Versten ran up with the communications equipment. 'I have the ship,' he said.

Marsec grabbed the handset. 'Come in, Castellan Belasco', he said.

'We are here, Captain Marsec,' a voice from the frigate crackled back. I moved closer to hear the exchange. 'Are you in position?'

I didn't recognise the speaker.

'We are,' Marsec replied. 'But there's no one here. Abort mission.'

'We have you,' said the voice.

We have you. What did that mean? Marsec stared at the handset, then at me. His face was blank with confusion. I'm sure mine was too. When the realisation hit, it couldn't have taken more than two heartbeats after Marsec had received that answer. It was still too long. When I pick at this memory, I want to grab that commissar by the lapels and shake the young fool into action. How could he not see what was coming? How did he not realise the danger the moment he stared at that empty ridge?

My anger with my younger self is not rational. I realise this. It is powered by hindsight, motivated by my wish that I could have averted what happened next, and by other, later, greater frustrations.

I have become much better at foreseeing disaster. But thanks to the stupidity of powerful men, I don't necessarily have any better luck at heading it off.

So it took me those few beats. Even then I was still confused, but the presentiment of doom was strong. I knew enough to listen to it.

'Take cover!' I yelled. I plunged back down the hill. 'With me!'

I didn't worry about the protocols of the chain of command. I was obeying dire necessity. I ran in a diagonal path, abandoning the clear route of the slope to forge into the thickets of wreckage. It was slower going, but there was cover, and I had to get us away from where the enemy wanted us to be.

I glanced back. Marsec was among those following me. Another contingent was disappearing into the ruins on the other side of the path. Then a comet pierced the night. The orbital bombardment was coming, and it was aimed at us. The barrage bombs landed on the peak of the ridge. They were little more than large masses. But then, so are meteors. Dropped from space, their impact was devastating.

The hill became a volcano. Tonnes of metal were vaporised or turned molten. An angry god hammered the ground, smashing it, reshaping it. Hundreds of little insects in human form died in an instant. I was running, and then I was tumbling, and then I didn't know if I was on my feet or not. The world had become a riot of sense impressions, all of them too much, too loud, too painful. I kept moving. I didn't know where I was going. As the night screamed, I barely even knew who I was. But if I stopped, I would die, and so would the soldiers who had followed me down the hill. That I knew. So I struggled on, buffeted by the monster sound, pursued by the heat of metallic lava. Behind us, the world flew upward in blazing fragments. Wreckage became ash. The air was choked with rust.

It ended. The thunder faded to the sullen crackling of flame and the groans of settling metal. After the blaze of the impact, night came back down, thicker and darker than before. It was difficult to breathe. I stood for a few moments, mind and body thrumming like a struck bell, trying to clear my head and understand where I was. The scrap heap that surrounded me was even more fragmentary than the hull we had sheltered in before. It was bits of framework and shards of bulkhead, piled every which way on top of each other. I felt as if I were viewing reality through a cracked lens.

I found the direction of the slope, reoriented myself, and looked for other survivors. We came together bit by bit, moving slowly back towards the centre of the bombardment. What was left of Sixth Company on this side of the wreckage began to cohere. Our losses were great. We were down by well over half our strength. I hoped, but didn't dare expect, that there were some survivors on the other side of where the path had been.

We approached a transformed landscape. The closer we came to the point of impact, the more the wreckage lost all semblance of form. It was just vague shapes and angles now. There were still some big fragments, but for the most part we were moving between and over hills of scrap.

I found Marsec. At first he just followed me like a servitor. Gradually, he became functional again. He was a long way from leading, but he remembered his role well enough to be the visible centre around which the company could reform. There were a few dozen of us when we neared the crater. The soldiers had donned their rebreathers to better deal with the clogged air. I kept coughing up black phlegm.

'They took the ship,' Marsec was saying. His voice was hoarse. His eyes were full of a horror that was greater than the tactical disaster. He seemed to be trying to focus on something concrete. But his gaze flicked and flinched over every burned, mutilated corpse we passed. 'They took the ship. How is that possible? We saw their fleet. They couldn't take a frigate.'

'They've been taking ships for centuries,' I pointed out.

'Civilian vessels. I haven't seen any Imperial Navy wreckage here, have you?'

None that was recent, true.

Marsec didn't wait for my answer. 'How did they do it? They couldn't have. But they did. How—'

He stopped as we passed a wide pool of congealing metal. Its heat baked our exposed skin. Heads and limbs of men and women poked up from the surface, silvery-grey statues of agony. There must have been at least fifteen dead in this location alone. Marsec's face twisted. I saw a man who was experiencing guilt as a physical blow.

He looked at me as if he would say something, but his personal horror was beyond his ability to communicate. I had no forgiveness to offer, and he didn't seek it. His decision had brought this fate to the troops he loved, and he knew it. I nodded that I understood, and we moved on.

I wasn't sure where we were going. It made a kind of sense to attempt to regroup close the point where we had been scattered. Beyond that, I had no ideas. I didn't know where the enemy was.

THE ENTIRE TOP half of the ridge had vanished. The barrage bombs had left two gigantic craters. Our initial charge had been to the north, and we now stopped at the edge of the western crater. It was deep, wide and unnatural. Something massive poked up from the bowl. It had been untouched by the explosions, which had simply brushed away the centuries of soil. It was the tip of a pyramid. The stone was black, with a green tinge. Its designs were complex, alien and completely unfamiliar to me. They were not Chaotic, that much I could tell. They were too regular. If anything, they spoke of a deathly, soulless order. Part of the formation of a commissar at the schola progenium was necessarily instruction in the enemies of the Imperium, their nature and kind. This was something new. It looked like a tomb. And if, as seemed to be the case, this was just the peak of the structure, and its lines continued underground, it was a tomb the size of a city.

One of the survivors was Versten, and he had been trying the vox every few seconds as we reassembled what we could of the company. We were down to not much more than platoon strength, almost all regular infantry. We had lost all of our heavy weapons, and had precious few grenade launchers and flamers remaining.

Perhaps because we were on higher ground now, or perhaps because the air was beginning to clear, he finally made contact with another operator. The sliver of good news shook Marsec out of his lethargy. There were other survivors, led by Hanoszek, and they had reached the lip of the other crater.

'What are you seeing there?' Marsec asked the sergeant.

'There's a… Captain, I'm not sure what it is.'

'That's all right. There's one here too.'

'What are your orders?'

'Hook up with us here. We will hold our position until—'

The las streak missed Marsec's head by a hair's breadth. We dropped to the ground. The single shot was joined by dozens. They were coming from the other side of the crater, and to our left. At the same moment, Hanoszek's voice started yelling that they were taking fire.

'Back down the slope.' Marsec shouted into the vox unit. 'Full retreat!'

But as we turned to start down, that path was closed to us too. With a roar, something dropped down from the clouds and landed at the base of the slope. It trapped us, and it revealed how the ship had been taken. It was a Thunderhawk.

'We're saved,' a trooper gasped. His name was Rohm, and I made a mental note to chastise him thoroughly, should we survive this day.

'We are not,' I hissed. 'Look at the markings'

The air was still dusty, but even from several hundred metres away, the gunship's livery was unmistakable: two scythes the colour of magma, crossed over a background of night, between them a cluster of burning skulls. I didn't expect the trooper to know the beings who fought under that emblem. I did expect him to know that this design belonged on no flag of the Emperor's Adeptus Astartes.

The xenos who had built the pyramid in the crater were a mystery to me, but I knew of the Chaos Space Marines who descended from the Thunderhawk's assault ramp. They were part of the store of dark knowledge that it had been my responsibility to learn. The need to punish ourselves with this dangerous lore had been impressed upon me and my fellow students in an address given by the Lord Commissar Simeon Rasp. 'You are the guardians of the Guard,' he had told us. 'Vigilance requires knowledge. Some knowledge requires faith to be withstood. Hold fast to all three.'

I did so now. 'Those are Harkanor's Reavers,' I said.

The squad of five massive figures began moving up the slope. Their armour was a deep black, broken up by lines that glowed like flame. As they drew nearer, it seemed to me that those lines were not markings. They were too irregular. And they seemed to be moving. 'We cannot fight them,' I said. Not so reduced in number, and under harrying fire.

'We can't stay here,' Marsec said.

I waited for him to issue orders. He did not. If we paused much longer, we would be finished. I turned my head to look down into the crater. There was one route left to us. 'Some of those doorways are open,' I said, pointing at the pyramid.

Marsec grunted in surprise. He hesitated. I gave him a second longer, thinking that even that might be a mistake. Then he called out, 'We go down!'

The fire from the heretics intensified as we descended the slope. We shot back, but they were still attacking us from behind strong shelter, and our only sense of where they were came from the flashes of las. We lost several more troopers on the way down. Not all of them died right away. But we could not stop.

There was an open vault at the base of the pyramid. We made for it As its bulk loomed over us, an ancient night made of stone, my instincts cried out to stop, to run another way, to try anything other than go inside. I didn't listen. There was no choice. I forced myself to run even faster as I hit the threshold. If I displayed reluctance, my example would be ruinous. So I plunged in, calling out as I did, so all would know that I was still alive. Marsec was right behind me, and once I was inside, he came too, bellowing something that wasn't coherent but sounded enough like an order to get the company to follow.

Once we were all inside, we paused. Our eyes adjusted to the darkness. It wasn't total. The green designs in the smooth stone glowed like near-dormant lumen strips. They showed that we were in a corridor that carried on in a perfectly straight line for some distance.

We could see just enough to advance, if that was what we had to do. Marsec posted a watch at the door while Versten and I contacted Hanoszek's contingent. I had to warn him about the Traitor Space Marines.

'We saw them,' he replied. They had taken refuge in the other pyramid. 'What are the orders?' he asked.

A good question. I suspected that Hanoszek knew that it was. 'Stand by,' I told him, and had Versten fetch Marsec. When the captain arrived, I filled him in. 'The sergeant wants to know what action he should take,' I said, and offered the handset.

Marsec stared at it, then took it. As he did, a call came from the entrance. 'Enemies approaching!'

That seemed to be the additional jolt Marsec needed. His voice was sharper, more in the present moment, when he spoke to Hanoszek. 'Any sign of hostiles, sergeant?'

'Yes, captain. They're coming down the slope.'

'Go deeper into the pyramid,' Marsec said. 'Use the space as best you can. So will we. When we make it out again, we'll link up with you.'

There was a pause. Then Hanoszek said, 'Captain, there are lights in here. These structures might not be quite dead.'

'They must have been buried for thousands of years. Whatever was in them most certainly is dead. We have no time to do anything else, sergeant. You have your orders. Go!'

'Understood.'

Marsec passed the handset back to Versten. He looked as if he wanted something from me. I nodded. That seemed to satisfy him. 'Let's go,' he said.

He led the way down the corridor. He sent no scouting party ahead. He was right. We had no other options. Our best hopes at this moment were speed and luck. And yet, I felt that he would have charged into the darkness even if there had been time to feel our way more carefully through possible enemy territory. I wondered if he really had learned anything from the disaster we had suffered.

We moved down the corridor. After a hundred metres, it branched left and right, while straight ahead was a steep ramp. We went down.

The ramp switchbacked a hundred and eighty degrees, and deposited us in another wide corridor. This one had many forks along its length.

We could hear voices and the tread of many boots echoing down from above. The heretics had entered the pyramid.

'I want an ambush point,' Marsec said as we jogged down the corridor. Either our eyes were finding it easier to see in the ghostly green half-light, or it was growing stronger.

'Plenty of intersections here,' I pointed out.

He shook his head. 'Main tunnel's too wide. After the surprise, they'll still be able to use their numbers.'

He was right. I didn't bother to mention that it was not just the numbers we had to worry about. I was relieved to hear him thinking like a warrior again.

We hurried down to the end of the corridor, and followed another lamp down to the next level. We were rushing to put more distance between us and our pursuers, to gain a little bit more time, but I was uneasy about venturing so far into the xenos construct. The risks behind us were bad enough. If we ran into something worse ahead, we could lose the entire company.

The third level down had even more branching corridors. We were in a maze. Though we had to take a side passage, it would be very easy to get lost once we were off the main path. The thought must have crossed Marsec's mind, too. He took in all the choices and hesitated. We didn't have long. I could still hear the heretics coming. Our lead had only grown by a few seconds at most. Worse, I could distinguish, above the general echoes of the pursuit, the heavy tread of something very large. The Traitor Space Marines were in the pyramid.

Trooper Lommell said, 'With your permission, captain,' and he barely nodded before she ran forward, ducking down one corridor, then another. The third seemed to offer what she wanted. 'Here,' she said. 'We should set up an ambush down here.'

'Why there?' Marsec asked, but he brought the rest of the company forward.

'It's very tight, and it gives us a usable back exit. I ran with a gang in the underhive of Tartarus on Armageddon, sir.' She carried the marks of her background. Her face was scarred with slashes in a cracked-glass pattern. When I had first seen her, I had assumed I was looking at an injury. It was not. It was a survival tactic in Tartarus. She had sliced her face herself, as a warning to her foes of how far she was willing to go. 'This environment isn't that different,' she said. 'It's just cleaner.'

'Good. Give us your expertise, trooper.'

She took us a few twists deeper into the labyrinth. The passageways were all empty, silent. They were dead. Except for the light. Why was it present? Whose purpose did it serve? The pyramid felt like a tomb, yet we had seen nothing that looked like markers, and what need did a tomb have for illumination?

I managed to keep track of our turns. Lommell set us up at a point where the narrow corridor we had taken had two intersections ten metres apart. Those branches, narrower still, fed on either side to other halls that would take us back to the main one. We had a perfect kill zone, and an easy retreat.

'Tartarus gave you a fine education,' I whispered to her as we waited for our foe.

'I didn't think so at the time.'

'We rarely do.'

We made just enough noise to give away which branch we had taken. Marsec sent a few soldiers on to create the illusion that we were still on the move, further along this passageway. The renegades took the bait. They rushed into our trap, laughing at the sport they were having.

This was my first look at them. In the dim green light of the pyramid, I couldn't see many details, but I had a sense of degraded human beings, wearing patchwork uniforms, no doubt stolen from their multitude of victims over the years. Their corruption had a hundred shades, yet it also had a unity. Across all the faces were runic tattoos and scarification. All the designs, however varied and however hard to make out, were an affront to the soul. They were, in the end, a single thing: the brand of Chaos.

The cultists were charging in without discipline or caution, which was madness, doubly so in a structure that must have been as alien to them as it was to us. I regarded them with contempt as they crossed the kill zone.

Just before we opened fire, I saw one of the Harkanor's Reavers loom out of the darkness. He brought with him his own terrible light. The designs on his armour that had puzzled me stood out clearly. They were cracks in the ceramite. Sorcerous heat spread fissures in the armour as if it were an eggshell. Baleful flame shone through. Then the cracks would seal, and new ones would appear.

He was a mass of cooling lava given the shape of a man. That such a monster had once been human was beyond belief.

There was little chance that our ambush would take him down. We had no choice but to try. Culling the numbers of his followers would be a meaningless gesture if he still came after us. I prayed that Marsec, positioned in the shadows opposite me, realised this truth and waited.

He did. The forward elements of the cultists moved beyond the kill zone. The Reaver entered it. Marsec waited a few seconds more, letting another dozen renegades escape, waiting until the Traitor Space Marine was close to the centre of the trap. Then he gave the signal by firing his laspistol.

We opened up. Enfilading fire filled the space of the corridor. The las was so bright, it was as if we had brought day to the tomb. The heretics caught in the web of energy beams went down in seconds. The concentrated fire was such that they didn't have a chance to retaliate. Their comrades ahead doubled back. They tried to mount a counter-attack, but by staying out of our field of fire, they had no angle on our positions in the side passageways. We had reversed the situation that we had faced outside. Now we were the ones under cover, ripping our foes apart.

Then there was the Reaver. He stood in the middle of the barrage with no more concern than if it were a rain shower. He raised a flamer and launched a stream of burning promethium into the nearest passageway. Screams filled the corridors. A corner of our ambush failed.

Lommell trained her fire on the Reavers flamer as he fired into the passageway one down from ours. The weapon exploded, drenching the Chaos Space Marine in liquid flame. From the grille of his helmet came an inhuman snarl. He staggered back a step and wiped at the promethium. It seemed to annoy him rather than harm him, but he could not see with fire engulfing his head.

From the other end of the ambush, Trooper Rohm fired his grenade launcher. The frag struck the Reaver full in the chest. It blew out the flames, but rocked the monster to the core. He roared in anger and pain even as he yanked a bolt pistol from his thigh and fired a wide barrage of shells. They didn't need accuracy. Any that hit one of our positions killed the troopers in the front line.

Where the grenade had hit, the Reaver's armour was a molten mass. Instead of cracks, here was a wide gap, blazing with eldritch fire. The ceramite was slow to reform. I leapt out of the passageway in a forward roll, staying low, beneath the spray of bolter shells. I came out of the roll in a crouch. I was right at the Reaver's feet. I aimed my plasma pistol at the roiling, burning chest, and shot the Traitor Space Marine point blank. Energies from the materium and the warp collided. The explosion knocked me flat. The Reaver stood there with a great void where his chest had been. His ribcage poked out, burned and broken. Where his hearts and lungs should have been there was now nothing. The fire went out. The monster's arms hung limp, and then he toppled backward.

The cultists faltered. We turned our attention to them. They had thought to trap us between themselves and their superhuman master. Now they were caught, exposed, in the narrow corridor. We cut them down. I moved, crouching low, back to cover, and added my fire to the assault. I was exhilarated. We all were. The ambush had worked better than we could possibly have hoped.

As the last of the heretics fell, I glanced back, and my heart sank. The enemy had been cautious after all. A second force, larger than the first, was approaching. With it came another Reaver.

We were outnumbered, we had lost the element of surprise, and our cover was useless against power armour and a flamer. If we fought, we would die.

'Go!' Marsec shouted.

We bolted down the side passageways, taking the route Lommell had mapped out for us. Our only advantage now was speed. We knew where we were going. We sprinted, once more putting distance and time between us and the enemy. As I took comers at high speed, I blinked away the effect of the glowing designs. It would have been easy, at this pace, to follow their lines straight into a black wall. I turned into a wider corridor, and took it back to the main hall. Our portion of the company linked up. Marsec looked towards the way back up, but there was the sound of more pursuit coming from that direction, so we plunged on deeper into the pyramid.

We went down three more levels. The heretics were close. We didn't have time to set up another ambush. We kept moving forward, even when we reached a level that was ominously different. It still had a maze of corridors along its periphery, but the centre was a massive block. Its rectilinear designs were the most complex yet, and their light was the brightest, and most deathly. The main hall widened out before the monolith, and became a series of parallel tunnels that dropped beneath it. When we reached the tunnels, we paused. Their slope was steep, almost a fall. In their depths glowed a green mist.

And there was something moving. We could hear what sounded like the shifting of weights. Worse, we heard footsteps. The light flickered, as if something had passed between us and the source.

There were other noises too. They were uncomfortably like voices. They spoke no recognisable words, and they could not come from any living throat. But down there, something walked and spoke. Whatever had built this pyramid was not done with it yet.

We couldn't have been perched at the edge of that descent for more than a second or two. That was long enough for us to hear and see all that was necessary. Marsec looked at me. We were trapped, yes. But we had one option. Perhaps it would be enough. 'We hide,' I said.

Marsec nodded. He raised his arm, waved his finger in a circular motion, giving the order to scatter. There were plenty of side corridors within reach, and we took them, racing for their shadows where we crouched down, motionless, silent, waiting for the arrival of our pursuers.

Throwing the dice on the fate of Sixth Company.

THE STEEL LEGION is a proud fighting force. It has every reason to be so. It did then, too, though its time of greatest glory and most painful sacrifice, which would also be mine, still lay over a century in the future. This, now, was not a moment relished by any of the soldiers of Sixth Company as we hid in the dark and hoped that the enemy passed by. Doing so grated against my self-worth as well. But the Steel Legion has not earned its triumphs by fighting blindly, or without sense. We had a chance of victory here, and to seize it meant swallowing pride. That requires its own form of courage.

We waited. I watched, as close to the exit of my refuge as I dared, as the cultists arrived. Even with the damage we had done, they were still three times our number. The Reaver towered over them. They advanced to the edge of the tunnels. The Reaver barely paused long enough to look ahead before he led the renegades down the central tunnel. I listened to their war cries as they descended. A minute later, the cries became screams.

The first screams were of fear. Then, as I heard what sounded like energy discharges of some kind, I heard screams of agony. The Reaver roared. Guns fired. The sounds of alien energy intensified. The green glow became brilliant, a strobing, slashing light. The screams stopped as if severed. The Reaver's bellows filled with shock and pain. Then they too, fell silent.

Marsec stepped back out of the shadows. I joined him. We stared down into the tunnels. There was still movement down there, still the alien sounds. For the moment, at least, they weren't moving upward.

Marsec whispered, 'What's down there?'

'Something we are not equipped to fight, captain. But we can report its existence.'

'Agreed.'

Moving quietly, limiting himself to hand gestures alone, Marsec signalled our withdrawal. We maintained silence for the first two levels. When it became clear that the pyramid's denizens weren't following, and that the last of our enemies had gone down to their annihilation, Versten went back to work with the vox, trying to raise the scattered elements of Sixth Company.

Marsec called him up to the front with us. 'Anything?' he asked.

'No answer from Sergeant Hanoszek, sir. But I received a transmission from Sergeant Brenken on the Castellan Belasco. She and some armsmen have freed themselves and are fighting back. She says that the occupying force is small. The Traitor Space Marines were the ones who captured our ship, and they left behind only a minimal group of cultists. They're armed, of course, but…'

'But it wouldn't take much to dislodge them,' I finished.

'That's what she thinks, commissar, yes.'

I gave Marsec a significant look. Our Valkyries, some distance from the ridge, should still be intact. Even with our numbers reduced to not much more than two squads' worth, we could retake the ship.

'Good,' Marsec said. 'We'll link up with Sergeant Hanoszek. With our company reunited, we shall purge the scum from our decks.'

I frowned. He was assuming that Hanoszek's contingent still existed. Two Reavers had come after us. Unless some were mounting guard outside the pyramids, which seemed unlikely, that meant the other three were pursuing Hanoszek and his troops. Those were formidable odds. Marsec was basing his strategy on an assumption for which we had no evidence. I was uneasy, but decided to say nothing until we had reached the surface.

As we were climbing out of the crater, Versten managed to get through to Hanoszek's vox operator for a few seconds. The other fragment of Sixth Company was being pressed hard, and driven deeper into the pyramid. There was no question of their being able to set up an ambush. The heretics and the Reavers were upon them.

They could not break off.

'Send a message that help is coming,' Marsec said.

'Belay that, trooper,' I told Versten. To Marsec, I said, 'Captain, a word.'

I expected him to be furious at my intervention. Instead, he seemed eager to talk, as if it was important to him that he bring me about to his perspective. We left the troops at the lip of the crater, and moved down the slope a short distance to speak behind a rounded heap of congealed slag.

'We cannot rescue them,' I said.

'We have to try.'

'No,' I said, 'we are duty-bound not to. Such an attempt would be doomed. You know that as well as I do. We would then be leaving a frigate of the Imperial Navy in enemy hands. That would be an unforgivable failure.'

'I have already failed my troops once this day,' Marsec said. 'I won't do it again.'

'You will if you follow this course. They will all die.'

'I have to try.'

I looked at him steadily. He did not blink. He knew exactly what he was saying. He knew the consequences. His ego had led us to this pass. He understood this, and sought redemption. But we didn't have the luxury for redemption. We needed victory. Before me stood a good man. The Imperium needed him to be something more, though. It needed him to be a good officer. Instead, he was the ruin of one. He was, in this moment of crisis, proving himself unable to make the truly hard decision. He was throwing that responsibility onto me. 'I cannot allow you to jeopardise this mission,' I told him.

'No,' he said softly. 'No, you can't. But you cannot make me abandon my troops.'

I pulled my pistol from its holster.

Marsec gave me a sad smile. He got down on his knees. 'Do what is necessary, Commissar Yarrick.'

'Why are you forcing my hand?'

'Stop me or let me do what I must.'

put the muzzle of the pistol against his forehead. He closed his eyes. Peace suffused his features. I felt a grimace contort mine. I knew what I was doing was correct. I have had to use this ultimate sanction against officers more often than I care to count. Each instance is a tragedy, a necessity whose causes are so unnecessary. But never before or since have I encountered a soldier who accepted my judgement with such grace. I hope I never will again.

The hard decision was mine, as was the harder action. Silently, I cursed Marsec for this moment that I would have to live with for all my years to come. I curse him still. He was, even then, still not fully honest with either of us. He was seeking a martyr's end as redemption for his failure. In this way, he turned away from the hard decision. He made it mine instead. Mine the choice, and mine the even harder action.

So be it.

I pulled the trigger.

I marched back to the company. A horrified silence had fallen over it.

'We make for the landing site,' I said. 'We are retaking the Castellan Belasco.' I didn't mind the gazes, whether averted or hostile. They couldn't add to the burden I was already carrying, or to the further weight I was about to shoulder. 'Get Hanoszek,' I told Versten. 'Don't stop trying until you do.'

We had reached the base of the slope when Versten passed me the handset. It was hard to make out what Hanoszek was saying. His words kept being cut off by what sounded like static, but I knew it to be weapons fire. He was asking for help.

'Sergeant,' I said, 'this is Yarrick. We cannot provide assistance. The ship is being held. That is the key to this mission's success. Do you understand?'

More explosions and cries in the background. Then, 'Yes.'

'Is there any way you can bypass the enemy?'

'No. We've already lost half our strength. They're backing us down a tunnel. Commissar, there's movement down there.'

I closed my eyes for a moment, hating what I was about to say. 'Sergeant, go deeper. Head towards that movement.'

Another pause. I didn't think it was only due to the fighting. 'Commissar?'

'What is down there will kill the enemy. Sixth Company will be victorious.' Again, I asked, 'Do you understand?'

There was no pause this time. 'I do.'

'The Imperium thanks you, Sergeant Hanoszek.'

'This is simply our duty, sir.'

He would have made a fine officer.

'I will remain on the vox,' I told him. 'All the way.'

'Thank you.'

We had no more exchanges after that. He left the channel open. I heard the sounds of the end. I kept my promise, and stayed present, bearing what witness I could. I was there as we reached the landing site, and boarded the Valkyries. Hanoszek and his portion of the Sixth fought well and hard and as long as they could, luring the enemy inexorably to disaster. The fight was still going on as we reached the frigate, and the immoral, leaderless rabble that occupied the bridge were confronted with the anger of the Steel legion.

I was barely aware of our victory on the ship. All of my attention was focused on the terrible victory inside that pyramid on Aionos. I was there to hear Hanoszek, in mortal fear but still fighting, cry, 'Throne, what are they?'

He would receive no answer. None of us would for many years to come. Years of blessed ignorance.

But on that day, I still sought the pain of knowledge. I forced myself to learn the cost of my decision. I listened to the transmission until the sounds of battle ceased. I listened for almost an hour after that. I listened as the reclaimed Castellan Belasco prepared to leave the system. Listened to the hollow, hissing remains of the hard choices.

THE LORDS OF BORSIS

L J Goulding

THERE WAS ONE thing for which Turakhin was renowned above all else and - much to the dismay of those that called him overlord – it was not his military acumen. From his throne at the head of the grand hall, he would regularly preside over the greatest and most lavish banquets that any on the seventeen worlds of the Bor Enclave could ever hope to witness.

Wines from Harapti flowed freely from ewers carried by robed servants, while others bore platters laden with spiced fruit and aromatic roasted meats. Guests were anointed with sacred oils as they seated themselves - lords and delegates from across the sector, who were then treated to harmless displays of techno-magick and rousing recitations of the ancient sagas performed in flawless penta-tonic harmony by Turakhin's troubador-minstrels. Fragrant incense burned in golden braziers, wafting scented smoke into the upper reaches of the hall where the quantum-flambeaux flickered silently overhead.

Not since the days of the old gods had such epicurean pleasures been known.

Or so it was said. Few of those now present had any memory of those times, and those that did were rather more preoccupied with other matters.

Amontar, rightful lord and ruler of the world of Xanderat, could not take his eyes from the goblet that sat upon the table before Turakhin. It was carved in shimmering crystal that caught the light, refracting and casting it through the wine like a hundred miniature rainbows. In any other household, it would have been a priceless treasure, but to the Overlord of Borsis it was simply one amongst thirty-five identical pieces that he used when entertaining his royal court, and he appeared to pay it no mind.

'Khetmes,' Turakhin muttered, fixing the noble seated opposite Amontar with an inquisitive squint. 'You look as though you have something to say.'

The exalted Nemesor Khetmes, bedecked in his warlike finery, stared coldly back. His fellow lords shifted uncomfortably in their seats - though the confrontation had been expected, this was far from the manner in which they had proposed that the matter be broached. As usual, the characteristically forthright Khetmes lacked the subtlety and sagacity required for proper courtly business.

'My lord, the hospitality you have afforded us is admirable. But we do not feel that now is the time for feasting and celebration. There are more pressing matters at hand.'

From his seat at the overlord's right hand, Turakhin's vizier and chief advisor Heqiroth stood and noted the interruption upon a lavish vellum-slate.

'The great and mighty Turakhin, regent of the Magadha dynasty and master of Borsis, recognises Nemesor-designate Khetmes, conqueror of the Ferandu Trinary.'

With an air of mild disinterest, Turakhin plucked the goblet from the table and peered disapprovingly into it. 'And what would these pressing matters be, nemesor?'

Amontar froze. He watched the overlord languidly swirl the wine around the bowl of the goblet, though his attention was clearly already drifting.

Khetmes rose, the woven electrum scales of his cloak clattering from his chair. 'Alien incursion, lord. The foulest creatures threaten our borders, most likely sponsored by the blood-witches or the damnable eldar, and yet you do nothing.'

He swept his arms wide, gesturing into the unseen heavens with his sceptre of office and silencing the troubadours and the idle chatter of the overlord's other guests. Heqiroth continued to scribble upon the slate as Khetmes spoke.

'The Kurg Reach has fallen. Xirec too. Our ancient domains are being picked clean by these ignorant upstarts, and yet you would have the Magadha dynasty remain quiet and isolated. How much longer do you really think it will be before the Bor Enclave attracts the notice of the alien invaders?'

Turakhin shook his head. 'Nonsense. Impossible. You start at shadows, Khetmes. The great war is long over, and these barely-sentient brutes will never truly threaten us. They are too parochial, too close-minded - they squat on the periphery of our domain without any understanding of our eternal majesty. With all the grand armies at our command, Magadha has nothing to fear from them.'

Khetmes continued to glower, but Turakhin merely raised the goblet to him, before taking a deep sniff of the wine's bouquet.

'Have I ever told you,' he began afresh, 'of the Quad-sultans of Obe? Theirs was a fascinating culture, though hopelessly doomed from the very beginning, you see. It is said that they believed themselves to be the pinnacle of sentience, and raised monuments to their artistic glories across a dozen worlds…'

Drink. Drink it, you old fool. Amontar felt his impatience getting the better of him, and released his grip on the edge of the table as Turakhin rambled on. He glanced around warily at the overlord's lychguard, suddenly convinced that he had somehow attracted their notice. He tried to get the attention of the servant that he had bribed, though the imbecile only stared vacantly ahead with the wine ewer still gripped in his cold hands.

'Enough!' cried Khetmes, drawing his ceremonial voidblade and plunging it into the polished surface of the table.

Halted mid-sentence, Turakhin stared at him with wide eyes. His praetorian judicator, Metzoi, stepped forward with his hand upon the hilt of his sword, already gauging Khetmes's stance, likely support and possible escape routes.

The nemesor was unfazed, and remained defiant even as his peers began to edge away from him.

'You are weak, my lord. You have no vision for our people, or the future of our dynasty. You would be content to spin us tales of your past glories from now until the suns grow cold, but I will not stand for it any longer.' He shucked off his cloak to an attendant groom, and pointed with his sceptre. 'I won the Bor Enclave for you, and if you will not defend it then I will take it back.'

Outraged, Turakhin threw his goblet to the floor where it shattered across the smooth marble. Heqiroth raised his voice to the hall. 'These are bold words, exalted nemesor. What is your purpose here?'

Amontar watched the poisoned wine trickling into the cracks between the flagstones, though he felt little regret - it seemed that his lost opportunity to act against the overlord was about to be replaced by a formal leadership challenge from Khetmes. An unexpected development, though not an unwelcome one.

Besides, eliminating the nemesor later on would be even easier.

Khetmes took up his long warscythe and began to pace around the table towards the throne, scattering servants and noble guests before him. 'Overlord Turakhin, I find you wanting in the leadership of Magadha and the Bor Enclave. As such, by the ancient forms of martiality I challenge you to single combat. Let justice be decided by—'

He never finished speaking his challenge.

One moment, Judicator Metzoi was standing ready behind Turakhin; the next, he was behind Khetmes with his sword blade extended. Life faded from the nemesor's eyes, and his severed head crashed onto the banqueting table, coming to rest upon a silver platter.

The symbolism appeared to please Turakhin. He clapped his hands together and laughed gleefully as Khetmes's body toppled to the floor.

'Well done, Metzoi - oh, well done indeed!' he cackled. 'You've saved me the trouble of having to reclaim the title of nemesor from him, one day. A most agreeable tum of events. Most agreeable.'

The judicator sheathed his blade once more, and gave the overlord a short bow.

Amontar gazed in horror at the slack, gaping death mask of Nemesor Khetmes before him. Several of the other delegates retired from the table at the sight, even as Heqiroth urged the troubadours to strike up once more.

'Praise be,' the vizier cried exultantly. 'Fortune favours our noble regent! Let it be known that the vile traitor Khetmes is hereby stripped of all rank and title, and his household condemned to dimensional exile. So shall be the fate of all who dare conspire against the great and mighty Turakhin of Magadha!'

AFTER THE FEAST, when the flambeaux were extinguished and the hall had fallen at last to silence, the remaining lords of Borsis met in the gloomy galleries beyond.

Uluszekh, the self-styled Tyrant of Ghyr, was skulking beneath an idealised statue of Yggra'nya; once the patron deity of Borsis, the c'tan was depicted in the classical style, bound up with symbolic restraints that held his legendary power in check.

'You choose an auspicious hiding place, "tyrant",' hissed Amontar as he approached. 'Do you cower in the shadow of the Shaper as a symbol of your desire to remould this world in your own image, too?'

'I'm not hiding,' Uluszekh snapped.

'Of course you're not. For, undoubtedly, you have nothing to fear from our great overlord's guardians, or that ghoul Metzoi.' Amontar drew up beside him, casting a quick glance in each direction to be sure that he had not been followed. 'Khetmes, he was easy prey, but you… you they would think twice about striking down as nothing more than an example to the rest of us.'

Before Uluszekh could reply, the two of them both started at the sound of another hushed voice in the shadows.

'Are you brain-dead? Quieten your words, both of you!’

Wrapped up as though against the chill in his coarsely woven robes, Hixos emerged from the gloom like a neurotic phantom. He pulled back his hood to reveal a gleaming, bare pate, and waved his two alien thralls away with almost skeletal fingers.

'The overlord's lychguard prowl these corridors even as we speak…’

Amontar sneered. 'You have brought the slave-lord into our confidences, Uluszekh? You have precious few allies among the court, true, but I never dreamed that you would stoop so low as this.' He glanced sidelong at Hixos, making a show of his disdain. 'Hail to thee, Hixos of Naravekhi. I would offer my hand, but I fear that I would never then be clean of the alien stench that clings to you.'

'Be still!' Uluszekh growled in frustration. 'You know that Hixos has ever been our ally, and while his Legions are few, his slaves have leave to walk the darker places of the palace where we cannot. Such gifts are not to be overlooked in our enterprises.'

Cautiously, Amontar regarded the two miserable thralls skulking in the wan light of the main gallery - they were malnourished, sallow things with heavy collars about their necks. 'I don't like the look of them. How can we be sure that these primitive beasts will even be capable of playing any part in our intrigue, or that they won't slit our throats while we sleep?'

Hixos grinned. It was a toothy, unpleasant sight.

'My lords, I make it my business to invest in only the finest stock. Though they may appear as little more than shaved apes, these creatures are intelligent enough to do as they are told. They are strong and capable, and have been vetted - they are not mind-singers.'

He rubbed his neck, thoughtfully.

'And besides, I have slept enough to last me a score of lifetimes.'

In spite of himself, Amontar chuckled.

Uluszekh inclined his head. 'Something amuses you, friend?'

'No. It is nothing. Recently I fancied that I had forgotten what true, restful sleep was, that is all.'

Hixos grinned again. 'Spending too long concocting your lethal poisons, no doubt. Although, it is my understanding that we have yet to see any evidence of your professed skill? You should take care not to confuse your exit-dose with your sleeping draught, my lord Amontar…'

'How dare—'

Uluszekh raised his hands. 'Friends, be still. It was merely bad luck that delivered Turakhin from Amontar's lethal attentions this night - the overlord's fit of pique was a variable that we could not hope to have predicted.'

Hixos nodded. 'Just so. My apologies, lord Amontar. I spoke out of turn.'

Aye, you simpering bastard, Amontar thought. I'll see you cold and froth-lipped on the floor of your chambers too, when this is all done.

'Then let us be about it,' Uluszekh went on. 'I bring news - great news, indeed, for our gathering. Khetmes and his household are gone, but still our numbers grow! There are others who would join our noble efforts to remove the imbecile Turakhin from the throne of Borsis.'

Amontar felt something like panic stirring in his chest.

'Uluszekh, you fool - who have you been blabbing to? You cannot just talk about these things openly. The forms of intrigue are not so carefully enshrined as the forms of martiality in the secret wars among the nobility. There are procedures, double-blind intermediary channels to protect—'

'Peace, friend. It was the other parties that approached me.'

Hixos leaned forward. 'Who? Who approached you?'

The Tyrant of Ghyr steepled his fingers. 'Why, none other than the high magister himself.'

Amontar gaped.

‘Overseer Ruadzhe?'

He caught himself as his fellow conspirators made to hush his outburst, and continued almost in a stage whisper that seemed to carry further than usual in the empty gallery.

'The regent's own cryptek - are you mad? It's bound to be a trap. You've doomed us all!'

Even Hixos seemed perturbed by this revelation. The slave-lord took a staggered step backwards, tugging his hood back over his skull. 'I am inclined to agree. This was ill-advised.'

'Calm yourselves,' Uluszekh insisted. 'Ruadzhe has a well-placed sponsor in this endeavour.'

Hixos blinked. 'Better placed than the high magister to the regent? Pray tell, who else—'

'I believe that Lord Uluszekh is referring to me.'

Amontar spun to face the newcomer, an envenomed blade flashing into his hand from the folds of his robe. Neither he nor Hixos could believe their eyes.

Vizier Heqiroth stood awkwardly at the edge of the gallery, half-swathed in the darkness beneath a set of luxurious hanging drapes. Aside from his simple loincloth and a ceremonially decorated breastplate and headdress, his lean form was bare, and he picked nervously at the large red gemstone mounted symbolically over his heart. This milksop was no warrior, no cunning leader of the Immortal Legions - that much was clear to Amontar.

He gestured with his dagger. 'This is insanity, Uluszekh. We must kill him now, before he takes word back to Turakhin. Or Metzoi.'

Heqiroth put up his hands in alarm.

'My lords, I beg you - let me be part of your conspiracy. I have diverted the lychguard patrols away from this meeting as a sign of good faith, and there is no one here in the palace who can get you closer to the regent than I.'

Uluszekh moved between Amontar and the vizier. 'He speaks truthfully, friends. Tell them, Heqiroth - tell them what you told me. Why should they trust you as I do?'

Heqiroth edged forward, a beseeching look about him.

'My dynasty was subsumed by Magadha during the last war. I and all scions of the once-mighty Nephrekh dynasty were bound up into the regent's own Legions, in exchange for his protection against the alien usurpers. But we weren't to know that he was nothing more than a paper prince, a bumbling coward. It was Khetmes who won our battles and guarded the borders of the enclave as Turakhin's designated war-leader, and now that he is gone I am left in a most precarious position - if my involvement in the nemesor's attempted coup is discovered, then—'

His meaning was clear. Amontar lowered his blade.

'Khetmes bargained outside of our gathering for his own gain in the succession?' Hixos muttered. 'Maybe he wasn't as ignorant as we thought.'

Amontar fixed Heqiroth with a level glare. 'The nemesor is gone, and with him our best hope of a martial challenge to the overlord's rule. Turakhin hides behind Judicator Metzoi - he and his praetorians are sworn to uphold the ancient codes, and to protect the throne of Borsis.'

'Yes, yes,' the vizier gasped, the tension quite visible in his trembling hands. 'Metzoi is a singular foe, and I doubt that any of you could best him… with all due respect, of course. It was for this reason that I enlisted the help of Overseer Ruadzhe.'

At the mention of the cryptek's name, Uluszekh became more animated.

'You see, friends? Our parallel intrigues meet in the middle. The high magister has procured an ancient device, a tesseract labyrinth of infinite complexity with which we might banish Metzoi long enough for our own households to storm the palace. With Hixos's slaves to open the gates from within and lead our warriors along the secret routes, our superior numbers will enable us to depose Turakhin. He will have no choice but to hand over the regency of the Bor Enclave to one of us!'

There it is, Amontar mused to himself. And I'm sure I know which one of us you intend it to be, ''friend''.

'It is agreed, then,' he said out loud. 'With Metzoi imprisoned within the labyrinth, Heqiroth will bring Turakhin to an agreed place and we can strike freely.' Turning to face the vizier, he narrowed his eyes. 'And if you think to betray us, we need only point to your involvement in Khetmes's treachery and you will simply disappear… along with the rest of your Nephrekh rabble.'

Heqiroth nodded quickly, his gaze kept low.

'How soon can the plan be put into action?' asked Uluszekh.

Hixos curled his claw-like fingers into a fist.

'My thralls can be ready to move by the next dual-sunset.'

ALARM BELLS RANG throughout the palace, though for whose benefit they were intended was a mystery. If, indeed, the witless multitudes that served the Magadha dynasty understood the great political upheaval that was about to begin across the Bor Enclave, they seemed not to care.

There was an old adage that Amontar couldn't exactly recall - something about the lower orders and their fascination with unimportant matters. As he led his own honour guard along the grand avenue to Turakhin's throne room with handfuls of dim-eyed commoners regarding them vacantly as they passed, he supposed that such wisdom might have felt particularly poignant.

Not to worry. He would include it in his victorious address to the people, perhaps as a sly barb at their expense.

Hixos's thralls had proven as good as the slave-lord's word. They had deactivated the great shield generators that protected the palace district, allowing Uluszekh's Doom Scythe wings to strafe the outer defences before the ground troops moved in. Ghost Arks had moved slowly through the streets of the capital, their grim clarions heralding the imminent end of the overlord's reign as the confederate Legions advanced.

Open war was not an elegant affair, but it was permitted under the forms of martiality as a symbolic show of force. In these things, the old ways mattered a great deal - whether by duellist, general or diplomat, the conflicts between the noble households had always been settled in just such a manner, since the earliest days of the Triarchy.

Following their thrall guide, Uluszekh and a cohort of his Immortals emerged from the immense hypaethral structure in the precinct beyond the grand avenue. The Tyrant of Ghyr was clearly not accustomed to walking into battle unseen and unchallenged, but with victory so close at hand he was also clearly quite willing to endure the indignity of it. He hailed Amontar as the two parties met.

'Greetings, friends. Fate smiles upon our enterprise, does it not?'

With his dagger concealed behind his back, Amontar nodded respectfully. If he could have forced a smile, then he would have.

'Indeed. We encountered little resistance - the vizier held true to his promises.'

A flash of heavy beam-weapon fire lit up the skyline, somewhere off towards the equatorial generator sinks where the fighting still apparently raged on.

Uluszekh gestured to the great throne room doors. 'Will you lead the way?'

Amontar snorted. What kind of fool do you take me for, he thought, but managed to be far more diplomatic in his response.

'It would be unseemly for either of us to be seen to enter first, under the circumstances.'

The Tyrant nodded. 'Together, then. We have nothing to fear from the regent any longer.'

Their warriors drew back the vast, graven doors on heavy iron chains, and the two lords strode into the throne room side by side. Flanked by their household guard, they were a sight that could have driven even a phaeron to surrender.

But the throne was empty.

No lychguard stood sentinel over the grand dais, no Immortal cohorts were arrayed to repel them.

Somewhat confused, Uluszekh directed his warriors to spread out through the chamber's expanse. 'Perhaps he—'

Laughter echoed from above them. Amontar's eyes snapped up to the shrouded galleries, where Turakhin lounged against a golden balustrade as though he might be casually taking in a mummers' performance.

We are betrayed. Damn you, Hixos.

'My lords,' the regent cackled, 'surely you can't be looking for me, with all your warriors in tow? You look very small from where I am standing.'

From the shadows in the arched recesses of the throne room, the unmistakeable, bulky silhouettes of the praetorians emerged - Metzoi's entire battalion, by the look of it. Their staffs and particle casters were trained and ready.

Amontar whirled around, realising too late that they were completely surrounded.

Turakhin made a grand flourish. 'As you can see, your pitiful coup has failed.'

A short, plaintive cry drew Amontar's attention to the alcove behind the main dais - Judicator Metzoi shoved a bedraggled looking Hixos into the light with the pommel of his sword. The slave-lord fell to his knees, his eyes beseeching his fellow conspirators for some kind of deliverance. Three of his alien thralls lay dead, their throats cut.

'Forgive me, my friends…' he mumbled. 'We were discovered.'

Turakhin was joined at the balustrade by Heqiroth. Uluszekh sagged at the sight, even as his staff was taken from him.

'You see?' Amontar spat. 'I warned you. I warned you both! We should not have trusted the vizier.'

The regent and his advisor made their way down the black marble staircase to the throne room floor, watching as the confederate troops were led away. Turakhin continued to laugh.

'Good, loyal Heqiroth - there is little that escapes his ear in courtly matters. You should not have underestimated him so, or maybe one of you would be sitting upon the throne of Borsis at this very moment.' He drew up next to Uluszekh, running a mocking finger down the captured lord's cold cheekbone. 'If you could stop plotting against one another for long enough, of course…'

Heqiroth stood just behind his master, fixing them with a piercing stare. His gaze now spoke of a resolve and intensity that Amontar would scarcely have guessed him to possess.

'It was simple enough to win their confidence. They knew that a covert intrigue would never be sanctioned by the judicator, after the fact. They needed to abide by the forms of martiality, if they wanted to seize the throne from you.'

His eyes seemed to sparkle at the thought.

'In fact, my lord regent - there is something else.'

Turakhin did not turn to face him. 'Oh yes? Present what you have, good Heqiroth. Though there is little that can further compound the misery that will soon be heaped upon these traitors…'

Heqiroth retrieved something from a pouch at his belt. 'It is a modest token, from Overseer Ruadzhe. He bid me reveal it to you only when the conspiracy was unmasked.'

The vizier placed it in Turakhin's open hand. The overlord looked down, as did Amontar.

It was a small, black pyramidal object. Its smooth inner surfaces seemed visible, moving and spiralling, whirling through infinite fractal loops, drawing the eye inwards… ever inwards, down into the darkness of an unknowable and eternal voidandnevershouldasentient— mindwitnesssuchhorrorssuchhorrorssuchhor—

Amontar let out a shriek, tearing his gaze away from the tesseract and sprawling to the floor. White flashes crazed his vision, hot needles of agony searing into his mental processes as he broke the contact.

Turakhin was not so fortunate.

His eyes wide and fixed upon the stygian depths, he simply vanished into the space between moments. The unassuming artefact dropped to the floor, clattering against the marble and letting out a faint, dying wheeze of quantum impossibility.

Uluszekh and Hixos stared. Amontar shook his head to clear the afterimages of his brush with oblivion, but he could only stare too.

Stooping to retrieve the tesseract labyrinth, Heqiroth turned to regard Amontar where he lay on the polished marble. The red gemstone at his breast seemed to pulse with an inner fire, and he hissed in delight.

'I should thank you, really,' said the former vizier. 'You were the perfect distraction while I made my final preparations. The lie wrapped in half a truth is so much easier to believe.'

Amontar rose shakily. He could not feel his own heartbeat.

Heqiroth turned to the dais where Metzoi still stood. 'Judicator Metzoi, appointed representative of the Triarch and praetorian guardian of Borsis - the forms of martiality have been obeyed. I stand victorious over the deposed regent, with fully two-thirds of his legions loyal to me and all conspirators against the throne brought out into the open. Will you honour my claim?'

Disbelief and outrage fought for dominance in Amontar's breast. Unthinking, his fingers fell to the grip of his concealed dagger.

'You will never sit upon the throne of Borsis!' he cried, and rammed the envenomed blade between Heqiroth's ribs, up to the hilt. It stuck fast.

There was a moment of awkward silence in the grand chamber.

Heqiroth glanced down at Amontar's blade, then to Amontar himself.

Then he turned back to the judicator.

'As you can see, the Magadha dynasty is plagued by madness. They fight amongst themselves, and are unfit to rule the Bor Enclave any longer. Noble Nephrekh will rise to relieve them of the regency, by your leave, and purge the alien menace that threatens our borders.'

He stepped away, and Amontar numbly released his grip on the knife.

'It is you who are mad, vizier!' he gasped. 'The judicator battalions are sworn to protect the overlord. You have falsely imprisoned their master!' Desperately, he pointed at Heqiroth. 'Kill him! Kill this usurper!'

The praetorians remained unmoving. Heqiroth spoke quietly, almost as an aside to Amontar and no one else.

'Do not embarrass yourself further. The judicator protects this world, not the regent.'

Amontar stumbled away, unable to process what he was hearing. He looked at Uluszekh with fresh eyes; where before had stood his sworn ally and rival for the throne, he now saw only a ghastly, tottering revenant of dark metal.

Heqiroth addressed the judicator once more. 'I ask again, will you honour my claim?'

Metzoi cast his inscrutable gaze over the assembled warriors, lords and praetorians. He looked down at the dead alien thralls at his feet, and then to the empty throne.

When he spoke, his voice was deep and resonant.

'The forms of martiality have been obeyed. The Triarch praetorians will honour your claim, Heqiroth of the Nephrekh dynasty. Take this world to war.'

Heqiroth laughed his triumph, long and loud.

Tugging Amontar's dagger from his ribs and letting it slip from his fingers, he took slow, deliberate steps towards the throne, and savoured each one. Standing before the ancient seat of power within the Bor Enclave, he gestured to the Magadha - no, NJephrekh - guards.

'Activate the holosphere.'

Amontar winced as energy pulsed through the conduits at the base of the throne, casting Heqiroth's skeletal form in a pale under-light that made him appear even more sinister. Hixos, still on his knees upon the dais, buried his face in his hands, lest his shame be caught in the glare of the new regent's vainglory.

Heqiroth laughed again, and snapped around to face the holospheric field.

'Loyal citizens of Borsis - your overlord is no more. I, Heqiroth of Nephrekh, have cast out the weakling Turakhin, and I stand before you now as the validated regent of the Bor Enclave!'

Across the world, vast projection cones would be relaying his words to every mausoleum, necropolis and monument district. The mindless commoners and drone-warriors of the Legions would find their eyes drawn irresistibly to the great, lambent figure that now addressed them from the dark skies.

None could fail to hear the commands of Overlord Heqiroth.

'There is a creeping evil at the borders of our domain, and I would see it eliminated once and for all before it challenges the eternal supremacy of the necrontyr race. We shall halt the advance of the alien vermin, and kick over every rock until we have driven them into extinction.'

As one, the praetorians around the throne room began to beat a fist upon their golden breastplates - a ponderous, fearful rhythm that underpinned Heqiroth's words. Cowed by the rising sound, Uluszekh tried to catch Amontar's eye, but the Lord of Xanderat found that he could no longer bear the sight of him for even a moment.

Heqiroth continued. 'Even though the subsumed Legions of Nephrekh are fewer in number than they once were, Borsis is far from helpless. The Triarch praetorians have kept a great secret upon this world, and now is the time to unleash its true power. We have not had need of such destructive weaponry since the days of the War in Heaven, but the necessary modifications will be made…'

As he spoke, his fingers strayed to the red gemstone mounted where his heart should have been. It pulsed in time with the praetorians' beating, and Amontar caught the faintest impression of a shimmering, quicksilver shape at its centre.

It was moving. Writhing. Yearning to be free.

Still illuminated by the hazy glow of the holosphere, Heqiroth noted Amontar's gaze and transfixed him with a fearsome, malignant stare. In that moment, there seemed no end to the depths of his hatred.

'Judicator Metzoi,' he hissed. 'Prepare the World Engine.'

THE LAST MAN

C L Werner

THE STREETS OF Wartenhof were a foul mire of mud and icy slush, desolate and deserted. Shuttered windows faced the troop marching through the town, the door of each hovel locked and barred. The soldiers of the Nachtsheer, calloused veterans long in the employ of the tyrannical Voivode Malbork von Drak, took a sardonic pleasure in the fright they evoked in the peasants. To them these people were little more than dumb animals, creatures to be subjugated. Mercenaries from realms as distant as Nordland and Solland, they felt neither kinship nor pity for the people of Sylvania. It was why Count von Drak employed them. Foreign troops wouldn’t balk at any atrocity that was asked of them.

The lean, russet-cloaked man who accompanied the black-garbed Nachtsheer almost wished he could share the mercenaries’ callous disregard for the denizens of Wartenhof. It was well enough for the soldiers to sneer at the fears of peasants, at the impotent hostility that shone in people’s eyes when they saw them approach. For them, the town was simply another posting, a place that would be left behind and forgotten when the crisis was over and new orders were issued to them. They didn’t call this place home.

For Vincent Rabe, it was different. He’d spent all his life around Wartenhof. As far back as could be remembered, his family had lived in the town. His father had been a forester in the service of the ruling cneaz and his father before him. Vincent was the fifth Rabe to hold the posting, acting as steward of Cneaz Vaclav Rezachevici’s extensive holdings. It was a position of honour and respect, even if it made him the sworn adversary of every poacher in the district. The resentment of poachers, however, was something he could accept. The scorn of his neighbours was something different.

A bitter smile crept onto Vincent’s lean features as his gaze strayed to the cross chalked across the door of a nearby hut. Every day there were fewer neighbours to despise him for colluding with the Nachtsheer, and fewer ears to listen to his protests that he’d been seconded to the brutal mercenaries by order of Cneaz Vaclav.

‘Quiet as a tomb,’ one of the Nachtsheer cursed, spitting into the slush of ice beneath his feet.

‘Keep it that way,’ snarled the commander of the squad, a burly Ostlander named Andreas. The soldier’s hair was parted by a livid white scar, the legacy of a boyhood encounter with a goblin’s knife. A collection of leathery green ears hung from his belt, a silent testament that he’d revenged the injury many times.

Vincent could tell from Andreas’s voice that the soldier was uneasy. It didn’t take any great stretch of imagination to understand why. Plague was abroad in Wartenhof. Normally, the Nachtsheer would simply cordon off an infected community and let it starve. Here, however, because of the strategic location of the town and the influence of Cneaz Vaclav in Drakenhof, the mercenaries had been compelled to take a more intimate interest in the town’s fate. A renegade priest, a madman calling himself Vanhal, was inciting rebellion in the west. The von Draks intended to use Wartenhof as a staging area for their campaign against the rebels once the spring thaw came. For that they needed a living town, not a dead one.

Andreas scowled at the buildings lining the street. His hand brushed against the tangle of dried goblin ears as he removed a strip of leather from beneath his belt. He glimpsed at the crude map of the town inked into it. Looking back at his troops, he jabbed a finger at one of the huts. The mercenaries shied when they saw the cross marked on the door – the warning that plague had visited the household. The Ostlander repeated his gesture, this time with a surly growl.

Accustomed to serving as gaolers for doomed villages, the Nachtsheer were having a difficult time accepting their new role as corpse-collectors. It took armed warriors to enforce the voivode’s edict demanding that the dead be burned as soon as they were discovered. The serfs of Sylvania were prepared to endure much from their noble lords, but denying their dead the dignity of resting in the gardens of Morr was going too far. Several soldiers had been wounded trying to take corpses away to be burned in the plague pit outside the town. In their sorrow, even the most docile serf might become a raging lion.

‘You’re sure?’ Andreas’s question was directed at Vincent. His men were still reluctant to approach the door, each soldier’s face turned to the forester with an expression of anxious hope.

Vincent sighed. Even among his new comrades, he had no friends. With a nod, he crushed their hope. ‘It has been three days since Mircea and his wife were last seen by anyone. When I knocked on their door this morning, there was no answer.’

‘Break it in,’ Andreas ordered his men. The mercenaries glared sullenly at Vincent, but carried out the command. It took only a single kick to smash in the wooden door. Hands closed about the grips of their swords, the soldiers swarmed into the little hut.

What they found sent gasps of alarm and horror ringing out in the street. Vincent hurried into the building with Andreas to see what had provoked such shock, and sickened at the grisly sight. Once again, the Nachtsheer had the advantage over the forester. They didn’t know the actors in the ghastly tableau set before them. They couldn’t put names to the gore-spattered faces that were turned towards them. Neither did they recognise the chewed wreckage strewn across the floor as belonging to a friend and neighbour.

Plague had decimated Wartenhof, but to this had been added an even worse calamity: hunger. The sinister starfall that had rained foul rocks down upon the Sylvanian countryside was an even greater bane to the town. Fields had been flattened by the noxious star-stones, the soil poisoned by their foul vapours. Crops had withered and livestock sickened. An already poor harvest had been ravaged by this ill sending, reducing the ability to sustain the town much less the regiment of Nachtsheer.

It was small surprise, then, that such food as the town was able to gather went to Cneaz Vaclav and the Nachtsheer. The people were left to fend for themselves, reduced to subsisting on tree bark and cooking the filthy black rats that infested the town. Count von Drak no longer ruled Wartenhof alone. He was forced to share his reign with an even greater tyrant: King Hunger.

The obscene result of perpetual starvation stared at the soldiers from the gloom of the hut. Discovered in the midst of their loathsome repast, the disturbed peasants sprang at the Nachtsheer, brandishing dripping bones and bloodied knives in their gore-streaked hands. Viciously, the mercenaries struck out against the corpse-eaters, cutting them down with their slashing swords.

Vincent watched the scene unfold, unable to reconcile his memories of the people he had known all his life with the degenerate cannibals being killed before his eyes. As though he were moving through some awful dream, he drew the heavy axe from his belt and defended himself as a blood-spattered thing that had once been a swineherd named Dumitru came leaping at him with a cleaver. His axe caught the cannibal in the midsection, opening his belly and knocking the howling wretch to the floor.

Andreas stabbed the point of his sword into Dumitru’s throat, silencing the dying man’s howls. Grimly, the Ostlander wiped his blade clean on the dead man’s goatskin boots. There was a look of disgust on his face as he gazed over the carnage his men had witnessed. ‘Take them all to the pit,’ he ordered and started to turn away.

The motion was arrested in mid-step. Andreas’s face paled until it was the same lifeless shade as the scar running through his scalp. The other Nachtsheer followed the direction of their commander’s gaze. Vincent’s stomach sickened when he saw the thing that had so horrified these hardened warriors.

Mircea’s gnawed remains were strewn across the floor. The cannibals must have been feeding on the corpse for at least an hour. It was impossible there could be any trace of life in what was left. Yet, before the incredulous eyes of soldier and forester alike, that human detritus was moving! With abnormal, abominable vitality, it was struggling to lift itself from the floor with the stump of arm still clinging to its shoulder. Its mouth flopped open and closed like a gasping fish. Its eyes rolled about in the pits of its face, staring balefully at the men gawking at it.

It didn’t take an order from Andreas to send the soldiers scurrying out into the street. Soon the structure was in flames, put to the torch by one of his men.

AS THEY WATCHED flames engulf the hut and the horror inside, the Nachtsheer felt relief. Vincent wished he could take comfort in the destruction, but it was impossible. The soldiers didn’t have to live here. They didn’t have to wonder about what they had seen. It was enough for them to simply destroy it.

Vincent Rabe didn’t have that luxury.

‘It is better not to ask why.’

Those words of wisdom came to Vincent from one of the few men in Wartenhof he could still count as a friend. Though by rights there should have been nothing but bitter enmity between Cneaz Vaclav’s forester and Wartenhof’s most capable poacher. Vincent’s father had never been able to catch Szalardy Dozsa and the son had fared as poorly as his predecessor. Out of their antagonistic relationship a strange kind of mutual respect had grown. It was still Vincent’s duty to catch Szalardy and of course it was the poacher’s job to avoid getting caught, but that didn’t mean the two men couldn’t feel a professional admiration for each other.

Vincent shook his head and sipped at the cup of watery beer his host had provided him when he’d come to Szalardy’s hut and started to relate the harrowing experience of that afternoon. ‘I can’t let it go,’ he said. ‘I have to wonder why the gods could allow such… such horror.’

Szalardy paced about the simply furnished room, the nimble fingers of his hands folded across his emaciated belly. ‘Hungry men don’t ask. They take,’ the poacher replied philosophically.

‘That isn’t what… It’s the other… That thing, that dead thing trying to move, trying to live again.’

‘Even the priests don’t know the ways of the gods,’ Szalardy stated. He forced a laugh to his lips. ‘I’ve spent most of my life amusing Ranald and I’m still never sure if the Trickster God is going to steer me away from one of your traps!’

Szalardy saw that his attempt at levity had no effect. It was a decidedly more dour man who seated himself on the stool facing Vincent. ‘You’ve heard what they are saying? The stories about Vanhal? That he is a necromancer, and wherever he goes he calls the dead from their graves?’ The laugh that he now uttered was thin and bitter. ‘Would a mere man dare defy the Von Draks?’

Vincent stared at his friend. ‘But why? Why would anyone evoke such terrible forces?’

The poacher shrugged. ‘He’s evil,’ he answered simply. ‘Or he’s mad. Maybe both.’ His expression became grave and he glanced across the hut, looking at a section of the floor. ‘Maybe he lost someone, someone he would do anything to get back.’

The forester repressed a shudder as he heard the mournful pain in his friend’s voice. Szalardy had lost both his sons and his wife when the plague struck Wartenhof. Except for his aged mother, the poacher had no family left to him.

‘One more hour,’ Szalardy said. ‘One more day. Wouldn’t that be worth anything?’

Vincent rose from his stool, every muscle in his body tense. Few men would have heard that slight scratching sound, but Vincent’s hearing had been sharpened by a life spent in the wilderness. His ears were acute enough to pick up that furtive scratching – a scratching he knew wasn’t the work of rat claws.

Szalardy grabbed his friend’s arm as he started to move towards the sound. ‘Please,’ he asked. ‘Leave her for me. She’s all I have.’

Horror pounded in Vincent’s heart as he pulled away and rushed across the room. For a moment he hesitated, staring at the floor. How often had he searched for Szalardy’s hiding place, that secret spot where he cached the furs from his traps? Now he knew he had found it.

He wished he hadn’t.

Szalardy didn’t move to stop him as Vincent’s fingers closed about the edge of the concealed door sunk into the floor. The poacher watched in silence as the forester exposed his hiding place and the thing which was its only occupant.

Scrawny, pallid arms reached up at Vincent as he threw open the door. He could see the blotchy marks of the plague that discoloured the decayed flesh and smelled the stink of the disease even over the funk of rot. There was no question of how Szalardy’s mother had died.

‘The one you saw wasn’t the first,’ Szalardy said, his voice soft and resigned. ‘There have been others. Some think it is Morr’s punishment because of the cannibals, others say it is Vanhal’s sorcery reaching out to claim Wartenhof. A few think it is the poison from the starfall.’ The poacher rose to his feet and faced his friend. ‘I don’t care what it is. It’s given me back my mother.’

There was a dagger in Szalardy’s hand as he approached Vincent. Cautiously, the forester backed away from his friend and the hole where the corpse of his dead mother scratched and clawed.

‘Szalardy…’ Vincent called to the poacher in a soft, placating tone. He continued to back away, careful to avoid the gaping hole. ‘This… It… Can’t you see the horror of it?’

The poacher paused, his eyes misty as he considered his friend’s question. ‘Yes. Oh, yes. I know the horror. Haven’t I lived with it these many weeks?’ He looked down at the dagger in his hand, the blade he had used so often to flense the hide from a trapped rabbit. He glanced back at Vincent. ‘Horror is all that is left now.’

‘Please, Szalardy, try to be sane,’ Vincent pleaded.

A sad smile formed on the poacher’s face. ‘We were friends, weren’t we?’ He raised his eyes to the ceiling. ‘All these years and you never caught me. Now you have something Cneaz Vaclav will be happy to hear.’

‘He doesn’t need to know anything,’ Vincent said. ‘No one need know of this, but we cannot… That thing down there isn’t your mother any more.’

Szalardy shook his head. ‘I think you would lie for me,’ he told Vincent. ‘Do they hang men who harbour monsters, or do you burn for such a crime? I wouldn’t let you take such a risk.’ The dagger fell to the floor as he strode towards the hole.

‘Besides, it still looks like mother.’

Vincent moved to stop Szalardy, but he was too late. Like a plummet, the unarmed poacher dropped down into the cellar and the waiting talons of the undead thing below. As he fled the hut, Vincent thought his friend’s screams would never stop ringing in his ears.

Before the next bell tolled, he returned with Andreas and a Nachtsheer patrol. Szalardy’s hut and the decayed monster beneath it were put to the torch. A macabre pyre for the man who’d refused to accept the cruelty of King Death.

The scene at Szalardy’s was repeated many times in the days that followed. The plague wasn’t through with Wartenhof and as quickly as the Nachtsheer quarantined one hovel the disease would pop up somewhere else. Even burning the structures did nothing to halt the corruption. Corpse carts trawled the streets twice a day, the dead heaped like cordwood as they bore their diseased cargo to the flames of the plague pit. Still, there were many bodies that went unburied: those with none to care if they went undiscovered and those with relations who cared only too much. Several times the Nachtsheer had uncovered some hidden attic or sealed room where families had concealed their dead, too horrified by the ghastliness of the plague pit to give up their beloved.

Such scenes were made still more horrible when the corpses shambled from their concealment, animated by some obscene semblance of vitality. With rotten fingers and clawed hands, the undead struck out at the living, even those who had loved them so dearly in life. Vincent had been there when a woman had been clawed apart by the rotten husks of her own children, and had watched as the shrivelled shell of an old man bit through the throat of his own son.

Day in, day out, there was no refuge from the horror that had descended upon Wartenhof. One by one, the men of the Nachtsheer began to drop away. Some deserted, deciding that even gold wasn’t adequate compensation for what was asked of them. Some were killed by the crazy and the desperate, mobbed by gangs of cannibals or knifed by looters. Many, however, were taken by the plague itself.

Sense of duty bound Vincent to the survivors, at least until providence deserted him. He’d been fortunate to escape the fate that had claimed so many of his comrades. His household wasn’t so fortunate. One morning, his wife Mircalla awoke to discover the stinking black boils of the plague at her throat and on her armpits. The plague had come for her.

Vincent had seen the plague take victims in only a few hours, while with others the flicker of life might linger for days. He knew there was no hope, that those visited by the plague were doomed to die. His obligation to the community was to announce Mircalla’s affliction, to alert the Nachtsheer, to have the white cross chalked upon his door to warn his neighbours away from his hovel.

It was no easy thing, refusing that obligation. It was an onerous weight that pressed down upon Vincent’s body, compelling him to obey the edicts of the voivode and cneaz. Defiance was a thing that had been periodically starved and beaten out of the minds of Sylvania’s peasants. Obedience was something that had become almost instinctive to men of Vincent Rabe’s station.

Yet, as he looked down into his wife’s eyes, he saw the last embers of her love for him shining out from behind the pain that blighted her flesh, and Vincent knew he could never consign her to the horror of the plague pit and its infernal fire. To tell anyone of Mircalla’s sickness would be to condemn her to such a fate. Mustering his courage, denying his duty to Cneaz Vaclav, he determined that his obligation to the woman he loved was greater than anything his noble lord and his peasant neighbours could expect of him.

The forester stayed at his wife’s side throughout the illness, shirking his work with the Nachtsheer. There was no sense to those hideous excursions through the town. Nothing they did, no matter how ruthless, had any effect on the spread of the plague. It was useless, an empty and fruitless labour. At least by staying with Mircalla, Vincent might ease her suffering, ensuring that she didn’t slip away into Morr’s keeping alone and unlamented.

Day and night, Vincent maintained his vigil. His senses became inured to the sick-room reek and blind to the horror of the sores and boils. It was harder to deafen himself to Mircalla’s pained gasps. Sometimes he would berate himself for being selfish, for greedily trying to possess every last moment of life she had left. Sometimes he would hear her cry out and wonder if he should do something to speed her passing. Then he would look down into her eyes and see that same light in her eyes. Even at the price of such pain, she was determined to have every last moment she could with him.

When the end finally came, Vincent tried to deny it. For long hours, he continued to hold Mircalla’s hand, feeling the last warmth drain out of the lifeless flesh. It was only when he heard someone pounding at the door of his hovel that he finally stirred from beside her deathbed.

Vincent felt his heart turn cold with fear as he opened the door. In the midst of his despair over Mircalla, he’d been too distraught to worry about the consequences of his grief. Now, the forester had a very vivid reminder of the obligations he’d cast aside. Standing outside his hovel, draped in armour as black as night itself, was the Nachtsheer sergeant, Andreas.

The soldier’s expression was stern as he stared down at Vincent. One hand rested on the pommel of his sword, ready to rip it from its scabbard on the slightest provocation. Andreas wrinkled his nose as the sick-house stink of Vincent’s hovel drifted out into the street. It was a stench the Ostlander had smelled many times before, a diseased reek he couldn’t fail to recognise.

Vincent braced himself, certain that his duplicity had been discovered. In that moment, his only regret was the knowledge that Mircalla’s body would be carted away to the fires of the plague pit. That he would suffer the same fate, possibly without the mercy of being dead first, seemed almost trivial to him beside the horrible image of the flames consuming his wife’s cold flesh.

For an instant Andreas glowered at him, then the soldier’s grip on his sword relaxed. ‘The Nachtsheer has missed you these past five days,’ Andreas said, his voice a low growl.

‘Five days?’ Vincent blinked. Somehow it didn’t seem that it had taken so long for Mircalla to die.

‘I’ve come to tell you that your services will no longer be needed,’ Andreas continued. ‘You are released.’

Again, Vincent felt confused by the soldier’s words. ‘Cneaz Vaclav needs me to guide the Nachtsheer,’ he said, though his tone lacked the display of emotion that might make the statement a protest.

‘Cneaz Vaclav needs no one now,’ Andreas said. ‘The plague took him last night.’ His face twisted into a bitter smile. ‘Even if it hadn’t, there is no one left to carry out his orders. My men are either dead or deserted. I knew when I was sent here that Wartenhof would be the end of us.’

He reached up, pulling away the scarf wrapped about his neck. Vincent recoiled when he saw the black marks on Andreas’s throat.

‘When?’ was all Vincent could think to say.

‘Yesterday,’ the soldier answered. ‘Almost the same time the cneaz was drawing his last breath.’ Andreas stiffened, turned a haunted face to the forester. ‘I will be staying at the tavern. When the pain gets too great I have a good knife of Nordland steel. My passing will go easier if you will make a promise to me.’

‘If it is in my power.’

Andreas nodded, accepting Vincent’s tenuous commitment. ‘I want you to take my corpse to the pit. Burn me. Better the fire than…’ He waved his hand in a helpless gesture. ‘They come back, you know. Not just some of them like in the beginning. All of them. Things from a nightmare. The undead.’ Suddenly his hand was clenched tight about Vincent’s shoulder. ‘I won’t come back like that. Put me in the fire! Promise me!’

Vincent twisted under the soldier’s grip, his body shuddering in revulsion. Somehow the same man who had held the diseased fingers of Mircalla for days now cringed from the infected touch of Andreas. Fear is never the slave of logic.

‘I will. I will!’ Vincent vowed, squirming free from Andreas. The scarred Ostlander stepped away from the door, ostentatiously replacing the scarf around his neck.

‘The tavern,’ he reminded Vincent. Andreas pointed at the room behind the forester. ‘If she’s gone already, you’d better burn her too,’ he warned. He frowned when he saw Vincent shake his head. ‘She’ll come back if you don’t. But it won’t be your wife; it’ll be some monster wearing her flesh.’

‘Thank you for your advice,’ Vincent said, his voice cold as a razor.

Andreas shrugged. ‘Don’t get yourself killed until you’ve burned my corpse,’ he said. ‘The tavern. Don’t forget.’

Vincent did forget. There were so many other things that occupied him in the days afterward that a promise extracted from him by a man he had feared and hated was far from his foremost thoughts.

WARTENHOF WAS DYING. There was no one to gather the bodies, to mark the places of infection, to toll the bell in the shrine of Morr and no one to usher the spirits of the dead into the netherworld. In the first days, the wailing of the bereaved, the moans of the afflicted were the only sounds rising from the stricken town. When Vincent stirred from his hovel in search of food, there was no one on the streets, only the stray dogs who nibbled at the unburied corpses scattered about. At first the curs were timid and easily frightened away, but with each day the mongrels became bolder. Where they had once retreated from the forester, they now stood their ground, snapping and snarling with bared fangs as they crouched over their hideous fodder.

Food was scarce before the plague, but now it took only a little searching to find enough to sustain himself. Every hovel and hut had its hidden cache of grain and seed, secreted away in defiance of Cneaz Vaclav and his decrees. Though never enough to feed an entire household through the winter, it was more than sufficient to sustain a single man.

Rarely did Vincent encounter anyone on these scavenging expeditions. But there were times and experiences that Vincent knew he could never forget.

The wattle-and-daub hovel that belonged to Petru, one of Wartenhof’s farmers, seemed to Vincent like any of the other abandoned structures. He couldn’t say when Petru had been taken, though he did remember visiting the place with the Nachtsheer to collect the body of his son. The white cross was chalked up on the door which swung open in the wind. Vincent knew that with the wild dogs prowling the streets, no inhabited building would leave its door unbarred. With this wisdom in hand, he descended upon the hut to see if Petru had left anything behind.

As he stole through the open door, Vincent came within an inch of losing his life. From the darkness there was a flash of steel. The forester darted back as sharpened metal whistled past his face. His hand fell to the grip of his hatchet, a tool that had served him well against marauding wolves and panthers.

It was, of course, no such animal that wielded cold steel. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw his attacker standing defiantly in the centre of the room, shoulders hunched, hand locked about the splintered grip of a meat cleaver. There was a feral, vicious gleam in the eyes that glared at Vincent. Even a starving wolf had never looked so bestial to the forester.

The hideous situation was compounded by Vincent’s recognition of the man. He was, or had been, a swineherd named Razvan. Even as he stared at the half-crazed savage, it was hard for him to credit the evidence of his eyes. Razvan had been an exuberant, cheerful neighbour. How many times had Vincent watched children clustered about him in the town square, listening with fascination as he regaled them with some old Fennone legend or some new fable of his own concoction? How often had he swapped lies with the man over mugs of ale in Lucian’s tavern?

There was no recognition in Razvan’s fierce stare, only violent challenge. Keeping a grip on the hatchet tucked in his belt, Vincent retreated back into the street, content to leave the madman to whatever plunder he’d found. The lesson, however, wasn’t lost on the forester. Before entering another structure, he would check the earth around it for signs of life. Never again would he assume a place unoccupied, no matter how desolate and forlorn.

And he would start bearing a sword as well as a hatchet.

Prowling through the shambles that had been Ghenadie’s mercantile, Vincent again found himself far from alone. There had been tracks outside the big half-timber building – as soon as the threat of Nachtsheer patrols was gone those who still lived in Wartenhof had descended upon the mercantile to steal supplies. The looters were gone, however – they had fled the town or else succumbed to the plague themselves. The only trace of them beyond their tracks was the corpse of a farmer with half his head caved-in; a victim of some disagreement among the vultures.

Vincent didn’t have much hope that the scavengers had left anything, but there was always the chance that they might have overlooked something. It transpired that they had.

In one of the rooms of the mercantile’s upper floor, Vincent discovered the pale, wasted frame of Tereza. Even a few weeks ago, Ghenadie’s wife had been the beauty of Wartenhof. Now it was an emaciated, near lifeless thing that lay stretched upon the enormous fur-trimmed bed. Vincent wouldn’t have recognised her except for the emerald band around her finger and her long golden hair. He wouldn’t have realised she was still alive if not for the trembling hand that rose from the bed and pointed at him.

There was too much desperate emotion in that gesture for Vincent to confuse it with the vacant, horrible action of the undead. When he looked at Tereza’s face, there was entreaty in her eyes, not the ghastly emptiness of a zombie.

He started to approach her, but the woman gave a violent shake of her hand, warning him back. He could see the splotches blemishing her delicate skin. She warned him back and when he had retreated a few paces, she made a stabbing motion with her finger. When Vincent gave her a questioning look, she repeated the gesture, raising her sickly body from the pillows as she jabbed her finger at the wall behind him.

Meekly, Vincent turned and tried to see what the sick woman was pointing to. After a moment’s confusion, he drew aside the heavy tapestry fastened to the wall. Tereza’s pointing hand became more emphatic, waving him towards the floor. He crouched down, almost flattening himself along the boards. Even with his nose a few inches from the wall he would have missed the hidden catch without Tereza’s guidance. A deft turn of the almost invisible hook and a secret panel opened in the wall.

From the sickbed, Tereza uttered a relieved gasp. Vincent looked back to see her slump back in the pillows, her arm dropping and dangling limply along the side of the bed. The relieved gasp collapsed into a death rattle, the woman finally conceding her long fight against the plague. It seemed she had lingered only to impart the knowledge of Ghenadie’s secret hiding place. With the task done there was nothing left to hold her to the mortal plane.

Vincent reached into the hiding place, dragging out a large bronze coffer. It took three blows from his hatchet to smash open the lock. When he did, and when he let his eyes fall onto the contents of the coffer, a bitter laugh rose from his throat.

The coffer was filled with coins. Gold and silver, the treasure of Ghenadie skimmed from the produce of Wartenhof, stolen before it could reach the hands of Cneaz Vaclav. It was more wealth than any man in the town could have hoped to see, enough to buy Wartenhof ten times over. Ghenadie must have spent decades amassing such a fortune without alerting Vaclav to his larceny. But, then, Ghenadie had been a crafty man well suited to sharp dealings and daring ventures.

Vincent ran his hand through the coins, feeling their weight as they poured through his fingers. He glanced back at the bed and the plague-marked corpse of Tereza. Treasure hadn’t helped her or her husband. Death was a force that respected neither wealth nor breeding. Death struck down rich and poor, noble and peasant, with equal disdain. There was no bribing the heralds of Morr, no paying away the claws of plague.

The forester left the coffer where it lay. Gold and silver! These were useless things. Could a man eat them? Could a man burn them for heat? Could he drink them? Vincent would have happily traded the entire coffer for a few ounces of venison and a bag of beans.

As he left the mercantile, Vincent wondered if some other scavenger would find the treasure. Perhaps some soul would use the money to escape Wartenhof and buy his way to a land where the plague was unknown. He wished such an adventurer the grace of Shallya and the luck of Ranald.

He wished he could escape Wartenhof, but he knew he could never leave the town. The ties that bound him to his home were too terrible to escape.

Two days after she died, Mircalla’s body stirred. The obscene echo of life poured back into her, causing her eyes to open, her mouth to move, her muscles to flex. Vincent had waited beside her deathbed to see if his wife would share the monstrous fate that had stolen upon so many of Wartenhof’s dead. He thought he had prepared himself for such a ghastly eventuality, but when it came he could only shudder and cringe in terror.

He almost died then. Vincent appreciated that fact even as he cowered against the wall of his hovel, unable to do anything but gawk at Mircalla’s ghoulish resurrection. Dead hands groped towards him with clawed fingers, jaws snapped in grisly menace. Had she been able, Mircalla would have killed him and he would have been helpless to stop her.

Foresight saved Vincent. Before the unclean simulacrum of life settled into his wife’s corpse, he’d taken the precaution of lashing her down to the bed. As he took the precaution, he’d tried to tell himself it wasn’t needed, that Mircalla would remain at peace. He would justify his decision to spare her the fires of the plague pit.

It was a long time before Vincent was able to rouse himself from his grief and horror, to tear his eyes away from the thing thrashing about in its bindings. He reached for the hatchet at his belt. How many times had he played the scene out in his fears? The undead husk of Mircalla and the abominable duty he must perform!

His fingers tightened about the hatchet and he moved away from the wall and approached the bed. As he raised the axe to bring the blade chopping down into the prisoned thing, Vincent’s resolve faltered. For all the horror of it, for all his understanding that what was tied down on the bed wasn’t his wife, it still looked like her. It was her flesh it wore. What if he were wrong, what if there were some remnant of her identity locked away inside that dead flesh?

Stricken with doubt, Vincent let the hatchet fall to the floor. He retreated from the bound zombie, escaping out into the silent streets of Wartenhof. Later, perhaps, he would have the strength to return, to do what he knew he must do, but for now he could only flee. He would find some other place to give him shelter, some refuge away from the empty eyes of the woman he had loved.

It was dark when Vincent abandoned his home to the ghastly echo of his wife. The image of Mircalla staring at him with that lifeless gaze, the sound of her thrashing in her bonds, these were memories that tortured him anew with each step he took, a physical agony that turned his blood cold and his stomach sick. He felt that he must scream or go mad.

He had actually stopped in the middle of the street, had started to sob when some sixth sense warned him to be silent. Instinctively, Vincent turned to the source of his unease. At first it was difficult to make out the shape in the shadow of a peasant hut. When he did, he wished the sight had remained indistinct. What he saw was a feral dog and the corpse of a plague victim. The corpse was horrible with the marks of the disease, made still more hideous by the depredation wrought by the dog. Great bites disfigured its limbs; its left cheek was a twist of gnawed flesh, its belly eaten out clear down to the spine.

Yet for all the damage inflicted upon it, the corpse moved! It raked its decayed hands through the gory mush of the slaughter dog, mindlessly strewing the street with the animal’s organs. There was a terrifying deliberation in the zombie’s savagery, a thoroughness of hate that needed no mentality to guide it. The unreasoning enmity of the dead for the living.

For a moment, Vincent hesitated, lost in the horror of what he was seeing. Then he felt himself gripped by a profound loathing – a disgust for this ravening abomination. Was it not enough that the plague had decimated Wartenhof? Must the town suffer the further misery of these loathsome fiends?

Snarling the names of Taal and Rhya, the gods of forest and meadow, Vincent drew the sword from his belt and rushed at the zombie. The creature was just turning away from its dismemberment of the dog when the cold steel slashed across its neck. The mushy flesh parted almost to the bone, leaving the head to flop obscenely against its shoulder, dangling by a flap of skin.

Vincent called upon his gods again as the mutilated zombie staggered towards him. A second chopping blow sent the rotten head rolling along the ground and the corrupt body pitched over, its vile vitality extinguished.

The forester gazed upon the twice-slain corpse, feeling his fury mounting with each breath he drew into his body. Again and again he brought his sword down into the rank flesh, butchering the zombie beyond anything recognisably human. With each blow, Vincent thought of Mircalla tied down to the bed, his Mircalla, who was now a thing such as this. As he hacked apart the undead, he tried to ignore the shame buried inside him, guilt that he wasn’t strong enough to do the same for his wife.

Panting from his exertion, his clothes stained with the decayed filth from the zombie’s rotten veins, Vincent recoiled from the carcass, disgusted not only at the corrupt nature of the thing he had destroyed, but also at his own bestial viciousness. He thought of Razvan, the cheerful storyteller who had descended to a state of brute madness. Was that same horrible gleam in his eye now? Did his face curl into that mask of primitive savagery? With a cry of revulsion he fled from the zombie he had destroyed. His retreat was a futile effort. It wasn’t the monster in the street he feared, but the one that might be growing inside his own mind.

AS HIS NEW home, Vincent selected the ostentatious apartment of Wartenhof’s only moneylender – a man who’d fled the town long ago to seek the supposed safety of Drakenhof itself. Behind him he’d been forced to leave rich furnishings and opulent accoutrements that even Cneaz Vaclav might have envied.

The richness of his new refuge proved a most insidious trap. That was something he’d discovered the third night he spent in the place.

Trying to sleep in the richly upholstered bed, Vincent was gripped by uneasiness. It was the same sort of nebulous anxiety that he’d felt many times in the forest when the panther or wolf he’d been tracking turned about and began stalking him instead. Despite the precautions he’d taken to secure the doors and windows, he felt a nagging sense of impending danger. Something he’d overlooked. Something he’d forgotten.

Unable to sleep, Vincent finally rose from the bed. The moneylender’s townhouse had been built on two floors, private chambers above with utilitarian rooms such as the kitchen and study below. Just as he approached the stairs, his sharp ears caught the creak of a wooden step. Like a statue, he froze – every sense alert for another sound. He didn’t have long to wait before the creak was repeated. Somewhere in the darkness below, someone or something was mounting the stairs!

Vincent drew the sword from his belt, eyes straining to penetrate the shadows. His heart pounded in his chest. Vainly he tried to reason away the dread clawing at him. Perhaps the rats were back, scampering about in the dark. Perhaps it was another survivor he heard, come to loot the moneylender’s vault.

Vault! Nausea welled up inside the forester as he recognised the worry that had been nagging at him, the sense of omission that refused to let him feel secure. When he’d made his inspection of the building and fortified it against invasion from outside, he’d neglected to check one place – the cellar underneath the larder.

The forester backed away from the stairs as his mind made other terrible connections. The moneylender had fled Wartenhof and left most of his possessions behind, yet there was no cross mark upon his door to indicate the plague had visited his household. Had some miracle preserved his home when all around him was afflicted, or had he simply hidden the fact from his neighbours? The moneylender’s household had been large, a big family and many servants. How many of them had felt the touch of plague? How many of them had he left behind, or hidden away in the cellar like Szalardy’s mother?

A beam of moonlight streamed down through a hole in the roof, bathing the stairway in silvery light. Every muscle in Vincent’s body began to tremble when he saw the silent procession stalking up those steps towards him. The moneylender had apparently left a very large household behind. Some of the advancing zombies looked so corrupt and decayed that they must have been weeks rotting down there in the darkness. The fresher ones were even more gruesome, their decayed flesh marred with the marks of nails and teeth. The horrible inference struck Vincent like a physical blow – when the moneylender abandoned Wartenhof, he had cast his still-living servants into the cellar to be slaughtered by the undead!

The foremost zombie was almost upon Vincent before his shrinking mind recovered its focus. With a cry of anguish, he brought his sword slashing into the decayed monster, breaking ribs and leaving bloated organs to spill from its torn flesh. The creature staggered back, upsetting the approach of the zombies behind it. For an instant, the forester hesitated, debating whether he should defend the ground he held.

The sight of the zombie he had struck, the rotten corpse with its dripping organs and shattered ribs lurching back towards him – it was this that made the courage of a man who had once hunted a crazed bear by himself buckle and break. With abject terror, Vincent turned and fled, retreating into the opulent chamber he had thought to claim as his own. Gasping for breath, shivering from crown to toe, he slammed the door shut and dropped the beam across it.

He was still leaning against the door when he heard the zombies staggering down the hall. His hands were pressed down upon the beam, trying to hold it in place when he felt the impact of rotten fists against the panel. The door shuddered ever so slightly under the impact. Then other fists were added to the assault and the commotion became more pronounced. Like blows from a hammer, the fists struck again and again, battering away at the barrier.

Tireless and remorseless, the zombies maintained their attack on the door. Vincent could feel the tremor of the repeated blows, which made the hinges shudder and the hard wood panels splinter. How long would the barrier hold? How long before it collapsed and left him helpless before the undead horde?

Vincent glanced over the room. There was no window, no connecting door. He was like a hare trapped in a box, waiting for the poacher to lift the lid and drag him out to be butchered.

A grim smile flickered on the forester’s face and he lifted his gaze upwards. There was a way out! But would there be time enough to take it?

Reluctantly, Vincent pushed himself away from the door, going sick as he watched the way the bar shuddered in its frame without his weight to reinforce it. There was no help for it; he had to trust that it would hold, that it would defy the zombies long enough for him to escape. Forcing himself to turn his back to the trembling door, he leapt onto the bed. Stretching, he brought his sword stabbing into the ceiling. Desperately he hacked away at the weave of thatch that formed the roof.

Progress was agonisingly slow, the thatch resisting his efforts with a stubbornness that seemed deliberate. The sound of the door rattling on its hinges, the pounding drum of undead fists against wooden panels, these boomed in his ears like the roar of thunder. It was all he could do to keep from turning away from his task, to stare at the shuddering portal. He knew that he dare not give in to such a compulsion. He didn’t need to know. Either he would force a hole through the ceiling or he would die. There was no help in knowing how long he had left before one or the other came to be.

Vincent uttered a jubilant bark of triumph as moonlight streamed into the room through the hole he had finally gouged through the thick layers of thatch. His victory crumbled as a new noise crackled from the door. It was the sound of splintering wood. The zombies were starting to break down the door.

Frenziedly, the forester attacked the ceiling, raw terror burning through his veins. Bit by bit, the hole began to widen enough to allow a small child to press through. Vincent shook his head. Too slow, it was all coming too slow!

With a ghastly din, the brutalized door sagged into the room, its upper hinges torn away from their fastenings. The undead clawed and fumbled in the resultant gap, mindlessly trying to force their way in despite the obstacle presented by the lower half of the door, oblivious to the long splinters of wood embedded in their decayed hands.

Vincent took one horrified look at the doorway. Under the weight of the zombies, he knew the remaining hinges would soon give way and the bar would soon buckle. He had only a matter of moments before the undead were inside and their cold talons ripped the life from his flesh.

Thrusting the sword back into his belt, Vincent jumped from the top of the bed, flinging himself into the hole he’d made. Head and shoulders thrust up into the cold Sylvanian night, hands scrambled at the surface of the roof before his own weight dragged him back down. From below, he heard the door at last give way. Frantically he fought to pull himself through the close-fitting hole and force his body through the cramped space.

For a moment, he was caught, and then he felt something grabbing at his feet. Flailing wildly, sobbing in horror, Vincent exerted muscles he didn’t even know he had, throwing every scrap of his being into one terrified effort. The thatch scratched him savagely as his body was wrenched upwards and the grip on his boot was broken.

Vincent lay upon the roof for what seemed like many minutes, listening to the zombies shambling about in the room below.

It was nearly dawn before the jitters that wracked him subsided enough that he felt composed enough to stir. Weakened by the violence wrought against it, he was careful lest more of the roof collapse and send him into the waiting claws of the zombies.

Gingerly, the forester crept to the raised centre of the roof where the timber support beam projected. As carefully as he could, he lifted himself onto the beam. Only then, with the hard solidity of the beam beneath him, did he take a moment to appreciate the narrowness of his escape. His understanding of how fortunate he was became magnified when he turned his eyes downward and saw the great mob that had gathered outside the building. Scores of rotting corpses animated by the most unholy magic, all of them drawn by some obscene sense to his refuge, to seek out the little ember of life yet to be extinguished in a town that had become Death.

The desolation of Wartenhof was complete when the rains came. Structures neglected for months began to collapse under the pounding torrent. Thatch roofs, having gone without mending for so long, crumbled down into peasant hovels, leaving only the skeletal beams standing stark against the grey sky. Wattle-and-daub walls cracked and split, strips of plaster fell from half-timber frames. The streets, simple lanes of dirt, became mires of mud and decay.

Even the rains couldn’t blot out the stench of death. The town was ripe with the smell of corpses, an all-pervasive stink that seemed to soak into the very earth. There was no relief from the reek, for it found a way to crawl into even the most firmly shuttered room. Vincent’s nose became adjusted to the offensive odour, growing accustomed to it until at length it became almost unnoticeable. Such familiarity bore with it danger of the most awful sort.

Feral dogs no longer prowled Wartenhof. Even the swarming rats had become a rare sight. The desertion of even these hardy scavengers marked the final abandonment of the town. A force more terrible than even the plague had closed its bony talons about the place. The corpses whose stench pervaded Wartenhof might be unburied, but they weren’t at rest. With shambling, stumbling steps they prowled the town as zombies, snuffing out the flame of life wherever they came upon it.

Vincent had deluded himself in those early days. In his time with the Nachtsheer, the monstrous affliction that caused the dead to rise again was a freak abnormality, but it could never be so widespread as to claim the entire town. He knew better now. It was true that certain bodies reacted more quickly, assuming their new obscene semblance of life more readily than others, but in the end none of Wartenhof’s dead remained at rest. From the vantage of the spire above the abandoned chapel of Shallya, he had even seen half-burned cadavers dragging themselves from the plague pit in the fields beyond the town, crawling on the blackened stumps of arms, their charred skulls blindly staring up into the sky. A ghoulish procession of mutilated undead, bodies the fires had been too weak to incinerate.

The chapel of Shallya – the peasants of Wartenhof had turned their back on the goddess when her power failed to save them from the plague. An angry mob had tried to burn the little temple down but were driven off before their mayhem could go too far, defeated not by the might of the goddess but by the threat of the Nachtsheer. Shallya had failed to protect even her clergy from the plague, why would a simple structure of timber and stone demand her attention?

It was necessity rather than faith that drove Vincent to seek out the chapel. For several days after quitting the moneylender’s house he had crept from one place to another, always trying to avoid the packs of undead that seemed to be everywhere now. The rooftops had become his thoroughfare, leaping from one building to another, cutting holes so that he could drop down inside and search for provisions. Dangerous, these expeditions, but necessary. All too often he found his hunting grounds infested with zombies. Sometimes he would fight the abominations, trying to bring to them a more lasting brand of death. He soon gave up such aspirations. Unless the body was destroyed entirely, the undead simply rose again within a few days. It was simply beyond his resources.

After his experience at the moneylender’s apartment, Vincent despaired of finding shelter that offered both security and openness. He wouldn’t put himself in a little box again, however secure it might seem. If the zombies breeched the defences of his refuge, he wanted a way to escape. For several days his solution had been to sleep on the rooftops, to endure exposure to wind and rain rather than tempt the prowling zombies.

A better solution came to him after observing one of the undead trying to extricate itself from a hog wallow. Despite the little ladder leading up from the swine pit, the zombie was unable to free itself. The coordination to mount a flight of stairs still belonged to them, but not the intelligence to manipulate a simple ladder successfully.

The steeple above Shallya’s chapel could be ascended only by means of a tall ladder adjacent to the vestry. As a further precaution, however, Vincent drew the ladder up behind him when he climbed into the steeple. In the little attic above the chapel he had room enough to store the victuals he’d been able to find, the protection of walls and the shelter of a shingle roof. The open face of the steeple offered easy egress should it be necessary and he fastened a length of rope to facilitate a quick drop to the ground.

Vincent could see all of Wartenhof from his new refuge. It was a sight that made him feel empty inside. In the entire town, he was the only living thing. He’d seen the gnawed remains of Razvan on one of his supply hunts. The crazed scavenger had found adversaries who weren’t intimidated by a meat cleaver.

He was the last man in Wartenhof. For all he knew, he might be the last man in the Empire, in the world. The plague had taken so many and those it left behind seemed doomed to perish in the claws of the undead.

Truly the gods had forsaken mankind. What awful thing he had done to make them spare him when everyone else was taken, Vincent didn’t know. All he knew was that he was alone.

And that was a misery worse than death.

Weeks passed in the ruins of Wartenhof. Vincent’s existence settled into a routine of prowling the desolation, scavenging supplies from the homes of the dead. Whenever he felt strong enough he would return to his old home and spend hours sitting beside Mircalla. By degrees loneliness and isolation made him numb to the ghastliness of her condition. Almost, he could imagine her as she had been. He took to talking to her, relating the events of the intervening days. Deep down inside he knew it was madness, these visits to the mindless husk of his wife. But he also realised that without even this shabby semblance of companionship he would succumb completely.

Hope blossomed one dreary winter day as Vincent was on his way to visit her. Leaping across the rooftops, he noticed something unusual on the ground below. Clinging to a chimney for support, the forester stared down into an alleyway and rubbed his eyes.

No, what he saw was no cruel trick of his eyes. There was a body lying there, the decayed carcass of a zombie. A spear had been thrust through its chest and the top of its skull had been sheared off with a blade. Such violence was beyond the paltry intelligence of the undead. Someone else had done this – a living person.

Desperately, Vincent scurried above the decaying streets. Here and there he would see further evidence that someone had been active in the town – the dispatched carrion of more zombies. Yet as hard as he might he could find no trace of them. Fear whispered inside his brain, setting a terrible doubt at work within him. Perhaps there was no one, perhaps he had assaulted the zombies himself and then, in his madness, forgotten his own actions!

The prospect was too monstrous. Despite the danger, Vincent dropped down to the street and rushed to where one of the zombies lay. His trained eyes studied the ground, his spirit becoming more wretched the harder he looked. He could find no footprints, at least nothing that belonged to anyone alive. There was no mistaking the dragging, clumsy print of the zombies. The only other tracks were those of animals.

Before despair could fully tighten around his heart, Vincent reflected that someone had killed the handful of zombies he had found. He might have missed their tracks, but he couldn’t refute their handiwork. They had to be somewhere, and he would find them!

Climbing back onto the nearest roof, Vincent resumed his search. It wasn’t long before his hunt bore results. From the mercantile’s roof he could see the tavern. The absence of active zombies in the streets was explained. A great mob of the undead had surrounded the tavern, cordoning it off in a ring of decayed flesh. There could be only one reason for such activity, one motivation that could stir the zombies to such effort. There was someone alive inside the tavern.

Hastily Vincent rushed across the roofs, reckless in the hope and urgency that now ruled him. Whoever was inside the tavern was trapped. If they didn’t think to cut an opening in the ceiling, to use the roofs as he had done…

Vincent fought down the horror such a possibility presented. To find someone after all this time only to lose them before he could even hear the sound of their voice! No, it was too abominable! The gods couldn’t be so cruel.

Nearing the tavern, Vincent found the area swarming with the undead. His stomach clenched as he recognised the faces of people he had known amidst the rotten tatters of the zombies. The decayed mob converged upon the timber walls of the building, some residue of mentality drawing them towards the doors and windows. Unfeeling fists pounded against the barricaded portals, relentless in their effort to get inside.

From his perch atop an adjacent roof, Vincent stared down at the zombies. It would take a desperate leap to reach the roof of the tavern; the slightest slip would send him hurtling to the street and the merciless talons of the undead. For an instant he hesitated, tempted to slink away, to leave the men trapped in the tavern to their fate. The awful spectre of loneliness overwhelmed his fear with a still greater terror. The risk of death wasn’t so terrible when life held nothing to make it precious.

Whispering a prayer to Taal, Vincent flung himself from the roof. His hands scrabbled at the wooden shingles as he nearly missed his target. Teeth clenched against the sting of splinters stabbing into his fingers, he fought to keep from slipping, from losing his tenuous grip. For a moment he hung suspended above the rotten ranks of zombies. His blood turned cold when he dared to look down, finding many of the creatures drawn away from their assault on the doors and windows. They were gathered below, reaching up to him with clawed hands, clutching at the feet hanging just beyond their reach. With a moan of horror, he forced the muscles in his arms to a supreme effort, pulling himself up onto the roof and away from the hideous throng below.

Gasping from his exertions and the ghastly death he had so nearly succumbed to, it was several minutes before Vincent was able to stir himself from where he lay among the shingles. It was the sound of splintering wood, the sharp distorted tone of a shriek that was inhuman in its agony, which provided the urgency that roused him to action. Desperate violence characterised his attack on the shingles, ripping them up with the head of his axe until he had gouged a hole in the ceiling of the room below.

Vincent didn’t delay. The moment the hole was wide enough for him to drop into he did so. Urgency didn’t allow him to look first, to exhibit the caution that had kept him alive these many weeks. It was a mistake that nearly cost him everything.

The room below had been a bedchamber, now an abominable stench of decay clung to it bringing tears to Vincent’s eyes. As he tried to blink away the stench, he didn’t see the figure that awkwardly rose from the bed and lurched towards him. The first he was aware of its presence was when tearing fingers gouged into his arm.

Vincent cried out in pain as he felt the talons sink into his flesh. He tried to whirl about, to bring his hatchet chopping down into his attacker. Yet at the last instant, he froze. Even with maggots squirming through the wreckage of its face there was no mistaking the visage of Sergeant Andreas. More horrible, however, was the recognition that flared through the zombie’s eyes, the way its rotten face contorted into a hateful snarl.

Vincent had forgotten the promise Andreas had exacted from him, but even in its obscene condition, the zombie remembered. Remembered and demanded revenge!

Before Vincent could bring the hatchet crashing down, Andreas grabbed his hand and froze the weapon in mid-swing. Now, with both arms immobilised by the zombie, it was all the forester could do to avoid the snapping teeth of his undead foe. He found himself locked in a ghastly dance, shifting and stumbling about in the dark reek of the closed room with the vicious monster clamouring for his death. At every step he could feel his strength ebb, draining away with the blood that flowed from his savaged arm.

Reeling across the room, Vincent stopped trying to writhe free from Andreas’s grip. Instead, mustering such reserves of strength as hadn’t already bled out of him, the forester locked his fingers about the zombie’s rotten flesh, securing his own hold upon the monster. Lunging forward in a fierce charge, he propelled himself and his foe in a drive towards the locked door.

Both man and monster crashed through the panel, splintering the board that had been used to lock the zombie inside. The momentum drove them across the landing and against the balustrade overlooking the hall below. The wood splintered beneath the impact of their bodies as Vincent and Andreas pitched to the floor below. With the zombie beneath him, Vincent was able to force it to bear the brunt of the impact. He heard bones splinter as Andreas smashed into the hard wood floor.

His own condition was little better. Vincent felt something snap in his left leg and screamed as his wrist bent back upon itself as he hit the floor. Rattled and battered, he tried to pull away from the crushed zombie, only to find its loathsome grip as powerful as ever.

Despite receiving the brunt of the violence, Andreas was oblivious to the damage inflicted upon it. The zombie lurched up at Vincent, snapping at him with jaws knocked askew by the fracturing of its skull. The forester cringed away, trying to escape the vindictive glare of the monster’s eyes.

As he pulled the zombie up with him, Vincent shouted, appealing to the survivors barricaded somewhere nearby. If only they would help him and come to his aid before Andreas could deliver his terrible revenge.

The zombie’s rotten breath washed over him as it leaned down to snap at his throat. Desperately Vincent pushed the thing back, but he knew it wouldn’t be long before the indefatigable strength of the undead prevailed against his own reduced vitality.

Suddenly, the zombie stiffened. A spearhead erupted from its chest in a spray of desiccated corruption. Like a bug on a pin, the zombie struggled for a moment before its mangled head was knocked from its shoulders by the slashing sweep of a sword.

He was saved! The survivors had heard his cry. Vincent laughed at the irony. He had come here to save these men, but instead they had saved him.

His laughter was echoed by a shrill, high-pitched chitter. Vincent’s eyes went wide with disbelief as he stared at his rescuer. He’d risked everything to rescue fellow men, but the life sheltering inside the tavern wasn’t remotely human.

An abominable shape that blended the revolting aspects of a huge grotesque rat with some vague suggestion of human shape stood above the corpse of Andreas. Bits of armour and strips of rag swaddled the beast in crude semblance of raiment. In its hand-like paws, the thing held the gory length of a spear and in its beady red eyes there was a profane gleam of mocking intelligence.

Vincent’s shock was so complete that he didn’t even feel the spear when it was thrust into his chest. Even when a second ratman approached with upraised sword to decapitate him, he could scarcely acknowledge what was happening to him. The plague, the zombies, all of them had been horror enough, but to see these things was something else. Truly the gods had abandoned the Empire and condemned the world to madness.

The skaven chittered with vicious amusement as it brought the edge of its sword hacking into Vincent’s neck. The chittering degenerated into an angry snarl when the blade failed to shear through what the ratkin expected would be flesh weakened by rot and worms. It took three strokes to remove the head and claim its trophy. It lifted its prize, sniffing at the unexpected aroma of fresh blood. Renewed squeals of fright from the barricade behind the tavern doors made the swordrat drop Vincent’s head to the floor.

The warriors of Clan Fester were finding it no easy prospect annihilating the zombies that infested the town, but such had been their orders. No ratman defied the commands of Seerlord Skrittar twice! The Seerlord wanted Wartenhof, therefore the town would fall.

Unwittingly, the swordrat had finished part of the conquest, its blade had cleansed Wartenhof of its human presence. Down to the very last man.

DEATH'S SHEPHERD

Andy Smilie

FOUR HUNDRED MILLION lie dead.

The world reeks of blood.

I can smell it over the ash-rich fires that light the horizon, over the putrid stench of the dead. It permeates the stale musk of the still-living, the last of the Zurconian Regulars who are gathered around me, poised for one final charge. Like a murderous siren it calls me back to war. My pulse speeds with every breath. I inhale the copper tang of a world soaked in arterial fluid, relishing it like a starving man might savour a meal. It has been almost an hour since I killed.

'Children of the Emperor.'

I turn to face the Regulars. Their breath fogs the night air as they summon their courage, hearts thumping in their chests. The Guardsmen no longer resemble the soldiers I had joined a year ago. The fire in their eyes is no longer born of hope. Instead, it is a murderous ember, flickering with malice. The freshly spilled blood daubed on their faces, echoing the Chapter symbol adorning my pauldron, is neither their own nor the enemy's. When the rations were exhausted, I had only been prepared to lead the strong.

'Sons of Zurcon.'

Starved of ammunition, the Regulars wield their lasguns like clubs. Most have fixed knives and blades to the barrels, binding them with boot laces, webbing and belts stripped from the dead. Others clutch farming implements and improvised weapons. I move to stand at their head, and raise my crozius to the sky. The heavens are as coal-black as my armour, the light from the neighbouring stars secreted behind kilometres of choking cinder, a blanket of darkness thrown up by the magma warheads and apocalypse missiles used to prosecute this war.

'My battle-brothers.'

Behind my skull-helm, I grimace. The Zurconians are not of the Blood. They are not Flesh Tearers. They are no more my brothers than the enemy we face. It is a necessary lie. Courage will grant them far more protection than any flak-vest. It will keep them advancing when instinct screams at them to retreat. General and standard bearer. Warlord and preacher. I am both shepherd and slaughter master. Where I lead, few will survive, and so I armour them with falsehood.

'Today, you redeem your world in the eyes of the Emperor.'

Downhill, across the plateau, a war-ravaged expanse of agri-soil scarred by artillery and churned to mulch by blood-stained boots, the Zurconian Royals are spread out before us. Heretics, mistaken in their belief that the old families deserved to rule in place of the Emperor-appointed governor. Trench lines, dugouts and gun pits cut across the landscape like a tortured mosaic. Piles of our dead pave a way through the minefields and razorwire. I smile. War is the greatest of all levellers, granting even the weak and the dying a chance to serve their Emperor. The previous dawn, I marched our wounded downhill to draw out the enemy positions and waste their ammunition. By my estimate, less than two hundred souls stood before us, only a fraction of which still had rounds for their weapons. The battle will not last long.

'Today, you will prove yourselves worthy of a freedom bought with Cretacian blood.'

Centuries ago, Master Amit expunged the taint of the Archenemy and liberated the Zurcon system. Yet the nobles of the royal houses had chosen to repay our sacrifice with treachery. It was an error none of Zurconian blood would live to regret.

'Bring them death!'

I charge. The fifty remaining Zurconian Regulars echo my roar and break into a run. It will take us three minutes to reach the trench line. Pinpricks of light stab towards us as the enemy open fire. Two men scream as they are cut down.

'Spread out,' I growl.

The Royals are battle-hardened. These are ranging shots, an attempt to find us in the darkness. They will save what remains of their solid-shot ammunition until we are close. Las-fire patters over my armour, as ineffectual as rainwater. I continue onwards, counting muzzle flashes, sprinting towards the largest concentration of enemy. My helm's autosenses dim, protecting my eyes from the sudden bursts of light as the Royals open up with heavy bolters and autocannons. The ground churns up around me, whipped into the air by explosive rounds. The Regulars are dying. Their anguished cries compete with the bark of gunfire as they are torn apart, blasted to fleshy gobbets by high-calibre shells. A burst of rounds slam into my breastplate and pauldron, spinning me to the ground.

'Kill until killed!' I roar as I recover my footing. The attack must not falter.

An instant later I am among the trenches. I am fury is my only thought as I kill a Royal, crushing his head between my elbow and the trench wall. I kill another, driving my fist through his chest. Another dies to my crozius, his torso shorn in half by an upwards blow. I grin as bone snaps and men scream. Gore splatters my armour, pooling in the lacerations and bullet holes, cleansing me of war's touch. I kill and I kill, cutting and bludgeoning, snarling in the torturous moments between kills.

Seven minutes. Seven short minutes and I am forced to stop. Forced to slow my pulse, to drive the rage from my veins. The enemy are dead.

Three of the Regulars remain: Troopers Cesan and Booy, and Sergeant Artair. They stumble towards me, exhausted. They are all that remains of Zurconian blood.

'We are saved,' Cesan mutters, his eyes wide with disbelief.

I growl. I am no saviour. I am a destroyer.

I smash my crozius into the side of Cesan's head. His skull bursts under the impact, showering Booy in clumps of brain matter. My reverse stroke kills him before he can react. Sergeant Artair drops to his knees.

'W… why?' he croaks, his voice as frail as his ruined body.

'Why?' I bark, lifting him up by his neck so that his face is level with my helm. 'A man who sins in ignorance is twice damned, a fool who lacks the strength of mind to determine his own fate. I came here to honour Amit's victory and remind you of the debt you owe the Emperor. Yet I find you have squandered your freedom and become weak with opulence. You have allowed the proud and the corrupt to take hold of your world.'

'But we… we have won. We have taken vengeance on the Royals as you said we would.'

He is right. The Royals are dead. All of them. But vengeance, vengeance was never enough. I remove my skull-helm, letting the terror in his eyes find the hatred in mine.

'I am wrath,' I snarl as I tear out his heart.

FLAYED

Cavan Scott

ALUNDRA WAS RUNNING, feet pounding on the dirt-covered road. She’d run everywhere all her life, always in a hurry. This way and that. Always being told to calm down – to stop and take a breath. She couldn’t stop today. No one could, not if they wanted to live.

She turned a corner, tearing into a paved side alley, the soles of her sandals slipping on the slick flagstones. Something wet. She didn’t look down to see what it was, didn’t want to know.

Seventeen years she’d lived in the township. Her entire life. She knew every corner, recognised every sound: the chirp of the birds, the braying of the grox in the fields to the south, the clamour of market day. Not today. Today there were no birds, no bustle – only screams and explosions and the incessant rattle of shots being fired.

There had been raids before. Of course there had. Perversely, the attacks had become just as much a part of life as the daily grind of washing and cleaning. They had learned how to deal with them, the people of Sandran. At first sight of the invaders, a bell would sound, the streets clearing immediately. The rich would make for their bunkers, the poor to whichever crumbling hab they called home. Raid shutters nailed against windows, families huddling together in the dark, praying that they wouldn’t be found.

Alundra could still remember her first time. A strange brew of absolute terror and the comforting smell of her mother, drawing her in tight and whispering gently in her ear: It will be over soon, my darling, just you see.

So many memories. Cautiously emerging onto the streets when the danger had passed, assessing the damage.

Clearing away the bodies.

So many bodies.

She’d seen her first corpse at the age of six, running into her aunt’s hab after a raid and discovering that one of the monsters had materialised behind the shutters, within the imagined safety of the four walls.

Alundra had lost count of how many raids there had been since then. How many sleepless nights cringing in the darkness, listening to the screams.

But this time was different. This time, everyone was going to die.

There had been no peal, no warning. Just the roar of engines in the sky.

The Flayers were close behind, drawn to bloodshed like dust moths to a flame.

Her grandfather had warned them when she was just a kid. The old man had found Alundra fighting her brother one blazing summer afternoon, the two of them trying to claw each other’s eyes out. There hadn’t been a raid in two years, maybe three. Grandfather’s calloused hands had pulled her from Husim, still kicking and screaming. It wasn’t anything unusual. Husim and Alundra were always scrapping, too similar in temperament. Headstrong. Stubborn.

It had been the first time she’d ever heard Grandfather raise his voice.

‘Don’t you realise what you’re doing? The Flayers can sense violence from two systems away. Do you want to bring them back, risk another raid?’

‘That’s rubbish,’ Husim had sneered, full of childish arrogance. ‘They don’t exist. Galeb says. It’s all lies.’

That night the bell sounded. All four generations of the family next door were slain. Husim and Alundra promised never to fight again.

As if that was ever going to happen.

Where was he? Alundra had already tried two of her brother’s usual hangouts. One had been abandoned; the other had already been raided. She couldn’t identify the remains, but the clothes didn’t look like Husim’s, even under all that gore.

Behind her, Alundra could hear the heavy tramp of booted feet, the all-too-familiar bark of handguns. They were close. Too close. She took a corner fast, belting down the narrow gap between two shops. There was an alley behind the buildings. She could avoid the main roads, make her way to Torin’s place. If he couldn’t come home, Husim would have gone there, probably dragging hapless Galeb with him.

‘Frag, no.’

Alundra skidded to a halt, kicking up a plume of dust. A dead-end; tall redbrick buildings boxing her in. How could she have gone the wrong way? She ran over to the far wall, trying the solitary door’s handle. Locked. Of course it was. There were a couple of windows on the upper levels, but was it worth chancing the old pipes that snaked down to a heap of old barrels in the corner? No, she should head back to the main streets, get her bearings. Time was running out.

Alundra spun on her heels and felt the blood freeze in her veins. A ghoul stood in the entrance to the alleyway, swaying back and forth, hungry red eyes fixed on her. It seemed to be waiting for her to make the next move, the noonday sun reflecting off what little of its metal frame was exposed. Its grimacing skull was still visible, as was a blood-smeared chestplate and long, knife-like fingers. The rest of its body was bound tightly in gory strips of human skin. Some of bands looked old, like brittle leather baked in the sun, while others looked disturbingly fresh, edges caked in rapidly drying blood.

A Flayer.

Alundra had heard the name during her first raid. Grandfather had gathered her near, gently explaining what they were hiding from.

‘They are daemons, my child, mechanical devils forged from steel and fury. They come to Sandran for one reason and one reason alone – to gorge on any living soul they encounter. They exist only to feed a hunger that can never be sated.’

Even as a child the very idea had seemed illogical.

‘But they are machines, Grandfather,’ Alundra had pointed out. ‘They don’t need to eat, do they?’ The old man had merely shaken his head sadly. He didn’t answer all of her questions that day. She’d asked where they’d come from, but he said he didn’t know, no one did. She asked what happened to the bodies of their victims. He’d just sent her to help her mother, but not before warning her that they would strike again. The inevitability in his voice was more chilling than the stories of the ghouls themselves.

It was only later she discovered how the Flayers earned their name – how the lifeless raiders wore the skins of their victims on their metal backs, a trophy for every kill. Some went even further, carrying exuviated torsos as grisly standards, testament to their madness.

Perhaps he had been trying to protect what little of her innocence was left. Maybe he had been right to try. Three years later she glimpsed a Flayer through a gap in the raid shutters, watching in horror as it shaved the skin from the medikai as easily as someone might peel an apple. From that day on, her nightmares were filled with tarnished skeletons appearing from nowhere. That was the thing that actually scared her the most. Not the butchery itself, but the fact that the Flayers simply shimmered into being. No spaceships descending from on high or smouldering drop pods crashing to earth. These mechanical devils just materialised from thin air, flensing talons scraping together in fevered anticipation.

Just like the abomination standing before her.

The Flayer cocked its head one way and then other, as if trying to ease out a crick in its neck, the fractured skulls it wore as a belt clattering as it swayed.

Who’s going to make the first move? Alundra asked herself, amazed she was even capable of rational thought in such a situation. Who’s going to run?

Time seemed to slow down, seconds stretching into minutes, hours, before she realised what she was going to do. She had always been fast, but could she outrun a Flayer? Only one way to find out.

Alundra feinted to the left as if she was going to attempt to run past it. The ghoul responded how she had hoped, racing forward to intercept, claws outstretched.

The gambit paid off, a move perfected over years of playing ball games with her brother and his friends, having to match their strength with cunning and fast feet. She immediately doubled back, racing for the barrels. She leapt on top of the containers, grabbing for the perilous drainpipe.

Realising its mistake, the Flayer dived towards her, talons closing around Alundra’s ankle. She screamed as the Flayer yanked, the rusty metal of the pipe stripping the skin from her palms as she slipped back down.

Kicking back with her free leg, Alundra somehow managed to find the Flayer’s head, although her thin, leather sole was little use against a living metal skull. The raider grabbed at her, one of its claws piercing the back of her calf, not deep, but enough to remind her that this was a battle she could never win.

She would die here, in a litter-strewn alley, a crazed raider carving her up like a cheap grox steak. Worst of all, she would never see her brother again.

The alleyway erupted with the thunder of gunfire. Alundra felt the robot’s claws whip away, looking down to see the Flayer flatten against the wall, shells punching into its body in quick succession. She followed the line of fire to its source, a giant stomping into the alleyway, an excessively large bolter held steady in a gloved hand. Her saviour was clad head-to-toe in heavy monochrome power armour, a winged skull emblazoned across a monumental chest. A similar death’s head was displayed on its bone-white pauldron, this skull painted over a pair of crossed ebony scythes.

The Death Spectres, another name whispered by Grandfather all those years ago; a chapter of Space Marines, dedicated to protecting humanity from the terrors of the Ghoul Stars. No, that wasn’t right. Dedicated to protect the Imperium. There was a difference.

Whatever its mission, Alundra offered a prayer of thanks to the Angel of Death’s God Emperor. Just because she didn’t believe in Him didn’t mean He wouldn’t listen. He might even deliver her from this madness, transport her far away from the vengeful Space Marine and the Flayer that was dancing like a deranged marionette under the Death Spectre’s onslaught.

‘Alundra. This way!’

She looked up, amazed not just to hear her name but also to recognise the voice that said it.

‘Husim?’

Her brother was leaning out of the window above her, a toned arm reaching down. ‘Keep climbing.’

Alundra didn’t need telling twice. As the Space Marine emptied its weapon into the stricken Flayer Alundra climbed, ignoring the pain from her palms and calf. The pipe creaked under her weight and with a sickening ping started to pull away from the brickwork. As it arched back, she threw up her hand, finding her brother, and let herself be hauled up.

Her fingernails scraped against the stone sill as she scrambled for a hold. Husim leant further out of the window, grabbed the thin material at the back of her tunic and pulled her through. They tumbled to the floor on the other side. She was inside. She was safe.

The bolter fire had ceased.

‘I need to see,’ she exclaimed, scrabbling back up to the window.

‘Alundra, wait!’ Husim made a grab for her, but she shook it off, almost throwing herself back over the sill in her haste. The Flayer lay on the floor, twitching where it had fallen. As if the punishment hadn’t been severe enough, the Death Spectre raised its grinding chainsword and severed the raider’s head in one practised move. The metal skull rolled away from the decapitated torso, coming to rest face up, staring straight at Alundra. Their eyes locked for a second, before the lights beneath the Flayer’s heavy brow flared and extinguished forever.

She became aware of another set of eyes upon her. The Death Spectre pointed its chainsword up at the window, uttering a single, solemn command.

‘Stay where you are.’

Husim pulled her away from the window. ‘What are you waiting for?’ he shouted. ‘Come on. We’re upstairs.’

Dazed, Alundra dragged her eyes away from the Space Marine and limped after her brother.

‘This way. Quickly.’

Husim grabbed her hand, guiding her down a corridor and through a storeroom. The place was crammed with sacks of grain and empty wooden trays. They were above the bakery.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked, as her brother ushered her up a stairwell.

‘Hiding, what do you think?’

She took the stairs two at a time, coming up into a sawdust-covered room stacked with boxes from wall to wall.

‘Are you alone?’

‘No. Galeb’s here too,’ Husim said, following her.

‘What about Torin?’

Husim simply barged past, ignoring the question.

‘Galeb needs your help.’

‘He’s hurt?’

‘See for yourself.’

Husim pushed back the tattered curtain that was covering a doorway at the back of the room.

‘What happened?’ Alundra asked, rushing over to the boy lying on the floor. Yes, she knew that she should think of Galeb as a man now, but he’d always be her little brother’s playmate, getting into scrapes and always coming out the worst.

But never as bad as this

‘One of them got Torin,’ Galeb wheezed, breaking into a wet, hacking cough.

‘The idiot tried to stop it,’ Husim said, his voice wavering despite the tough talk. ‘Got slashed across the belly for his trouble.’

‘It was killing him,’ Galeb argued, wincing as he tried to push himself up.

‘He was already dead,’ replied Husim, flatly.

Alundra examined the blood-soaked shirts wrapped around Galeb’s stomach.

‘You did this?’ she asked her brother.

‘It was all we had,’ Husim snapped back. ‘I had to think quick.’

‘You did well,’ Alundra said, trying to still her brother’s defensiveness. ‘But we’re going to need to find more supplies if we’re going to get him out of here. Proper bandages.’ She glanced around the room. There was a small pile of food in the corner, a couple of loaves, some migan fruits and a few nuts. It wouldn’t last them long.

‘We can’t go back out there.’

Alundra fixed Husim with a look that told him he was being stupid. ‘We have to.’

‘No way,’ Husim insisted, pacing back to the curtain and checking the room outside. ‘We’re safe here. We’ll wait until the raid is over and then we’ll get him home. Mother will know what to do.’

Alundra felt tears prick her eyes. She knew she should tell him why that wasn’t possible, that Mother was no longer waiting at home, but it wouldn’t have helped. He’d stick his heels in even further.

‘He’s right, Alundra,’ Galeb wheezed, grabbing her arm with a trembling hand. ‘If we head outside, we’ll be taken.’

Alundra looked up into the rafters, feeling a cool breeze across her face, cool against the stifling heat of the small room. She could just make out a hole in the ceiling. There must be an attic above them, maybe a way out onto the roof. Not that Galeb was in any fit state to clamber up and out of the building.

She closed her eyes for a second, letting the draft wash over her. She wished Grandfather were here. He’d know what to say, how to persuade the boys.

She squeezed Galeb’s hand, forcing a smile. ‘Listen to me, both of you. We’ve got to keep moving. Everyone is gathering in the town hall. They’re going to find a way of getting us out of this.’

Husim snorted. ‘What are they going to do? Reason with them?’

‘They’re going to try,’ she snapped back. ‘Better that than hiding in darkened rooms.’

‘That’s what we always do,’ Galeb pointed out, his voice catching with the pain.

‘This time is different,’

‘Yeah,’ snorted Husim. ‘This time the ghouls aren’t the problem.’

Alundra sighed, stood and walked back to her brother, placing her hand on his shoulder, giving it a squeeze in the same way Mother always had when she tried to get through to him.

It was amazing how soon you started thinking of someone in the past tense.

‘We’ve got to move Galeb.’

‘And how do we do that, genius?’ he asked, shrugging her off.

‘We’ll carry him. If we’re careful–’

A noise from below cut her off.

‘What’s that?’ Galeb whimpered, only to be told to shut up from Husim who peeked around the curtain.

‘There’s nothing there.’

‘It’s coming from downstairs,’ Galeb insisted, fixing Alundra with a panicked stare.

Footsteps.

They weren’t alone in the building. It could have been the baker, of course – if the baker had started wearing exceptionally heavy boots.

‘Husim...’ Alundra hissed, willing her brother to make the right decision.

‘OK, OK,’ he finally agreed, throwing his hands up in surrender. ‘There’s a hole in the wall in the far room. We can crawl through to the next building.’

‘I won’t be able to,’ Galeb sobbed.

‘You’ll have to,’ Husim insisted, moving over to his friend. ‘Put your arm around me and keep it quiet, will you?’

Alundra crept over to the little food Husim had scavenged, trying not to make too much noise as she shoved it into her brother’s leather satchel.

The stairs creaked.

‘It’s coming up,’ Galeb snivelled, drawing a glare from Husim. The three of them froze, staring at the thin curtain, as they listened to the hydraulic pumps hissing with every step.

Should have got them to move straight away, Alundra scolded herself. Stupid. They could have been out of the building by now, heading to the town hall.

Whoever was on the other side of the curtain stopped. Alundra glanced at her brother, Galeb’s arm around his shoulder, his own hand looped around his friend’s waist, holding him close. Galeb’s eyes were so wide they looked like he was no longer blinking.

Then, above them, something moved. Wood creaked. Metallic limbs glinted over their heads.

Alundra yelled a warning, forgetting about keeping quiet. Husim looked up to the ceiling and tried to pull his friend to the side, but it was too late. The Flayer dropped down from the rafters, landing on top of Galeb. Husim was shoved back, cracking his head on the far brickwork before slumping to the floor.

Galeb screamed as the monster’s tapered claws pushed deep into his belly. The cry was replaced by the sound of someone choking on their own blood as the raider yanked free a handful of intestines and attempted to cram the fresh meat into metal jaws that couldn’t even open. The entrails spilled through its fingers, slopping back down onto Galeb’s convulsing body.

Trapped behind the Flayer, Husim threw himself forward, slamming against the metal body, trying to shove the ghoul from Galeb. The Flayer merely thrust out a hand, claws puncturing Husim’s chest, pinning him against the wall.

Alundra looked around, frantically searching for something to use as a weapon. A water pipe ran around the foot of the wall. She gripped it hard, the rusted surface cutting into already punished hands, and yanked. It shifted, but not enough. She dropped down, pressing a foot against the wall and heaved again. Once, twice, until finally it came away from the wall.

Screeching like a banshee she rushed forward, bringing her makeshift quarterstaff down on the skin-covered back. It connected sharply with the ghoul’s exo-skeleton, sending vibrations shooting back up her arms, almost forcing her to drop the pipe. But she carried on battering the living robot, screaming in fury with every strike.

The attack was short-lived. With a hiss of annoyance, the Flayer turned, slashing out with bloodied claws, and swatted her aside. Gashes opened cleanly across her side and she was propelled headfirst into the wall. The pipe clattering across the floor, Alundra threw up her hands to protect herself, the skin tearing from her arms as she skidded down the bricks.

She landed in a crumpled heap, reeling from shock and pain, her head spinning. Husim’s screams seemed to be coming from all directions at once.

‘Leave him, abomination, and feel the Emperor’s teeth.’

A shadow fell over Alundra, a giant figure pushing its way into the tiny room, ripping the curtain from its pole, chainsword held aloft and growling like a mechanical hound. Her saviour from the alley. The Death Spectre.

The Flayer whirled around, flinging Husim aside, but it was already too late. The chainsword bit into the Flayer’s shoulder plate, cleaving the monstrosity in two in a blaze of coruscating sparks.

Alundra scrabbled behind the Space Marine, gathering Husim into her arms, trying to gauge how badly he was hurt. Her brother’s chest was a spider’s web of lacerations, each ebbing dark, treacle-like blood. His eyes were rolling in their sockets, his body going into shock. She shouted his name, trying to get him to stay with her.

‘You must come with me,’ a reverberant voice growled above her. The Space Marine was looming over her, its power armour splattered with gore and oil. ‘Leave the boy.’

Alundra all but snarled at her rescuer. ‘He’s my brother.’

The Death Spectre reached out a gauntleted hand and pushed her aside to examine Husim, the Angel of Death’s touch gentler than Alundra had expected.

‘The injuries are severe,’ the hulking figure concluded categorically. ‘He will not survive.’

‘He won’t if we leave him here,’ she snapped back, her fury giving her courage she never knew she possessed. The Space Marine could snap her neck in an instant, but she didn’t care anymore. There was no hope of rescuing Galeb, trampled beneath the Flayer’s bisected corpse, but she wasn’t going to abandon her brother.

A shower of sawdust rained down from above. The fight had attracted more ghouls, hoping to scavenge carrion. Three of the creatures were attempting to claw their way through the hole in the ceiling, stuck halfway in their haste. It wouldn’t take long for them to burst through. The ceiling was already bulging, cracks spreading as they struggled, consumed with blood lust.

‘Get out,’ the Death Spectre barked, snatching his mag-locked bolter from his leg and firing into the Flayers, the report of the gun like thunder in the enclosed space. ‘Get out now!’

Alundra grabbed Husim, ignoring his screamed protestations and bundled him out of the room even as the ceiling gave way. Behind her, flensing claws squealed against ceramite armour.

Alundra didn’t look back.

‘We’re nearly there,’ Alundra coaxed, half carrying her brother down the back stairs to the ground floor. She’d slipped twice, Husim landing painfully on her own injuries. There was no time to rest. It sounded as if the building was about to come down around them.

‘Hurts,’ Husim whined, sounding like the child she had known growing up. ‘Really bad.’

‘I know, Hu, but you’ve got to help me. We can do this together.’

‘Okay, Ma,’ Husim replied weakly, at least attempting to put one foot in front of the other. Alundra didn’t correct his mistake.

The stairs ended in another storage area, crammed with mops and buckets. She struggled over to the door, praying that it wouldn’t be locked, that they wouldn’t be trapped here. She could hear talons skittering on floorboards above. Perhaps even an Angel of Death hadn’t been strong enough to hold back a flood of ravenous Flayers. A renewed volley of bolter fire told her differently. If the Space Marine could keep the Flayer busy she might still be able to get Husim to a semblance of safety.

She twisted the handle, cursing as the door wouldn’t budge. Hefting her brother, she put her shoulder to it, offering thanks to a Throne she still didn’t believe in when it shifted in the frame. Just stiff. They could still get out of this. She tried again and it sprang open, nearly sending them sprawling across the bakery’s tiled kitchen.

Outside she could hear concussive blasts and the deafening howl of transports thundering through the air. The evacuation had already started.

‘This way,’ she said, guiding Husim around a large wooden preparation table and into the passageway. There was a heavy thud from above, knocking plaster from the ceiling. Husim had stopped responding, but at least was allowing himself to be mindlessly led by his sister. ‘Not long now,’ she lied.

Something crashed down the stairs, clattering into the buckets and trays.

‘Just keep going,’ she said, barrelling into a narrow corridor that led out to the street, unsure if she was encouraging herself or Husim. ‘A few more steps, that’s all.’

They reached the door. They were going to get out. Shifting Husim’s weight, she reached forward, pulling on the handle. It didn’t move. She panicked, her heart thudding in her chest. Why wasn’t it moving? Then the realisation dawned. Push to open. She laughed at the ridiculousness of the situation, and shoved at the metal door. It swung open easily; too easily. Alundra and her brother tumbled forward, Husim’s legs giving way, dragging her down. The two of them splayed on the floor, Husim crying out. It was the last sound she’d ever hear him make.

Alundra groaned, her wounds, shallow though they were, burning like a furnace in her side. She looked up, realising that she was staring at melanoid boots that crunched on the dirt as they turned. She cast her eyes skywards, squinting in the sun, not one but two unmistakable silhouettes above her.

‘No,’ Alundra cried out, trying to throw herself over Husim as armoured fingers pulled her roughly back to her feet.

‘Superficial wounds,’ rumbled a red-helmed Death Spectre, yanking her arm up to examine the dark stain spread across her tunic. ‘Scan her, Quintus.’

‘At once, Sergeant Vilda.’

Alundra tried to wriggle free but the sergeant just stood as immovable as a statue, its brother sweeping a handheld augury up and down the length of her body. The device buzzed and chirped as the results scrolled on a screen.

‘She is surprisingly well-nourished, sir. No known maladies or infections,’ the Death Spectre called Quintus reported, looking up from the augury. ‘Safely within selection parameters.’

Her captor nodded. ‘Excellent. She will be taken with the others.’

Alundra fought against Vilda’s grip. ‘What about my brother? You need to help him.’

The Death Spectre released her, and she tumbled back into the dirt, instinctively reaching out to touch Husim. He was so still.

Quintus didn’t even check his scanner.

‘Subject rejected,’ he intoned. ‘Injuries fatal.’

‘No,’ Alundra yelled, springing back to her feet and pounding her fists against the Space Marine’s chest, no longer caring if such actions were tantamount to a death sentence. ‘You’ve got to do something. He can’t die.’

The red-helmeted sergeant grabbed her arm once again, but this time the fingers bit deeper, bruising muscle, making her cry out.

‘And spirited too,’ he commented, sounding what, amused? She wanted to kill both of them.

From the passage behind them, a voice rumbled out, agreeing with the sentiment. Alundra twisted to see her saviour marching down the restricted space of the corridor, his pauldrons scraping against the narrow walls. As he stepped out into the sun, Alundra couldn’t help but stare. The Space Marine had lost his helm in the battle, revealing a stark visage, almost completely devoid of pigment. The skin was corpse white, with closely cropped hair the colour of snow and eyes as red as the blood that flowed freely from a fresh wound across his pale cheek.

‘She took on a Flayed one single-handedly,’ he reported, almost sounding proud. ‘Strength of will as well as body. Unusual for a human.’

‘Then we have chosen well, Karnos,’ Vilda replied, shoving Alundra towards the albino. ‘Prime stock. Take her to the transport.’

‘Wait,’ Alundra pleaded, as Karnos clutched her arms tightly. ‘I’ll go with you, as long as you take my brother too.’

Vilda reached forwards, grabbing her cheeks between thumb and forefinger.

‘Listen to me, girl,’ the Death Spectre snarled. ‘If it were up to me you would all burn. Too many of my brothers have been lost rescuing you from these unholy aberrations.’

‘Sergeant Vilda,’ Quintus warned, glancing up the road. ‘Another wave of necrons approaching...’

But Vilda didn’t acknowledge his battle-brother. ‘The Megir has ordered we select the best specimens from your settlement, those strong and healthy enough to bear future generations who might join the ranks of the Death Spectres.’

Prime stock. Vilda’s early comment replayed in her mind, filling her with a deeper horror than the Flayers had ever induced.

‘Suitable colonies are few and far between this far from the heart of the Imperium. An Exterminatus order has been issued and you will be taken to a suitable breeding world near Occludus. A glorious future awaits, girl. You will serve your Emperor well.’

Behind her, Karnos released one of her arms to fire into the approaching Flayers. It was the chance Alundra had been waiting for, a distraction she could use to escape, but the fight had gone, stripped as easily as the ghouls could have flensed her skin.

‘Sir,’ Quintus prompted, ‘we should make for the extraction point.’

‘Agreed,’ Vilda acknowledged, pushing Alundra’s face away sharply. Her head cracked painfully against Karnos’s chestplate. ‘Bring her.’

Alundra didn’t struggle as Karnos plunked her from her feet. Instead she stared into the glazing eyes of her brother as he lay in the rampaging necrons’ path, bleeding out in the baking sun.