After you enjoy the stories in this anthology,
we recommend the following titles:

BELISARIUS CAWL: THE GREAT WORK

Guy Haley

MARK OF FAITH

Rachel Harrison

GHOUSLAYER

Darius Hinks

STORMVAULT

Andy Clark

THE HARROWED PATHS

Various authors

THE DEACON OF WOUNDS

David Annandale

Contents

Cover

Backlist

Title Page

To Speak as One

Death on the Road to Svardheim

Champions, All

Skull Throne

The Strong Among Us

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Dawn of Fire: Avenging Son’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

To Speak as One

Guy Haley

‘What is this?’ Inquisitor Cehen-qui unrolled the message scrip and pulled it through his hands. Paper rasped on his soft gloves. As he read the message again, his expression grew more incredulous. His fine brows narrowed. His glossy black topknot fell from his shoulder and laid itself across his shining white tunic.

Four of Cehen-qui’s most important staff attended the inquisitor. The first was a small, bald figure of non-specific gender. Callow had no title. Factotum was the closest word for what Callow did. Callow fetched, Callow carried, Callow smoothed away the irritations of the day. Cehen-qui expected little more than that, so it was Callow’s great misfortune that they’d been given the message to deliver.

Callow blinked nervously. ’It is an astropathic message, my lord, from the Archmagos Dominus Belisarius Cawl.’

‘I can see that, you fool,’ Cehen-qui snapped. ‘And stop cringing.’ He reread the message for the third time before screwing it up and throwing it down onto the deck of the station command centre. The paper rolled in and out of shadow as it passed under broken lumens, then fell down a hole left by a missing plate. ‘Who by the Sacred Throne of Terra does he think he is?’ He straightened his very white gloves.

‘My lord?’ said Callow, in some distress.

The second attendant, a tall man of late middle years, at least in appearance, shifted the heavy book he carried and laid a calming hand on Callow’s arm. He shook his head. Don’t say anything else, he meant to convey. Callow didn’t notice.

‘Who does he think he is to demand our prisoner?’ Cehen-qui continued. ‘Who does he think he is that he can command the Emperor’s Inquisition, the Inquisition,’ he growled, ‘to do his bidding like that?’ He clapped his hands together. His gloves muffled the sound. The gold braid on his jacket swung violently. Callow flinched.

‘What do you think of him, Gamma?’ Cehen-qui asked his third attendant.

Gamma was an adept of the Machine Cult. He wore black robes fringed with golden cog teeth. His augmetics, most obvious of which were a pair of heavy industrial claws poised over his shoulders, were plated gold to match. His armour was a very deep red, with the smallest accents of cream. His forge world was so obscure that few would have recognised the colours. He liked it that way.

His full name was Frenk Gamma-87-Nu-3-Psi. Cehen-qui never used it.

‘He is a heretic and a blasphemer,’ said Gamma firmly. ‘He pollutes the Omnissiah’s work with his meddling. He makes free use of xenos technology, and,’ his voice thickened with disgust, ‘he conducts original research. We cannot give him the aeldari. Who knows what perfidious use he will put it to.’

The second servant, whose name was Valeneez, sucked in a breath between unevenly spaced teeth. He had been in Cehen-qui’s service longer than any of the others.

‘I disagree, Frenk, and respectively with you, my lord. His communique bears the seal of Lord Regent Roboute Guilliman himself. Technically, there is a case to be made for the legitimacy of the archmagos dominus’ request.’

‘Cawl is a puppet of the usurper,’ said Gamma. His bloodshot eyes glared above his respirator mask. His augmetics made an angry clicking.

‘Gamma has a point,’ Cehen-qui said. ‘While I believe the returned primarch to be true to the cause of human survival, Lord Guilliman has no more right to command the Inquisition than Cawl has. To whom is the Inquisition answerable, Valeneez?’

‘The Emperor Himself,’ said Valeneez deferentially. ‘But the Lord Guilliman is the Emperor’s son, and His appointed deputy, ruling in His stead, so therefore it is reasonable to–’

‘Appointed by whom?’ said Cehen-qui loudly. The few crew on the command deck tried very hard not to listen in. ‘We only have his word that the Emperor gave him this role. Of course,’ he said, tugging his coat into place, ‘his right to command the armies of the Imperium in defence and reconquest of the Emperor’s domains is indisputable, but command the Inquisition, whose operations he has actively worked against? Never. The primarch’s authority in this matter will not stand. The prisoner remains where he is, imprisoned, until the excrutiators from Cypra Largo arrive.’

‘If we assume you are right…’ began Valeneez.

‘I am right!’ Cehen-qui shouted. He tapped at the Inquisitorial badge pinned to his sash. ‘This says I am right.’

‘Well then, my lord, given that you are right,’ Valeneez said, ‘we are not in a good position. This station has not been occupied for some time, most of its systems are offline, we’ve multiple blind spots, not enough storm troopers to patrol it, and a barely functioning weapons grid. If we stay here we are leaving ourselves open to attack. We should take the prisoner elsewhere.’

‘Maybe,’ said Cehen-qui, becoming thoughtful. He looked out of the long slit window overlooking the station’s three prongs. The orange gas giant it orbited filled much of the view beyond. ‘Cawl is a maverick. If we do not give him what he wants, then the danger is that he will attempt to take it from us. However, we cannot change the rendezvous. None of our messages to Inquisitor-Castellan DelGrani have got through the warp storms. We must assume that the ship is still coming, and will be here within the week. The prisoner cannot get free. He must be presented to excrutiators with the appropriate abilities as soon as is possible. His own kind will be looking for him. We must be ready to stop Cawl. I will not have the prisoner’s knowledge fall into the hands of the Adeptus Mechanicus. We might be exposed, but we are not without our own weapons now, are we, ShoShonai?’

He turned to his fourth servant. She stayed off the few spots where the deck was properly illuminated. She stood totally silent, face downcast.

‘ShoShonai, I am speaking to you,’ Cehen-qui said. ‘Are you ready?’

She lifted her head. Her face was shadowed by her hood. Silvered eyes shone in the dark. ‘My lord,’ she said with a voice of inhuman quality. The cloth of her robe moved disturbingly, as if a nest of serpents writhed beneath. ‘We are ready.’

‘My lord!’ one of Cehen-qui’s minions called from the etheric monitoring station.

‘What is it?’ Cehen-qui said.

‘I have a warp signature on the edge of the system.’

‘Any indication of provenance?’

‘Datapulse signum identifier will not reach us for another four hours, my lord, but etheric waveform patterning suggests a vessel of middling gravitic draught.’

‘Well then,’ said Cehen-qui briskly. ‘They’re here. To action stations, everyone. They shall take our prize over my dead body. If that happens, I’ll make sure the rest of you die first.’

Otranti was a gas giant of a vivid shade of orange, with a fuzzy atmospheric boundary. It reminded Primus of a rare fruit he’d tried thousands of years ago, the albaricoque. It had been velvety and sweet. He had liked it.

He tried to remember if that had been one of the last things that had moved him.

The station was a bright dot against the equator, and growing fast.

‘Interesting,’ said Qvo-87.

‘Interesting?’ said Alpha Primus. His purple lips were downturned. Only the slight raise to his voice’s pitch indicated he was, in fact, interested in what Qvo had to say. Even so, he sounded like he was on the cusp of crippling ennui.

‘This facility is very poorly defended,’ Qvo went on. A small forest of pistons lifted his command cradle up so that he could peer into a set of displays hidden behind rubber viewing visors, forcing Primus out of the way. The command deck of the 0-101-0 was too tight for the Space Marine. Qvo’s command crew were bulky creatures, high-level magi possessing many extra limbs. None looked remotely human any more, and although Primus could feel the flickering of humanity within their metal bodies, his eyes insisted they were not people, but ugly idols to the Machine-God. They were creatures with steel souls.

Primus was the first to acknowledge he was as artificial as them himself, everything about him having been rewritten down to the genetic level. The big difference between he and they was that they had chosen to be the way they were. He most definitely had not. Thinking about it made his scars itch, and as much of Primus’ skin was scar tissue, the experience was unpleasant, so he stopped thinking about it. He cleared his mind as easily as switching off a lumen. Blankness took the place of irksome thought, until Qvo started gabbling again.

‘Interesting, interesting, interesting,’ said Qvo. It was impossible to tell where the magos ended and the ship began. Primus had known all the iterations of Qvo. He still wasn’t sure if he was a machine or not.

‘You will not provoke more interest in me by repeating the word interesting,’ said Primus. His voice was low and miserable as a leaden bell. ‘You are irritatingly predictable.’

‘I am, aren’t I?’ said Qvo brightly. ‘I do wish that the Archmagos Dominus Belisarius Cawl had seen fit to give me a broader range of self-determinative logic patterning.’ He gave Primus a mock-serious look. ‘But that would break the lore.’

‘I care not at all that your red-robed brethren would find you an abomination,’ said Primus.

‘Lucky me, I am unique,’ said Qvo. He spoke distractedly, flitting on hissing pistons between screens and interface ports. He hummed a few bars of an ancient tune, and stopped. Primus lifted his heavy head. Qvo tapped away on a brass claviboard with four of his hands. Green logic code scrolled down a wafer-thin glass screen.

‘Are you going to give me the appropriate data to accomplish my mission or not?’ said Primus.

‘I am hoping it will not come to that.’

‘When our dear master is involved, it always comes to that,’ said Primus. ‘We are here. I shall be fighting. It is never any other way. Why this place? We are asking for trouble.’

‘Ahem.’ Qvo cleared his throat preparatory to speaking. The noise was entirely synthetic; only his head appeared to be organic, therefore he probably had no throat. If Primus was honest, he was mildly curious about what parts of Qvo were flesh and what were not, but asking the infuriating pseudo-magos would have felt like a defeat, so he never did. That, like so much else, annoyed him.

‘Because this station has the exact combination of circumstances that will allow us to secure what we need without anybody finding out about it, that’s why,’ said Qvo. ‘It is a genius plan on the part of the archmagos.’

Qvo pulled a number of levers. A high-detail hololith in far-spectrum colours sprang up in the middle of the bridge. Primus ducked a hissing pipe to get a better view, coming to stand to the front of Qvo.

Primus’ eyes possessed the spectral spread to see the hololith. Qvo knew that, Primus knew Qvo knew; presenting the diagram in such exotic shades was his way of making some kind of point. Qvo always seemed to be making a point. Primus was often at a loss as to why, or indeed what the point was.

The station had an unusual configuration: a tall cylinder topped with a wide disc with three long, boxy limbs pointing towards the gas giant, the spread of which was contained within forty-five degrees. It looked like a primitive wheel with all but three of the spokes broken off. The rear of the hub had a bulge fringed by the piers of a modest dock. A single ship was berthed there: swift, deadly and highly technologically advanced, with a superstructure surmounted by a gilded Inquisitorial ‘I’ surrounded by lightning bolts.

‘The station is an ex-void dungeon,’ Qvo said. ‘Run by the Ordo Xenos to imprison and interrogate xenos captives. The number of different types of containment unit it boasts is quite fascinating, with facilities to hold life forms of extreme sorts – high-pressure beings, high-G, non-water-based life, non-carbon-based life, gaseous entities, beings both transdimensional and temporally unstable, warp sensitive and warp native, even–’

Primus’ fist clenched involuntarily. ‘It’s a prison for aliens. I understand. Please continue.’

‘It was a prison for aliens,’ corrected Qvo. ‘It has not been in use for several hundred years.’ The hololith zoomed out until it incorporated a tri-D light model of Otranti. Qvo depressed a button with an unnecessary flourish. A decaying orbital track was projected onto the image. ‘Behold! A decaying orbital track,’ he said, also unnecessarily, as Primus could clearly see it for what it was. ‘It looks to me like this moon here…’ More images flickered on. A small moon was outlined in a shade only visible to creatures with infrared-sensitive vision. ‘…was hit by an asteroid – you see the debris about it?’

Primus did see. It was blindingly obvious. Qvo was beginning to give him a headache.

‘The moon’s orbit is not where it should be. Its gravitic interference has perturbed the facility’s orbit. Cosmic billiards, if you will.’

‘What’s billiards?’

‘Never mind,’ said Qvo.

‘It must not have been very important, or the Ordo Xenos would have corrected the fault,’ said Primus.

‘Or,’ said Qvo smugly, ‘it is very, very important. Bringing out the kind of vessel required to pull the station back into a stable anchor, or a construction barge to fit it with engines to allow it to do the task itself, would require the requisition of a great deal of men and materials. Even were the workforce liquidated in its entirety, the news would get out. The station’s secrecy would be compromised. Did you not think of that?’

‘Politicking and secrecy are the methods of cowards,’ said Primus. ‘They are not my way.’

‘You’re more of a direct mass strike sort of man, aren’t you?’ said Qvo. ‘I wonder what they were doing there? I wonder why they have come here now?’

‘The prisoner,’ said Primus.

‘Yes, but if they wanted only to interrogate it, then why not take it to another facility? Why this one? Because if there is one thing more secret than a top-secret facility, it’s an abandoned top-secret facility. Something’s afoot here. How exciting!’

‘You are like a child.’

‘A child’s curiosity and enthusiasm gives the energy of a star to any enquiry,’ said Qvo. ‘You must learn to enjoy your work.’

‘I enjoy nothing,’ said Primus.

‘That’s not true. I know you like killing people.’

‘Like is too strong,’ said Primus. ‘Combat alleviates boredom. That is all.’

The station in the oculus proper had grown in size from a glint to a round of light. Primus stiffened, and took a few steps forward towards the armaglass.

‘What is it?’ asked Qvo.

‘There’s a psyker on the station, a powerful one,’ said Primus.

‘You can handle that,’ said Qvo. ‘The archmagos made you powerful too.’

‘This one feels different,’ said Primus.

‘How?’

‘There is more than one voice to the mind.’

Qvo disengaged himself from some of the cables. Not many, only enough to allow him to be carried forward on tentacles of banded steel until he was beside Primus; otherwise he remained joined to the ship as thoroughly as if he were a component. He adjusted his elevation so his face was level with Primus’.

‘Can you be more specific?’ asked Qvo.

‘No.’ Primus felt the smallest twitch at the corner of his mouth.

‘Are you smiling? Are you well?’ said Qvo, with genuine concern.

Primus wasn’t listening. The being on the station knew he was coming. A brightness in his witch-sight flashed, then went dark. He was being actively blocked.

‘This could almost be interesting,’ Primus said.

‘We are being hailed by the approaching vessel,’ reported one of Cehen-qui’s followers. The inquisitor did not have anything as specialised as a vox-master. All his troops were expected to be flexible and well versed in multiple arts. All but his four principal servants – Callow, Valeneez, Gamma and ShoShonai – were dressed in identical uniforms, as fuliginous as Cehen-qui’s robes were white.

‘Make them wait,’ said Cehen-qui.

‘As you command, inquisitor.’

‘Gamma, give me a deep augur scan, if you would.’

Gamma’s industrial claws reached down and ripped out a dusty chair so he could get close to the augury. His supplemental limbs jabbed at buttons and levers, his mechadendrites plugged into multiple input jacks, so that he was working three stations simultaneously.

‘The ship is that of Cawl’s principal lackey, Qvo-87,’ Gamma said. ‘He styles himself a magos, but he is nothing of the kind.’

‘Meaning?’ said Cehen-qui.

‘Cawl has many blasphemous creations in his service. Things that think and act like men, but are not. He has only avoided censure because his followers are so many, and Cawl is cunning, always sure to make his things so they almost adhere to the principles of the lore. Qvo-87 is a clone, in a way. As such, it could be argued that he falls within the lore laid out in the Warnings. But there are others that say he is not a clone, not even within a very wide margin of error.’

‘You are one of those.’

‘I am. They call Cawl the Prime Conduit of the Omnissiah. I call him blasphemer.’

‘That’s all fascinating, Gamma,’ said Cehen-qui dismissively. He stretched out his back. It cracked. ‘Do they have their weapons powered?’

‘Not yet. All weapons are retracted and inactive, all defensive and offensive subsystems unengaged, but they could be hiding their intentions.’

‘Are they?’

‘They have allowed a full augur sweep. No interference on the macro or micro levels.’ Gamma sounded disappointed.

‘In that case, we shall keep this cordial, for the time being. Be alert to any attempt to infiltrate the base while we are communicating.’

‘I am receiving another hail from the ship, lord inquisitor.’

‘They can wait a little longer,’ said Cehen-qui. ‘They will not consider leaving empty-handed. If Cawl is true to his reputation he will take the aeldari witch. Xenic guard to battle stations. Prime defensive weapons batteries. Activate internal defences.’

Cehen-qui pointed at the comms station. ‘Prepare to open channels in three minutes. Let them see the weaponry of this station awake, then we shall find out how brave they are.’

‘Only a fraction of it is operable,’ warned Valeneez.

‘It will be enough,’ said Cehen-qui.

Primus paced the short distance between the 0-101-0’s principal hololith pit and Qvo’s command cradle.

‘They are stalling for time.’

‘They are,’ said Qvo, busy with some esoteric task.

‘They are not answering our requests for contact,’ said Primus.

‘They are not.’ Qvo moved from one bank of instruments to another.

‘They will be powering their weaponry,’ said Primus.

‘They are powering their weaponry,’ said Qvo distractedly.

‘Then what are we waiting for?’ said Primus.

‘Really, Primus,’ said Qvo. ‘You may prefer frontal assault, but sometimes it pays to be cunning.’ He blurted a jarring stream of binaric at one of his followers. The priest, a box with a fringe of flailing metal extrusions, responded in kind. ‘Of course they are stalling for time. Of course they are making a show of strength. We shall show ourselves to be unconcerned. Meanwhile, I am making use of the time to infiltrate their cogitator systems with subversion code script that will make your task a great deal easier.’ Qvo’s voice rose in exasperation. ‘So if you please, allow me to concentrate. Thank you.’

‘I should be going,’ said Primus.

‘Yes.’ Qvo peered at a screen. He frowned. ‘That’s looking about right.’ He pushed a plunger down with his humanoid hand while a dozen other stick-thin metal limbs jabbed at the keys of an input device. ‘Very good. You can go. They will not see you. I have made sure of that.’

‘I have been alive for millennia,’ said Primus. ‘I am tormented by such boredom and despair, I sometimes cannot think, but I do not wish to end my time by being obliterated in the void because of one of your mistakes.’

‘There shall be none,’ said Qvo.

‘Good,’ said Primus. ‘Because if there is, I shall find a way to exact revenge upon you.’

The big Space Marine struggled around the data-posts and draping cables of the command sphere, and exited.

Qvo rolled his eyes and continued with his work.

‘Magos Qvo.’ Adept-Dialogus Kurubik addressed his lord from his bronze speaking trumpet. ‘The Inquisitorial facility has indicated that they are ready to begin communications.’

‘Aha!’ said Qvo. ‘Excellent. Let’s have him then, this inquisitor who likes to keep the servant of the Prime Conduit waiting.’

The hololith blinked. A figure appeared in full over the pit. The hololith was presented solely in shades of orange, but Qvo’s internal mechanisms provided life-true colours to the projection. The inquisitor wore a startling white jacket and gloves, blue trousers piped with grey, high boots, a lot of brocade and many metal badges. His hair was meticulously arranged. He was handsome, with a single scar on his cheek that Qvo suspected had been deliberately left in place for effect.

‘Greetings!’ Qvo said loudly. ‘I am Qvo-87, servant and confidant of the Archmagos Dominus Belisarius Cawl, Prime Conduit of the Omnissiah and foremost practitioner of the Machine-God’s mysteries. I believe you have something that my lord desires.’

The inquisitor gave no name. ‘He shall not have it. The prisoner you desire is in the custody of the Ordo Xenos.’

‘Then we find ourselves at odds,’ said Qvo.

Primus passed across the gap between the 0-101-0 and the dungeon. His armour spirit broadcast anti-augur obfuscation noise. He had his reactor and systems down at the lowest possible settings. Qvo’s infiltration codes kept the station’s augurs from picking up this fleck of man-shaped metal, so Primus was to all intents invisible to machine senses, and so small and insignificant against the great emptiness of the void it was unlikely any human eye would see him either.

With Primus’ radiation vents shut to keep his thermal profile low, there was nowhere for his reactor’s energy to go but inward. An internal thermometer rose steadily in his retinal display. His altered physiology had a broader thermal tolerance than a standard human’s, but he was not immune. A chronograph ticked down above the gauge. Fifteen minutes, eleven seconds until internal temperature became dangerous. He was already perspiring profusely. Sweat stung his eyes and pooled around the soft-seal collar of his undersuit.

He couldn’t let that distract him. The psyker on board the ship was looking for him. He felt its attention sweep across the stars like a searchlight. He must maintain a perfect psychic cloak at all times, for even when the psyker’s inner eye was looking elsewhere, his unshielded soul would burn bright, drawing them inevitably to him.

The psyker was looking everywhere for him. The Inquisition were not stupid. They suspected infiltration.

‘But so it must play out,’ Primus said to himself.

The station loomed ahead. Primus had shoved himself off with his feet. His aim had to be perfect. He could not risk a burst from his stabiliser jets to correct his course. If that became necessary, he would have to choose between discovery or overshooting the station completely.

He was near enough now to see automated guns tracking back and forth. Their single red targeting eyes passed over him, not seeing him. He breathed shallowly nonetheless, although the idea of them hearing him was ludicrous.

He had no idea why he was so tense. Qvo was irritating him more than usual. Being with Qvo was not overly different to being with the magos himself. There seemed to be no escape from Cawl.

He lost sight of the shape of the station. It became a huge metal cliff adorned with blindfolded angels and windowless arches. The speed of his approach appeared to increase the closer he got, now he had a reference point for his progress. He lifted his feet and activated his mag-locks. His feet hit the hull hard. He was thrown forward, and had to swing back his arms violently to counteract his momentum.

Primus checked his equipment was still attached to his belt, then stepped around.

The hull there was two hundred feet tall. Dozens of decks were contained inside. He had a long search ahead of him. He called up the station’s cartolith. The nearest airlock was thirty yards above.

Feet locking jerkily to the plasteel hull, Primus made his way upwards.

‘You must give up the prisoner,’ said Qvo, for the sixteenth time. He had tried every modulation of the human voice he could. None had worked. Nor had logic, or emotive pleas. Inquisitor Cehen-qui remained immovable.

‘The prisoner is a high-ranking xenos of a power in active opposition to the Imperium of Man,’ said Cehen-qui. ‘It falls within the purview of our ordo to interrogate him and decide upon the correct usage of any information that might be yielded from that interrogation. You cannot have the alien, not under any circumstances.’

‘I will not leave until you have given it up,’ said Qvo.

‘If you do not, we will be forced to regard your trespass in our orbit as an aggressive act. We will open fire upon your ship.’

‘That would constitute a direct act of war against the Adeptus Mechanicus,’ countered Qvo. ‘There will be severe repercussions.’

‘If anyone ever gets to hear about it,’ said Cehen-qui. ‘And you will be dead whether they do or not.’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure about either of those things,’ said Qvo. ‘I am the servant of the Prime Conduit of the Omn–’

‘By the Emperor, the lord of all the galaxy, you are a tedious creature,’ said Cehen-qui.

‘Perhaps we should resolve this face to face?’ said Qvo. ‘It may go more quickly. If I could but present the lord primarch’s documents to you so you may see their authenticity…’

‘You must think I was born outside the Emperor’s Light if you think I’ll fall for that trick. Of course I will not agree to meeting you. Either on your ship or on mine. You are going to leave, immediately. You have two minutes to power your drives and move off, or we will open fire.’

The hololith blinked out.

Qvo sighed. ‘Tricky, tricky, tricky.’

‘You can’t have thought it would be easy, magos,’ said Loseol-Azeriph, the 0-101-0’s arch-belligerus.

‘No, no, I didn’t,’ said Qvo. ‘It would be quite dull if it were.’

‘Then your orders?’

‘Bring the shields up. Ignite our main drive, take us out from the station. We’ll make them think we’re on our way.’

‘Then we can open fire?’ said Loseol-Azeriph with relish.

‘Then we can open fire. Power our weapons as soon as the void shields are active. Secure targeting locks on all their active weapons batteries. Come about, and attack.’

Primus crept as well as an eight-foot-tall warrior in power armour could through the station. His suit was of the Intercessor type, tooled for direct confrontation rather than stealth, yet he moved quietly enough. The sigh of his motors and muffled tread did little to penetrate the dungeon’s sepulchral silence. It was a quiet that went beyond the material realm. A heavy weight of suffering smothered all sensation. The pain and sorrow of the creatures once incarcerated there steeped the fabric of the place. Primus passed along many corridors, each one lined with dozens of cells. He peered into a few through the viewing slots. A significant proportion contained age-yellowed bones. The variety of beings was astonishing. But though the creatures were different, their lingering imprints were the same; each and every cell shared the same psychic taint of despair. These last occupants had been left to their fate when the dungeon was abandoned. Primus was so old his emotions were worn away to stubs, but the atmosphere of the place got to him even so.

The tremor of a weapons strike on shields made him pause. Qvo had begun his attack. Further strikes followed. He was going to have to be quick.

He dropped his psychic mask a moment to let out his mind, searching for the greatest concentration of souls. He found two, one up in the hub, the other not far distant. At the second he felt the strange psyker’s presence, and it felt him.

Throwing off stealth, Primus hurried towards his target.

Loseol-Azeriph’s mechadendrites clicked in and out of interface sockets all over his vast, cathedral-organ operations station. Lines of data text were reflected in each of his six eyes.

‘I regret to inform you, Magos Qvo, that although their void shields have collapsed, the Ordo Xenos dungeon will withstand our weapons for several days.’

The 0-101-0 trembled under return fire. Void discharge lit up the command sphere in violent purples and greens.

‘Now now, we don’t want to blow it up,’ said Qvo. ‘You’re too eager for destruction.’

‘Forgive me, my lord,’ said Loseol-Azeriph. ‘One loses oneself in one’s specialisation.’

‘Praise the Machine-God that it is so,’ said Qvo. ‘Current status of enemy weapons, if you please, Loseol.’

‘Eighty per cent reduction in destructive capability. Their guns outnumber ours, but they are very much outmatched by our targeting speed and prioritisation protocols. I have taken the liberty of removing their voidward weaponry first. They are toothless.’

‘You are enjoying yourself.’

‘I shall answer affirmatively to that,’ said Loseol-Azeriph gladly.

‘Then might we approach?’ asked Qvo.

‘In complete safety.’

‘Engage main engines, quarter speed. Bring us back towards the dungeon, and prepare to launch boarding craft.’

<Polite interrogative (request insolence amelioration): Why?> canted the box of wires and nerves in fluid Qvo called Sixer.

‘I concur with the magos-transmechanic. Quarter speed is insufficient for a ramming run,’ said Loseol-Azeriph. ‘The tonnage of the station is in excess of ours by a factor of three hundred. We shall die, broken against their higher mass.’

‘We’re not going to ram it, Loseol,’ said Qvo with a gleeful grin. ‘We’re just going to give it a little push. The dungeon is falling into the world it orbits anyway. Let’s help it along. That will keep their eyes off the ball, as I believe people used to say a very long time ago.’

The station was under heavy attack, and so Primus approached his target openly. Light bursts from hotshot lasguns blasted at him down the narrow approach way. Their overpowered beams punched smoking craters into his grey ceramite, but failed to penetrate. He replied with his bolter, cutting down three men in a single burst. He walked into the crossroads they were covering, and came into view of a tripod-mounted heavy bolter sheltered behind a barricade of rusted boxes to his right. His battleplate and his psychic senses warned him before it opened up, and he stepped back as a swarm of large-calibre bolts screamed down the corridor.

He would save his psychic strength. Mundane methods of death were called for. He pulled out a frag grenade from his bandolier, flicked out the pin and tossed it around the corner, angling it perfectly so that it bounced from the wall and came down behind the barricade. As soon as it exploded, he strode forward. Shouts came from his left. Half a dozen men in heavy carapace were coming at him. Bolts from his gun drove them into cover. The magazine ran dry and he ejected it one-handed, raising the other hand to call upon the warp.

A barrier of purple fire roared across the corridor. The foremost troopers were caught and screamed as the uncanny flames ate into their bodies. The rest were driven back.

The station shook to a direct hit. Then another, then several more. Primus recognised the shock patterns of Mechanicus assault boats boring through the hull.

Qvo had sent in his tech-thralls.

Primus pressed on.

‘I can’t believe they’re doing this! Bring the damn thing down!’ shouted Cehen-qui apoplectically.

‘The men are trying, my lord inquisitor,’ said Valeneez calmly. ‘We cannot penetrate their shields. The full weapons grid of the station is non-functional due to neglect. What might we had, we have now lost.’

‘My lord, we have reports of hostile forces upon multiple decks,’ said one of Cehen-qui’s technicians.

‘How many are close to the prisoner?’ asked Cehen-qui.

‘Some fifty or more, my lord. More assault boats are coming. The main vessel is not slowing.’

‘Then shoot it! Shoot them all.’

‘By the Emperor, they’re going to ram us!’ shouted Valeneez.

A heavy impact rocked the station, sending Cehen-qui staggering. He stared with disbelieving fury at the Adeptus Mechanicus ship. The vessel’s flat prow nosed against the hub, the tail swinging from side to side as it adjusted its position to stop itself from slipping free. The hub vibrated as the ship pushed against it. Metal creaked as, slowly, the station began to move towards its host planet.

The vessel sparkled under a constant rain of fire from the station, but none of the weapons were powerful enough to break the void shields.

‘Oh, my lord!’ Callow squeaked.

‘How long do we have?’ asked Cehen-qui.

‘Time to planetary impact is deceptively short,’ said Gamma. ‘Once Otranti has us in its grasp, we shall accelerate rapidly. I calculate not longer than three hours.’

‘What about our ship?’

‘Undamaged,’ reported one of his men.

‘They are giving us a way out,’ said Valeneez. ‘Clever.’

‘Will you stop praising them!’ Cehen-qui swore. ‘Prepare to evacuate. Get the prisoner ready. They’ll never chase down an Inquisitorial cutter.’

Primus came within a hundred yards of a raging battle waged between demi-men and Inquisitorial shock troops. He passed them by, his powerful mind clouding their perceptions. The sounds of shouts and the crack of las-beams receded, and he reached a T-junction. To his left, towards the hub of the station, was the greatest concentration of troops. They clustered around their sleeping prisoner, waiting for their enemy, their minds filled with fear and thoughts of duty.

Primus brought up a cartolith. A red dot pulsed half a mile away in the opposite direction. Quietly, he stepped into the corridor, and turned right.

Cehen-qui blasted a cyborg warrior at point-blank range. There was so little human left it was practically a servitor. Whoever this Qvo-87 was, he had no skitarii troops to call on, only the dregs of the Adeptus Mechanicus military. The machine-man died in a spray of oil and brain matter. The storm troopers pushed on ahead, shooting more of the clumsy foe with characteristic efficiency. Gamma marched with them, remorselessly gunning down the servants of his own cult.

Cehen-qui reached the cell of the prisoner. The fighting moved away, and he whistled impatiently up the corridor.

‘You can come out now!’ he shouted.

Valeneez emerged from a side door. Callow cowered in his shadow.

Cehen-qui holstered his bolt pistol and looked at the door to the cell. Active psychic wards gleamed on the metal. ‘Open it.’

Valeneez came down the corridor, taking out a bunch of data wands as he came. He employed the keys in a strict sequence to deactivate the door’s defensive measures, and it opened with a warning fanfare. Chilled nitrogen billowed out, clearing to reveal a small room with a clear methanol suspension tube at its centre. Within was the spindly form of a naked male aeldari. His hands and feet were bound in all-encompassing manacles. His was head locked into a psychic cradle.

‘Amateurs,’ growled Cehen-qui. ‘The Adeptus Mechanicus do not have the wit for this kind of work.’ He spoke into a vox-bead mounted on his collar. ‘Get the prisoner onto the ship.’

Men and servitors moved up, and began locking chains to the tube’s transit points.

He looked around. ‘Where by the Throne is ShoShonai?’

The further Primus got from the hub, the more dilapidated the dungeon became. Holes in the metal were crudely patched. Readings from his cogitator warned of chambers open to the void behind closed doors. The gravity plating was inconstant in effect, and many lumens were out.

Finally, he reached his destination. A locked door closed so long ago it had rusted shut.

Primus rested his hand on the door and closed his eyes. He attempted to scry the room, but his clairvoyance showed him only blankness. Absence in this case was evidence of presence.

His eyes snapped open. The psyker was close by. Perhaps even in the room. He extended his senses. The blank spot extended in all directions.

Battle was coming. He checked his bolt pistol and loosened his chainsword before dealing with the door. Other psykers preferred force weapons, but Primus did not care for them. He was physically strong enough to put the chainsword through a bulkhead, if need be.

He checked the devices in pouches on his belt: a platinum signum projector, and three locking blackstone rings.He placed a melta bomb on the door, twisted the activation handle, and stepped back.

Metal flashed with white heat as the fusion reaction bit. The melta bomb evaporated with a roar, taking the door and part of the wall with it.

Primus drew his sword, and stepped over cooling slag.

A stasis coffin was clamped to the far wall, fed by a series of conduits that glowed with green energies. They, like the coffin, were not of human origin.

Primus looked around. He saw nothing, not with his second sight nor with his auto-senses. The psyker was not in the room.

He moved towards his target. Through a window of clear mineral, he saw the occupant of the coffin uplit by more of the soft green energy – a metal skull for a face on a body as tall as Primus. It had a lidless, cyclopean eye of glassy stone. Its head was crowned with a crest of precious metals.

‘You were right, Cawl,’ said Primus. ‘It’s here.’

Primus opened the coffin with the wand. Ancient locks lifted. Cylinders of alien steels spun from the side, and the coffin lid rose up.

A necron lay in funereal splendour within. Primus tossed out priceless grave goods, locked the blackstone rings about his neck and wrists, and clamped a teleport locator to the spidery design on its chest.

He sent a coded datapulse.

‘I have it, Qvo,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

Cehen-qui slaughtered his way to the dock. Qvo’s troops did what they could to block the way to the Ruptor Xenorum, but they were no match for him. He and his party gained the quayside, bloody and exhausted, but mostly alive.

His master of cargoes was waiting. A small tractor dragged the prisoner on a grav-sled onto the ship through a loading umbilical. Cehen-qui strode aboard.

He waited a few minutes for his remaining servants to retreat to the ship, but the station’s internal augurs showed a large force of Qvo’s cyborg troops making for the berth, and he decided to leave the rest of his men to their fate.

‘Cast off,’ he said. ‘Ignite engines. Forty-five degrees down, full speed. We’ll go under the dungeon and be away.’

The psyker decided to show itself. Primus turned. A woman stood in the doorway, emanating a dangerous power.

‘That is not yours to take,’ she said. Her voice was doubled, two speaking as one.

Primus gunned his sword. Witch-fire burst into life around his head.

‘Then you’ll have to stop me taking it,’ he said.

Pale warp light lit the room. The woman raised a hand. Primus flew against the wall with a booming clang. She held him there. With a twitch of her head, she slammed his hand against the wall until his chainsword clattered to the ground.

Her triumphant grin faltered. She blinked, confused.

‘I… I don’t want to hurt you,’ she said.

Primus snarled. A sphere of energy burst from his heart, blasting away her psychic bonds.

‘Then don’t,’ he said. He threw aside his bolt pistol, and punched out. A ball of telekinetic force hit her in the chest, throwing her out of the room into the corridor. He pulled, and she hurtled into the room towards him. He lifted his hands and she rose up, her arms and legs stretching behind her.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘Stop. I have blocked it, for now. Please listen.’ Her robes writhed. Primus narrowed his eyes. He felt two souls, not one.

He pinched his fingers and ripped away the psyker’s outer garment. Underneath, the woman wore a tight-fitting bodysuit with no seams. She was emaciated. The flesh clung tightly to the bones of her skull, making her eyes appear shockingly huge.

Another organism was clasped about her head. Squid-like in appearance, its soft body draped down her back, tentacles wrapped about her throat and gripping her face. Their hooks were embedded so deep that the woman’s skin had grown over them. Eyes of marbled yellow with cruciform pupils stared at Primus from either side of the woman’s face.

He faltered at the sight of this abomination.

‘He put it on me,’ she said. ‘It enslaved me.’ The doubled nature of her voice wavered. ‘Please, help me. When I sensed you, I knew you were strong enough to break it. Kill it. Kill me. I am impure.’

He sensed the woman fighting the creature. She was a psyker, but so was it. Its xenos mind mingled with hers. He had never seen anything like it before.

‘Quickly! I can’t hold it back any longer!’ The twinned nature of her voice came back with redoubled strength. Primus pushed his own powers harder, keeping it restrained. He strode towards the woman, and gripped the boneless parasite in his right hand.

A rush of images bled from its soul. Its world devastated, its kind driven to the edge of extinction, the last of them exploited and enslaved. The focus of its hatred wore many faces, but all were human.

His grip loosened.

‘Please,’ said the xenos. ‘Kill me.’

‘You are the xenos, you are talking to me,’ he said. He looked into the woman’s eyes. She stared at him angrily, but she could not speak.

‘Yes. I, not it,’ the xenos said. ‘Kill me. Free me from this rigid creature. End my suffering.’

Primus obliged. His hand clenched. The creature was leathery and tough, but he was strong. It gave a thin bubbling scream as its organs were pulped. Primus ripped it free, the hooked tentacles flaying the woman’s skin from her face.

He stamped the last of the life from the alien and released his telekinetic hold on the host.

The woman fell down.

She lifted her ruined head. ‘Why did you do that? Why are you fighting against us? We are both servants of the Emperor.’

Primus went to retrieve his bolt pistol, batting away her feeble psychic assault as he picked it up from the corner.

The gun felt good in his hand.

‘Those words ceased to mean anything to me centuries ago,’ he said.

He obliterated her head and torso with three shots.

‘Qvo, Qvo, this is Alpha Primus. I have our target. Bring me back.’

Corposant wisped up from the ground. Lightning crackled from his armour and the skin of the necron. The familiar, horrible sensation of imminent teleportation crawled through his bones.

Primus closed his eyes.

With a thunderclap of air rushing to fill a void, Primus and the necron were gone.

The Ruptor Xenorum sped around the curve of Otranti, leaving the slower Mechanicus ship far behind.

Cehen-qui watched it vanish in the hololith and smiled triumphantly.

‘So fail all who would oppose the Emperor’s Inquisition,’ he said.

‘Wait.’ Gamma stepped forward, his human arms folded, his mechanical claws twitching and snapping as he thought. ‘Scan for etheric disturbance.’

A moment passed.

‘There’s an echo – single or double teleport from the outer reaches of the dungeon,’ reported an ensign.

‘What was kept there?’ asked Gamma.

‘Unknown. Records missing,’ another crewman said.

Cehen-qui leaned forward in his chair. ‘Why are you asking?’

‘Do you not think that was a little easy?’ said Gamma.

‘Are you suggesting they let us go?’

‘Have you considered, my lord,’ said Gamma, ‘that the false priest Qvo might not have been there for our farseer after all?’

Cehen-qui’s face hardened.

‘Bring us about. Lock on to that ship. Begin pursuit.’

Nervous faces peered into blank scopes.

‘My lord,’ said the man at the prime augury. ‘The Mechanicus ship has vanished.’

Cehen-qui slammed his fist hard into the armrest of his throne.

‘Maybe not so amateurish after all,’ said Valeneez drily.

BELISARIUS CAWL: THE GREAT WORK
by Guy Haley

In the wake of the Great Rift, Belisarius Cawl turns his attention to the abandoned world of Sotha. Once home to the Scythes of the Emperor, it also hides a long-buried secret… and an ancient evil.

Find this title, and many others, on blacklibrary.com

Death on the Road to Svardheim

Darius Hinks

‘Idiots.’ Gotrek stomped through the dust, his axe jolting on his sunburnt shoulders.

His words shook Maleneth out of a daze. It had been hours since either of them had spoken and his sudden outburst made her realise how close to sleep she was. They had been walking for three days with no sign of civilisation. No sign of anything, for that matter. She looked around at the desolate, sun-baked fields. The earth was the colour of blood, and so riven with cracks that it reminded her of Gotrek’s scarred face. There were no clouds. No vegetation. Nothing to break the monotony of the view. There were also no people. ‘Who?’ she said, her voice a dry croak. ‘Who are idiots?’

Gotrek nodded at the pale shapes heaped all around them. The road from Gamp to Svardheim was lined with skulls. The plains had been conquered, liberated and reconquered so many times that the ground was more bone than earth. And, at some point, Khorne’s cannibals had decided to decorate the road with human heads. Crows had taken the flesh and the sun had bleached the bone. Now the skulls gleamed in the heat, grinning at everyone unfortunate enough to pass by.

For once, Maleneth agreed with the Slayer. ‘How did they think they could stand against the legions of Khorne with picks and shovels? They should have fled to Svardheim. At least a few of them might have kept their heads.’

Gotrek stopped and grabbed one of the flasks at his belt. Then he muttered a curse and held it upside down, spilling a single drop of liquid into the dust. He stared at the dark spot it made, looking bereft. ‘No beer.’

Maleneth rolled her eyes, threw him a flask of water and wandered over to the edge of the road. The skulls were covered in patches of crimson dust and she had not realised, until now, that there were designs scored into the bone. She stooped down to examine one of them, wiping some of the dust away. To her surprise, rather than the brutal symbols of Khorne, the skulls were scored with elegant characters that she could read. ‘Sigmar?’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t understand.’

Gotrek wiped his beard and threw the flask back. ‘Probably put here by your sort. Starry-eyed lightning enthusiasts.’

‘Nonsense.’ Maleneth dusted down more skulls, revealing the name Sigmar on each of them. ‘The God-King does not demand human sacrifices.’

‘He doesn’t demand anything. He just hides. Skulking in the clouds, keeping his head down and waiting for someone else to sort out the mess he made. I didn’t say they were sacrifices, anyway. I just said they were put here by your sort. By people so stupid they think writing names will save them.’ He booted a skull down the road. ‘They put these out thinking Sigmar would see their devotion.’ He laughed. ‘Thinking he would send help.’

Maleneth’s pulse quickened as she realised they were resuming an argument she thought they had abandoned hours ago. ‘The war for the realms won’t be decided by mortals. It doesn’t matter how big your biceps are, Gotrek. It doesn’t matter how sharp your axe is. Your fate will be decided by the will of gods. You’re a piece in their great game, whether you know it or not.’

‘Codswallop.’ He rounded on Maleneth. ‘You’ve skulked in my shadow longer than most, aelf, so you can’t be as dim-witted as I thought. But you won’t last long if you persist in thinking that gods care about you. Sigmar, Khaine, or whoever it is you really whisper to in the dark when you think I’m asleep – they don’t know you exist. And if they did, they wouldn’t give a rat’s arse about you.’

Maleneth snatched a knife from her belt and waved it at the skulls. ‘Call them idiots, Gotrek, but the people who left these have more sense than you. They know that they can’t be saved by muscles or iron. They know they’ll only be saved by faith. Only divine power can stop divine power. Only gods can halt gods.’ So many hours without rest or food had left her nerves raw and she turned her knife on Gotrek, her hand trembling. ‘And don’t try to kid yourself that you’re not part of the struggle. If you’re not fighting for Order, you’re aiding the enemy. There’s no middle way. There’s no impartiality. You are either with us or you’re against us.’ Maleneth had never accused Gotrek so directly and it was a blessed relief to finally spit the words out. They had festered between them for too long.

‘I’m with no one.’ He leant towards her, his eye blazing. ‘And no one is with me.’

‘Then perhaps you should ask yourself why. You have so much power, Slayer. Power beyond anything I have encountered.’ She tapped the rune embedded in his chest. ‘Power that can’t be explained by this Fyreslayer gold. And where do you think it came from? Do you think you caught it, like an ague? Do you think you gained it through heroic consumption of beer? Do you think you earned it by being more ill-mannered than anyone else? Of course not. So where in all the hells of Shyish do you think it came from?’

Gotrek’s expression darkened but he seemed at a loss. He spat into the dust.

‘It came from the gods,’ she continued. ‘Or one particular god. Either way, you’re a pawn. A piece in the game whether you know it or not. And if you don’t lend your strength to Sigmar’s crusade then you might want to think about why. Maybe it’s because your power comes from the forces he has sworn to defeat.’

‘Chaos?’ He gripped his axe in both hands and began circling her. ‘You’ve got some bloody balls, saying that to a son of the Everpeak.’

‘Then prove me wrong. Show me you’re working for something other than yourself.’

The Slayer continued pacing for a while, then marched on down the road, muttering curses.

Maleneth smiled as she followed. She doubted she had done anything to change Gotrek’s mind but goading him was one of her few remaining pleasures.

They walked in silence for another few hours, with Gotrek pausing only to boot the odd skull down the road. Then, finally, just as Maleneth thought she could bear the heat no longer, the light started to dim into a sullen dusk.

‘Is that a campfire?’ she said, spotting a glow up ahead.

‘Doubt it. Too many cannibals and brigands round here. Even the local morons know not to light fires.’ Gotrek gripped his axe and nodded to Maleneth’s knives. ‘Keep your wits about you, aelf. This journey might not be quite as tedious as I thought.’

Maleneth drew her knives and jogged down the road, peering into the dusk, trying to make out the source of the light. It was not long before she spotted the silhouette of an overturned wagon. The horses had gone and there were flames whipping across a torn canvas. ‘This happened recently,’ she said, slowing and glancing back at Gotrek.

He nodded as he passed her, testing the weight of his axe and scouring the surrounding plains. ‘Look there,’ he said, pointing his axe towards the sinking sun. ‘Another road.’

Maleneth shook her head ‘Just hoofprints. Fresh ones. And I think I see the riders.’

Gotrek turned back to the smouldering cart. ‘I wonder if they left anything to drink in there.’ He marched towards the flames, humming tunelessly.

Bodies were scattered across the road and most of them were headless, darkening the road with their blood. They were wearing white robes trimmed with gold and stitched with hammers and comets.

‘Sigmar botherers.’ Gotrek paused as he reached the first one, prodding the corpse with his boot. ‘They should know better than to travel these plains.’ He gave Maleneth a pointed glance. ‘Funny. Faith doesn’t seem to have done them much good. Perhaps Sigmar was too busy having his hair plaited. He always looks so pretty in those paintings. It must be hard work keeping his nails in good condition.’

Maleneth ignored him, treading carefully through the corpses, looking for survivors.

Gotrek snorted. ‘What do you care, aelf? You’d have done the same to them if you thought it would impress Khaine. He is called Khaine, isn’t he? Your preferred bloodthirsty deity?’

‘I serve the Order of Azyr. I’m sworn to hinder Sigmar’s foes and aid his followers. It is the faith of people like this that will give the God-King his victory over Chaos.’

‘And then what? If the Chaos Gods really were defeated, how much would you care about Sigmar and his followers then? You’d be doing murder dances for Khaine before I could say “fickle turncoat”.’

Maleneth was about to reply when she noticed a gleam of polished metal under one of the cart’s broken wheels. In truth, her reasons for scouring the corpses were not entirely virtuous; she was always on the lookout for weapons or artefacts that might be valuable. As she approached the metal, she saw it shift slightly. ‘Who’s there?’ she cried, raising her knife and backing away.

Gotrek rushed to her side, lifting his axe.

‘There’s someone under here.’ Maleneth nodded at the wheel. ‘Armed, I think. We should tread carefully in case–’

Gotrek booted the wheel and tipped the cart over. Dust and splinters flew everywhere, and someone bolted, clutching a sword.

Maleneth was about to hurl a knife, then paused and held up a warning hand to Gotrek. It was a human priestess, dressed in the same Sigmarite robes as the others. ‘Wait!’ cried Maleneth. ‘We serve Sigmar.’

Gotrek was about to disagree but Maleneth yelled again before he could speak. ‘We mean you no harm.’

The woman ran further down the road, then, when she realised no one was following her, she paused to look back. Her robes were torn and bloodstained, and the sword trembled in her hand, but she did not look badly injured. ‘There’s nothing left to take,’ she said, glancing at the ruined cart. She stumbled, unsteady on her feet, then pointed the sword at Gotrek, frowning as she took in his tattooed muscles and tall crest of hair. ‘What are you?’

Gotrek raised an eyebrow. ‘A pawn.’

The priestess looked even more confused. She shook her head and turned to go.

‘Wait,’ called Maleneth. ‘I’m Maleneth Witchblade. I’m an agent of the Order of Azyr. I have travelled here from the Celestial Realm.’

The woman’s eyes widened. ‘You’ve seen the Eternal City?’

Maleneth nodded. ‘I spent many years in Azyrheim.’

The priestess took a few, hesitant steps back towards them. ‘Really? Azyrheim… Is it as beautiful as the ancient hymns claim?’

Maleneth thought of the Khainite Murder Temples where she’d learned to kill, picturing the blood-drenched altars and statues. ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’

The woman stared at her, clearly shocked. ‘I am called Carmina,’ she said, lowering her sword. She looked at Gotrek. ‘Are you a Fyre–’

‘He’s Gotrek,’ interrupted Maleneth. ‘He comes from the world-that-was.’

The priestess looked even more dazed. Maleneth started to wish she had let her run off. There was nothing more annoying than a doe-eyed weakling dogging your every step. She decided that they needed to be rid of her as soon as possible. ‘Who did this to you?’ she asked, nodding at the corpses.

Carmina’s face turned an unhealthy grey as she studied the bodies. ‘All dead,’ she whispered, stumbling again. ‘All of them.’

‘Who was it, lass?’ asked Gotrek. ‘Khorne’s Blood Tribes?’

‘No… Well… Yes, they might have been followers of Khorne. Most people are in these plains. And they were well armed and provisioned. But they weren’t cannibals from the Skran Hills. I think they were just thieves. Marauders.’ She clamped her eyes shut. Then she rushed over to Maleneth and gripped her hand. ‘You have to help me.’

Maleneth extracted her hand and wiped it clean. ‘Where were you headed? Svardheim? We’re going there too. You can travel with us.’

‘No.’ Carmina sounded almost hysterical. ‘That’s not what I mean. The brigands took our cases.’

‘Looks like they took everything,’ said Maleneth, ‘but we’ll get you home.’

‘There was a holy relic.’ The priestess grabbed Maleneth’s arm again. ‘The Incorruptible Fist. The cornerstone of our faith. We must retrieve it.’

Maleneth laughed. ‘Retrieve it?’ She looked at the tracks she’d spotted earlier. The riders had vanished into the growing dusk. ‘If we chased every rogue in this desert we’d never leave.’

‘The cornerstone of your faith, you say?’ Gotrek gave Maleneth a wry look. ‘Sounds like the sort of thing the Order of Azyr should be protecting.’

Maleneth glared at him.

He shrugged, the playful look still in his eye. ‘You lecture me on the value of faith, and then when this lass tells you that her precious Sigmar tat has been stolen you’re too scared to try to get it back. Scared of a few lowlifes.’

‘Scared?’ Maleneth knew Gotrek was playing mind games with her but it was impossible not to bite. ‘Of course I’m not scared.’

Carmina’s eyes lit up. ‘Then you’ll help? The Incorruptible Fist is the relic that we built our temples to preserve. Losing it would be a terrible blow.’ She stared at the corpses, her eyes full of tears. ‘Such a blow.’

Maleneth resisted the urge to hit her. ‘Yes. I’ll get your damned relic back.’ She jabbed her finger at the Slayer. ‘Because I know that serving the God-King is the only way to liberate the realms.’

Gotrek raised an eyebrow. ‘You have more guts than I thought.’ He looked at the priestess, his eye gleaming again. ‘How many of these brigands are there, would you say?’

She grimaced. ‘Fifteen. Maybe even twenty.’

Gotrek looked disappointed. ‘Shame. Still, better than nothing.’ He hefted his axe, catching firelight on the blade. ‘It’s been so long since I actually used this thing.’

Maleneth nodded. ‘Good. If there are so few, we can make short work of them and get out of this tedious desert.’ She sheathed her knives and continued down the road, waving for the priestess to follow. ‘Stay near me and away from him. He doesn’t always swing that axe where he’s meant to.’

Gotrek grinned at the priestess. ‘Don’t worry, lass, I know how to swing an axe. As long as no cowering aelves get in the way.’

Maleneth led the way to the tracks Gotrek had pointed out earlier and began following them. The going was easy for the first hour or so, but after that the land tumbled into a series of ridges that had not been visible from the road. Even with the sun almost setting, the desert was fiercely hot, and the ascents soon had Maleneth gasping for breath. It did not help matters that the priestess was clinging to her shoulder, barely able to walk.

‘Why did you venture out here?’ asked Maleneth. ‘This whole country is full of warbands and brigands. Why would you risk your lives? Why would you risk the relic for that matter?’

‘What use is it if we don’t show it to people? The Fist is what drives us.’ Carmina looked out into the dust clouds. ‘People have cowered for so long, crushed by the boot of Chaos, but they’re rising now. Because they know Sigmar is coming to their aid.’

Gotrek cast Maleneth a sideways glance but she ignored him and nodded for the priestess to continue.

‘If we keep the Fist hidden away in a temple it’s worthless. It has to be out here, where people can see it. See proof of Sigmar’s will.’

Maleneth was about to argue with Carmina’s logic when Gotrek grunted and signalled for them to keep their heads down. They had reached the brow of a hill and as Maleneth edged forwards, she saw why Gotrek had warned them. Nestling in a small valley, hidden from the surrounding plains, was a ruined keep. It must once have been large enough to house a thousand soldiers but most of it had been destroyed centuries ago. The architecture was unfamiliar to Maleneth. It did not have the spires and domes of a Sigmarite Stormkeep, nor the brutal, thorn-sharp towers of a Chaos Dreadhold. She guessed, from the organic curves of its walls, that it was from the time before recorded history, the time before Chaos laid claim to the realms. The masonry was carved to resemble mythological beasts and warriors clad in strange, elaborate armour. The light was fading fast now, but she could see that one of the towers had been refortified. The walls had been repaired and there was a light flickering inside, red and angry as it spilled from the crumbling windows. It did not seem like firelight and something about it troubled Maleneth. There were a dozen or so horses tethered outside, huddled in the shattered remains of a stone outbuilding. The sound of laughter and singing drifted up towards them through the darkness.

‘Sounds like there’s barely twenty,’ said Gotrek.

‘Good,’ muttered Maleneth.

‘They’re heavily armed,’ whispered Carmina.

The priestess grew more pathetic by the second and Maleneth cursed herself for ending up in this situation. If it had not been for the argument with Gotrek, she would never have got herself drawn into such an absurd predicament. Not for the first time, Maleneth had the horrible feeling that her true feelings were more aligned with the Slayer’s than she could bear to admit. She crushed the idea, refusing to accept it. Gotrek was grinning and about to speak but she talked over him. ‘Before you suggest it, we’re not going to just walk down there and kick the door in.’

Gotrek’s grin broadened. ‘Simple plans always work best. You aelves overcomplicate things. What could be wrong with clobbering them, getting the relic and clearing out?’

‘Firstly, I don’t trust you not to behead me. Secondly, while we’re stuck at the gate, fighting guards, someone else could easily get on one of those horses and take the relic, which would make the whole exercise pointless.’

‘Boring, but true, I suppose. What do you suggest then? A bit of prayer?’

Maleneth looked down at the ruins and thought for a moment. ‘I suggest not acting like savages. It’s almost dark. We should wait until the sun’s gone down. Then, you can go ahead with your elegant door-kicking plan. But you can wait until I’ve positioned myself at the rear of the tower by that toppled archway. Then, when you start shouting and stamping, and all eyes are on you, I’ll make my way into the tower with less opposition and find the relic.’

‘You mean, I do the hard work while you sneak around and get the prize?’

Maleneth shrugged.

Gotrek nodded. ‘Stops you from getting under my feet, I suppose.’ He looked at the priestess. ‘And what about you? What’s your plan?’

The woman looked terrified. Maleneth replied on her behalf. ‘Carmina will stay up here, on this ridge, until we come back for her.’

Carmina nodded eagerly, holding up her sword like it was hurting her hand. ‘I would only hinder you.’

Maleneth shook her head. ‘How in the name of Khaine have you reached adulthood without learning to defend yourself?’

The woman shrugged awkwardly.

Maleneth sighed and looked back at the tower, trying to discern its details before the last of the light faded. There was an exterior staircase that circled the tower from the ruined arch. It was too unstable for clumsy, heavy humans but she would be able to race up it to another archway at the top of the tower. Once Gotrek started bellowing she would easily be able to descend into the tower from there.

They sat in silence until the sun was no more than a crimson line on the horizon; then Maleneth nodded at Gotrek. ‘Wait until that light has gone and then attack in whatever manner you think best. Just make sure to make a lot of noise.’

Even in the half-light she could see his rows of buckled teeth, smiling back at her.

Maleneth waved Carmina back a few steps then ran down into the narrow valley, leaping easily over rocks and scrub. She had never seen a keep hidden at the bottom of a valley before, but she could see the sense of it. It would be hidden from any of the roads that crossed the plain. As she neared the ruins, she dodged around the patches of red light thrown from the windows. The sounds of revelry grew louder as she came nearer. She could not understand the language, but it was clear from the slurred words that the brigands had been drinking. Maleneth was pleased. If they were drunk this should all be over quite quickly.

She ducked even lower as a door creaked open and a man stumbled out. He was wearing a copper-coloured cuirass and helmet, and there was an axe slung over his back, but he was clearly drunk, mumbling and singing to himself. He weaved and staggered off into the night, leaving the door open.

Maleneth waited until he was out of sight then dashed over to the side of the doorway, listening carefully for sounds of any other guards. Then she stepped inside, knives raised. The passageway was lined with doors and, at the far end, it opened onto a courtyard, which was the source of the red light. Figures were moving back and forth in front of it, dancing and stumbling. Maleneth took a few steps down the corridor, identifying the door that she thought would most likely lead out to the staircase she had seen. Then she halted. There was another sound coming from the courtyard. As well as the voices of the brigands, there was a deeper, louder sound, like the breathing of a large animal. Very large, she realised. Each rattling breath drew another burst of laughter and jeers from the men. Maleneth cursed. ‘What is that?’ she whispered. She carried on past the door, keeping to the shadows as she edged closer to the opening at the far end of the corridor.

‘Khaine’s teeth,’ she whispered as she saw what was happening in the courtyard. There was a small group of drunken men and women, all clad in the same copper-coloured armour as the man she had seen outside, and all of them were singing. It was not the scene of wild debauchery she had expected, though. The brigands were moving with purpose, dancing around a circle of objects. Maleneth barely looked at the drunks, however. Her gaze was drawn straight to something that was seated at the centre of the circle. For a moment, she thought it was a repulsive statue. It was nearly thirty feet tall and built in the likeness of a bull but with muscular arms and the head of a slavering hound. It was gripping a sword the size of an oak tree, with the blade plunged into the ground. Maleneth quickly realised that it was not a statue. There was a palpable sense of malice pouring from it and its bare, heavily muscled chest was oozing blood.

Maleneth whispered a prayer and edged back into the passageway. ‘Daemon,’ she gasped, the word catching in her throat. She could not take her eyes off the thing. Every inch of it was wet. Streams of blood were rushing from its flanks and the beams of light she had seen from outside were blazing from beneath the lids of its closed eyes, spilling across the drunken dancers. The circle that surrounded it, scored into the flagstones, was incredibly complex, decorated with sigils and script and divided into eight segments. An object had been placed at the outer edge of each segment – a seemingly random assortment of holy icons and religious relics. Maleneth had seen enough blood rites to realise what was happening. These people were not simple thieves. They had sourced holy artefacts with a specific purpose in mind: to drag this monster from the aether-void.

‘Gotrek,’ she whispered, remembering that the Slayer was about to burst into the ruins.

She hurried back down the passageway and as she left the building, she sighed with relief. The sun had not quite set. There was still a line of red on the horizon. ‘I still have time,’ she whispered, heading back across the valley.

‘Form a queue!’ bellowed Gotrek as the sound of breaking wood echoed through the darkness. ‘I can’t kill you all at once!’

Maleneth clutched her head as she heard the unmistakeable sound of the Slayer wading into battle. ‘It’s not time!’ she hissed, halting and looking back at the ruins. The red light was flickering, and she could hear the sound of blades clashing. ‘I hate him,’ she spat, turning and heading back towards the doorway she had just left, running back down the passageway.

She reached the courtyard in time to see Gotrek barrel into view, crashing into the crowd of drunks and sending them tumbling in every direction. ‘Stand and fight, you bloody cowards!’ cried the Slayer. ‘There must be one of you who can–’ His words stalled in his mouth as he saw the daemon. ‘Grungni’s balls,’ he muttered, stumbling to a halt and lowering his axe, looking up at the blood-slick giant. ‘You’re an ugly beast.’

‘Gotrek!’ howled Maleneth, running across the courtyard towards him. One of the brigands lashed out at her with an axe but she ducked the blow and slit his throat without breaking her stride. ‘We have to get out!’

Gotrek was staring up at the daemon and Maleneth’s heart sank. His eye was flashing with kill-fever. She would not get him to leave until either he or the daemon had been destroyed. She wished she could leave the oaf to his fate, but she was sworn to protect the rune in his chest.

Another attacker lunged towards her, but she parried the blow, turned on her heel and opened his throat. Most of the brigands were already dead or sprinting for the exit, but Gotrek had clearly lost interest in them. He walked slowly towards the towering figure at the centre of the courtyard, staring at it eagerly. ‘Come on,’ he growled. ‘Let’s see what you’ve got.’

Maleneth halted and looked up at the daemon’s canine features, praying the thing would not hear Gotrek.

Red light blazed across the courtyard as the daemon opened its eyes and turned to face Gotrek. It bared a row of tusk-like teeth. ‘I remember you.’ Its voice was like an earth tremor. The walls juddered with each syllable. ‘The Slayer who ran.’

Maleneth’s sanity was straining. The daemon’s voice was not a natural sound. It was not produced by vocal cords but torn from the darkness. It split the air, rattled her teeth and filled her head with visions. She wanted to howl or flee but Gotrek replied as though he were still speaking to one of the drunks.

‘Ran? What are you talking about, ran?’

The daemon’s reply caused Maleneth’s stomach to lurch. ‘When the others marched, you fled.’ The daemon glared down at Gotrek. ‘Fled your own world. Left them to die.’

Gotrek looked dazed for a moment. Then his brows bristled. ‘Liar.’ He paced closer. ‘I did not flee anything. The gods tricked me. Grimnir tricked me. He said I would find my doom.’

‘Gotrek!’ cried Maleneth, realising what was happening. ‘Don’t listen! It’s goading you. It wants you to–’

Gotrek charged across the courtyard, entered the circle and dived at the daemon, raising his axe as he hurtled through the air.

The moment Gotrek entered the circle of runes, the daemon roared and rose up, shattering the roof as it drew back its sword.

Gotrek’s axe clashed with the daemon sword. A wave of energy slammed into Maleneth and the few remaining drunks, sending them tumbling across the flagstones as masonry crashed down around them.

Maleneth rolled clear a moment before a stone lintel crushed her.

Coarse laughter filled her head as the daemon hurled Gotrek through the air, sending the Slayer smashing through the wall and causing another section of the tower to tumble.

Maleneth dodged more falling stone and ducked under an archway.

‘You can’t kill it!’ she cried, as Gotrek clambered back into view and ran back into the circle, drawing his axe back and leaping up for another attack.

The daemon parried, but Gotrek’s blow was so fierce that it staggered under the impact, swaying and almost falling. Maleneth noticed that the daemon’s smile faltered when it neared the circle’s perimeter. It managed to right itself but not before Gotrek had hacked deep into its chest, spilling crimson light.

‘It’s not ready to be born,’ she said, looking at the objects arrayed around the circle. ‘It can’t leave the summoning circle.’

More wall crashed down as Gotrek and the daemon fought, and Maleneth had to dodge the falling debris.

‘If not for your cowardice,’ said the daemon, ‘your world would never have died.’

Gotrek sneered and hacked at the daemon’s leg.

Again, the daemon was so concerned with not stepping outside the confines of the circle that the Slayer was able to land another blow.

Maleneth sidestepped more falling masonry and found herself next to the circle. She could feel power radiating from inside it, crackling across her skin and pounding in her skull. She was standing beside one of the objects placed around the perimeter and realised it was an ugly, badly chiselled rendition of a fist. ‘That?’ She laughed in disbelief as she realised that the lumpen object must be the relic Carmina sought. She grabbed it and was about to hurl it in disgust when the daemon howled and grew smaller, shrinking visibly.

It looked down and fixed Maleneth with its burning glare.

‘Wait,’ she gasped, backing away.

‘Quick thinking, aelf!’ Gotrek dropped to the ground and booted another relic from the circle.

The daemon convulsed and roared as it shrank a few more feet.

Maleneth cursed herself for not seeing the answer before. The daemon was not yet born. The circle of relics was the only thing giving it purchase in reality. She dashed around the circle, scattering objects as Gotrek did the same.

The daemon jerked and juddered as it shrank, howling and barking until, finally, it was only a few feet taller than Maleneth. The light had almost totally faded from its bloody flesh and it was struggling to stand.

Gotrek strode from the dust clouds and beheaded it with a single blow of his axe. ‘A Slayer does not flee.’

The head blazed like lava then blinked out of existence. The rest of the daemon slammed to the floor then did the same.

Gotrek stood over the scorched flagstones, breathing heavily and gripping his axe, staring at where the daemon had fallen. Then the tower let out a deep groan and started to lean.

‘Out!’ cried Maleneth, bolting for one of the archways.

Gotrek paused to pick something up from the ground, then jogged calmly after her, wiping blood and dust from his face.

A few of the brigands had survived and were hastily mounting horses and racing from the valley, but most were sprawled in the ruins.

‘Keep moving,’ said Maleneth as the tower slumped slowly in their direction.

They ran on, back up to the top of the slope where Carmina was waiting, cowering on the ground, her eyes wide. She was about to speak when the tower’s foundations finally gave way, sending tons of rock crashing onto the ground. Maleneth shook her head, looking at Gotrek. ‘That place probably stood for thousands of years. You’ve been here two minutes and it’s rubble.’

Gotrek gave her an elaborate bow.

‘You have it,’ whispered Carmina, staring at Gotrek.

‘He has what?’ demanded Maleneth.

Gotrek held up the Incorruptible Fist and frowned at it. ‘It looks like a bloody turd, lass. Are you sure this is going to inspire devotion?’

Carmina hesitantly took it from him. As soon as she held it, cool light spilled from the knuckles, lighting up her ecstatic face. ‘I’m sure.’

Maleneth took a few steps backwards. ‘I’ve seen enough magic light for one evening. What is that?’

‘The power of faith,’ whispered Carmina. ‘When so many souls believe in something, they imbue it with power. Power that goes beyond nature.’ She held the icon towards Gotrek’s face, bathing his battered features in light. ‘You have achieved something incredible tonight, Slayer. You have retrieved a portion of the God-King’s might.’

Maleneth expected Gotrek to say something dismissive, but he looked puzzled, staring into the glare. Then he rolled his shoulders and grunted, backing away from the priestess. The light faded from the Fist and Carmina secreted it in her robes.

Gotrek pointed down to the outbuilding. ‘The idiots have left you a horse. Get yourself home, lass. You’ll travel quicker on that than with us. Get that relic back to your temple.’ He gave her a stern look. ‘And don’t go wandering around in the desert with it.’

Carmina’s eyes flashed in the dark as she gripped Gotrek’s hand and kissed it. Then she rushed through the shadows towards the outbuilding. A moment later they watched her ride off into the night, steering the horse with the skill of an experienced rider.

Gotrek watched her for a few minutes, muttering into his beard, then turned and began marching back towards the road.

Maleneth hesitated before following him, thinking of how he had looked into the holy light, and how he had insisted that Carmina keep the relic safe. ‘You do believe,’ she said rushing after him.

He glanced back, his face half-hidden in the darkness. ‘In what?’

‘In faith. In gods. In the power of gods.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘When you saw that fist light up, you didn’t know what to say.’

‘Rubbish. I just know when to shut up. Not like some people I could mention.’

Maleneth smirked, pleased to know that she had been right. Helping the annoying priestess had been the correct thing to do. Even Gotrek could see it. They had helped the followers of Sigmar preserve a powerful talisman of their faith. She sensed that there would be great ramifications in the battles to come.

They reached the skull-lined road, and for the next few hours they marched in silence, each lost in their own thoughts. Maleneth was determined not to show weakness in front of the Slayer, but she was ready to sleep at the roadside when she spotted lights in the darkness, just less than half a mile from the road.

‘That might be a place to sleep in safety,’ she said, pointing it out to Gotrek.

He laughed. ‘Safety?’

‘This road is under the protection of Svardheim. I know it’s teeming with brigands but a building that’s so visible from the road must be under the aegis of Svardheim. It looks like a monastery to me.’

Gotrek was unimpressed. ‘I say we keep on until we reach the capital.’

Maleneth thought for a moment. ‘I imagine they’ll have ale. And food.’

Gotrek shook his head. ‘You act like I only think with my belly.’ He looked at the distant lights, frowning. ‘Perhaps I do.’ He thought for a moment, then turned off the road and struck out across the plains.

As they neared the building, Maleneth saw that she was right: it was plastered with symbols of the Sigmarite faith and the Svardheim colours were flying from its walls.

They were still a few minutes away when voices called down from the battlements, demanding to know who they were.

‘I’m Maleneth Witchblade,’ she yelled back. ‘I serve the Order of Azyr.’

‘Get back on the road,’ replied a hidden speaker, sounding angry and afraid. ‘You’re not welcome.’

Gotrek laughed but Maleneth felt a surge of fury. ‘We have just risked our lives saving one of your most precious relics. You can at least have the decency to offer us a place to sleep.’

There was a pause. ‘Which relic?’

Maleneth stiffened with anger and wondered if she could pinpoint the speaker accurately enough to hurl a knife. ‘The Incorruptible Fist!’

There was another pause. ‘The Incorruptible Fist was stolen last night.’

‘We know that, you nitwit,’ cried Gotrek. ‘We found the bloody cart. We got the relic back to Carmina.’

‘The Fist was stolen from our vaults last night,’ the voice was trembling with anger, ‘by a murdering thief called Carmina. She disguised herself as one of our order. She and her companions killed several priests as they raided the vault.’

Maleneth could not understand what she was hearing for a moment, thinking of the timid, cowering priestess they had rescued from the cart. Then she recalled how Carmina had seemed to change her demeanour as she rode off into the night, replacing her hesitant manner with a sudden confidence. ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘It can’t be.’

‘The Fist is made of realmstone,’ cried the voice. ‘It’s priceless. Carmina will have it smashed into pieces and sold to a hundred bidders. She has stolen our most treasured prize just to make herself rich. Have you seen her? She has to be stopped.’

Maleneth gripped her scalp, trembling with hate as she realised how completely she had been deceived.

Gotrek watched her for a moment, shaking his head in disbelief. Then he threw back his head and laughed, his great, booming guffaws echoing through the night.

GHOULSLAYER
by Darius Hinks

Gotrek Gurnisson, last survivor of the world-that-was, seeks the Undying King himself amidst the bleak underworlds of Shyish. Surrounded by the ghosts of the past, can Gotrek achieve his goal, or will his soul be forfeit?

Find this title, and many others, on blacklibrary.com

Champions, All

Marc Collins

Cenric knelt, and prayed.

There was nothing else. Only the movement of his lips and the beating of his hearts. The scent of incense drifted from the burning braziers across the plains before the fortress. He had kept his vigil through the chill night, till the crimson sun rose above Daronch and bathed the plains in bloody dawn. Like the spreading of great wings…

A crimson angel, bearing the Emperor’s light in one hand, and death in the other. Her wings, burning sanguine glory, casting long dark shadows. Destiny turns about her.

The Emperor spoke to him in visions such as these. On the eve of battle, at the moment of truth, He spoke. It had been so for the past five years of the Edioch Crusade. Cenric had fought for its forty-seven years, from neophyte to initiate… before he had been chosen, raised up as the Emperor’s Champion. Battle-brothers who had once stood shoulder to shoulder with him now looked to him in awe. Chaplains and Marshals clamoured for his guidance.

Cenric ceased his prayer and rose to his feet. He checked the chains about his wrist, ensuring that they held tight to the shackled glory of the Black Sword, tracing his fingers along their links to the words etched onto the obsidian hilt. His name was engraved there, a binding the strongest chain could not match. He had not yet raised the blade in martial struggle, but soon. Soon it would taste blood and know battle. He would wield it as Sigismund had once wielded it, when he’d faced down the traitors before the Palace walls, when he had stood his long vigil before the gates of hell. Theirs was the legacy of heroes, the blood of crusaders.

This is eternal, this duty. We cannot, will not, shirk from it. The mantra was like iron, a core of determination grounding his thoughts. He passed through the ranks of his brothers, where they knelt in obeisance before the Chaplains. Skull-faced warriors smeared ashen crosses upon the brows of the Templars, or flicked oil from sacred aspergills. Servitors stalked the ranks, their arms replaced by swaying auto-censers. This was war at its most sacred, its most perfect.

‘Brother!’ The voice rang out across the plain, like the hammer of inevitable artillery. Marshal Adelbert looked at him with muted concern. The warrior was unhelmed, his dark skin like carved wood beneath the beating sun. He was crowned with a simple circlet of bronze, the smooth metal riveted into his skull as a symbol of office. His armour was battered, lacking the true grandeur owed to him. At his side stood a neophyte, Baldwin, if Cenric was not mistaken, bearing the crusade banner. It fluttered in the wind, bathing the Marshal in its tattered shadow. ‘Does He speak, Brother Cenric? Does the God-Emperor bless this holy undertaking?’

Cenric nodded. ‘The Emperor speaks in His tongue of fire, scouring the unworthy and girding the faithful.’

‘Glorious,’ Adelbert rumbled. He did not pry; he did not have to. Faith was its own reward. ‘He has spoken, and all that remains is for you to be the edge of His blade, His Champion.’ He placed his hand upon Cenric’s shoulder and leant in. ‘I know your pain, brother. The galaxy burns, and we fight alone. Unsupported. Ailing. Some would have me send word to the Helicos Crusade, to meld our strength.’ He shook his head, and Cenric could see the weight of his centuries of service press upon him. ‘While there is yet might in my body, we shall continue to do the Emperor’s work. The sons of Dorn do not turn from sacrifice. That is how the eternal crusade has endured, these millennia. That is how we have survived our own half a century of battle.’

Cenric bowed his head and kept his counsel. Once we were over a thousand strong; now we are a mere handful. Wounded by the Archenemy, scarred by the wiles of the xenos, wearied by the attempts to cross the Rift. How much more can we endure?

‘As you will, brother.’ He spoke the words as though the desert grit clogged his throat. ‘Our allies are prepared?’

Adelbert chuckled dryly and swept his arm round across the plain. ‘Come, Champion. Come survey the glorious faithful.’

They passed through the serried ranks of their brotherhood and the sacred scents of their devotion. Warriors brought their fists to their breastplates with the clatter of ceramite, or formed the sign of the holy aquila as the Marshal and the Champion passed. They seemed ramshackle, their armour dented and the paint scraped. They offered their obeisance like the ragged hedge knights of old, a shadow of their crusade’s proud beginnings.

Beyond them lay the muster fields of the Adepta Sororitas. Cenric and Adelbert passed beneath black banners, bearing the heart and cross of the Order of the Valorous Heart. The cloths rippled in the breeze, disturbed by the hymnal booming of laud hailers as though they were human adherents, stoked to zealotry.

Canoness Aurea greeted them at the edge of the muster, a stern-faced woman holding an ornately sculpted power sword. She examined the blade with casual indifference, her blue eyes drifting along graven scrollwork that she had doubtless read a thousand times. She was armoured in black, as he was, though it felt moribund next to the vital shade of Cenric’s own plate.

‘Canoness,’ Adelbert said, bowing his head respectfully.

‘Marshal,’ she returned and then bowed before Cenric. ‘And you, the instrument of His will. Praise be.’ Voices chorused behind her, the laud hailers hitched an octave into a higher key of hosanna. Cenric nodded, though the adoration of mortals grated upon him. It was to the Emperor alone that they owed thanks.

‘Our warriors stand ready, our weapons prepared.’ Her lips tightened, barely contained anger thrumming within her. ‘We shall reclaim what has been sullied. We shall drive back the alien.’ She glared past them, and Cenric followed her gaze to the source of their shared ire.

The fortress loomed.

Once it had been a cathedral, hewn from the desert rock like ancient mega-scale scrimshaw. The winds had sung through it for generations, and a million artisans had carved and shaped and fluted its structure. Multitudes of scriveners had recorded the song, sifting it for the Emperor’s holy word. As Cenric understood it, they had still been recording when the ork scrap-ship had speared into them.

Now the cathedral was a ruin, its walls broken and marred with alien graffiti, patched with great plates of salvaged metal. Defiled. Occupied.

Cenric assessed the looming horror of the fastness, its rough angles crowded with guns, the air thick with smog and woodsmoke. The first shots were already echoing out, finding their range. A sudden detonation showered them in rock and shrapnel, but none of them moved. Aurea did not even flinch when a whipping spur of stone cut a thin line across her pale cheek. If anything, her determination appeared to grow.

Behind her, Cenric could see the kneeling ranks of the penitent. The women had cast aside their battleplate, in some cases so violently that their interface ports still bled. They were silent, eyes fixed. Their robes were torn, bound by declarations of penance and contrition. Flakboard had been carved with further condemnations, and hammered against their exposed skin as makeshift armour. Some were gagged or hooded with rough hessian, others had their mouths sewn shut or sealed with wax and stamped with the fleur-de-lys. Great Eviscerator chainswords lay before them, unprofaned by their touch. Cenric drew his eyes away, as the Marshal made his judgement.

‘We advance,’ Adelbert stated simply, as he drew his own blade. ‘We end this.’

The sky was burning as they charged beneath the greenskin artillery. It tore lines of fire across the heavens, hurling a rain of infernal spite against the pure. Prayers boomed across the plain, the divine cadence of the faithful in their rage. Cenric shared in it, gloried in it. He cast forth his voice in condemnation of the alien, the mutant, the heretic.

‘I am His rage and His sword! Judgement and justice!’ Everywhere he looked there was the enemy. They spilled from ramshackle gates or hurled themselves from the walls, bellowing their swine-cries. They were vermin. They would die for their transgressions, for their fundamental inhumanity.

Cenric hurled himself into the midst of the foe, cleaving through the first of the greenskin warriors without stopping. The energised blade blazed white hot, obliterating the roaring warrior in a magnesium-bright burst of superheated blood and powdered flesh. He slammed it into the armour of another ork, splitting its plate and taking its arm off at the shoulder. The beast roared and grabbed at him with its free hand, letting an oversized cleaver fall from its fingers as it tried to strangle him. Lumpen digits scraped at his immaculate battleplate, but he cast it aside with the back of his gauntlet. Slamming the sword clean through its midriff, he wrenched it to one side and bisected it.

‘Face me, xenos dogs!’ The cry rippled from him, vox-amplified by his armour and echoing across the tumult. ‘Face the Emperor’s will made manifest!’ Lesser beasts scattered from his path, whether in fear or in the attempt to reach his brothers, Cenric did not care. They were nothing before him, not compared to the greater examples of their filth-breed. Where those things walked he could see the Emperor’s golden light, singling them out for His divine judgement. Cenric would tear apart their champions, cast down their tyrants. Only humanity would reign over this burning world.

Cenric hewed the head from another greenskin and the corpse reared back, still firing its crude gun. He moved in a storm of sword thrusts and parries, watching alien blades break on his weapon’s edge or careen off his armour. The Emperor was with him, in every movement. Every breath. Whether he swung his sword in great two-handed arcs, or brandished it in one hand while he fired his bolt pistol, every strike was sacred.

He could see others of his brotherhood slam into the ork horde. Adelbert brought his sword through an alien’s chest with an artful thrust, rending armour and flesh, showering himself in inhuman gore. Sword Brethren and Chaplains flanked him, lashing out with mace or sword and shield. They sang their war cries as they slew, chants of devotion to Him on Earth. Aurea fought her way forward, as though to prove her faith the equal of the Templars’. She need not have; all present knew the hearts of the Sororitas beat true and faithful. She fought in determined silence, lips tight when not moving to the echoing laud-hailed hymnals.

The Sisters Repentia were an undulating, febrile knot of motion near her. They were a blur, almost frantic, moving with such rapidity that they seemed out of phase with the battle around them. The great chainblades swung and cleaved into the foe, drawing great gouts of blood and viscera. They forced their entire weight behind each thrust, driving the enormous weapons down with nothing more than human zeal, and the determination to atone. Together they were pushing forward, holding against the tide of roaring alien filth. The xenos’ animal stink was like a bow wave before their fury.

He looked around. The larger orks seemed to be pulling back, rallying their forces with snarls and violent gesturing. If he moved up to support the Marshal, they could push through to the enemy’s leaders. Then there would be the reckoning Cenric craved. Turning the sword in one hand, he advanced, cleaving through the dregs with disdainful ease.

Ahead of him, a clutch of orks suddenly burst up from the ground, trailing dust and garish purple paint. They glared at him with bestial malice, yet he could see the flicker of amusement in their eyes. Each of them held a clunky device, prodding and shaking it experimentally. Lights flickered on their surfaces, antennae sprouting madly in every direction. They quivered with ruinous potential.

Detonators. By the Thro–

Cenric had no time to finish his thought before the world erupted in fire.

When he awoke, it was without a sense of time.

The world was changed, warped like a pict twisted by heat. There was a greater darkness, beyond the smoke-streaked sky. Death, fire, the stench of burning meat.

He forced himself up, feeling at his armour. The master-crafted plate held firm, though he could feel the weakness of his own flesh. Blood ran within his armour, from largely minor cuts. As he moved, he could feel that his fused ribs had split or cracked in places. He would live. The Imperial Fists, his Chapter’s gene-source, believed that suffering bound them to the heroes of the past.

But here, all Cenric felt was alone.

He had fallen. That much was clear. He was in a pit hewn into the earth by massed explosives. Ancient passageways had collapsed, spilling the broken bas-reliefs of their walls into the depths. The faces of saints and heroes stared up, impotently, their shattered visages judging him. Pipes that had once carried sacred oils had ruptured, burning with lurid multicoloured flame. The light rippled along the ragged walls, picking out details and horrors.

Bodies surrounded him, giving the place a charnel air. Masses of the enemy lay dead, alongside multitudes of the Sisterhood and his own brothers. His grip tightened about the Black Sword. This was not the victory he had been promised. He pressed the blade tip into the cracked stone and bowed his head.

Do not forsake us in our hour of glory or time of suffering. We venerate you, we trust in your guidance. This cannot be the end. This cannot be all that you have wrought me for.

He nearly choked on the pride in his thoughts. His was not to question; merely to serve. To fight and to die at the Emperor’s will. Then his body and blade would be carried back to the Eternal Crusader, to lie alongside the other vanished heroes of the Chapter. An honour that would be denied to the brothers here, unless the Apothecaries were to find them when, if, the battle was won.

‘I will not let you moulder here, brothers,’ he swore. ‘When the enemy lies dead before me, you shall be honoured as you deserve. Your legacy shall return to the Chapter, that future generations might serve our cause in the Emperor’s name.’

His words were drowned out by a tortured mechanical scream. The earth shook and trembled, dislodging debris from the sides of the pit. It pinged uselessly against his armour, not even scoring the pure blackness of the ceramite. He looked up. Great mechanical plates slid across the gap above, obliterating the sky with their grinding passage. Greenskin chants echoed, and he could hear their stamping and pounding upon the makeshift bridges.

Sunlight died beneath their advance, and he was left alone in the flickering shadow.

His armour’s auto-senses compensated quickly. Where his eye had first been drawn skywards, now he looked to the ruined mess of shattered tunnels and ancient cracked-open vaults. Powdered masonry and old bone coated everything, spilling from violated reliquaries and shrineholds. Worlds such as Daronch were threaded with them, like capillaries through flesh. All inevitably snaked back to the great organs of the cathedrals. He looked to the north, where the perverted fastness of their enemy waited. The tunnels were unreliable, likely still teeming with greenskin stragglers, but they were all that remained to him.

He has set a path before me, and I will follow it even if it leads to death.

To others it might have seemed a haunting thought, but it bore a reassurance within it. This was ordained; it had to be. Did the galaxy not turn by His will?

Cenric pushed on, his pain forgotten, his kindled blade held before him.

The light of the power weapon split the darkness, resolving the intricately carved walls of the passageways. Even here they had been worked and graven, the better to channel the desert winds into sacred song. Now they echoed with the distant sound of bestial roars and grunts, of metal on metal, and the clamour of battle. It had become a debased alien hymnal of desecration.

And of struggle.

He could hear human exertion echoing amidst the fray, the muted sound of battle. Orkish cries and jeers sought to drown it with their savagery. The whirring of an engine rose and fell, the juddering of teeth against metal. Someone was fighting, struggling to survive. Cenric barged his way past piles of debris and crude barricades, crushing rocks to powder beneath his tread. He rounded another corner and emerged into a domed circular chamber. There he found his quarry.

The woman fought like a cornered animal, slashing at the air with the massive chainblade. Three of the greenskins had closed in around her, laughing with piggish amusement. They were toying with her, seemingly unconcerned by the rents in their armour and the wounds carved into their skin by her defiance. Her eyes were ablaze, piercing in their unbridled hatred. She swung recklessly, not caring if she exhausted herself, only that she struck, that she endured. She would fight, to the bitter end.

Any brother of the Chapter would be proud to fight like this – to die like this. The thought gave Cenric pause, resolving his duty like a sharply honed blade.

He hurled himself forward, bellowing his wrath. ‘For Dorn! For Sigismund! For the Emperor!’ The beasts turned, their red glare suddenly focusing upon him. The warrior took her chance and rallied. The great blade came up, teeth screaming as she raked it across the back of the nearest ork. It roared in pain and rage, spinning back towards her and catching her return sweep in the face. Its head vanished in a burst of gory slurry, its body shuddered and dropped. She was already moving past it, into the fray, initiative regained.

Cenric swung the Black Sword double-handed and the nearest ork flinched back from it, too slow. The crackling tip of the blade opened a gouge in its oversized plate armour. Rivulets of molten pig iron spilled across exposed skin with an acrid crackle, and it swung its own axe in a desperate arc. The flat of the blade caught him in the side of the helm, knocking him backwards. The visual display jolted, damage runes staining everything with winking crimson.

He gritted his teeth and pushed in, past its guard. Drawing the sword in towards his body, he spun on his heel, letting it swing forth as he moved out and away from the ork. The beast’s arm followed him as it was sliced free from its body. His pistol came up as he stopped, and fired two shots into its skull. Its head snapped back in a shower of brain and bone fragments but he was already turning from it, forgotten like the vermin it was, to face the last of them.

Champion and Sister struck as one, moving at almost the same moment. He brought his blade across its throat, while the Repentia went low and her chainblade hammered wetly at its knees. The beast was ripped apart, its body torn in opposing directions, scattered across the chamber. The woman was panting with exertion, but Cenric stood perfectly still. He raised the blade, touching it lightly to his forehead, before relaxing his stance.

‘Be at peace, Sister.’

Her eyes snapped up to meet the lenses of his helm. She gritted her teeth and rose, her gaze never flinching from him. Votive parchment had stuck to her wounds, the blood obliterating whatever canticles of contrition had been written upon them. Her robes were rough-spun, threaded with barbs and thorns, smeared with blood from her injuries. He could see the remnants of wax, where her lips had been sealed shut. Her hair had been shorn crudely from her head in ragged lines, dark where it had already begun to grow back. She was the image of the humbled warrior. Yet still she fought, with a devotion that would put lesser men to shame.

‘You…’ She spoke in a rasp, her voice atrophied from lack of use. ‘He has sent you to me.’ She almost laughed, looking away lest the sight of him strike her blind. She fell to her knees, head bowed. ‘I am unworthy to stand in His light, by His Champion.’

‘I have watched you fight. Worthiness lies in the deeds done in the Emperor’s name. Rise.’ There was a deep respect in his every word, and she rose with the gesture of his hand. ‘I am Cenric, named Emperor’s Champion of the Black Templars.’ He placed a hand on her shoulder to steady her.

‘Penance,’ she hissed. ‘That is the name granted to me in mercy and contrition. I am Penance, or I am nothing.’

‘Penance.’ Cenric bowed his head. ‘A fine name.’ Her face creased with sudden anger, and for a moment he wondered if her blade would come up. White-knuckled hands were locked around the grip, and the chainblade revved with sympathetic fury.

‘A fine name? One born of shame? I had a name, before I was judged unworthy of holding it. I will claim that name again in death, my oaths fulfilled.’ She spat to one side, the saliva blood-flecked.

‘I meant no offence.’ He spoke the words in a peal of sincere thunder. ‘The Emperor tasks us with our finest work, in war and in peace. He expects our all, but many are found wanting. They could have executed you for your failings, as many amongst the Militarum are. Instead, you have the opportunity to erase your sin with blood. Yours or the enemy’s. It makes little difference to Him on Earth.’

She looked away, as though burned. ‘Perhaps you are right,’ she swallowed, the admission bitter. ‘We yet live, and so have our chance for redemption.’ She cast her gaze skywards. ‘Do you think they endure? Your brothers, and my sisters?’

‘All things that serve Him persist in Him.’ Cenric spoke the words almost by rote. ‘If they continue to fight, then there is hope.’ He raised his sword, pointing it towards the catacombs ahead of them. The blade’s black metal was aglow with the caged lightning of its power field, a blazing beacon to light their way in the darkness. ‘The only way out of the abyss is through.’ He turned back to her, his helm impassive yet burning with the majesty of his calling.

‘Will you rise with me, Sister?’

For a time, they advanced in silence.

Both of them stared at the walls of the defiled tunnels. The crude script carved over sacred inscriptions and the murals profaned with alien filth. The stonework beneath their feet was already beginning to crack as xeno-fungal growths wormed their way up from the earth below. Fingered protrusions tasted the air, staining the close atmosphere with spores and the gentle light of bioluminescence. They could have been beneath some strange ocean, rather than trapped in the bowels of a temple to the Emperor.

The walls shook with the distant sound of battle, palsied with the echoes of siege and defence. They could not tell who was winning, who held any sort of advantage. Bestial snuffling drifted through the empty corridors, but they saw no one. Perhaps all the enemy were above, set against their allies, and all that remained in the depths were the ghosts of the xenos, the shades of their brutal past.

‘How much further?’ Cenric asked as he paused, running his fingers along the intricately carved walls of the tunnel. They teemed with etched hymnals and prayers, where the passage of orks had not erased them and altered the directed song of the wind. He traced the words IMPERATOR GLORIANA with his gauntleted hand, lingering, considering.

‘We should be nearing the base of the cathedral. These tunnels are singing lines, meant to carry the song out across the plains to shepherd the faithful.’

‘You know them well, then?’ he said. Still his fingers danced across the words. He dwelt over warnings against pride, and the laxity that such vanity carried with it.

‘I once had the honour of patrolling them. The wind was bracing, the song…’ She trailed off. ‘I cannot describe it.’ Penance shook herself from her reverie, chastened by thoughts of nobler times. ‘I served my last posting in defence of the reliquaries.’ She looked at him, at the fixedness of his gaze. ‘Why do you tarry, Cenric?’

‘I–’ He paused, his fingers hovering over the inscription. He clenched them into a fist and turned from her and the carvings. ‘I meditate. Upon my duty to the Emperor and my responsibilities to the Chapter.’ He looked back. She was following him closely, and nodded her head as he spoke. ‘In duty are all things made pure. Even the most egregious of trespasses can be mended in service.’

‘As mine may be.’

‘As yours may be,’ he affirmed, and then held up his hand suddenly.

Something rattled ahead of them, the sudden movement of steel on stone. He could hear the low growling of beasts, hungry and slavering. There was another rattle, the snap of chains going taut, and the enemy were before them in a sudden flash of stinking flesh and teeth.

The five squig-beasts were rotund and blubbery, their hides scarred from pit fighting and idle malice. Their eyes were frenzied, jaws foaming as the collars locked tight around what passed for their throats. He could see the beast master beyond them, chortling as it cracked the chains like whips to urge them on. The first creature hurled itself at Cenric, clamping its jaws around his sword arm. He backhanded it fiercely, his gauntlet driving into the side of its snout to the sound of shattering teeth. He smashed it against the wall, using his pinned arm to batter it into the cold stone. It let go with a yelp of surprise, coughing teeth and blood. Cenric brought his boot down on it, and it burst in a shower of quivering organs. Behind its pets, the ork gave a stunted cry that might have been amusement or grief. Cenric cared not. He stalked forward.

Penance fell back, struggling to bring her Eviscerator to bear, her injuries bleeding with the effort. The teeth bit at the air and caught on the stonework, lighting the darkness with sparks and filling the tunnel with a dusty miasma. She braced herself, digging her feet into the floor as a beast hammered into her guard. The squig’s jaws clamped against the blade, and she shook it to dislodge it. It opened its mouth and roared as it tumbled back, tiny arms flailing, showering her with the debris of its last meal. Saliva and blood stained her holy weapon, and she bellowed her own rage back in its face.

‘You do not end me!’ Penance screamed as she hurled herself forward. The Eviscerator fell, and reduced the swollen beast to red ruin. She trod through the remains of it, swinging again and battering the next squig against the wall as she passed it. She drew level with Cenric and then turned.

They fought, back to back. Penance lashed out against the two remaining beasts, guarding Cenric as he advanced upon their keeper. The ork grunted, and then lashed out with a thick club of knobbled metal. It cracked against his helm, and he reeled back before bringing his sword up. The crackling energy field split the darkness, and the ork stumbled, hurling insults in its guttural tongue. It fumbled for the pistol at its belt, getting off a single shot. The round scored across the side of Cenric’s pauldron, as he spun in and round. He thrust the Black Sword through its ragged breastplate, impaling the creature as it sputtered and snapped.

The club came round again in great swinging strikes, cracking against his helm and chestplate, before the ork began to slam it against the sparking power field of the sword. Its eyes were wide with pain and anger, and it battered the club against the sword until it broke and wept molten metal. It snarled, its toothed maw wide and glistening with spittle, mirroring its charges. Despite its wounds, it lunged forward and stabbed the ruined weapon at him. He bit back pain as the spur of metal lodged in the joint of his arm. His grip did not falter. He grabbed his bolt pistol, thrusting it into the beast’s hateful face.

‘Die,’ he spat. ‘Die, and blight His creation no more!’ Cenric fired, again and again, till the pistol rattled empty. The ork’s skull detonated, and Cenric took hold of the sword with both hands once more. He dragged it up and through the corpse, bisecting it completely. He turned in time to watch Penance hammer the last of the squigs into the ground. The gore seemed to halo her, for one moment rendering her as a–

Crimson angel.

Cenric shook off the vertigo of recognition, the near-gravitational pull of prophecy. Penance was panting, exhausted, bleeding. She turned her gaze to him again, and nodded simply.

‘We live, Champion.’

‘For the moment.’ He looked around. ‘Their numbers may grow from this point on.’ He shook his head. ‘You said we were near the cathedral’s base?’

‘More so now.’ Her lips opened in a hiss of pain as she forced herself to stand. Her legs trembled, but she steadied herself with the Eviscerator. ‘We go up. We fight, perhaps we die. But it is the will of the Emperor that we do so. It is the stoniest paths that lead surely to absolution.’

‘And the path set before us is rough indeed.’ He bowed his head in contrition. ‘I wonder how I found myself upon this road. Have I erred? Should I have cleaved closer to the Marshal? I was a mere initiate before He raised me up as His Champion. I have striven to be an exemplar of our creed – always forward, never showing cowardice in the face of the enemy.’ He looked to his sword, to the chains that bound it to him. As unyielding as honour. ‘Could I have done more?’

‘We can only do what the Emperor has set as our task. His is the ordered universe, His the tempered blade. We are all instruments in that design, implements under that aegis. I held rank, before. I was a Sister Superior, watching over the outer shrineholds.’ She paused, lost in memory. Tears streaked her ashen, bloody features. ‘I erred. I fought, and I lived, where my Sisters died. I could not save the relics. Thousands of years of history, ground to dust beneath their boots. While they laughed. They laughed. Had I the option then, I would have demanded I be nailed to a Penitent Engine, and cast into the fire of battle. This, though, is my reward.’ She swallowed hard before she continued. ‘But it is His plan that guides us. It is the God-Emperor’s will that has brought us to this moment. What is pride, next to that? What are our lives?’

‘From the mouths of the faithful.’ His voice was sombre, and she turned to him as he spoke, silently watching. He looked up, helm inclining as he considered their options. ‘Up then, as you say.’

They climbed the steep ascent of a winding stairway, a narrow chamber that seemed more oubliette than thoroughfare. ‘The passages,’ Penance whispered. Once they had been used by the clergy; some brought them to the vaults with ease, others were for escape. There were fist-sized gouges in the walls, where munitions had detonated or great hands had torn in frenzy at the masonry. When the end had come, these passages had failed just as surely as the rest of the defences.

They had climbed almost halfway up the stairs, Cenric moving gingerly as he eased his bulk around the turns while Penance hobbled behind him, when the first of the enemy became aware of them.

Debris began to rain down, thrown with an almost childlike indolence, the whimsy of giants. A huge chunk of hewn stone split against the edge of the stairway. The bricks trembled. The mortar cracked. Both quickened their pace, forging on to the next landing. More debris impacted around them. The head of a saint shattered against Cenric’s chest, staggering him slightly. His vision clouded with dusted marble, and he barely had time to react before the offending ork had hurled itself down onto their level.

An axe blade scraped across his battleplate, defacing the black paint of the Armour of Faith with a long gouge. He stepped back, almost knocking Penance off the platform. Without igniting the power field, he brought his sword down upon the ork’s head, denting its spiked iron helmet. It gurgled, bemused, and lashed out again. Cenric reached up, catching its wrist, before slamming his helmeted face into its gurning features. The ork stumbled backwards, filling the air with the mulchy stench of its blood. Cenric raised the blade two-handed above his head, as best as he could in such cramped conditions. As soon as he brought the flat of it straight down onto the ork’s skull, the field triggered with an ozone snap. The beast’s head burst with a thunderclap of force. He kicked the still-twitching corpse into the depths.

‘Dregs and stragglers remain. Outcasts, left to roam the deeps. If we can find the war-leader, and he has not committed his strength, then we can end this.’ He spoke the words with new certainty, cleansed in the baptism of blood and battle.

They came to the top of the stairs and Penance took the lead. He was content to follow her. She had walked these halls, lived amongst them. The ruined grandeur of the great cathedral had been her home, and was now her hunting ground. They passed beneath broken arches, hung with scorched banners. Mosaics had been shattered to their component tiles, obliterating the faces of saints and heroes. The gilding of the floors was tarnished, thick with muck and condensation. Cenric trudged through it, even as the cacophony hit them.

It was the primal howl of war, of massed cannons and artillery. The pounding of fists against chests, of bare flesh against stone, and the animal ululation of countless orks. And behind it all, woven through it, singing through the shattered airways of the temple itself, was a word. A war cry, a celebration.

Grashbakh! Grashbakh! Grashbakh! GRASHBAKH!

It took him a moment to realise it was a name. An entire army chanting one name, in one voice. A tribe honouring their chief. This was the malignant heart of their enemy’s forces. He could feel the air grow close and tight, electric with the anticipation of combat. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them he saw again with the eyes of the divine. The Emperor Himself, reaching down, to take a hold of his senses.

‘Praise be.’ Cenric whispered the words in awe.

All he could see was perfect golden light, its burning core beyond the next wall. It clawed at his sight – like fire, like fever, like the caress of stellar radiation.

He strode forward, placed both hands upon the great oaken doors before him, and pushed his way into the sanctum.

The chamber was dimly lit by crude low-burning firepits and by the wan sunlight that drifted through the broken windows; the remains of the stained glass cast it into strange, ethereal combinations, lending the great hall an unearthly feel. As though they had stumbled beyond the bounds of reality and into the hateful empyrean.

At the centre there was an awkward assemblage of refuse, beaten and forged into the shape of a throne. Before it there seemed only more junk, in strange configurations. It took Cenric a moment to recognise it as the battlefield outside, rendered by barbaric hands in mockery of a strategium.

Above it, the warboss towered.

Grashbakh was enormous, a bloated example of its filth-breed. Plates had been hammered into its skin, the rivets lodged in burnt flesh. Its head had been bent, broken, reshaped and largely replaced by crude cybernetics. Iron teeth glistened wetly in a misshapen jaw, and the eyes that turned to meet them were mismatched: one bloodshot and glaring, the other a throbbing red bionic. A great iron claw flexed and crackled, large enough to encompass Cenric whole, while the other arm was gone, lost in a mismatched jumble of barrelled weapons. Cenric’s mouth twitched into a snarl at its living blasphemy, the hideous violation it represented. The arm twitched, drifting this way and that as it sought targets. The ork exuded threat, swathed in a miasma of murder.

Cenric raised the Black Sword, tip pointed at the creature’s heart. ‘I name you Beast, and I condemn you.’

Grashbakh snarled, a bellow of rage that hit him in a solid wall of sound. They were all moving; Cenric and Penance went left and right as the ork barrelled towards them. Weapons fire slashed across the length of the chamber, great solid shots that cratered the marble floors and lurid energy blasts that reduced columns to molten slag. The warriors ducked and weaved through the storm of fire, till they were beneath the arc of the guns, and their blades came round in their own arcs of destruction.

Cenric went high, and the Black Sword carved great gouges from the warboss’ armour. Sheets of it fell away, smoking and warped. Penance swept in low, until the teeth of the Eviscerator were whirring and smoking against the stout plate of a bionic leg. She pulled the blade back, and spun away, swinging her weapon across its armoured back in a spray of sparks and shards. Cenric took advantage of the beast’s distraction, stabbing for its throat, but Grashbakh reached up and closed the blade in its own sparking fist as the claw’s power field engaged with a snap. Lightning danced between the competing weapons with a tortured whine. Cenric saw the sword, haloed in terrible light, trembling madly as the pressure between them built. He pushed, trying to drive it through the furious maelstrom, but it would not move. The ork’s eyes narrowed, and its maw twisted into a sneer of triumph. Even so, within its closed fist the force of the caged energy was building to a crescendo. Cenric could still hear the thunderous roar of the chainsword as Penance moved about it, hacking and slashing. He could not even shout to warn her.

The explosion hurled them apart. Cenric and Penance were thrown back, skidding along the floor. Grashbakh cursed in its gutter-invective, flailing the smoking ruin of the claw as it sought to regain control. Cenric sprawled on his back, having borne the brunt of the detonation. His armour smoked, and the chain around his wrist had broken. He reached out, fingertips trying to touch the pommel of the Black Sword, but falling short.

Not like this. Not in failure and shame.

He saw movement to his right as he tried to rise. Penance knelt, checking him for wounds, aware all the while of the roaring beast behind them, heaving itself to its feet. She reached for the krak grenade at his belt, detaching it with a click.

‘Sacrifice, Champion. Sacrifice is the soul of duty.’

She threw herself forward, though her wounds slowed her progress. She revved her sword, hefting it awkwardly as she lurched towards Grashbakh. It could have fired, but did not. Cenric looked up, seeing the faintly bemused creasing of its mouth. It was toying with her. Playing. Letting her get close. She ducked as it swung with the barrels of its gun-arm, burying them in the befouled marble. Penance swung herself to one side, brought the sword up and round. The whirring, snarling teeth bit into flesh with a spurt of foul blood, and a grunt of muted pain.

She looked up.

Grashbakh reached down and grabbed her, the smoking claw enfolding her. She let go of the sword, still lodged deep in its guts, but did not struggle. Her hands came up, as though in prayer. Cenric could see the grenade cradled in her hands, like a benediction. A promise. A sacrifice.

There was a flash, a pulse of light and heat. For a moment it was near blinding, but Cenric could see her. Caught in the heart of the explosion, she was haloed by blood and fire. For one glorious moment, she was a crimson angel, bearing the Emperor’s light, and death.

Her body tumbled away, through the rising smoke and dusted marble. Cenric pushed himself to his feet, looking up as he heard the grinding rumble of movement. As Grashbakh jerked suddenly through the smog.

Half its face was gone, a ruin of wet flesh, glistening bone and sundered metal. It bellowed, striking its ruined weapons against the ground. It recklessly knocked over braziers and shattered columns in its fury. The fabric of the cathedral trembled as it lumbered forward, caught in some unnatural disaster. Cenric closed his eyes.

He could still see the golden light. The Emperor’s judgement. It burned, like the purifying heat of the world’s sunrise. Like amber wings.

He reached out, across the broken links of still-smouldering chain.

He took up his sword.

Its tip scraped across the ruined marble floor and he moved in a blur, up and away, with a sudden burst of speed that caught Grashbakh by surprise. A throaty roar followed him, but he ignored it. He drove in at its side, slashing and hacking. The wounded beast lashed out, scraping at his armour with its ruined claw. He felt it buckle, but hold. Cenric snarled, his eyes ablaze with hate. He struck, again and again, and then reached out with his free hand. He grasped the hilt of the Eviscerator lodged in its side, and pushed.

The ork howled in pain and rage, flailing at him. Cenric took the blows, let them wash over him in a tide. He forced the chainblade into the warboss with every iota of his transhuman might. He watched Grashbakh collapse to its rusted knees, glaring up at him with pure animal hatred.

Cenric stepped back, panting. He raised the Black Sword, aimed it for the beast’s throat, and pronounced his judgement.

‘Imperator Vult,’ he hissed, and the blade fell. The ork’s roaring head came away from its neck in a welter of unclean gore, and fell silent. Cenric stood for a moment in the sudden silence, trembling as the grace of His guidance fell quiet. The divine light was gone, but the chamber felt brighter, the sunlight picking out an untouched altar sitting beneath the sight of a golden aquila. He made his way to Penance, knelt and checked at her throat, but she was gone. Her body was untouched by fire, miraculous in the circumstances.

‘Praise be unto Him, for His mercy as for His wrath.’ Cenric bowed his head in reverent awe.

He reached up with his gauntleted fingers and gently closed her eyes. He lifted her, her body so very frail and mortal, and placed it upon the altar.

He strode back to the warboss’ corpse, picked up the head and made his way to the main doors. He braced himself for a second, the Black Sword alive in his hand, and threw open the doors, hefting the ork’s head high as he bellowed his challenge to the world.

And below, in loyalty and in impurity, that challenge was answered.

When they eventually found him, he was alone.

He knelt in prayer before the altar, surrounded by the bodies of the xenos. He had removed his helm, and it sat to one side of him as though forgotten. He waited for a long moment, as the first of them entered the chamber.

They had the decency to be surprised by his presence.

‘Champion?’ a quavering voice asked. ‘Brother Cenric?’ It was Baldwin who spoke, the young neophyte who had accompanied Adelbert. He was without his master now, and the banner hung ragged and limp. The words of it were almost obscured by fire and ash, EDIO the only letters that remained.

‘The Marshal?’ Cenric asked, and there were tears upon Baldwin’s cheeks. So young. So weak. Had he ever been so himself?

‘Dead.’ It was Aurea who spoke. ‘He died in the charge, holding the breach so that your brothers could forge their beachhead. A hero, to the end.’ The old canoness was limping, bloodied but unbowed. ‘We owe him a great debt.’ She inclined her head to the warboss. ‘And you a greater debt still, it would seem.’

‘You owe me nothing. We are servants of the same design.’ He bowed his head, remembering. He gestured to the altar. ‘This Sister died in service of our mission, bravely in the face of abomination. In her shame, she was named Penance.’

‘I know her.’

‘I would have her true name. The name she wore in fealty.’

‘She…’ Aurea hesitated, and then straightened as she regained her composure. ‘She was Sister Superior Osyth.’

‘My thanks,’ Cenric replied. He looked to Baldwin. ‘Much has transpired that we would wish otherwise, but now is not the time to fear, or doubt, my equerry.’ Baldwin barely had time to register his surprise. Cenric looked at the gathered throng: battle-brothers and Sisters, champions all.

‘We shall fortify this world in His name, and drive back the alien. Once that is done I intend to send word to the Helicos Crusade. We have suffered, and we have sacrificed.’ He paused. ‘But we shall rise glorious and triumphant by His will. Ave Imperator!’

Each voice echoed his words, till they filled the hall and the tunnels that wound beneath it. Till the world sang anew, with the hymn of faith and the promise of a new dawn.

INFERNO! VOLUME 5
by various authors

Discover tales from across the worlds of Warhammer in a new instalment of the action-packed short fiction anthology!

Find this title, and many others, on blacklibrary.com

Skull Throne

Jake Ozga

I walk barefoot beneath the silent, predatory sky. I step carefully among brittle indigo flowers and leave no trace of my passing. I watch – unblinking – the line of trees as they tremble and fade away. The sky sighs and the flowers blur in the wind, their petals becoming indistinct smears of colour.

Time passes; it flows around me like a river. I settle back into its currents and drift. I close my eyes and when I open them again I am elsewhere. Day has turned to night and in the weak light of the moon the grass is blue and ethereal. I crouch among it and become invisible. I whisper to myself, ‘To live peacefully, we must live unseen.’ I whisper it over and over like a prayer. My mother taught me this when I was a little girl, when I was still a thing of flesh and blood. There is no sound in this Realm of Death, the place I once called home. There are no birds, no insects, just the barest breath of the wind. I listen. Any moment now. Here they come.

Dark shapes separate from the deep blue shadows of the treeline and walk into the field, down where the grass is shorter. I am as still as a mouse and if I breathe it is not so anyone would notice. There is a new sound, the sound of something scraping. It does not belong here, it is so vulgar in this place. Three men walk under the light of a burning timber, most likely taken from a homestead nearby; they make no secret of their presence. The first of the three drags along a girl by her hair. A second is lost in the shadows at the edge of the field, a darker shade. Moonlight picks out the edges of his form; it reflects on sharp corners and cutting angles. The third pulls behind him a great axe with hooks and barbs that furrow the earth as he walks.

I watch as they make the girl kneel in the gently swaying grass. She is like a bird, so skinny and delicate. Her bare arms and legs are almost translucent in the light of the waning moon. Her face is hidden by long, lank black hair. She doesn’t cry out; she knows better. I bite my lip and draw a bead of blood – a test to see if I am dreaming. They pull her head back and I see her face. Her wide, dark eyes seek out my hiding place, and just for a heartbeat her gaze meets mine. I see that she is me and I am her. I am her and I am there in the field, and they hold me by the hair as I kneel and I am scared but not for myself and then the axe swings just once and my head comes away from my body, which topples lifelessly, like a broken doll, to lie discarded in the grass.

I gasp, and the three men turn to look towards where I lie hidden, but they do not see me. The second man takes my head and ties it to his belt. I watch them do it. I watch them do it over and over and over. She is me and I am her. I lie down and curl into a ball. The scraping sound is changing and getting louder. From here, I know, things only get worse. I close my eyes.

Behind my eyelids the edifice looms from the pulsing, rusty haze. It is cyclopean, limitless, the colour of dried blood. There is a thunderous noise that I feel in the base of my skull, that I hear in the bone behind my eyes. It sounds like a boulder dragged across gravel or broken glass but repeated ten thousand times. I squeeze my eyes tight but the shape of the monolith is revealed to me: a monumental throne, built from skulls in numbers beyond my ability to comprehend. They grind against each other like teeth under the weight of the throne’s occupant, a form I cannot make out, lost in the haze. And in dark heavens at the limits of my perception, a burning eye holds me in silent regard.

We are no strangers to death, we who live in his realm. I am no stranger to death; it has always surrounded me. But this is not a vision of death, this is…

Violence. Always the same visions of violence. Even now, when I’m awake, I see the throne. I see the cutting edge of a jagged blade across a fragile, delicate neck. I see a burning, hate-filled eye. I see these things with my eyes open or closed. I see them interwoven with the mundanity of my hidden existence: they are there as I gather my herbs, as I walk under the blanched and sallow sun, as I whisper through the floorboards to the bodies down in the darkness, as I watch from the shattered windows of my ruined home in the realm of silent ghosts, and as I sleep alone under cold and lifeless stars.

Days and nights pass without distinction. Their edges blur as if viewed through a raindrop, remembered only as a dream upon waking – real in one moment and nothing but fragments in the next. I too am blurred. I am a figure without definition, a form without edges. This numbed existence – this fugue, this dream – I float through it like a ghost. Live unseen, but how do you live a life without hope? In truth I do not live, but I exist still, I remain. A heavy blade scrapes a furrow through freshly tilled soil and the skulls grind together under a crushing weight. I remain in incoherence. I linger in madness. I do not know how long it has been this way and I wonder if it will ever end. I am missing a part of my soul.

I open my eyes. Daylight. I am in the charred remains of my crumbling home. I am standing at my favourite broken window that looks down onto a field where nothing grows and no animals graze. The glass panes are long since gone, but there is no wind in this place to speak of and I no longer feel the cold. I am rarely hungry and eat sparingly; instead I make tea in a heavy iron cauldron that hangs from a chain over a modest firepit that I do not remember replenishing. The fire burns white, the pale smoke drifts away towards the stars through the ruin of the roof. The water takes time to boil. I add more of the herb than last time: a pinch of mhurghast root adds a bitter taste but too much can cause paralysis or even death. Brewed to the correct strength the tea removes my dreams, replaces them with this confusion of non-existence, though every day it takes more and more to grant me peace, and every day the dreams return like an invasive weed with roots grown deep inside my head. The herb is found everywhere in this quiet corner of Shyish and I have harvested enough to kill myself a hundred times over.

I do not know if I will kill myself. It is not that I want to be alive, it is that I am unable to decide. It is too much to decide a thing like that; I need guidance. I used to have help, but I have lost a part of my soul and so I am as a ship adrift, alternately becalmed or borne on indiscriminate tides. Decide to die, decide to live.

I see three shapes emerge from the shadows at the edge of the field. I quickly drink the tea and feel its effects immediately. The figures blur into nothing. The world loses its hard edges. I deliquesce, I slip away.

Wait. Wait. I wade back towards the shore from some impossible, dreamless depth. Something has disturbed me from my sleep; some primal instinct sets my heart fluttering as if a predator’s shadow has fallen upon me. I lie awake on my cot and listen. There is something… Far away I hear a man’s voice, raised in rough song. It echoes across this silent, dead land. This is new. My dreams have never sung before.

I walk to the broken window. I move carefully, barefoot on the fragile, fire-blackened floorboards that creak and splinter at my passing, tiptoeing so as not to disturb the bodies as they rest beneath me. I do not know if it is morning or evening. There is pale light as the sun swims weakly across a liquid sky that is always the same ashen grey, faintly diffused with smudged silver stars. The fields are smothered in a funeral shroud of mist and I see nothing and no one, but still I hear the song. It is a chant, vulgar and brutal; it does not belong in this place. I stand in the doorway and watch the shadows as they coalesce and pool together, and from the mist there comes a man.

There comes a man: tall, swaggering, alone. He sings his barbaric song with words I do not understand. He wears the piecemeal red armour of the invaders, so deep in colour that it first appears black. ‘To live peacefully,’ I whisper. ‘To live peacefully…’ My voice trails away. This is something new. I try to think what I should do. I should hide, I should remain unseen, but instead I sit in the doorway and watch as he turns to walk towards the house. I should fetch my mother’s spear, but it is too much to contemplate and instead I close my eyes, and when I open them he is approaching me. He is a new vision. So things do change after all – a part of me is relieved. I bite my lip and taste the metallic tang of blood, but I do not wake up. ‘Open your eyes,’ I say to myself. ‘Open your eyes.’ But they are open. I should run, but instead I sit and I think: it would be the easiest thing in the world to die now.

He does not stop his song as he takes a handful of my hair and drags me back into the charred bones of my house. With his free hand he beats the heavy iron armour on his chest, a percussive crash to accompany his chanting. I watch the stars as they blink out in the heavens. I watch the tea as it boils in the heavy iron pot on the last embers of the fire. Am I to be forever a spectator at my own death? Decide to fight, decide to die – even in these final moments it is too hard to consider.

He throws me ahead of him and I fall awkwardly beside my bed, scraping my bare knees. He draws the sword he wears across his back: an ugly pockmarked blade with a single, well-notched edge. He removes his helmet and I see he is a young man, not much older than me. He has stopped singing. His jaw is ruined from some old injury that has healed badly, and the wound is only partially disguised by a tangled black beard. He says something in a tongue I struggle to understand – the guttural, snarling accent of the invaders is so different from my own – but I know what he intends: I see myself on my knees. This has happened before, different but the same. Time repeats itself. Existence is a loop of chain, the links pass endlessly through my hands. He means to take my head, over and over again. The thought stirs something in me, an unfamiliar anger. Just the tiniest drip, drip, drip of this new feeling into a pool at the bottom of a deep, dark well. Maybe I can use it.

And then he steps towards me; he steps on brittle boards damaged by the fire. He does not tread lightly, as one should, as one must. I hear cracking. I see it coming, I almost smile. And so of course, the floorboards break, and he falls into the darkness, into the darkness with the corpses.

I touch my neck cautiously, but I am intact. I cock my head and listen, waiting for the grinding that heralds the vision of the skull throne, but it does not come. This is something new. The man is hurt – a bone broken in the fall perhaps. There is cursing and moaning: ugly words and sounds that have no place here and which make me want to retreat somewhere hidden and silent. But instead I sit at the edge of the hole, legs dangling into the darkness below, and watch him. He is struggling to get his arm free of some splintered wood that has him pinned in place. His leg is bent the wrong way.

‘Please be quiet,’ I whisper. But he does not hear me and he continues his awful noise. I consider the situation for a while, then I stand and stoke the fire that has cooled in the firepit. I add new bundles of kindling, taken from the thickets near the house, and then cuttings of the grey wood that I keep in a basket near the door, and I wait for the fire to catch and get hot and the water in the cauldron to boil, and then I push the whole thing over so that the cauldron falls and spills down into the hole. There is more screaming – louder now – and then finally there is silence. I watch the last of the water trickle over the broken floor for a moment. Drip, drip, drip. Then I go back to my cot and fall asleep.

Later, as I lie in my bed, I talk to him. I ask him what happened to his jaw, but he does not reply. I lie and watch the stars and imagine him injured in a duel with some brutish rival. I try to remember the song that he sang but when I attempt to whistle it, it does not sound right at all. It has been some time since I checked on him – some days perhaps – it is so easy to lose track. In the hole the moaning sometimes resumes but not for so long that I need to boil any more water. I leave the cauldron where it lies, I do not numb myself with tea. I feel different. I am feeling more and more different all the time.

One night I hear him talking. His voice is small now. I lie in bed, wide-eyed in the darkness, and I listen.

‘I do not want to die here. I do not want to die like this.’ He slurs his words. I have to concentrate to understand him.

‘We came here before. A year ago or more. We killed you,’ he says. ‘We killed you, my brothers and I.’

‘Yes,’ I whisper.

‘What are you? Are you a ghost? A spirit? We have met such things in this strange land.’

‘Am I a ghost,’ I whisper. ‘Am I a spirit.’

‘We killed you – we cut off your head!’

‘You cut off my head,’ I whisper. ‘You cut off my head and I want it back.’

The next day I make a decision. I rise from my bed and I retrieve my mother’s spear and I step down into the cellar, barefoot among the debris and the bodies. He is still trapped by a beam of splintered wood that tears into the meat and muscle of his arm when he tries to move. His leg is twisted. He has stripped off most of his armour until he is naked and his skin is pink and cross-hatched with raw and bloody fingernail marks where he has scratched at his blisters. His face is pale and his tangled beard is foul with vomit. He snarls at me and so I push the broad bronze point of the spear into the sole of his bare foot and he screams. ‘We killed you, we killed you,’ he groans. The bodies in the darkness watch us in silence and I try not to think about them. ‘You will tell me where you have taken my head,’ I say, and twist the spear. And so, in time, he tells me.

Later, we are sat quietly together. He says that he doesn’t want to die this way but I am not listening, my thoughts are elsewhere. His breathing becomes strange and uneven and eventually he goes still. I contemplate the information that he has shared and finally I decide what to do; I decide all on my own. ‘I know,’ I say to the bodies in the darkness, ‘I am feeling different. I am sorry that I have to leave you.’

I pack a few things from around my home and I carry my mother’s spear. I take a bag with some little provisions and my herbs, although I have not drunk any of the tea in some time. In the grey of the evening of that same day I set out to walk towards the setting sun, in the direction from which the man came some few days past.

I pass from the lands where my mother chose to hide into the land that once belonged to my father and his people. I walk through fields I knew as a child and then yet others that I have never seen before. All is still, all is dead. As it should be. At the edge of a copse of skeletal, ash-white trees I walk into a cloud of mist, until I come to a beach of colourless sand that stretches away into the distance. Each step I take along the beach is swallowed by the mist that spills out from a vast lake or sea, and it is only by following the edge of the water that I do not become disoriented. Behind me my footprints are erased by the milk-white water as it laps soundlessly at the shore. Ahead of me, my path is not yet written.

I walk along the shore until I reach the stone marker that I am looking for: an upright column of obsidian, almost twice as tall as me. I trace the razor-sharp edges of the stone with my fingers. Etched on the glassy surface is an eight-pointed star and another shape – a crude skull perhaps, repeated over and over. This object too does not belong here; I know somehow that it was once not of this realm, that it was carried here by the invaders.

I turn and step into the tepid water, the light of Azyr at my back and the spectre of the waning moon ahead of me. The shallow sea vanishes towards an invisible horizon, where it merges in silence with the mist. The water is thick and opaque and the air is redolent with the smell of brine. I taste salt on my lips. After a short while I am up to my knees in the milky water and it seems to get no deeper, the coast now long lost somewhere in the mist behind me, and all around is beautiful, bloodless serenity. I stop and I think that I could fade away here, that I could forget about the edges of myself and dissolve into this nothingness. I close my eyes. And then I hear the drip of the blood from the head I carry by its tangled beard, the drip of blood into the lifeless water, and I am reminded of why I am here and what I now seek. In the distance, muffled by the mist, I hear the familiar sound of bone grinding on bone, and I wade through the water towards it.

They are camped in the skeleton of some great sea creature. The bones of a giant ribcage rise from the water, black and ragged. A fire illuminates an area of land at the heart of the creature’s remains, the light diffused by the mist. Around it I see figures moving. I lower myself into the water until only my eyes would be visible if they were to look in my direction. I remain unseen. It is too shallow to swim but I pull myself along on the seabed, my hands sinking through the spongy silt to find purchase on the rock beneath.

I observe the scene for a while, drawing slowly closer to the camp. The water around the island is full of froth and movement, and I realise that it is surrounded by a frenzy of fish of some sort. No, not fish but eels. They gather at the island of bones, thrashing in the water, writhing and knotting around each other like coils of oiled rope as they fight to feed. They tear scraps from the carcass of the great sea creature, ripping black meat away from the bones and bringing it back into the froth. As I watch, I see an eel uncoil from the swarm to snatch something from the shore in its jaws: a severed human arm. There are many more body parts that lie discarded near a great iron cooking pot in the camp. Even as I observe, one of the men walks to the pile of body parts, takes part of a carcass upon a curved butcher’s hook and hefts the torso up and into the cooking pot.

Is this where they brought me when they took my head? I wonder. Is this where they would have tossed my body? My skinny little arms and skinny little legs and my poor little stump of a neck where my head should be?

Wait. I think. Wait, how could it be me? I am here. I am alive. I am more alive than I have been for some time.

Something moves in the water alongside me. A huge black eel glides past – clouds of white sand billow as it twists its body to turn and face me, almost as long as I am tall. It darts forward in the water; small, sharp teeth sink into the meat of my arm, drawing blood, and I drop the head that I have been carrying. And then the eel retreats, slipping away from me, back to join the others. I follow it, joining the writhing mass. I am surrounded by life and it is invigorating. The eels nip at me but they don’t persist and I let them have their fun. My blood tastes too bitter for them, I expect, full of poisonous mhurghast root. They coil around me, I am welcome among them, I am one of them. I smile. I make a decision. Decisions are coming easily to me now.

I slip out of the water, I crawl on my belly among the carcasses. I am coated with white silt and streaming with watery blood from dozens of tiny bites. I still have my mother’s spear and the pack containing the mhurghast root, enough to kill me a hundred times over. The men in the camp are fighting among themselves: violent games and duels. I think of the man in the cellar of my house, how his jaw was ruined. I think of his violent life and I think, well, my life has not been without violence. I had thought to offer it as a trade, but it doesn’t matter now. I throw the poisonous herbs into the cooking pot. Three handfuls. It floats for a moment in the scum on the surface of the stinking, rust-coloured stew, then sinks. I lie among the body parts.

The men grunt and brawl late into the night, their voices muffled by the mist; they pause only to eat their cannibal feast. I close my eyes. Bone grinds on bone as the skull throne looms but I remain unseen here among the dead. ‘To live peacefully,’ I whisper. I feel something warm inside my chest; it is a new and fragile and alien thing, and I realise after a while that it is an ember that could in time become something good, and I nurture it within me as I lie among the bodies, warmed by the glow of the cooking fire as it slowly burns down to ash. In time, the warriors sleep. I am so tired now. I fade away. In the morning I am the only one to wake.

The new day brings with it a change of atmosphere and I almost do not recognise where I am. A cloud of choking sand has gathered to suffocate this evil place. The red light of the throbbing, heatless sun turns the air to deep rust. I walk through the haze, among the black bones of the camp. I tread carefully, barefoot among the men that lie here and there, and I leave no trace. Some of them are alive; their chests rise and fall, their eyes are open, but they cannot move and so they watch me as I pass. Most are dead. I tiptoe so as not to disturb the bodies. I hum the song that the bearded man once sang as he dragged me by my hair. I can’t get it to sound quite the same – it is confused somehow, distorted. To my ears, my variation sounds better.

In the heart of the camp, one of the invaders sits slouched in a chair crudely formed from black, glassy stone. A great axe – covered in cruel hooks and barbs – lies at his feet. His eyes follow my movements, his pupils pinprick vortexes in the bloodshot whites of his eyeballs. His fingers twitch; the muscles in his neck are bunched, the cords so prominent they look like they might snap. His jaw works slowly from side to side, like cattle chewing cud. My father once had cattle, back when I was little more than a babe. He is trying to talk. I wait patiently.

‘What vision is this?’ His speech is slurred. ‘What strange vision? Are you a daemon? Come to me, born in blood. Your kind are welcome here.’

I look down at myself. The white mud that coats me is dry and cracked and stained with blood.

I laugh and the sound startles me – it is so loud!

‘Am I a daemon? No, no. I am just a girl.’

There is silence for a while. His fingers continue to contract and stretch as he wills his body back to life, fighting against the paralysis. His eyes are so full of hatred and rage; it must be wonderful to feel so intensely, to conjure such emotions out of nothing. Around us the red haze closes in until we are the only two beings in existence; all else is obscured by a miasma of sand the colour of dried blood.

‘Just a girl,’ he rasps. ‘What are you doing here, girl? Do you come to die?’

I think on this; it is not an easy question to answer.

‘Don’t you recognise me?’ I ask. ‘You took my skull. You cut off my head with your ugly axe. I am here to take it back.’

Even as I say it I know the words are not true; they are confused, and out of shape, like the half-remembered melody.

No. I sigh. No, this is not right.

I sit cross-legged in the sand, my head in my hands.

Not my skull, I correct myself. My sister. My twin.

We were born on the same day, moments apart. Our mother said we shared a single soul. Only moments older, but how much she must have learned in those few fleeting heartbeats before I joined her. How wise she was. How I looked up to her. At times it was as if we shared a single body, that we looked on the world with a single set of eyes.

‘You cut off her head,’ I say. ‘And I could only watch.’

I hear the grinding of bone on bone; it echoes around this place. I feel it in the nape of my neck and behind my eyes. I can taste violence in the air. Violence poisoned this hidden corner of the realm when I was just a child. Violence bled into our lives from some other place, carried by invaders. My father did not survive it. My mother kept us hidden for a time. But my sister… my sister was my guide when I could not have survived on my own, when I struggled to understand and to make decisions. She was the guiding force and I merely a passenger. She was so brave to carry this burden and I… I was such a weight around her neck, and worse: a liability. Because I could taste this violence in the air – even as a child, I could taste it. And because I did not hate the taste.

He starts to speak again but I am not listening. I stand slowly and take the axe and drag it behind me to the first of the bodies, the first of the men that litter the camp. The axe is so heavy I struggle to lift it above my head and when I let it drop it is with weight enough to cut bone. It is hard work; one cut is not enough. Some of the men are not yet dead, but it is all they can do to watch me as I approach. Their eyes are full of hatred and something that might be fear. Would my sister have stayed my hand? I wonder. My sister was full of kindness and compassion but I have never truly understood those things.

It takes me most of the day but I gather their heads. The heads of all that came here, invaders in the realm of the dead. I have to pause frequently to rest. It is hard work but it must be done. I take their heads and bring them to the centre of the camp.

‘You make of these an offering,’ the seated man growls. ‘This is as it should be.’

His voice is no longer slurred. He has watched me as I have worked, his head turning to follow my movements even as I cut the heads from the men that he commands.

‘An offering,’ I say. ‘I offer these in exchange for my sister’s skull.’

‘You should be on your knees…’ His voice is so full of hatred and contempt. There are flecks of bloody saliva at the edges of his mouth. He begins to stand. ‘I will consider your request if you beg.’

‘It is not meant for you,’ I say. Before he can rise I push the tip of my mother’s spear into the soft flesh between his ribs and I laugh at his shock as the blade pierces his heart. He does not stop hating even as he dies, as he first slumps forward on his seat then topples to the blood-soaked sand. The grinding of skulls consumes me, overwhelms me.

‘God of violence,’ I call out. I have to shout to make myself heard above the crushing waves of terrible noise. ‘God of violence, I offer these to you. Your men, your Champion. All in your name.’

High above, in dark heavens, the blood-red sun is now a burning eye that holds me in hateful regard. I do not shy from its attention. And I know that this is still not enough.

‘God of violence! I have so little left that I can offer you.’

I push the hilt of my mother’s spear deep into the fine white sand until it hits bedrock. I angle it towards my own throat. It is still so sharp. The tip draws a bead of blood and I know that I am not dreaming. Decisions come so easily to me now. My parents would be so proud of what I have become.

‘Goodbye, mother! Goodbye, father! I’m sorry I troubled you… and I’m sorry I didn’t visit you, down there in the dark. My sister, my soul, I will see you soon.’

I am crying. It is a rare and beautiful gift to feel such emotion.

‘All I ask is that we may gaze upon each other!’

And the dark heavens shrug in acquiescence.

I hold the shaft of the spear tight in trembling hands. And I push myself forward with all my strength and I push and I push and I pu–

There is a noise like that I feel in the base of my skull, that I hear in the bone behind my eyes. It sounds like a boulder dragged across gravel or broken glass, repeated ten thousand times. The skulls of the skull throne grind against each other, unceasing, forever.

And we are together again.

THE HARROWED PATHS
by various authors

In the grim worlds of Warhammer, death is always near, and unspeakable horror awaits the lost, lonely and hopeless. Experience tales of dark journeys, ill tidings and doomed souls in this Warhammer Horror anthology.

Find this title, and many others, on blacklibrary.com

The Strong Among Us

Steve Lyons

The forge had been besieged for seventeen days.

It felt like longer. Jarrah struggled to remember how life had been before, when he had felt protected. He was becoming accustomed to fear’s icy grip on his heart, and this frightened him more.

Hard labour was a welcome distraction. Today, he manned a defensive emplacement. A half-constructed Earthshaker cannon had been wheeled up to a huge crack in the wall. Jarrah didn’t know how to operate it – though he had played a small part in its manufacture – but he could heft heavy shells up onto his shoulder and pass them to a fellow drudge, who would load them.

The big gun’s blast had made him wince, at first. Now his ears were deadened to it, as they were to the rolling thunder of guns from without.

Jarrah hadn’t looked outside in days. He feared what he might see, though he knew he would likely see nothing. The forge’s attackers were distant yet, hunkered down in their trenches and dugouts. Jarrah had glimpsed them only once, shortly after their arrival, specks on the horizon or possibly tricks of the eye. Now a smoke haze clung to the blasted land between them, obscuring them further.

He knew the attackers were still there by their thunder. In his bones, he felt the impacts of their better-targeted shells. He may have helped assemble their cannons as well. Blackfire Forge had shipped so many Earthshakers to the Emperor’s fighting forces. It was one such force that now pounded at its obdurate walls.

Every morning, every night, Jarrah prayed for them to break through.

He prayed for the Emperor to save him.

Jarrah slept in fits and starts.

The most comfortable places – the few living spaces and larger clerical offices – were taken by Blackfire’s occupiers. He bedded down draped in a scavenged sheet against the cold, iron side of a broken-down press. He hadn’t bathed in weeks.

The forge was the size of a hundred city blocks. This deep inside, the only light was actinic, unnatural. Jarrah had no way to measure time, but for the klaxons that still blew to mark the changing of work shifts. He rose not when he had slept enough, but when his muscles ached too much to sleep on.

He took what food was provided to him. There had been plenty, but now rations seemed to shrink daily. Jarrah boiled up grey oats over a sputtering furnace, and joined a group of weary labourers to eat and converse in low voices.

‘I tell you,’ said an older, sallow-faced man – Jarrah didn’t know his name, but thought he had worked in Grinding – ‘they’re Death Korps. That’s who they’ve sent to take back Blackfire, a Krieg regiment.’

At least half his audience, including Jarrah, looked blank.

The man sighed. ‘I saw them in a pict-feed. It must have been, I don’t know, twenty years ago. Siege specialists, they are. No matter the target, they’ll dig in and wait, for weeks or months if they have to. I heard of one siege that lasted over ten years.’

A gleam had entered the sallow-faced man’s eye. He cleared his throat and looked away. A pair of cultists in frayed black robes, their faces crazed with tattooed blasphemies, walked by but didn’t spare the speaker a glance. He resumed his narrative, trying harder to maintain a neutral tone.

‘I saw footage of them in action. They never once faltered. For each one that fell, another two, three, four rose to replace him, and they just kept on coming, advancing.’

Jarrah pictured a mass of Guardsmen in shining armour, breaking Blackfire’s tattooed captors, trampling them underfoot. He felt a thrill of hope, but suppressed it. Like the speaker, he didn’t dare let his loyalties show. No cultists were watching him now, but there were traitors among his fellow captives.

He had woken to the screaming of one such, two nights ago: ‘Masters! Masters! These men are plotting to kill your sentries and open a gate to our foes.’ Jarrah had shrunk beneath his flimsy sheet, plugging his ears and hating himself for being unable to do anything. He had tried to blot out the sounds of gunshots and tortured screams, as black robes had swooped upon the scene.

Three alleged plotters had been dragged away, bloodied, one body left to rot. The informant had snatched at a trailing robe, gibbering, ‘Did I serve you well? Will I be rewarded?’ Dislodged with a sharp kick, he had scampered into a corner to whimper.

When Jarrah had woken again, the informant was dead, his throat slit. This at least reassured him that not all his former workmates had turned. Most were keeping their heads down as he was, doing what they must to stay alive. He couldn’t tell the faithful from the heretic, however, nor guess who might break next.

‘I heard…’ a young man with a tangle of blond hair ventured, ‘I heard that Garran and the others were dead.’

The news was met by non-committal murmurs, none of them surprised. ‘I heard the same,’ someone else spoke up, ‘from Tharn in Waste Disposal. He said their bodies…’ He drew in a shuddering breath. ‘He said they were covered in boils and sores, and deformed. Like their skin and bones had melted.’

A few men almost crossed their chests with the sign of the aquila, but checked themselves. Jarrah eyed the mound of tasteless oats on his spoon and lowered it again.

When the cultists had infiltrated and seized Blackfire Forge two months ago, they had killed its shift managers, administrators and security personnel. They had spared the labourers, those who didn’t try to fight them. In the earliest days, they had been pressed back into service, forging and assembling weapons to employ against the soldiers whom the Emperor would undoubtedly send.

Most of the forges had ceased to function now. The cultists, blaming sabotage, had executed scores of suspects – or done worse with them, it was rumoured.

More likely, they were themselves to blame. They had no concept of how to run this facility, how to serve the machine-spirits that controlled its daily routines. They cared only for their earthly pleasures, and for whatever profane rituals they conducted behind chained doors. They worked their captives hard – but one cultist’s order was often gainsaid by another, creating confusion. Small but crucial tasks had been neglected until the complex processes that relied upon them had broken down.

Jarrah’s job, assembling minor components of the Earthshaker’s targeting system, had vanished along with said components. He had not been reassigned, but was afraid to stand idle. He had no wish to be taken beyond those chained doors, to share the fate of the luckless Garran and friends.

‘How much longer, do you think?’ asked the young blond man. ‘They’ve been out there so long, the soldiers, and don’t seem to be getting any closer.’

‘They will,’ said the sallow-faced man with quiet certainty.

‘You said they’ll wait. They’ll wait for months if they have to.’

The older man nodded. ‘The Death Korps of Krieg will break through these walls, we can be sure. It’s just a matter of time. But if half of what we hear is true – about the cultists, about the powers they are trying to raise here – they may be too late.’

The diners lapsed into a sullen silence thereafter. Jarrah added his bowl to the piles of dirty crockery that it was no one’s job to wash, and trudged back towards his post. He spotted a rattling, whining trolley headed his way and, hurrying to match speed with it, hopped onto its flatbed trailer.

The trolley snaked its way through the forge’s gloomy, overheated tunnels, with passengers stepping on and off along the way. Some of them conversed, in the usual desultory tones, and Jarrah listened in, always eager for news, for hope.

He never spoke himself, however, just as he never met the glowering eyes of the cultists they passed along their route. It was safer that way.

Jarrah had not been assigned to the Earthshaker. Becoming superfluous several days ago, he had anxiously sought a useful role for himself. Finding two workers struggling to tame the massive cannon, he had offered his assistance.

He knew Tallen, the cannon’s loader, already. His skin was bronzed, his muscles rippling from a lifetime of swinging heavy hammers. The wirier, thin-faced gunner he did not know, and they hadn’t swapped names.

Compared to Tallen, Jarrah felt puny and clumsy. He had struggled to match the fitter man’s pace, at first. By now, he had adapted to the unchanging routine of bending, lifting, turning, lowering – or Tallen had wearied and slowed.

Jarrah tried not to think about what he was doing. He prayed that none of his shells had taken a life. The soldiers surrounding the forge, he hoped, were safe in their trenches. The bombardment was merely intended to keep them from emerging. He was only delaying their advance – which was troubling enough.

A braver man might have confided in the others. He might have suggested firing the cannon less often, perhaps only when they were observed. He might have proposed tampering with its sights to make its shells fall short. They could even have damaged the weapon beyond repair.

Tallen thrust a shell into the Earthshaker’s breech and stepped back, wiping his brow with the back of his hand. ‘Let’s hope it blows some soldier’s head off,’ he grumbled. ‘Why can’t they just leave us alone? We didn’t invite them here.’

Jarrah looked at the big man – properly, for the first time that day – and suddenly his failure to speak out felt like a blessing. Tallen’s face was not smeared with soot as he had assumed, but with ink. It formed a smudgy but distinct shape on his cheek, spilling onto his neck: a shape that Jarrah had seen upon many a cultist’s face.

It was a star, formed by a black circle with eight barbed spears jutting out of it.

‘If they just went away, we would be fine,’ Tallen resumed. ‘We could live as the masters aim to do, a life of pleasure.’

‘Outside of the Emperor’s protection,’ the Earthshaker’s gunner rumbled, without turning from his charge.

‘What has the Emperor done for us?’ Tallen spat. ‘I break my back for over twenty years, working ten-hour shifts for Him, and for what in return?’

He glared at Jarrah, who shifted awkwardly. He wasn’t prepared for such a test. He shied from speaking blasphemies aloud. He forced a weak smile – supportive enough, he hoped – to his lips instead, but hated himself for it.

‘You think the cult will allow us to join them?’ the gunner asked, mildly.

‘They said so, didn’t they? They told us, anyone who turns to their cause would be welcomed. They said we could be saved. We could be free.’

Jarrah heard a sudden sound, and whirled around. He expected to find a cultist standing behind him, perhaps with a knife drawn to punish him for disloyal thoughts. Instead, he only glimpsed a dark, hunched figure as it slipped away around the tunnel’s curve. It was roughly humanoid in size and shape, and yet something about it made his spine tingle with dread.

The murmurs around the tables that evening concerned monsters.

They – or possibly it, no one could be sure – had been glimpsed throughout the forge, always cloaked in shadows. Descriptions varied hugely. The monster or monsters had eight limbs or just two. One slavering mouth full of sharp teeth, or smaller maws all over their misshapen bodies. The monsters had claws or tentacles or suckers – and tails, reportedly whip-thin, barbed or forked.

Observers agreed that pale, grey flesh tumbled in folds from the monsters’ twisted skeletons, pitted with scars and livid with boils. There was much talk of the cultists’ secret rituals, and general agreement that the monsters were linked to them.

‘Summoned to protect the forge?’ someone wondered.

‘Or sent to punish us?’ suggested another, in a quavering voice.

Jarrah had convinced himself that he had been imagining things. Now, the memory of the fleeting, indistinct shape in the tunnel left him feeling nauseous.

He heard no reports of the monsters attacking anyone. There was much talk, however, of labourers unseen for days. Some were soon confirmed alive and well; of others, there was only speculation. Jarrah wondered what might have been left of him, of Tallen and their gunner, had the monster chosen not to pass them by. Who would have missed him, he asked himself, or even noticed him gone?

He knew things were serious when the cultists employed the public address system to insist that they weren’t. He hadn’t heard the crackles and hisses of the old vox-speakers in some time, and they startled him.

The cultist whose voice boomed out across the forge sounded drunk. He rambled at length about power and freedom, and cursed the Emperor repeatedly. ‘We welcome the spawn creatures as they test our faith,’ he slurred, ‘our resolve to cast off Imperial shackles. The strong among us need have no fear of mutations.’

That wording bothered Jarrah. Did it mean, as was the muttered consensus around him, that the monsters would kill the cultists’ enemies? He recalled the fate of Garran and his plotters, the lurid account of their disfigurements in death, and another – a far worse – possibility took root in his nightmares.

He took a long gulp from his glass, in part to cover the revulsion etched clearly on his face. Blackfire Forge straddled numerous underground rivers, so at least there was plenty of water, pumped up by the gallon as a natural coolant.

That night, Jarrah knelt beside the broken-down press, with his back to the grunts and snores of his fellows. He breathed on a glass panel over a dial and rubbed it with a grimy sleeve until he could see his reflection faintly by actinic light. He lifted a trembling finger, caked in wet soot.

He prayed to the Emperor, begging His understanding.

It wasn’t that he had lost faith. But the Emperor’s soldiers weren’t here. They couldn’t protect him. He had to protect himself until they came and, not being a fighter, he could think of only one way.

Jarrah put his fingertip to his cheek, letting the overgrown nail dig in. He gritted his teeth. He marked his face with the shaky image of an eight-pointed star.

On the twentieth day, the Death Korps broke into Blackfire Forge.

The first Jarrah knew of it was a panicky vox announcement: ‘If you value your freedom, if you value your life, you must fight them.’

His three-man crew exchanged glances, each seeing only indecision in the others’ eyes.

‘Do we keep firing?’ asked Tallen helplessly.

They didn’t know where the incursion had occurred: a long way from their emplacement, clearly. Through the crack in the wall, nothing had changed. They could see only smoke, hear only thunder. Jarrah had waited so long for this moment, and it didn’t seem real.

‘Don’t let them beat us, not when we are so close. Keep them back. You must keep them away from us!’

There followed a series of distorted bangs and crashes. Then another voice – more confident and commanding – crackled over the speakers.

‘All labourers, report to the south-west sector immediately. Stragglers will be punished.’

Jarrah’s crewmates sprang into motion. He found himself running with them, though it was the last thing his legs wanted to do. He looked for an escape route, somewhere to hide until the fighting was over. But what if it didn’t end? he asked himself. What if the attackers were repulsed? What if this was another test?

Then it was too late. More men streamed out of the tunnels around him, hemming Jarrah in between them. Blackfire had employed many tens of thousands of labourers. They outnumbered the occupiers by a considerable factor – but, like him, they had chosen not to fight but to survive. What else had they done all their lives, after all, but follow orders?

An engine whined, tyres squealed and suddenly there was a trolley alongside him. Hands snatched at Jarrah, pulling him aboard its trailer. It was badly overloaded, spilling passengers over the sides, but he was trapped by a press of heaving, sweaty bodies. Most seemed as lost, as anxious as he was, but there were black-clad cultists among them too, so no one could voice their fears.

The trolley managed little more than Jarrah’s running pace. Tunnel walls slid by with aching slowness. Not that he was eager to reach his destination.

Did his captors really expect him to fight for them? Perhaps so. For the first time, it struck him just how many labourers had painted stars on their faces. Jarrah glimpsed a familiar figure – an old foreman, someone he had once known well – and it compounded his misery to see that he was draped in black robes.

He felt the fighting long before he saw it.

He felt the ripples of grenade bursts thrumming through the floor. Waves of dry heat crashed across his face. Jarrah heard screams of anger, desperation, horror and death.

The tunnel vented into a part of the forge he hadn’t visited before. The trolley was blocked by a writhing crush of bodies. Cultists were yelling orders, but Jarrah couldn’t make them out above the clamour. Other passengers dismounted, so he followed their lead. He spent the next few minutes being pushed one way and pulled another. Whenever he picked a direction to strike out in, he collided with labourers coming the other way. Finally, he saw heavy tools being handed out from another trolley’s flatbed. This gave him something to aim for, so he shouldered and elbowed his way forwards with some sense of purpose. He might feel less helpless, he reasoned, with a weapon in his grip.

He had almost reached the trolley when a firm hand landed on his shoulder. Jarrah turned and caught his breath in horror at the sight of a cultist behind him. He had never been touched by one before, and his skin crawled.

He could smell corruption on the cultist’s breath. He willed himself not to recoil, to stand firm as if he had nothing to hide. Narrowed, dark eyes glared into Jarrah’s soul. Then, to his immense surprise, the cultist thrust a gun into his hands. It was a lasrifle, brand new and gleaming.

He gaped at it. He wanted to ask, Why me? But the cultist was gone, and he was caught up in the tides of the crowd again. This time, they were pulling him in a definite direction, towards a broad, railed gallery overlooking a vast, high-ceilinged space. Ahead of Jarrah and around him, terrified but browbeaten labourers wielded hammers and wrenches and soldering irons in the service of the heretics who had held them hostage, defiled and brutalised them.

They reached the gallery, where black-robed marshals separated them into streams flowing left and right. The sounds of battle were deafening here, coming from below, drowning out the clatters of boot steps on metal mesh flooring. The air was hot, black and heavy with clouds of soot, but shot through with explosive flashes. All Jarrah could do was clench his teeth, keep his head down and weather the storm.

He stumbled against the gallery rail and, for a terrible, stomach-plunging instant, thought he would topple over it. He caught himself, gaping into a fiery pit. He was overlooking an assembly hangar, he realised. Six angular shapes stood in two rows of three, as if ready to roll out through the gates. They were Basilisks, mobile artillery platforms, four of them with Earthshaker cannons fitted.

Their attackers had sundered the gates and were pouring through them. Jarrah couldn’t see them properly through the smoke that wreathed them, but he saw no shining armour. They were met by ten times as many armed labourers, crashing into them with curdling screams and wrenches raised, many cut down in a bloody instant by las-beams or bayonets.

The invaders were swarming the Basilisks, which were pinned down, unable to manoeuvre. Their hull-mounted bolters jerked wildly, spraying bullets, hitting as many friends as foes. An Earthshaker belched out an incendiary shell with an apocalyptic roar. It streaked through the broken gates, but the blinding flames of its explosion billowed back into the hangar to consume scores of labourers.

More marshals loomed ahead of Jarrah. They were directing people to gaps in the gallery rail, from which long, narrow steel ladders plunged into the abyss. Those few who balked at descending were thrashed into submission with sticks or cut with blades. One man was bundled over the rail and fell, screaming.

Jarrah’s palms sweated into the stock of his lasgun. Little good it would do him, he thought, amid such carnage. A braver man would have turned the weapon upon the nearest cultists, maybe taking one life in exchange for his own. Perhaps, if he had more faith in his aim… Instead, when his turn came, Jarrah tucked the lasgun awkwardly under one arm, clambered onto a ladder and began to descend.

The climb down seemed to take forever.

The cultists were herding more and more people onto the ladder. It strained and shook under their writhing weight. Jarrah clung for his life to each rung, but couldn’t falter lest his head feel the heavy boot of the man above him. All he could do when this happened – which was often – was stamp on the head below in turn.

More than one labourer plummeted past him. A flailing hand snatched at Jarrah’s coveralls but, panicking, he shook it loose lest he be dragged down after it. At last, he felt something under his feet again. The hangar floor, he thought, but it yielded and shifted beneath him. He had alighted onto a heap of mangled corpses. Jarrah couldn’t bear to look at them. He scrambled away as quickly as he could.

He was swept up by another streaming crowd. This time, he tried to fight it. He looked for an escape route. He glimpsed a doorway at the hangar’s rear, leading back into the forge, but it was guarded. More labourers were stepping off the ladders from the gallery, and those who didn’t move with the heaving throng were dragged under and trampled to death.

Jarrah found himself funnelled between two of the Basilisks. One had repulsed its attackers, for now, and was edging forwards. He winced as its cannon fired, blotting out all other sounds. The other tank had been cracked open. Smoke billowed from its seams, while burnt skeletons manned the crew compartment.

He couldn’t yet see the invaders, but they couldn’t be too far ahead. He was treading on the bodies of those who had preceded him, and they were piling up. Jarrah’s only hope now was to signal somehow to the Krieg men that he was an ally, an innocent in need of their protection. A desperate hope. More likely, an exploding shell would wipe him out before they even saw him.

He remembered his lasgun. The cultists – and the desperate, unreasoning labourers around him – were expecting him to use it. Jarrah didn’t have a target, but he squinted through his iron sights to show willing. His elbows were jostled and he almost lost his balance. Taking time to aim was not an option. He raised his barrel over the heads in front of him, and a little bit higher for safety. He teased back the trigger.

The gun disgorged a blazing fusillade of energy beams. Jarrah started and almost cried out, though there was little recoil. The weapon was set to automatic. He hadn’t realised. He prayed he hadn’t actually hit anyone. He couldn’t tell.

Another two men dropped out of his line of sight – Jarrah didn’t know why, what had befallen them – and he stumbled into the space vacated.

And saw them.

Krieg soldiers. Six of them. Little wonder they had been so indistinct from above, as they were clad entirely in black. Just like the cultists. They wore black greatcoats, helmets and plates of flak armour. Jarrah found his gaze riveted to their black masks, whose opaque lenses gave them an eerie semblance of hollow-eyed skulls.

The masked men fought tirelessly. Swarmed by panicky labourers, too confined to use their guns, they fought with knives and fists but struck with terrible, almost rhythmic precision, like the forge’s great, repetitive machines. They cut down their stumbling, inexpert foes in bloody swathes.

Jarrah’s heart tightened as first one Krieg man then two more were finally brought down, by force of numbers. He didn’t know whether to feel dismayed or relieved. At least one fallen soldier struggled on, dragging two men to the ground on top of him. At the same time, one of his fellows plucked a grenade from his belt.

He lobbed it over the heads of his attackers. The grenade dropped into the midst of the crowd, somewhere behind Jarrah, close enough for the furnace heat of its blast to wash over him. The crowd convulsed, thrusting him forward, and suddenly there were four more Krieg men directly ahead of him.

Jarrah couldn’t tell them from the others: they might have been the fallen soldiers risen, for all he knew. They wore the same black masks and battled with the same single-minded purpose.

A braver man might have done something. A smarter man might have known what to do. Jarrah froze as a featureless, black-masked face turned towards him. An ally, he reminded himself – but he saw no kinship in the Death Korps soldier’s blank eyes. He saw no mercy, no reason, no compassion. How could there be?

The Krieg man’s arm drew back, a metal glint in a black-gloved hand.

Jarrah barely registered a sudden blur of motion, as something hurtled past his right ear. That something – some multi-limbed, fleshy grey horror – crashed into the Krieg man in a flurry of claws and teeth and gore. A second later, both were gone, as if neither had been real at all but only Jarrah’s worst fears made manifest.

He broke out in prickles of sweat at the thought of how close he had been to death and what had saved him – or rather just bought him more seconds.

The soldiers filled his field of vision now: a horde of skull-masked apparitions surging towards him, relentless, unstoppable. A few other labourers with guns blasted desperately at them, and some Krieg men fell, and yet their ranks never thinned out. Not a single soldier conceded a single step. They had no fear for their lives. Each of them was content to be blasted to pieces if he could gain an inch of ground.

Nor did they pause to distinguish friend from foe.

There were monsters on both sides of this conflict. Jarrah wondered why he hadn’t seen it before. The Death Korps of Krieg were inhuman killing machines – sent by the Emperor not to save him, but to destroy him.

It was his last conscious thought for some time. He didn’t see the cause of the explosion. He was only aware of it for the briefest possible instant, before his senses shut down to save his sanity.

He thought he must have died.

When Jarrah woke again, he couldn’t breathe.

His reaction was instinctive. He scrabbled his way upwards, feeling heavy weights sliding from atop him. He emerged into gossamer light and lay with his chest heaving. Smoke filled his lungs, and he coughed up blood-flecked bile. His body was beginning to react to its tribulations, every nerve lighting up with throbbing pain.

He didn’t know where he was, for a moment.

His head felt stuffed with cotton wool. White fog enveloped the world, so he could see no more than a few feet in any direction. In those few feet, he saw rubble and dismembered bodies. As reason reasserted itself, he knew he couldn’t have moved far. Rather, it was everything else that had shifted around him.

The front end of the assembly hangar had collapsed. Jarrah, fortunately, had been far enough back to avoid being buried completely. Still, heavy hunks of black rock had crashed down on top of him. He should probably have died.

Through a bleak, mournful silence, he heard wracking sobs and a weak voice pleading for help. So, others had been spared as well as him. Dimly, through a nightmare haze, he realised that some of the weight pinning him down had been soft and warm. He had been lucky. He could make no better sense of it.

He didn’t know how long he lay there, his thoughts tumbling into each other. The collapse, he could only assume, had been deliberate. The cultists had sent their captives to die for them for one reason alone: to buy them time. Time to lay explosive charges. They had sealed off the breach in Blackfire’s walls, at the same time crushing its invaders – and many of its labourers.

Jarrah heard a familiar muffled rumble of thunder. The siege guns outside had already started up again. He recalled what the sallow-faced old man had told him, about the Krieg soldiers’ inexhaustible patience. They may have been forced to withdraw, but they hadn’t gone far.

For now, however, the battle was over. Jarrah closed his eyes, and may even have slept again. He stirred as the rubble across which he was sprawled began to shift. He heard voices, but couldn’t tell how far away they were. He stopped himself from calling out, until he knew to whom the voices belonged.

He tried to stand, but his left foot was still trapped.

Jarrah tried to pull it free, but a sharp pain lanced through his ankle. He scrabbled desperately at the rubble that pinned him, but only tore his fingernails and slickened his palms with blood. His head spun, and he had to close his eyes and breathe deeply. Whatever jolt of adrenaline had kept him going thus far, it had more than run its course. He felt drained.

He forced himself to work on his problem more methodically. It took him long, anxious minutes, but he finally freed his foot and raised himself up onto hollow-feeling, shaky legs. Looking down, he saw his lasgun, nestled between two hunks of plascrete, scuffed and battered. He stooped to retrieve it.

He took one faltering, lurching step after another. Debris shifted underneath his weight, and threatened to plunge him back down into the blackness.

A dark shape erupted from the ground in front of him. Jarrah stumbled back, scrambling to bring his weapon to bear. He had disturbed a body, but one with some life in it yet. Was it friend or foe? With a sickly knot forming inside him, Jarrah realised that he no longer knew which was which.

The body belonged to a Death Korps soldier. His right arm hung at an awkward angle from his shoulder, clearly shattered. He had lost his helmet, and blood seeped through his black mask. His greatcoat was shredded. Jarrah could hear his hoarse, laboured breathing. For the first time, he saw that the mask was connected by a flexible tube to a respirator on the soldier’s chest. It was a trivial detail, but it made him realise that this was just a man, after all. A broken man.

The soldier, sensing Jarrah’s approach, had levered himself up into a crouch. No one else was in sight. This was Jarrah’s chance. He opened his mouth to explain why he was here, to unburden himself of the hell he had been put through, to ask this emissary of the Emperor what to do.

He didn’t know where to start. He hadn’t spoken in so long, and the words – too many words – caught in his throat, contriving with the smoke and the dust in the air to choke him into tearful silence.

Jarrah glimpsed his own reflection in black lenses. He saw how he must look to the Krieg man in his filthy, torn coveralls. He saw the eight-pointed star etched on his face in soot. He saw the gun clutched tightly in his hands – the gun with which his cultist masters had entrusted him to kill their enemies.

In that same moment, he saw what the soldier was doing.

A lasgun hung limply from his broken fingers. Somehow, he had maintained a stubborn grip upon it – and now, with his good hand, he was reaching carefully for it, even as his hollow gaze remained fixed upon Jarrah.

As the Krieg man’s hand found and closed around the weapon, a scream exploded from Jarrah’s lungs: ‘No!’ And, almost before he knew it, without conscious thought, he had snapped up his own gun and fired it, screaming again, ‘No!’

Las-beams impaled the Krieg man’s chest like needles of light. His body jerked and thrashed, but didn’t fall. Jarrah watched in horror as, in slow motion, or so it seemed, a gun barrel swept up towards him.

He screamed, for a third time, ‘No!’ and squeezed his trigger again.

He realised that his eyes were closed tight. He forced them open.

The Krieg man lay on his back at Jarrah’s feet. He wasn’t moving. Jarrah couldn’t tell if he was dead or not. The mask, with its black lenses, gave the eerie impression that he was still conscious, glaring up at his would-be killer.

Jarrah shuddered and fired into the soldier’s body again. And again. When he squeezed his trigger the fifth time, his gun just clicked and whined, its power pack dry. Jarrah let it slip from his numbed fingers. His coveralls were wringing with sweat, and he was trembling.

He heard footsteps and raised voices, converging upon him.

The forge had been besieged for twenty-eight days.

Jarrah was back at his cannon emplacement. He had learned how to operate the Earthshaker – it was easier than he had imagined – and now served as its gunner. He had a single new loader, whose name he didn’t know, but who frustrated Jarrah with his slowness.

His old crewmates were missing, almost certainly dead. Blackfire’s dark tunnels seemed quieter than ever before, though ghosts danced in their shadows; but at least the food supplies stretched further now.

Jarrah was just glad to have things back the way they had been, more or less.

The Death Korps of Krieg still hunkered in their trenches, pounding at the forge. Why couldn’t they leave him alone? He answered their bombardment with blast after blast of his own. He adjusted the Earthshaker’s sights between each one. The less predictably his shells fell, the more hindrance they would be. If he was lucky, one might even fly far enough to cause some real damage.

No longer did Jarrah pray to the Emperor. He knew he had compromised too much to be forgiven. He refused to be ashamed of this, however. What choices had he had? He hadn’t betrayed his god. His god had betrayed him.

When the cultists had found him in the assembly hangar’s wreckage, standing over a Krieg man’s corpse, they had hailed him as a hero. The eight-pointed star on his face had been freshly inscribed with ink. He wore the black cloak they had given him.

They had not yet invited him to join their secret rituals, and Jarrah was glad of this. The cultists’ pursuit of power had so far sent a score among them mad and resulted in more hideous mutations. Still, they insisted that they were making progress. They just needed more time.

Every morning, every night, Jarrah prayed – though he didn’t know to whom – for their success. He prayed for the walls of Blackfire Forge to hold. He knew that if the men of Krieg broke through those walls again, fortune would not favour him a second time. Those monsters would butcher him and everyone else he knew.

He prayed for his new gods to save him.

DEAD MEN WALKING
by Steve Lyons

The Death Korps of Krieg arrive at a mining world overrun by necrons, determined to win this brutal war at any cost.

Find this title, and many others, on blacklibrary.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Guy Haley is the author of the Siege of Terra novel The Lost and the Damned, as well as the Horus Heresy novels Titandeath, Wolfsbane and Pharos, and the Primarchs novels Konrad Curze: The Night Haunter, Corax: Lord of Shadows and Perturabo: The Hammer of Olympia. He has also written many Warhammer 40,000 novels, including the first book in the Dawn of Fire series, Avenging Son, as well as Belisarius Cawl: The Great Work, Dark Imperium, Dark Imperium: Plague War, The Devastation of Baal, Dante, Darkness in the Blood and Astorath: Angel of Mercy. He has also written stories set in the Age of Sigmar, included in War Storm, Ghal Maraz and Call of Archaon. He lives in Yorkshire with his wife and son.

Darius Hinks is the author of the Warhammer 40,000 novels Blackstone Fortress, Blackstone Fortress: Ascension and three novels in the Mephiston series, Mephiston: Blood of Sanguinius, Mephiston: Revenant Crusade and Mephiston: City of Light. He also wrote the audio drama The Beast Inside and the novella Sanctus. His work for Age of Sigmar includes Hammers of Sigmar, Warqueen and the Gotrek Gurnisson novel Ghoulslayer. For Warhammer, he wrote Warrior Priest, which won the David Gemmell Morningstar Award for best newcomer, as well as the Orion trilogy, Sigvald and several novellas.

Marc Collins is a speculative fiction author living and working in Glasgow, Scotland. He is the writer of the short stories ‘Ghosts of Iron’, ‘Respite’s End’ and ‘Champions, All’ for Warhammer 40,000, and ‘Cold Cases’ for Warhammer Crime. When not dreaming of the far future he works in Pathology with the NHS.

Jake Ozga is a lifelong Warhammer fan and horror fanatic with a particular interest in exploring the dark corners of the Mortal Realms. He lives in Leamington Spa with his partner and several pets. His first story for Black Library, ‘Supplication’, featured in the Warhammer Horror anthology Invocations, and he has since gone on to write ‘Skull Throne’, ‘Suffer the Vision’ and ‘Into Dark Water’.

Steve Lyons’ work in the Warhammer 40,000 universe includes the novellas Iron Resolve, Engines of War and Angron’s Monolith, the Imperial Guard novels Death World, Ice Guard and Dead Men Walking, and the audio dramas Waiting Death and The Madness Within. He has also written numerous short stories and is currently working on more tales from the grim darkness of the far future.

An extract from Dawn of Fire: Avenging Son.

‘I was there at the Siege of Terra,’ Vitrian Messinius would say in his later years.

‘I was there…’ he would add to himself, his words never meant for ears but his own. ‘I was there the day the Imperium died.’

But that was yet to come.

‘To the walls! To the walls! The enemy is coming!’ Captain Messinius, as he was then, led his Space Marines across the Penitent’s Square high up on the Lion’s Gate. ‘Another attack! Repel them! Send them back to the warp!’

Thousands of red-skinned monsters born of fear and sin scaled the outer ramparts, fury and murder incarnate. The mortals they faced quailed. It took the heart of a Space Marine to stand against them without fear, and the Angels of Death were in short supply.

‘Another attack, move, move! To the walls!’

They came in the days after the Avenging Son returned, emerging from nothing, eight legions strong, bringing the bulk of their numbers to bear against the chief entrance to the Imperial Palace. A decapitation strike like no other, and it came perilously close to success.

Messinius’ Space Marines ran to the parapet edging the Penitent’s Square. On many worlds, the square would have been a plaza fit to adorn the centre of any great city. Not on Terra. On the immensity of the Lion’s Gate, it was nothing, one of hundreds of similarly huge spaces. The word ‘gate’ did not suit the scale of the cityscape. The Lion’s Gate’s bulk marched up into the sky, step by titanic step, until it rose far higher than the mountains it had supplanted. The gate had been built by the Emperor Himself, they said. Myths detailed the improbable supernatural feats required to raise it. They were lies, all of them, and belittled the true effort needed to build such an edifice. Though the Lion’s Gate was made to His design and by His command, the soaring monument had been constructed by mortals, with mortal hands and mortal tools. Messinius wished that had been remembered. For men to build this was far more impressive than any godly act of creation. If men could remember that, he believed, then perhaps they would remember their own strength.

The uncanny may not have built the gate, but it threatened to bring it down. Messinius looked over the rampart lip, down to the lower levels thousands of feet below and the spread of the Anterior Barbican.

Upon the stepped fortifications of the Lion’s Gate was armour of every colour and the blood of every loyal primarch. Dozens of regiments stood alongside them. Aircraft filled the sky. Guns boomed from every quarter. In the churning redness on the great roads, processional ways so huge they were akin to prairies cast in rockcrete, were flashes of gold where the Emperor’s Custodian Guard battled. The might of the Imperium was gathered there, in the palace where He dwelt.

There seemed moments on that day when it might not be enough.

The outer ramparts were carpeted in red bodies that writhed and heaved, obscuring the great statues adorning the defences and covering over the guns, an invasive cancer consuming reality. The enemy were legion. There were too many foes to defeat by plan and ruse. Only guns, and will, would see the day won, but the defenders were so pitifully few.

Messinius called a wordless halt, clenched fist raised, seeking the best place to deploy his mixed company, veterans all of the Terran Crusade. Gunships and fighters sped overhead, unleashing deadly light and streams of bombs into the packed daemonic masses. There were innumerable cannons crammed onto the gate, and they all fired, rippling the structure with false earthquakes. Soon the many ships and orbital defences of Terra would add their guns, targeting the very world they were meant to guard, but the attack had come so suddenly; as yet they had had no time to react.

The noise was horrendous. Messinius’ audio dampers were at maximum and still the roar of ordnance stung his ears. Those humans that survived today would be rendered deaf. But he would have welcomed more guns, and louder still, for all the defensive fury of the assailed palace could not drown out the hideous noise of the daemons – their sighing hisses, a billion serpents strong, and chittering, screaming wails. It was not only heard but sensed within the soul, the realms of spirit and of matter were so intertwined. Messinius’ being would be forever stained by it.

Tactical information scrolled down his helmplate, near environs only. He had little strategic overview of the situation. The vox-channels were choked with a hellish screaming that made communication impossible. The noosphere was disrupted by etheric backwash spilling from the immaterial rifts the daemons poured through. Messinius was used to operating on his own. Small-scale, surgical actions were the way of the Adeptus Astartes, but in a battle of this scale, a lack of central coordination would lead inevitably to defeat. This was not like the first Siege, where his kind had fought in Legions.

He called up a company-wide vox-cast and spoke to his warriors. They were not his Chapter-kin, but they would listen. The primarch himself had commanded that they do so.

‘Reinforce the mortals,’ he said. ‘Their morale is wavering. Position yourselves every fifty yards. Cover the whole of the south-facing front. Let them see you.’ He directed his warriors by chopping at the air with his left hand. His right, bearing an inactive power fist, hung heavily at his side. ‘Assault Squad Antiocles, back forty yards, single firing line. Prepare to engage enemy breakthroughs only on my mark. Devastators, split to demi-squads and take up high ground, sergeant and sub-squad prime’s discretion as to positioning and target. Remember our objective, heavy infliction of casualties. We kill as many as we can, we retreat, then hold at the Penitent’s Arch until further notice. Command squad, with me.’

Command squad was too grand a title for the mismatched crew Messinius had gathered around himself. His own officers were light years away, if they still lived.

‘Doveskamor, Tidominus,’ he said to the two Aurora Marines with him. ‘Take the left.’

‘Yes, captain,’ they voxed, and jogged away, their green armour glinting orange in the hell-light of the invasion.

The rest of his scratch squad was comprised of a communications specialist from the Death Spectres, an Omega Marine with a penchant for plasma weaponry, and a Raptor holding an ancient standard he’d taken from a dusty display.

‘Why did you take that, Brother Kryvesh?’ Messinius asked, as they moved forward.

‘The palace is full of such relics,’ said the Raptor. ‘It seems only right to put them to use. No one else wanted it.’

Messinius stared at him.

‘What? If the gate falls, we’ll have more to worry about than my minor indiscretion. It’ll be good for morale.’

The squads were splitting to join the standard humans. Such was the noise many of the men on the wall had not noticed their arrival, and a ripple of surprise went along the line as they appeared at their sides. Messinius was glad to see they seemed more firm when they turned their eyes back outwards.

‘Anzigus,’ he said to the Death Spectre. ‘Hold back, facilitate communication within the company. Maximum signal gain. This interference will only get worse. See if you can get us patched in to wider theatre command. I’ll take a hardline if you can find one.’

‘Yes, captain,’ said Anzigus. He bowed a helm that was bulbous with additional equipment. He already had the access flap of the bulky vox-unit on his arm open. He withdrew, the aerials on his power plant extending. He headed towards a systems nexus on the far wall of the plaza, where soaring buttresses pushed back against the immense weight bearing down upon them.

Messinius watched him go. He knew next to nothing about Anzigus. He spoke little, and when he did, his voice was funereal. His Chapter was mysterious, but the same lack of familiarity held true for many of these warriors, thrown together by miraculous events. Over their years lost wandering in the warp, Messinius had come to see some as friends as well as comrades, others he hardly knew, and none he knew so well as his own Chapter brothers. But they would stand together. They were Space Marines. They had fought by the returned primarch’s side, and in that they shared a bond. They would not stint in their duty now.

Messinius chose a spot on the wall, directing his other veterans to left and right. Kryvesh he sent to the mortal officer’s side. He looked down again, out past the enemy and over the outer palace. Spires stretched away in every direction. Smoke rose from all over the landscape. Some of it was new, the work of the daemon horde, but Terra had been burning for weeks. The Astronomican had failed. The galaxy was split in two. Behind them in the sky turned the great palace gyre, its deep eye marking out the throne room of the Emperor Himself.

‘Sir!’ A member of the Palatine Guard shouted over the din. He pointed downwards, to the left. Messinius followed his wavering finger. Three hundred feet below, daemons were climbing. They came upwards in a triangle tipped by a brute with a double rack of horns. It clambered hand over hand, far faster than should be possible, flying upwards, as if it touched the side of the towering gate only as a concession to reality. A Space Marine with claw locks could not have climbed that fast.

‘Soldiers of the Imperium! The enemy is upon us!’

He looked to the mortals. Their faces were blanched with fear. Their weapons shook. Their bravery was commendable nonetheless. Not one of them attempted to run, though a wave of terror preceded the unnatural things clambering up towards them.

‘We shall not turn away from our duty, no matter how fearful the foe, or how dire our fates may be,’ he said. ‘Behind us is the Sanctum of the Emperor Himself. As He has watched over you, now it is your turn to stand in guardianship over Him.’

The creatures were drawing closer. Through a sliding, magnified window on his display, Messinius looked into the yellow and cunning eyes of their leader. A long tongue lolled permanently from the thing’s mouth, licking at the wall, tasting the terror of the beings it protected.

Boltgun actions clicked. His men leaned over the parapet, towering over the mortals as the Lion’s Gate towered over the Ultimate Wall. A wealth of targeting data was exchanged, warrior to warrior, as each chose a unique mark. No bolt would be wasted in the opening fusillade. They could hear the creatures’ individual shrieks and growls, all wordless, but their meaning was clear: blood, blood, blood. Blood and skulls.

Messinius sneered at them. He ignited his power fist with a swift jerk. He always preferred the visceral thrill of manual activation. Motors came to full life. Lightning crackled around it. He aimed downwards with his bolt pistol. A reticule danced over diabolical faces, each a copy of all the others. These things were not real. They were not alive. They were projections of a false god. The Librarian Atramo had named them maladies. A spiritual sickness wearing ersatz flesh.

He reminded himself to be wary. Contempt was as thick as any armour, but these things were deadly, for all their unreality.

He knew. He had fought the Neverborn many times before.

‘While He lives,’ Messinius shouted, boosting his voxmitter gain to maximal, ‘we stand!’

‘For He of Terra!’ the humans shouted, their battle cry loud enough to be heard over the booming of guns.

‘For He of Terra,’ said Messinius. ‘Fire!’ he shouted.

The Space Marines fired first. Boltguns spoke, spitting spikes of rocket flare into the foe. Bolts slammed into daemon bodies, bursting them apart. Black viscera exploded away. Black ichor showered those coming after. The daemons’ false souls screamed back whence they came, though their bones and offal tumbled down like those of any truly living foe.

Las-beams speared next, and the space between the wall top and the scaling party filled with violence. The daemons were unnaturally resilient, protected from death by the energies of the warp, and though many were felled, others weathered the fire, and clambered up still, unharmed and uncaring of their dead. Messinius no longer needed his helm’s magnification to see into the daemon champion’s eyes. It stared at him, its smile a promise of death. The terror that preceded them was replaced by the urge to violence, and that gripped them all, foe and friend. The baseline humans began to lose their discipline. A man turned and shot his comrade, and was shot down in turn. Kryvesh banged the foot of his borrowed banner and called them back into line. Elsewhere, his warriors sang; not their Chapter warsongs, but battle hymns known to all. Wavering human voices joined them. The feelings of violence abated, just enough.

Then the things were over the parapet and on them. Messinius saw Tidominus carried down by a group of daemons, his unit signum replaced by a mortis rune in his helm. The enemy champion was racing at him. Messinius emptied his bolt pistol into its face, blowing half of it away into a fine mist of daemonic ichor. Still it leapt, hurling itself twenty feet over the parapet. Messinius fell back, keeping the creature in sight, targeting skating over his helmplate as the machine-spirit tried to maintain a target lock. Threat indicators trilled, shifting up their priority spectrum.

The daemon held up its enormous gnarled hands. Smoke whirled in the space between, coalescing into a two-handed sword almost as tall as Messinius. By the time its hoofed feet cracked the paving slabs of the square, the creature’s weapon was solid. Vapour streaming from its ruined face, it pointed the broadsword at Messinius and hissed a wordless challenge.

‘Accepted,’ said Messinius, and moved in to attack.

The creature was fast, and punishingly strong. Messinius parried its first strike with an outward push of his palm, fingers spread. Energy crackled. The boom generated by the meeting of human technology and the sorceries of the warp was loud enough to out-compete the guns, but though the impact sent pain lancing up Messinius’ arm, the daemon was not staggered, and pressed in a follow-up attack, swinging the massive sword around its head as if it weighed nothing.

Messinius countered more aggressively this time, punching in to the strike. Another thunderous detonation. Disruption fields shattered matter, but the daemon was not wholly real, and the effect upon it was lesser than it would be upon a natural foe. Nevertheless, this time it was thrown backwards by the blow. Smoke poured from the edge of its blade. It licked black blood from its arm and snarled. Messinius was ready when it leapt: opening his fist, ignoring the sword as it clashed against his pauldron and sheared off a peeling of ceramite, he grabbed the beast about its middle.

The Bloodletters of Khorne were rangy things, all bone and ropey muscle, no space within them for organs. The false god of war had no need for them to eat or breathe, or to give the semblance of being able to do so. They were made only to kill, and to strike fear in the hearts of those they faced. Their waists were solid, and slender, and easily encompassed by Messinius’ power fist. It squirmed in his grip, throwing Messinius’ arm about. Servo motors in his joints locked, supplementary muscle fibres strained, but the White Consul stood firm.

‘Tell your master he is not welcome on Terra,’ he said. His words were calm, a deliberate defiance of the waves of rage pulsing off the daemon.

He closed his hand.

The daemon’s midriff exploded. The top half fell down, still hissing and thrashing. Its sword clanged off the paving and broke into shards, brittle now it was separated from its wielder. They were pieces of the same thing, sword and beast. Apart, the weapon could not survive long.

Messinius cast down the lower portion of the daemon. There were dozens of the things atop the wall, battling with his warriors and the human soldiery. In the second he paused he saw Doveskamor hacked down as he stood over the body of his brother, pieces of armour bouncing across the ground. He saw a group of Palatine Sentinels corner a daemon with their bayonets. He saw a dozen humans cut down by eldritch swords.

Where the humans kept their distance, their ranged weapons took a toll upon the Neverborn. Where the daemons got among them, they triumphed more often than not, even against his Space Marines. Support fire rained down sporadically from above, its usefulness restricted by the difficulty of picking targets from the swirling melee. At the western edge of the line, the heavy weapons were more telling, knocking daemons off the wall before they crested the parapet and preventing them from circling around the back of the Imperial forces. Only his equipment allowed Messinius to see this. Without the helm feeds of his warriors and the limited access he had to the Lion Gate’s auspectoria, he would have been blind, lost in the immediate clash of arms and sprays of blood. He would have remained where he was, fighting. He would not have seen that there were more groups of daemons pouring upwards. He would not have given his order, and then he would have died.

‘Squad Antiocles, engage,’ he said. He smashed a charging daemon into fragments, yanked another back the instant before it gutted a mortal soldier, and stamped its skull flat, while switching again to his company vox-net. ‘All units, fall back to the Penitent’s Arch. Take the mortals with you.’

His assault squad fell from the sky on burning jets, kicking daemons down and shooting them with their plasma and bolt pistols. A roar of promethium from a flamer blasted three bloodletters to ash.

‘Fall back! Fall back!’ Messinius commanded, his words beating time with his blows. ‘Assault Squad Antiocles to cover. Devastators maintain overhead fire.’

Squad Antiocles drove the enemy back. Tactical Space Marines were retreating from the parapet, dragging human soldiers with them. An Ultramarine walked backwards past him, firing his bolter one-handed, a wounded member of the Palatine Guard draped over his right shoulder.

‘Fall back! Fall back!’ Messinius roared. He grabbed a human by the arm and yanked him hard away from the monster trying to slay him, almost throwing him across the square. He pivoted and punched, slamming the man’s opponent in the face with a crackling bang that catapulted its broken corpse over the wall edge. ‘Fall back!’

Mortal soldiers broke and ran while Squad Antiocles held off the foe. Telling to begin with, in moments the assault squad’s momentum was broken, and again more bloodletters were leaping over the edge of the rampart. The Space Marines fired in retreat, covering each other in pairs as they crossed the square diagonally to the Penitent’s Arch. The mortals were getting the idea, running between the Adeptus Astartes and mostly staying out of their fire corridor. With the fight now concentrated around Squad Antiocles, the Devastators were more effective, blasting down the daemons before they could bring their weight of numbers to bear upon Antiocles. Sporadic bursts of fire from the retreating Tactical Marines added to the effect, and for a short period the number of daemons entering the square did not increase.

Messinius tarried a moment, rounding up more of the humans who were either too embattled or deaf to his orders to get out. He reached three still firing over the parapet’s edge and pulled them away. A daemon reared over the parapet and he crushed its skull, but a second leapt up and cleaved hard into his fist, and power fled the weapon. Messinius pumped three bolts into its neck, decapitating it. He moved back.

His power fist was ruined. The daemon’s cut had sliced right through the ceramite, breaking the power field generator and most of the weapon’s strength-boosting apparatus, making it a dead weight. He said a quick thanks to the machine’s departed spirit and smashed the top of his bolt pistol against the quick seal release, at the same time disengaging the power feeds by way of neural link. The clamps holding the power fist to his upper arm came loose and it slid to the floor with a clang, leaving his right arm clad in his standard ceramite gauntlet. A century together. A fine weapon. He had no time to mourn it.

‘Fall back!’ he shouted. ‘Fall back to the Penitent’s Arch!’

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

‘To Speak as One’, ‘Champions, All’, ‘Skull Throne’ and ‘The Strong Among Us’ first published digitally in 2019.
‘Death on the Road to Svardheim’ first published digitally in 2020.
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